Displaying items by tag: Islamic State
Today’s new terrorists were radical before they were religious
The attacks in Brussels, on the heels of those in Paris and San Bernardino, Calif., have stoked an already white-hot debate about Islamic terrorism in the United States. Many in the West, including the two Republican presidential front-runners, Donald Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), urge a campaign that targets Muslim communities more directly, searching for those who might be prone to religious extremism and thus terrorism.................Download the full article in pdf attachment (below)
Middle East Upheavals: More Politics than Religion
The perception of the Muslim world’s association with violence and extremism has become progressively entrenched in mainstream consciousness during the post-9/11 years. This is partly due to power shifts in the Middle East and the consequent response of a struggle for a new political order.....................Download the full article in pdf attachment (below)
A voice of hope in the Muslim world
THE most important contest in the world right now is between the ISIS (Islamic State) model and the Tunisian model,” said Rachid Ghannouchi, who was visiting New York this week. “It’s not between Islam and the West. It’s between ISIS and us.” Ghannouchi is the intellectual leader of Ennahda, Tunisia’s Islamist party that, despite winning the country’s first free elections, compromised with its political foes, relinquished power and helped make Tunisia the Arab Spring’s only success. He explained why his small country’s story is crucial to the struggle against militant Islam across the world.................Download the full article in pdf attachment (below)
Denying the Islamic State what it wants
Don't dance to their tune: Their barbaric acts of terror may well be a devious strategy to treat all Muslims in Europe as suspicious. Once again, an Islamic States (IS) murder leads to fear that it is wining, and calls to do more. Fox News Bret Baier captured the mood when he said of the latest video.................Download the full article in pdf attachment (below)
How to think - and talk - about Islam
WHEN television host Bill Maher declares on his weekly show that “the Muslim world... has too much in common with ISIS (now known as the Islamic State, or IS)”, and author Sam Harris, a guest on the show, concurs, arguing that Islam is “the mother lode of bad ideas”, I understand why people are upset. Maher and Harris made crude simplifications and exaggerations. And yet, they were also talking about something real. I know all the arguments against speaking of Islam as violent and reactionary. It has a vast following of 1.6 billion people. Places such as Indonesia and India have hundreds of millions of Muslims, who don’t fit these caricatures.................Download the full article in pdf attachment (below)
Lure of the caliph and Islamic State
THE declaration of a so-called Islamic State (IS) in Syraq (Syria+Iraq) on June 27 by Sunni renegades led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi claimed a universal authority throughout the Muslim ummah in the manner of caliphs of old. Baghdadi has degrees in Islamic studies from the Islamic University of Baghdad. He was then a preacher in Diyala province where, after the 2003 United States invasion, he led his own armed insurgency group. The veteran observer Patrick Cockburn objectively describes IS to be “the most powerful and effective extreme jihadi group in the world... violent and sectarian”................Download the full article in pdf attachment (below)