Today's Wild Geese: Foreign Fighters in the GWOT

[davidbfpo]

LTG (R) Mike Flynn @MTPFLYNN
Should Islam Be Reformed; So says a former Muslim who believes the religion she's rejected is completely corrupted.

http://www.newsmax.com/t/newsmax/article/631746

Ayaan Hirsi Ali was on the BBC last night explaining her stance. It is hard to think of a person less likely to be listened to by Muslims than her, an openly declared atheist and awhile ago a Muslim who recanted her faith. Being a best-selling author, appearing on TV and courting controversy is IMHO hardly a recipe for Muslims to listen.

[OUTLAW 09]

Ayaan Hirsi Ali was on the BBC last night explaining her stance. It is hard to think of a person less likely to be listened to by Muslims than her, an openly declared atheist and awhile ago a Muslim who recanted her faith. Being a best-selling author, appearing on TV and courting controversy is IMHO hardly a recipe for Muslims to listen.

But her book carries a massive statement centered on the Muslim community as a whole.

There has been coming out of Sisi in Egypt a similar plea lately.

[OUTLAW 09]

Bill M--someone is seeing the light finally in the Philippines.

Philippine President Benigno Aquino called on lawmakers Friday to pass a bill endorsing a pact aimed at ending a decades-long Muslim separatist rebellion, warning them they would otherwise start counting "body bags".

Aquino had wanted the bill, which would give autonomy to the majority Catholic nation's Muslim minority in the south, passed this month.
But Congress suspended debates on the proposed law in the face of public outrage over the killings of 44 police commandoes by Muslim guerrillas in a botched anti-terror raid in January.

The Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), which signed a peace deal a year ago Friday, had said its members fired in self-defence at the commandoes, who passed through a rebel camp while going after Islamic militants.

"This is the crossroads we face: we take pains to forge peace today, or we count body bags tomorrow," Aquino said in a nationwide television address.
"Perhaps it is easy for you to push for all-out war," he said, hitting out at critics who have condemned the peace deal with the MILF.
"But if the conflict grows, the number of Filipinos shooting at other Filipinos will grow, and it would not be out of the question that a friend or loved one be one of the people who will end up inside a body bag."

The rebellion for a separate state or self-rule has claimed nearly 120,000 lives and cost billions of dollars in economic losses, according to government estimates.
Under a peace deal signed with the MILF, the 10,000-member group pledged to disarm while the Philippine government vowed to pass an autonomy law in Muslim areas of the south.

"The Bangsamoro basic law is one of the most important proposed bills of our administration. It answers the two most pressing problems of our countrymen: poverty and violence," Aquino said Friday.
He warned it would be difficult to restart peace talks if the current process failed and the MILF leadership lost its influence among its members to more radical elements.
Aquino is required by the constitution to stand down in mid-2016 after serving a single six-year term.

The January police raid sought to capture or kill two men on the US government's list of "most wanted terrorists" who were living among Muslim rebels in southern Philippine farming communities.
One of the men, Malaysian national Zulkifli bin Hir who had a $5-million bounty on his head, was reported killed.
But the other, Filipino Abdul Basit Usman, escaped as rebels surrounded and killed the police commandoes.

[davidbfpo]

But her book carries a massive statement centered on the Muslim community as a whole.

There has been coming out of Sisi in Egypt a similar plea lately.

Outlaw09,

Calls for Islam to be reformed from outside maybe listened to by some within. I doubt many will listen to Ayaan Hirsi Ali and a good number will regard General Sisi's statements as self-serving, as he tries to reduce the impact "political Islam" has on Egyptians.

[davidbfpo]

Medhi Hassan has a long commentary on this call, in part raised by non-Muslims, notably the atheist Ayaan Hirsi Ali (cited before):http://www.theguardian.com/commentis...luther-europe?

Here are two passages:

Don’t get me wrong. Reforms are of course needed across the crisis-ridden Muslim-majority world: political, socio-economic and, yes, religious too. Muslims need to rediscover their own heritage of pluralism, tolerance and mutual respect – embodied in, say, the Prophet’s letter to the monks of St Catherine’s monastery....



What they don’t need are lazy calls for an Islamic reformation from non-Muslims and ex-Muslims, the repetition of which merely illustrates how shallow and simplistic, how ahistorical and even anti-historical, some of the west’s leading commentators are on this issue. It is much easier for them, it seems, to reduce the complex debate over violent extremism to a series of cliches, slogans and soundbites, rather than examining root causes or historical trends; easier still to champion the most extreme and bigoted critics of Islam while ignoring the voices of mainstream Muslim scholars, academics and activists.

[davidbfpo]

A short detailed rebuttal of the arguments of Ayaan Hirsi Ali from Will McCants @ Brookings, which IMHO is devasting. Here is his opening paragraph:

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is correct that darker passages of Islamic Scripture endorse violence and prescribe harsh punishments for moral or theological infractions. And she is right that in many Muslim countries, too many citizens still think it is a good idea to kill people for apostasy, stone them for adultery, and beat women for disobedience just because Scripture says so. But Hirsi Ali is profoundly wrong when she argues that Islamic Scripture causes Muslim terrorism and thus that the U.S. government should fund Muslim dissidents to reform Islam.

Link and not behind a paywall:https://www.foreignaffairs.com/artic...re-not-problem

[davidbfpo]

In part prompted by recent "lone wolf" and other terrorist attacks, this wide-ranging thought piece by Raffaello Pantucci is worth a read:https://raffaellopantucci.com/2016/0...om-by-the-day/

[Azor]

I am responding to your 2 most recent posts from this week...

I broadly agree that the solution to Islamic terrorism is not a Western-originated top-down reform of Islamic texts and practices. Certainly there are texts in Judaism and Christianity that can be used to justify aggressive violence against non-Christians and Christians deemed heretical. Moreover, the Christian Reformation and Counter-Reformation were not struggles for tolerance and peace, but violent struggles driven by fanatics.

Yet we must also acknowledge that people identifying as Muslims and acting on behalf of Islam are committing atrocities in Western countries against non-Muslims. Taken into a global context, the statistics indicate that wherever Muslims and non-Muslims exist in the same country, there is inter-communal violence. Nor do non-Muslim minorities in Muslim-majority countries ever not face oppression, whether in the 8th Century or 21st Century.

In the United States, since 9/11, Muslim terrorists have killed 105 people and wounded hundreds. Yet Muslim Americans constitute only 1% of the population. In comparison, anti-Muslim attacks have killed 17, of which 10 were non-Muslims mistakenly identified. We hear about Islamophobia, but if non-Muslim and Muslim Americans had the same propensity toward violence toward one another, we would see either much greater anti-Muslim killings or far less killings by Muslims.

We are told that diversity enriches Western countries, yet I fail to see what good Islam gives us that cannot be gained from other non-Muslim immigrants. As for the bad, well, that is what keeps the FBI, MI5, et al, up at night.

The problem is Islamic Supremacism. It does not matter whether it is endorsed in the Quran or by the local Imam, or not. Individuals and groups of individuals are drawn to it either due to their cultural backgrounds or because of its anti-Western revolutionary counter-culture "credentials", as it seems to have supplanted the lure of Fascism and Revolutionary Socialism.

Unlike in Northern Ireland, where the political solution involved the deconstruction of Loyalist Protestant supremacy, and equality rather than independence or union with Ireland, I fail to see what political solution is possible for Islamic Supremacism.

Supposedly Muslims are entitled to freedom of religion, but what about freedom of ideology, which is all religion is? We don't allow "practising Nazis", now do we?