DR. LAINA FARHAT-HOLZMAN
Many intellectuals believe that the political right-wing is
"demonizing" Islam. This is a conundrum, because it appears that Islam
is demonizing itself. How peaceful is a religion when it is obviously
going through a fever fueled by resentment, fear of modernity, and a
phase of religiosity that is as much at war with its own people as it
is against the rest of the world?
Religions are like rivers:
there is upstream, downstream, rapids, still waters, and a delta where
the religion reaches the global ocean. Christianity and Judaism have
both flowed through such a river and are now, by and large, part of the
global ocean of civilizational values. Buddhism has traveled the same
route, and its key values are now global. Hinduism is in the delta
stage, with varying streams approaching the ocean. This is not to say
that all religions are in a perfectly peaceful place; there are pockets
of extremism and rigidity, but by and large, most of the world's
religions share civilizational values today.
Islam, the youngest
of the great religions, is in a fever that is roiling not only Muslims,
but every neighbor they have in the world. Small but determined groups
can terrorize huge populations that had grown accustomed to order.
Suicide bombers, truck bombers, and carefully staged assassinations do
not need to kill masses of people to sow terror.
There is a
worldwide trend that is alarming, but understandable: a trend to put an
end to the problem, sweeping up both criminal zealots and ordinary
practitioners. We are seeing this now with Russia and China: threats of
total extermination of their Muslim populations.
Russia.
Russia's problem is several centuries old. In the 19th century, they
conquered all the old Muslim city-states (the Silk Road) across Asia,
incorporating them into the Russian Empire. During the early days of the
Russian Revolution in 1917, these Muslim states were freed, then
absorbed again as the Soviet Union became the new Russian Empire. With
the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Muslim states once more asserted
their freedom, but Russia has pulled most of them into a neo-imperial
union. Although Russia conquered these Muslims, they never fully
pacified them. We are seeing this now. The region is suffering both
internal warfare (nationalism vs. Islamism) and ethnic warfare, the
results of Stalin's campaign to displace whole populations and draw
borders that are deliberately designed to divide and conquer.
Militant Islamists are directing their fury at Russia, with the
threat that they will deal with the other issues later. Russia, hosting
the Winter Olympic games, is under attack by Islamists. President
Putin has announced (and I believe him) that he will deal with these
terrorists with extermination. We will soon see that anyone in Muslim
clothing (veils or robes) will be marked for punishment.
Asia.
Thailand (Buddhist and secular majority) is in a war of extermination
against their Muslim minority, as is Burma (Myanmar), and for some
time, China against their once moderate Muslim population, the Uighurs.
Egypt. Islamists got as far as getting elected, where
they expected to reverse Egypt's trend toward secularization and
modernization. The army has put an end to that, and is now in the
process of exterminating the Islamist membership.
The United States.
This country responded to a series of deadly attacks, culminating in
that of 9/11, by going to war in Afghanistan and Iraq, neither of them
wars of extermination and neither of them transformative either. We
ourselves are in a slow-moving internal war that throws into conflict
civil libertarians and the government responsible for our safety. If
there is another large-scale attack on our homeland, the civil
libertarians will lose.
Europe. The horrors of World War
II had convinced the European elites that they must be tolerant toward
immigrants. This tolerance has met the stone wall of organized
Islamism, converting thugs in prisons, radicalizing hapless and
unemployed youth to seek martyrdom in "holy wars," and pushing liberal
laws to permit illiberal behavior. Europe is now reversing its
liberality, not with extermination, but probably expulsion in the
future.
The Islamists are in a death cycle.
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