Here are two different explanations for 9/11. We report, you decide.
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Have you ever read about the reasons they attacked us? They attack us because we've been over there. We've been bombing Iraq for 10 years. We've been in the Middle East. I think Reagan was right: we don't understand the irrationality of Middle-Eastern politics. So right now, we're building an embassy in Iraq that's bigger than the Vatican, we're building 14 permanent bases. What would we say here if China was doing this in our country or in the Gulf of Mexico? We would be objecting. We need to look at what we do from the perspective of what would happen if somebody else did it to us.
I believe very sincerely that the CIA is correct when they teach and talk about blowback. When we went into Iran in 1953 and installed the Shah, yes, there was blowback. The reaction to that was the taking of our hostages. And that persists. And if we ignore that, we ignore that at our own risk. If we think that we can do what we want around the world and not incite hatred, then we have a problem. They don't come here to attack us because we're rich and we're free. They come and they attack us because we're over there. I mean, what would we think if other foreign countries were doing that to us?
http://www.allronpaul.com/2007/05/ron-paul-rudolph-giuliani-discuss-911.html
I was ten years old when my home exploded around me, burying me under the rubble and leaving me to drink my blood to survive, as the perpetrators shouted “Allah Akbar!” My only crime was that I was a Christian living in a Christian town. At 10 years old, I learned the meaning of the word "infidel."
I had a crash course in survival. Not in the Girl Scouts, but in a bomb shelter where I lived for seven years in pitch darkness, freezing cold, drinking stale water and eating grass to live. At the age of 13 I dressed in my burial clothes going to bed at night, waiting to be slaughtered. By the age of 20, I had buried most of my friends--killed by Muslims. We were not Americans living in New York, or Britons in London. We were Arab Christians living in Lebanon.
As a victim of Islamic terror, I was amazed when I saw Americans waking up on September 12, 2001, and asking themselves "Why do they hate us?" The psychoanalyst experts were coming up with all sort of excuses as to what did we do to offend the Muslim World. But if America and the West were paying attention to the Middle East they would not have had to ask the question. Simply put, they hate us because we are defined in their eyes by one simple word: "infidels."
Under the banner of Islam "la, ilaha illa allah, muhammad rasoulu allah," (None is god except Allah; Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah) they murdered Jewish children in Israel, massacred Christians in Lebanon, killed Copts in Egypt, Assyrians in Syria, Hindus in India, and expelled almost 900,000 Jews from Muslim lands. We Middle Eastern infidels paid the price then. Now infidels worldwide are paying the price for indifference and shortsightedness.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=21364
I hate to sound like a cliche, but the truth is somewhere in the middle, or a little of both.
ReplyDeleteI find it hard to believe that all or even most of the Moslem animosity toward the US can be explained by Madonna, miniskirts, or (what's left of) Christianity. At least a fair amount of it has to do with what many Moslems believe is one sided support for Israel, Iraq policy and the like.
If they hate America because of its values (Christian or secular), then why were they here in the first place? And I've read that some of them were engaging in rather American behavior (drinking and wenching) prior to being recruited by Al-Q.
The "drinking and wenching" actually helps in recruitment. These are guys who give in to temptation quite easily, and they know that their lives are not pleasing to God. Thus, they are quite happy to learn that there is a way for them to redeem themselves and get their virgins.
ReplyDeleteBut it's also the case that they are young, unhappy, single, rootless men. They blame Big US for their problems. I don't think it's a coincidence that many terrorists are from immigrant families.
ReplyDeleteI think it's a stretch to compare religious and ethinic tension within Egypt and Lebanon to the situation of Moslems within US. On the other hand, I don't deny that anti-Christian hostility plays a role in some of terrorism.
American foriegn policy certainly fuels that propensity for Islam to become radicalized with hatred toward the US. It's like blowing air over hot coals. The fire is already there... but the extra oxygen makes it burn much hotter.
ReplyDeleteI'm encouraged by the comments I see here. We are all well aware of the truth of what Islam teaches over against the way muslims in countries without muslim rule act like it teaches - or what our feel-good pandering politicians tell us it is. We can all agree that they definitely hate Christians - anyone really that doesn't recognize Allah as the only god.
ReplyDeleteYet it would by folly to think that even the primary motiviation for 9/11 is because of our freedom, or because our "primary religion" is Christianity. (If only that were true).
While the people the terrorists hire to carry out these plots seem to be er...not quite the sharpest knife in the drawer, the people doing the plotting aren't stupid.
They have to realize they aren't going to convert a huge nation like america by setting off bombs in a few cities. No, these are retaliatory strikes.
