Terror attacks in Brussels

[Lisa loves Pooh]

You must be confusing me with someone who suggested "bombing them". I merely asked how you meet terrorists halfway who believe in a long-held ideology that we in the West are infidels and deserve nothing less than death?

Aren't we talking long-held as in hundreds of years? When was the last time those who held this ideology liked the West to not want to kill the ?

 

[Pea-n-Me]

I believe it does go way, way back, but speaking of more modern times, we can trace the roots of terrorism as we know it today back to the 40s and 50s, when preachers of hate began calling on holy wars against the West. So it's not something that happened over the more recent past. This has been brewing for a while!

 

[DLgal]

I believe it does go way, way back, but speaking of more modern times, we can trace the roots of terrorism as we know it today back to the 40s and 50s, when preachers of hate began calling on holy wars against the West. So it's not something that happened over the more recent past. This has been brewing for a while!

Yes, it has. Probably as a direct result of America meddling in the region and basically establishing Israel and all that went along with that so that the good old USA could control trade in the region via the Suez Canal.

But we're the "good guys" right?

 

[manning]

Who's going to stop them?

We know who isn't

 

[UncleMike101]

When have we tried "peace and love"? We've been at war in the middle east for most of my lifetime. But honestly, I'm not suggesting we meet their weapons with daisies.

I am suggesting that we put at least as much into building as we do into bombing, that we focus not on Daesh directly but on the people over whom they hope to rule. Because they're not an insurmountable force. Without the consent/complaisance of the people in the areas they seek to control, they cannot continue to claim territory. They're just not that big, not that well armed. But when people are desperate for stability, even a warlord may look better than anarchy. We need to offer a real alternative worth living with (and working to defend) rather than thinking in terms of getting rid of yet another negative without looking ahead to what will fill the power vacuum left behind. And I think the idea of "multi-generational hatred" is overplayed. History has showed time and again that the world can change in just a generation or two, and our own recent history shows that the opinions of youth are shaped by forces far more complex than their parents' beliefs... unless, as is the case in much of the middle east right now, they see evidence all around them that their parents' hatred is justified.

This is in no way a generational incident.
The Middle East has been in turmoil for well over a thousand years.
A great deal of the violence there is directly bred by those who take it upon themselves to interpret the teachings of Mohammed to suit their needs or wants.
Anyone disagreeing with an Imam's version of the Quran is subject to being deemed a heretic and condemned to death.
Shiites and Sunnis have been slaughtering each other for hundreds of years over their Imam's versions of the Quran.
The Muslim Religion lends itself particularily well to tribal mistrust and hatred by giving it's followers the "right and duty" to kill all heritics and infidels.
The latter being us.
The Middle East is now, and always has been, a tribal society with little or no regard for the ideals of outsiders.
Again that's us.
We can either destroy all vestiges of radical Islam, or let them continue to pick away at the threads of our civilization until it unravels completely and we are wiped out for being, in their warped minds, infidels.

 

[manning]

My husband has been in China for a few days. One of the first things he noticed is that they have security everywhere. He's pretty well traveled and this is the first time he has gone somewhere that they check your bags again after you land. As the bags come down to the carousal from the plane, you can't take it until the bag has been checked by the dogs. DH's bag was tagged for something! They took him and the bag aside and he needed additional screening before he could LEAVE the airport. He said he also noticed security personal checking cars/cabs as they pulled up to pick up passengers. He didn't know if they checked each one individually, but he saw them sweeping with a mirror or detector under a couple waiting cars. I've always thought baggage pickup in most airports was such an easy target.

Disney's screening has always been a joke and they are just making it worse now.

I'm no expert but there is a prime spot and I ain't going to say where.

 

[Pea-n-Me]

Yes, it has. Probably as a direct result of America meddling in the region and basically establishing Israel and all that went along with that so that the good old USA could control trade in the region via the Suez Canal.

But we're the "good guys" right?

Maybe you need to dig a little deeper.

From Smithsonian

A Lesson In Hate

Before Sayyid Qutb became a leading theorist of violent jihad, he was a little-known Egyptian writer sojourning in the United States, where he attended a small teachers college on the Great Plains. Greeley, Colorado, circa 1950 was the last place one might think to look for signs of American decadence. Its wide streets were dotted with churches, and there wasn’t a bar in the whole temperate town. But the courtly Qutb (COO-tub) saw things that others did not. He seethed at the brutishness of the people around him: the way they salted their watermelon and drank their tea unsweetened and watered their lawns. He found the muscular football players appalling and despaired of finding a barber who could give a proper haircut. As for the music: “The American’s enjoyment of jazz does not fully begin until he couples it with singing like crude screaming,” Qutb wrote when he returned to Egypt. “It is this music that the savage bushmen created to satisfy their primitive desires.”

