By Valentina Colombo
The appalling sentence “Radical Islam is a fact of life. How to live with it,” appears on the green cover of the present issue of Newsweek magazine (international edition). You can read it either in Arabic or in English. The title refers to a worrisome article written by Fareed Zakaria, editor of the magazine. Islam is complex reality. Nearly one and a half billion Muslims live on our planet; they cannot be the same and no doubt only a minority is radical and linked to terrorism. However it was astonishing to read that we do not have to generalize even when it comes to radical Islam because “it’s time to stop treating all Islamists as potential terrorists.” It was March 2007 when I last felt the same kind of disappointment while reading in “Foreign Affairs” Robert Leiken and Steven Brooke’s article, “The Moderate Muslim Brotherhood.” Their aim was to demonstrate that inside the Muslim Brotherhood along with an extremist wing there is a “moderate” group of new leaders. The American scholars totally trusted what they were told personally by some members of the movement. Unfortunately they forgot that the Muslim Brotherhood’s members are allowed to dissimulate, that is to tell lies if necessary to their survival.
Fareed Zakaria goes many steps further: he admits the existence of radical Islamists, like the Taliban and the Islamic courts in Somalia and Nigeria, and he writes we have to cope with them, but not in the same way the Bush administration did. If during Bush’s presidency “all Islamist groups were one and the same” and any distinctions or nuances were regarded as a form of appeasement”, now in Zakaria’s view “it’s also worth stepping back and trying to understand the phenomenon of Islamic radicalism” because “not all these Islamists advocate global jihad, host terrorists or launch operations against the outside world - in fact, most do not.” Then comes the shocking example: “Consider the most difficult example, the Taliban. The Taliban have done all kinds of terrible things in Afghanistan. But so far, no Afghan Taliban has participated at any significant level in a global terrorist attack… Most Taliban want Islamic rule locally, not violent jihad globally.” I have a few questions: What about Afghanis? What about Afghani women? What about universal human rights? Does Mr. Zakaria mean that radical Islam can be understood as long as it stays away from us? Read more ...
The appalling sentence “Radical Islam is a fact of life. How to live with it,” appears on the green cover of the present issue of Newsweek magazine (international edition). You can read it either in Arabic or in English. The title refers to a worrisome article written by Fareed Zakaria, editor of the magazine. Islam is complex reality. Nearly one and a half billion Muslims live on our planet; they cannot be the same and no doubt only a minority is radical and linked to terrorism. However it was astonishing to read that we do not have to generalize even when it comes to radical Islam because “it’s time to stop treating all Islamists as potential terrorists.” It was March 2007 when I last felt the same kind of disappointment while reading in “Foreign Affairs” Robert Leiken and Steven Brooke’s article, “The Moderate Muslim Brotherhood.” Their aim was to demonstrate that inside the Muslim Brotherhood along with an extremist wing there is a “moderate” group of new leaders. The American scholars totally trusted what they were told personally by some members of the movement. Unfortunately they forgot that the Muslim Brotherhood’s members are allowed to dissimulate, that is to tell lies if necessary to their survival.
Fareed Zakaria goes many steps further: he admits the existence of radical Islamists, like the Taliban and the Islamic courts in Somalia and Nigeria, and he writes we have to cope with them, but not in the same way the Bush administration did. If during Bush’s presidency “all Islamist groups were one and the same” and any distinctions or nuances were regarded as a form of appeasement”, now in Zakaria’s view “it’s also worth stepping back and trying to understand the phenomenon of Islamic radicalism” because “not all these Islamists advocate global jihad, host terrorists or launch operations against the outside world - in fact, most do not.” Then comes the shocking example: “Consider the most difficult example, the Taliban. The Taliban have done all kinds of terrible things in Afghanistan. But so far, no Afghan Taliban has participated at any significant level in a global terrorist attack… Most Taliban want Islamic rule locally, not violent jihad globally.” I have a few questions: What about Afghanis? What about Afghani women? What about universal human rights? Does Mr. Zakaria mean that radical Islam can be understood as long as it stays away from us? Read more ...
Source: Hudson Institute
H/T: A.L.
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