Further, look at who is getting bombed and who is not. There are many countries who are not involved in military actions in Iraq who are much closer and much easier to infiltrate and target than the US is who are not, and have not been subject to these attacks. They don't worship Allah either, they have freedom in varying degrees that would be offensive to muslims...why are they not being attacked as well if this theory is true?
I just don't think it's tenable to extrapolate from the motivations of Muslims carrying out muslim law in a muslim country in persecuting Christians to the motivations of terrorist cells acting against external entities like the United States.
And why now? Why all of a sudden? It's not like the middle east just now discovered how to make explosives. If they hate us for the reasons everyone says they do, and they have hated us as long as everyone says, why is it that it is only in recent history that this kind of terrorism has been perpetrated against the US?
(Yes, other kinds of terrorism - ones specifically interested in making demands in exchange for lives has happened infrequently prior to 9/11 - but that is obviously different from the terrorism of today where no demands are made - people are simply killed.)
I'm particularly concerned by statements like these (from the article quoted):
America and the West are doomed to failure in this war unless they stand up and identify the real enemy: Islam
That statement bridges to a section that was not quoted here, wherein some extremely strong language is used. It would seem that for her, as well as many "Christians" extermination of the Muslim population is the answer. I would've thought we'd learned our lesson about such things. Haven't we been through that before?
I'm not interested in meeting demands of muslims beyond the requirements of international law. They are a sovereign nation, and absent an action which activates the just-war theory we ought not to be at war with, or occupying a sovereign nation. And a war should be that, a decisive action that ends a conflict - not a nation building exercise.
Reasonable demands to evacuate their company should be honored. I don't call that appeasement, I call it a refreshing respect for international law and national sovereignty.
Lastly, I think this kind of focus on terrorism is dangerous. While everyone is looking at the terrorists and pretending it's some kind of national invasion they are missing the real danger. The quiet infiltration and growth of "peaceful" muslim populations. This is readily visible in European nations where as the second article points out, we have had eruptions of riots and such and even outright calls for their law to be instituted in these countries. Why? Because the european populations are shrinking and the Muslim populations are growing, and soon they will outnumber the europeans in their own country. This is the real danger.
Ha! Ron Paul for the win!
ReplyDeleteWhy werent 767s being rammed into the Vatican? Why havent suicide bombers blown themselves up in downtown Amsterdam? Are they not infidels as well?
The CIA has known about blowback for years and has lots of documentation regarding its causes. US defence agencies have already conceded in detailed reports that the war on terror itself has increased the danger that America faces worldwide.
Hehe. Now you've done it. You've awakened the Ron Paul supporters! ;-)
ReplyDeleteThis is without doubt one of THE best blogs on the series of tubes that we call the internet. It is therefore a disgrace THAT COMMENTERS ON HERE COULD BE BLAMING 9/11 ON THE ACTIONS OF AMERICA AND NOT ON THE MUSLIMS WHO CARRIED IT OUT! (can you say 'patronising racism')
ReplyDeleteOne of the guys who got arrested for trying to blow up a plane over the Atlantic last year was a white boy who went to my school. He was brainwashed into the sicko death cult that we call Islamism. Do you dunderheads not know what Islamism is?! It's {POLITICAL} ISLAM.
How hard is that to understand? Islam commands jihad. It's a violent religion. This has been true throughout history. Something like 260 million people have died in the name of jihad. The source of hatred is religious, not political. They pretend to have political grievances. But guess what? They also do that in the Koran.
Please read these two excellent websites:
http://www.prophetofdoom.net/
http://www.ejectejecteject.com/
Read all of these two websites and you will LEARN. I'm sick of people being so ignorant of history.
America has 'intervened' in two countries more than any other: Germany and Japan. The results: unmitigated success! America is the best country, and a force for good in the world and don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Not Ron Paul, nor any other ill-informed myopic 'philosopher'. Learn! Look at both sides of the issue! Don't let the liberal media elites dictate your foreign policy for you!!!!!:-)
"Why werent 767s being rammed into the Vatican? Why havent suicide bombers blown themselves up in downtown Amsterdam?"
ReplyDeleteWhat is wrong with you kinney?
Haven't you heard of Bali, Madrid, London, the constant attacks in Thailand, riots in Paris, Van Gogh shot dead in Holland? Do you care?
What on earth has come of this civilization?
Anonymous said:
ReplyDeleteIt is therefore a disgrace THAT COMMENTERS ON HERE COULD BE BLAMING 9/11 ON THE ACTIONS OF AMERICA AND NOT ON THE MUSLIMS WHO CARRIED IT OUT! (can you say 'patronising racism')
Nobody said the Muslim's weren't responsible, or that their choice of actions were in any way right, good, or justified.