Such grumbling by an unhappy crank would be almost comical but for one fact: a direct line of influence runs from Sayyid Qutb to Osama bin Laden, and to bin Laden’s Egyptian partner in terror, Ayman al-Zawahiri. From them, the line continues to another quietly seething Egyptian sojourning in the United States—the 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta. Qutb’s gripes about America require serious attention because they cast light on a question that has been nagging since the fall of the World Trade Center: Why do they hate us?

Born in 1906 in the northern Egyptian village of Musha and raised in a devout Muslim home, Qutb memorized the Koran as a boy. Later he moved to Cairo and found work as a teacher and writer. His novels made no great impression, but he earned a reputation as an astute literary critic. Qutb was among the first champions of Naguib Mahfouz, a young, modern novelist who, in 1988, would win the Nobel Prize in Literature. As Qutb matured, his mind took on a more political cast. Even by the standards of Egypt, those were chaotic, corrupt times: World War I had completed the destruction of the Ottoman Empire, and the Western powers were creating, with absolute colonial confidence, new maps and governments for the Middle East. For a proud man like Sayyid Qutb, the humiliation of his country at the hands of secular leaders and Western puppets was galling. His writing drew unfavorable attention from the Egyptian government, and by 1948, Mahfouz has said, Qutb’s friends in the Ministry of Education were sufficiently worried about his situation that they contrived to send him abroad to the safety of the United States.

Some biographical sketches suggest that Qutb arrived with a benign view of America, but if that’s true it didn’t last long. During a short stay in Washington, D.C., he witnessed the commotion surrounding an elevator accident and was stunned to hear other onlookers making a joke of the victim’s appearance. From this and a few offhand remarks in other settings, Qutb concluded that Americans suffered from “a drought of sentimental sympathy” and that “Americans intentionally deride what people in the Old World hold sacred.”

This became the lens through which Qutb read nearly every American encounter—a clash of New World versus Old. Qutb easily satisfied the requirements at the graduate school of the Colorado State College of Education (now known as the University of Northern Colorado) and devoted the rest of his time to his true interest—the American soul, if such a thing existed. “This great America: What is its worth in the scale of human values?” Qutb wondered. “And what does it add to the moral account of humanity?” His answer: nothing.

Still, Qutb’s contempt for America was not as simple as some people might now imagine. He did not recoil from political freedom and democracy, as, say, President Bush might expect from a jihadi theorist, nor did he complain about shades of imperial ambition in American foreign policy, as writers on the left might suppose. Regarding the excesses of American culture—vulgarity, materialism and promiscuity—Qutb expressed shock, but it rang a bit hollow. “The American girl is well acquainted with her body’s seductive capacity,” he wrote. “She knows seductiveness lies in the round breasts, the full buttocks, and in the shapely thighs, sleek legs and she shows all this and does not hide it.” These curvy jezebels pursued boys with “wide, strapping chest” and “ox muscles,” Qutb added with disgust. Yet no matter how lascivious his adjectives, the fastidious, unmarried Egyptian could not convincingly portray the church dances and Look magazines he encountered in sleepy Greeley as constituting a genuine sexual “jungle.”

The core problem with the United States, for Qutb, was not something Americans did, but simply what America was—“the New World...is spellbinding.” It was more than a land of pleasures without limit. In America, unlike in Egypt, dreams could come true. Qutb understood the danger this posed: America’s dazzle had the power to blind people to the real zenith of civilization, which for Qutb began with Muhammad in the seventh century and reached its apex in the Middle Ages, carried triumphantly by Muslim armies.

Qutb rejected the idea that “new” was also “improved.” The Enlightenment, the Industrial Age—modernity itself—were not progress. “The true value of every civilization...lies not in the tools man has invented or in how much power he wields,” Qutb wrote. “The value of civilizations lay in what universal truths and worldviews they have attained.” The modern obsession with science and invention was a moral regression to the primitive condition of the first toolmakers. Qutb’s America was bursting with raw energy and appetite, but utterly without higher virtues. In his eyes, its “interminable, incalculable expanses of virgin land” were settled by “groups of adventurers and groups of criminals” who lacked the time and reflection required for a civilized life. Qutb’s Americans “faced the uncharted forests, the tortuous mountain mazes, the fields of ice, the thundering hurricanes, and the beasts, serpents and vermin of the forest” in a struggle that left them numb to “faith in religion, faith in art and faith in spiritual values altogether.”

