Subj : The War Has No Clothes
To   : Finnigann
From : Frank Reid
Date : Thu Oct 06 2005 05:16 pm

  Re: The War Has No Clothes
  By: Finnigann to Jazzman on Thu Oct 06 2005 09:39 am

 > Short of some miricle of biblical proportions, these people have continued t
 > demonstrate over centuries that they do not want to get along and you think
 > something 'w' has started will succeed where others have failed?

While it is common to confuse the historical animosity between Muslim
and Jew with Islamic extremism, the latter is actually a very recent
phenomenon.  The Wahabist sects, represented by bin Laden and his ilk,
and whose hateful teachings were formerly perpetuated under the Taliban
in the madrasas of Afghanistan, only came into being in the early 20th
Century, and really didn't flourish until the past two decades.  This is
why you don't remember reading about Muslims killing Americans and other
"infidels" through suicide attacks in the history books while you were
in school.

Ironically, the Wahabis (largely nomadic at the time) actually helped
the British dislodge the moderate Muslim government of the Turkish
empire during the Arab revolt in the First World War.  Google "Wahabi"
and "Lawrence of Arabia" (Thomas Edward Lawrence), and you'll be amazed
at how and what the West created in Saudi Arabia.  I doubt you'll be
amazed at why we did it, given the coincidence with our industrial
revolution and the dominance of the internal combustion engine!

"The Wahabis, followers of a fanatical Moslem heresy, had impressed
their strict rules on easy and civilized Kasim. In Kasim there was but
little coffee-hospitality, much prayer and fasting, no tobacco, no
artistic dalliance with women, no silk clothes, no gold or silver head
ropes or ornaments. Everything was forcibly pious or forcibly
puritanical. It was a natural phenomenon, this periodic rise at
internals of little more than a century, of ascetic creeds in Central
Arabia. Always the votaries found their neighbor's beliefs cluttered
with inessential things, which had become impious in the hot imagination
of their preachers. Again and again they had arisen, had taken
possession, soul and body, of the tribes, and had dashed themselves to
pieces on the urban Semites, merchants, and concupiscent men of the
world. About their comfortable possessions the new creeds ebbed and
flowed like the tides or the changing seasons, each movement with the
seeds of early death in its excess of rightness. Doubtless they must
recur so long as the causes -- sun, moon, wind, acting in the emptiness
of open spaces, weigh without check on the unhurried and unencumbered
minds of the desert dwellers." 
--T.E. Lawrence, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1922)

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