Charlatan

I think we will just have to disagree on the point that there are not many moderates, I can agree however that their influence is not being felt.

As I see it, they are there and don't have a voice (read: lack of free speech retards the ability of any voice but that of the pulpit or the official government voice). From the reading I have done and the people I know from the region, all signs indicate there are many moderates in the Middle East. They just don't have the tools or the platform to get their message through.

__________________
"My hands are on fire. Hands are on fire. Ain't got no more time for all you charlatans and liars."
- Old Man Luedecke

jorgelito

but what about moderate muslims in free countries? at least the ones in uk protested and spoke up against the sudan govt. but i rarely ever hear moderates in the us etc condemn terrorism or abuse of women, foreigners etc.

host

Maybe it's because of <a href="http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showthread.php?p=2355567#post2355567">the extremism</a> evident in the US. I'm shocked by it, and I'm a christian and a native.

Charlatan

A good point. I do hear them personally and have read their comments in articles but is it really their job to mount massive protests? Perhaps it is but I am not sure how much good it would do other than to make westerners feel good.

__________________
"My hands are on fire. Hands are on fire. Ain't got no more time for all you charlatans and liars."
- Old Man Luedecke

Ustwo

So we are to embrace "moderate" Muslims and tone down our reactions, even though they are really powerless to make a difference where it matters? Really a 'pro-peace' type of rally would be nice, Islam is in need of some PR that doesn't include 'bomb', 'riot', or 'woman charged' in the head line.

I'm also going to have to question the conventional logic that our actions 'create' terrorists. Outside of a movie of the week moment where ones family is killed by an errant US bomb, one doesn't just go from 'well both sides need to work out their issues' to 'KILL THE INFIDELS!'

The roots of radicalism are already there, from the, shall we say 'creative' history they get to sermons of hate they get daily. If you can forgive the Goodwin, the closest equivalent in the West would have been the Hitler Youth, only that was more organized but far less deep.

So the question becomes how do you proceed with millions of young men, taught to hate, and who's governments foster said hate for various reasons?

If I still believed in God it would be a sort of Loki, because it would take a God like that to then put in this region a vast quantity of the energy needed by the rest of the world.

__________________
Agents of the enemies who hold office in our own government, who attempt to eliminate our "freedoms" and our "right to know" are posting among us, I fear.....on this very forum. - host

Obama - Know a Man by the friends he keeps.

roachboy

gee, what a shock...

the one thing that obviously emerges from even the coverage of this surreal business in the sudan is the selectiveness of press coverage of islam, its fatuousness, its--uh---problematic relation to accuracy---from this follows that the press coverage of islam is an element in the ongoing mobilization of opinion in support of otherwise bankrupt policies--so the "free press" is at least in part and element of ideological co-ordination and in routinized ways DOES NOT function as a critical check on the actions of the political order: it is OF that order, and EXTENSION of the order, which functions, wittingly or not these days, as a co-ordination mechanism. the problem does not seem to be the individual papers--in that you see critical editos (once an issue emerges as clearly problematic, news outlets will bravely move into saying "this is clearly problematic") but rather in the way routine articles are sourced, in the repetition of the same wire-service factoids across outlets--which has the effect of generating an illusion of objectivity (in the sense of descriptive value, referring to objects or phenomena in the world, and not of neutrality in the way these referrals operate). so it follows that a small demo in khartoum gets framed as a representation of an entire (hallucinated) global tendency within islam, which is also presented (falsely) as a unified entity that "we" know as if it were transparent, that "we" have an operative image or map of, such that the absence of "moderate voices" can be attributed not to problems in the shaping of information, but to some phenomenon on the Map of Islam.

this can only follow because folk want to believe that they know the world, they are invested in the illusion of knowing and in the subsidiary illusion that the press, in its routine functioning, provides material that fills out that knowledge. they do not want to face the extent to which this infotainment is **political**

conservatives in the states have reached an almost mind-boggling pitch of projection as a device to cope with this--they see everywhere a conspiracy of "liberals" which justifies a counter-movement of blatant erasure of any meaningful line between information and conservative policy premises--and they WANT TO BELIEVE they desperately want to believe that this is ok.