What is being said is that we need to not be foolish in analyzing their motivations. That we not swallow the hogwash about "they hate us for our freedom". They hate us for the same reason they hate everyone - yet they don't fly planes into buildings in every country - so what is the difference?
Do you dunderheads not know what Islamism is?!
Wow, how can one possibly respond to such a well crafted argument?
It's {POLITICAL} ISLAM.
The source of hatred is religious, not political.
So Islam is political - but it's not political, it's religious?
Nobody here has claimed there isn't hatred or jihad against Christians bred in their religion. However, it doesn't generally spill out into random acts of terrorism against foreign nations historically outside of traceable elements of foreign aggression of one type or another.
Read all of these two websites and you will LEARN. I'm sick of people being so ignorant of history.
No, not anything new I won't. I'm familiar with both. I find your comment about ignorance of history interesting in light of your followup:
America has 'intervened' in two countries more than any other: Germany and Japan. The results: unmitigated success!
And you have the gall to speak of other people's ignorance.
America is the best country
Talk about damning with faint praise.
and a force for good in the world and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
I suppose that depends on your definition of good. I don't generally call disregarding domestic and international law and meddling in the affairs of sovereign nations out of a self-righteous belief that they know better than everyone else how all the other nations should be run "good." But then, I'm probably just a "myopic philosopher."
Look at both sides of the issue!
I have, and I'm sure most other people here have - since most of them fall somewhere in the middle so far. But I guess nobody can have looked at both sides truly until they agree with you.
Haven't you heard of Bali, Madrid, London, the constant attacks in Thailand, riots in Paris, Van Gogh shot dead in Holland? Do you care?
ReplyDeleteApparently you utterly missed the point. Those are all political entities. I believe his point was that if the attacks are entirely motivated by religion why are not locations like the vatican targeted?
The attacks otherwise are politically motivated, most of them the same kind of blowback as the US experienced in 9/11. Entirely targeted at getting them to withdraw from their participation in Iraq.
The riots in France and elsewhere are directly tied to their religion but are quite different from terrorism. They are perpetrated by rank and file muslims and do specifically reveal the true nature of their religion when they have sufficient numbers and power to get away with it.
What led to 9/11? May I be provocative and suggest that 9/11 took place, not because of the West, but because of the Islamic world itself?
ReplyDeletePut simply, the reason for the rise of political Islam is the failure of Arab Nationalism. The failure of Arab Nationalism to solve the 'problem' of the existence of Israel and the lopsided relationship between the Islamic world, particularly the Arab lands, and the West.
The sort of Arab Nationalism represented by Nasser and his ilk was ethnic, and allowed Arab Christians and Muslims to live in (relative) peace. It promised a balancing of the previous unequal relationship between Arabs and the rest of the world. Arab leaders pursued a westernising policy, following the lead of the Turkish leader, Mustapha Kemal, and with that a secular policy. Organisations like the Muslim Brotherhood were suppressed as 'unhealthy.'
However, these regimes did not deliver. Endemic corruption and a commitment to continuing state control stifled economic growth, and the promise of oil failed to materialise for most of the common people. Several wretched defeats by Israel showed that the new nationalists were just as inept militarily as the kings they had replaced.
For the young, disenfranchised Muslim, seeing this indicated that Pan-Arabism was an error. Looking back to the days of a politically unified Islam under the Caliphs (an ideology that first came to the fore under Sultan Abdul Hamid in the latter years of the nineteenth century), seems to show that Islam's glory days, when she easily outpaced the West were when all Muslims were governed by a single leader, in the period from the seventh century to the disintegration of the Caliphate, the unification of Islam in response to the Crusades, and the Ottoman Empire prior to the 1690s. In this atavistic world, Israel plays the part of the Crusader states, while America is the Roman Empire, to be attacked and destroyed because by her power and the keeping of certain Arabs states as clients, she prevents the unity of Islam.
The states of the West are like barbarian kingdoms of the former Western Roman Empire, some of them weak, all of them unstable. They can be subverted and taken over, as they die, just as happened to Visigothic Spain.
Why did Islam not take over the world in the early middle ages? Not because of the Battle of Tours, as Fuller notes, but because the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire did not collapse, but Constantinople stood firm. America now occupies that role, possessed of a culture that can absorb other cultures, and thus is stronger than the mere tribal culture of other states. That, in itself, is an act of aggression. The existence of troops of occupation on Arab soil exacerbates this. It is not the root cause.
And I write this not as a citizen of the New Rome, but of the old, as I see her begin to move towards the end.