Quote Originally Posted by MikeF View Post
Additionally, an excerpt from Greg Mortensen's 3 Cups of Tea:

“Osama, baah! Osama is not a product of Pakistan or Afghanistan. He is a creation of America. Thanks to America, Osama is in every home. As a military man, I know you can never fight and win against someone who can shoot at you once and then run off and hide while you have to remain eternally on guard. You have to attack the source of your enemy’s strength. In America’s case, that’s not Osama or Saddam or anyone else. The enemy is ignorance. The only way to defeat it is to build relationships with these people, to draw them into the modern world with education and business. Otherwise the fight will go on forever.”

-Pakistani General (Ret) Bashir
Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace…One School at a Time
When Mortenson was in Pakistan during 911 the flip in how we treated him was pretty much an abomination. Here is a guy who is scraping together money to build one or two western style schools a year (that require girls to be educated too), and he watches hundreds of Madrassa spring up around him and nobody prior to 911 can connect the dots.

Religion and intolerance are as linked in Islam to jihadism as Christianity and the forced conversion process of evangelism (having seen this process well into the 1970s ouch). The militancy of the Christian fundamentalist "right to life" groups bombing abortion clinics are just another side of the counterfeit penny of illogic found in radical Islamic teaching too. Neither view represents either society, but both societies are judged harshly for the existence. Islamofascism, and jihadism rarely represent an entire peoples view, but using those terms can create identity and radicalize populations that never would have considered it.

The American neo-conservative policy position that the wahabism and salafalism (sp?) are truly representative views of the entire population are simplistic but make for great punditry. Similarly American liberalism fails to realize that even one percent of a population radicalized is an imminent threat to stability and peace. In the dichotomy between opposing views one sides polarized views of "kill em all" radicalizes while the other similarly polarized view of "give peace a chance" fails to take even the most basic protective measures.

In an effort to be right the method is to yell louder, create echo chambers of thought, ignore rather than debate, insult rather than consider, and our own process of American radicalization continues. How many conservative or liberal only BLOGs are there? Are CNN and FOX fair and balanced? As an intelligent American population prizing our first amendment rights we should embrace considered debate as a societal obligation and expectation. We should not need a law or rule to enforce courtesy on the field of discourse when it the first and central tenet to the American system. Instead we hide in stovepipes of intellectual stagnation and repress and denigrate views we do not agree with. Denigration has become the center pillar of discourse.

When we start arguing over taxonomies rather than debating solutions we have insured failure and surrendered the high ground.