it isnt ok.
it is a problem.
it is a big problem.

what seems to have happened is that over the last week there was a degree of indecisiveness in the uk government about how to respond to this situation in the sudan. the sudanese government is problematic and has been for a very long time--the civil war, the events in darfur, their resistance to international pressure, their refusal to play by the rules---the fact that the sudan sits on ALOT of oil that has not yet been exploited---and so actions like the decontextualized magnification of the demo in khartoum was functional in that it prepared ideologically for an option that was being considered, organized proactively a bit of consent by enabling EXACTLY the kind of nonsensical blur of this demo into the pre-packaged imagery folk have been conditioned (i dont like this word in this context, but dont have a better one) into using as a default interpretive backdrop for processing information about islam.

you were chumped. again. you were chumped by infotainment.

i dont see anything in the pseudo-realist line from the folk on the right above but an inability to face the obvious.
within this, a kind of distrubing sense emerges of the level of investment in the crudest form of bush-administration marketing--the Heroic Stand Against an Nebulous Other. a wholesale disabling of the ability to think critically follows in the train of this vulgar and one-dimensional worldview.

same old same old, in short: 6 fucking years of the same old same old.
amazing.
depressing as hell, too, in the way that any demonstration of intellectual castration is depressing.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Charlatan

First off, I don't think military action on its own is going to solve this. There may be cause to use military action but not without a very healthy dose of diplomacy and engagement.

I think we need to have closer diplomatic and business ties to these nations. The US currently has no official voice in Iran, for example. If the Iranians are going to claim to be a democracy, diplomats should be there on the ground to call them on this. At present there is little to know voice of support for the reformists on the ground in Iraq.

Looking around the world at places like India/Pakistan and China/Taiwan I can't help but think that potential conflicts in these areas have been prevented by their being part of the global business supply chain. Not too long ago India was ready to go toe to toe against Pakistan with nukes. When it was noted that India is the back office of much of America and that to go to war would not only close that business down for the duration of the war but most likely forever, the leaders made a choice to support their economy over increased sabre rattling.

Similar things can be said for the Taiwan/China issue.

Countries that have a vested interest in growing their economies through International trade have an increasingly internationalist point of view (i.e. more cosmopolitan, more open), have a vested stake in maintaining good relations with their trading partners (i.e. if they are not a stable supplier of their promised goods and services, the clients will go elsewhere and fast) and in order to take part in this form of trade they must develop their population rather than just their natural resources (i.e. education and development of the populace leads to less influence by radical elements).

I think these is much truth to holding your friends close and your enemies closer.



Engagement at all levels is essential.

__________________
"My hands are on fire. Hands are on fire. Ain't got no more time for all you charlatans and liars."
- Old Man Luedecke

loquitur

it's all about power. People who like power invoke whatever idea is at hand to increase their power. In some parts of the world it's Islam. In Zimbabwe it's colonialism and race. In Nazi Germany it was the Aryan nation, and in the Soviet Union it was the glorious proletariat.

Seaver

So how did we go from a Teddy Bear to Bush caused 9/11?

Damn it, I said my last post would be the only one I post here.

__________________
"Smite the rocks with the rod of knowledge, and fountains of unstinted wealth will gush forth." - Ashbel Smith as he laid the first cornerstone of the University of Texas

Charlatan

I don't think I was bashing Bush per se...

__________________
"My hands are on fire. Hands are on fire. Ain't got no more time for all you charlatans and liars."
- Old Man Luedecke

Strange Famous

the UK govt did a deal with the Sudanese... and then moved the goalposts when even the 15 days was unacceptable to our public.

But the diplomacy always goes on behind closed doors... the original sentence and the silly protests were for internal consumption I think.

__________________
"Do not tell lies, and do not do what you hate,
for all things are plain in the sight of Heaven. For nothing
hidden will not become manifest, and nothing covered will remain
without being uncovered."

The Gospel of Thomas