This portrait likely would have surprised the people of mid-century Greeley, had they somehow become aware of the unspoken opinions of their somewhat frosty neighbor. Theirs was a friendly town best known for the unpretentious college and for the cattle feedlots sprawling pungently on its outskirts. The founding of Greeley in the 1870s involved no ice fields, hurricanes or serpents. Instead, it began with a simple newspaper column written by Nathan Meeker, agricultural editor of the New York Tribune. On December 14, 1869, Meeker appealed to literate readers of high moral character to join him in building a utopian community by the South Platte River near the foot of the Rocky Mountains. More than 3,000 readers applied; from this list Meeker selected the 700 best qualified to realize his vision of a sober, godly, cooperative community. The town was dubbed Greeley in honor of Meeker’s boss at the Tribune, the quixotic publisher Horace Greeley, who died within weeks of his failed run for president in 1872, just as the project was gathering steam.

Poet and journalist Sara Lippincott was an early visitor to the frontier outpost, and later wrote about it under her pen name, Grace Greenwood. “You’ll die of dullness in less than five hours,” another traveler had warned her about Greeley. “There is nothing there but irrigation. Your host will invite you out to see him irrigate his potato-patch...there is not a billiard-saloon in the whole camp, nor a drink of whiskey to be had for love or money.” None of that made any difference to Qutb, who saw only what he already believed, and wrote not facts, but his own truth, in his 1951 essay, “The America I Have Seen.”

Page 2 of 2
Sayyid Qutb cut short his stay in America and returned to Egypt in 1951 after the assassination of Hassan al-Banna, founder of the nationalist, religious and militant movement known as the Muslim Brotherhood. Over the next decade and a half, often writing from prison, Qutb refined a violent political theology from the raw anti-modernism of his American interlude. Virtually the entire modern world, Qutb theorized, is jahiliyya, that barbarous state that existed before Muhammad. Only the strict, unchanging law of the prophet can redeem this uncivilized condition. Nearly a millennium of history became, to the radicalized Qutb, an offense wrought by the violence of jahili “Crusaders” and the supposed perfidy of the Jews. And Muslim leaders allied with the West were no better than the Crusaders themselves. Therefore, Qutb called all true Muslims to jihad, or Holy War, against jahiliyya—which is to say, against modernity, which America so powerfully represents.

This philosophy led to Qutb’s execution in 1966. Proud to the end, he refused to accept the secular Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser’s offer of mercy in exchange for Qutb’s repudiation of his jihad. Nasser may have silenced a critic, but the martyrdom of Sayyid Qutb accelerated his movement. The same year the philosopher was hanged, according to journalist Lawrence Wright, the teenage al-Zawahiri formed his first violent cell, dedicated to the overthrow of the Egyptian government and the creation of an Islamist state. Meanwhile, Qutb’s brother Muhammad went into exile in Saudi Arabia, where he taught at King Abdul Aziz University. One of his students, an heir to the country’s largest construction fortune, was Osama bin Laden.

Others have taken Qutb’s ideas in less apocalyptic directions, so that M.A. Muqtedar Khan of the Brookings Institution can rank him alongside the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran as “one of the major architects and ‘strategists’ of contemporary Islamic revival.” But the last paragraphs of Qutb’s American memoir suggest just how far outside normal discourse his mind was wont to stray. After noting the stupidity of his Greeley neighbors, who failed to understand his dry and cutting jokes, Qutb writes: “In summary, anything that requires a touch of elegance is not for the American, even haircuts! For there was not one instance in which I had a haircut there when I did not return home to even with my own hands what the barber had wrought.” This culminating example of inescapable barbarism led directly to his conclusion. “Humanity makes the gravest of errors and risks losing its account of morals, if it makes America its example.”

Turning a haircut into a matter of grave moral significance is the work of a fanatic. That’s the light ultimately cast by Qutb’s American experience on the question of why his disciples might hate us. Hating America for its haircuts cannot be distinguished from hating for no sane reason at all.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/a-lesson-in-hate-109822568/

(Not sure why there are lines but it is still readable.)

 

[Tozzie]

I have not read most of the posts on this thread, i like to travel internationally, in fact I was in that airport 2 years ago on my way to Rome, I in fact work and live in NYC, the number 1 terrorist target in the USA. I have a lot of feelings about this, I lived through 9/11, not watched it on TV, I lost more than one friend on 9/11 and it has made me stronger. I mourn for the people of Belgium but I refuse to stop living. Everyone is going to die one day that is a fact and I believe our destinies are already predetermined, while it may be scary don't stop living your life, because when you do not only do these bastards win but you end up dying as a scared person who stays inside and that is existing not living. Don't let these savages rule your life.

 

[CPanther95]

We need to look at the reason it's happening in the first place and figure out how to meet half way.

I'm speechless. Well almost ......

Meet the terrorists halfway? What exactly would our world look like if we meet somewhere halfway between civilization and these terrorists? We could all convert to Islam and start treating our women like cattle - and we still wouldn't be quite halfway there.

 

[dadtoagirl03]

I find the attitude that we can "negotiate" with Islamic Terrorists is part of the problem. You can't negotiate, reason, plead with these people because they are doing exactly what their Holy Book tells them to do. It's like telling a Christian to do something that is in direct opposition to what the Bible teaches and expects them to do it.

 

[mnrose]

I find the attitude that we can "negotiate" with Islamic Terrorists is part of the problem. You can't negotiate, reason, plead with these people because they are doing exactly what their Holy Book tells them to do. It's like telling a Christian to do something that is in direct opposition to what the Bible teaches and expects them to do it.

It's a twisted interpretation of their Holy Book. Muslims will tell you that Islam forbids killing another. There is nothing in Islam as practiced by the vast, vast, vast majority of Muslims that commands the killing of another. It's like taking our Bible, reading portions of Deuteronomy, and determining we should stone people to death who worship "other gods" because it is commanded in our holy book. Twisted. I think we need to be very careful to distinguish between the small segments of Islam that support killing another, and the vast majority who do not.

 

[AnnaFloridaLover]

Really - no one suggested talking - hmmm then how does one meet a terrorist halfway. You can kill some of us but not the red heads, or maybe no one under 12 or just females. And why do YOU go to violence on a large scale? I never suggested it but what is wrong with small surgical strikes? What would you do? You seem to have all the answers so enlighten me - what is your brilliant plan to protect your children, parents, grandparents, spouse - what are YOU suggesting? Maybe we can just buy them all puppies!

Oh and please tell me where I said to "wipe them out?

Oh and I, unlike you do not sit in an armchair, I actually have to deal with this in the real world.

Wow, you really like to put words in other people's mouths. You also claim to know what other people do for a living. I think you'd be surprised, although I'm sure you know you can be anyone you want to be on the internet.

 

[AnnaFloridaLover]

I find the attitude that we can "negotiate" with Islamic Terrorists is part of the problem. You can't negotiate, reason, plead with these people because they are doing exactly what their Holy Book tells them to do. It's like telling a Christian to do something that is in direct opposition to what the Bible teaches and expects them to do it.

Well for one thing we can stop bombing their countries and people for the profit of our own countries and people.

 

[AnnaFloridaLover]

I'm speechless. Well almost ......

Meet the terrorists halfway? What exactly would our world look like if we meet somewhere halfway between civilization and these terrorists? We could all convert to Islam and start treating our women like cattle - and we still wouldn't be quite halfway there.

You are confusing extremists and terrorists with millions of Muslims of the Islamic faith.

 

[CPanther95]

You are confusing extremists and terrorists with millions of Muslims of the Islamic faith.

No, I believe you are confused. Your entire quote:

This isn't a video game, it's real life. We need to look at the reason it's happening in the first place and figure out how to meet half way. Our big bombs vs their small bombs. Same.

Are these small bombs you are referring to being wielded by "millions of Muslims of the Islamic faith"? If so, they are terrorists as well.

 

[punkin]

Yes, it has. Probably as a direct result of America meddling in the region and basically establishing Israel and all that went along with that so that the good old USA could control trade in the region via the Suez Canal.

But we're the "good guys" right?

Really, you should read a history book sometimes.

 

[MickeySP]

Wow, you really like to put words in other people's mouths. You also claim to know what other people do for a living. I think you'd be surprised, although I'm sure you know you can be anyone you want to be on the internet.

So then how does one meet a jihadist halfway without talking?

 

[CPanther95]

So then how does one meet a jihadist halfway without talking?

You just die - then he won't have to take out a bunch of people trying to kill you.

 

[Pea-n-Me]

It's a twisted interpretation of their Holy Book. Muslims will tell you that Islam forbids killing another. There is nothing in Islam as practiced by the vast, vast, vast majority of Muslims that commands the killing of another. It's like taking our Bible, reading portions of Deuteronomy, and determining we should stone people to death who worship "other gods" because it is commanded in our holy book. Twisted. I think we need to be very careful to distinguish between the small segments of Islam that support killing another, and the vast majority who do not.

Problem is, it's not a small segment waging jihad against us - by any stretch of the imagination.

Well for one thing we can stop bombing their countries and people for the profit of our own countries and people.

Can you give specific references to what you're talking about?

 

[AnnaFloridaLover]

So then how does one meet a jihadist halfway without talking?

Again, twisting my words. Only you said jihadist. No me.