Khross wrote:
History is not so simple as this statement indicates. "Western" thought tends to create narratives and ascribe motivations, even when dealing with its own history. In fact, there's much academic debate about how we write history in the West precisely because so many authors are intent trying to find why in evidence that doesn't support such endeavors. That said, I've not privileged any one version of events over another. I have stated that I've read the history from "both" sides of the cultural divide. "Both" being a bit limited, since Bedouin oral histories, Arabic written histories, etc. all have different takes on the situation. And that's one of the more complicating factors when talking about the Near East, Middle East, and Southern Asia: There are entirely too many distinct ethnic groups and autonomous cultures to reduce them all into simply Muslim or non-Muslim. Islamic sectarianism complicates this even further.
There are two problems here:
1) There shouldn't be academic debate about how we write history. This is academics analyzing to the point of absurdity. People will write as they write.
2) Merely having read both sides is not sufficient to show one has not priviledged one side. You correctly point out the ethnic and cultural divides of Asia, but you've still dismissed "Western" views as a homogenous group. Even the opinions of western press and politicians are not homogenous.
Khross wrote:
It's not a matter of listening to "Western propaganda" so much as it is repeating the inaccuracies fostered by Western news and commentary on the subject. As I demonstrated in my last post, there are specific instances of blame directed at the religion. In fact, for at least 3 of the 5 posts mentioned, religious identity is the only cause considered.
That's because religious identity is the common thread tying these events together. I fully understand that an Iranian shi'ite, an Iraqi Sunni, a Palestinian Shi'ite, and an Indian Sunni will have many differences culturally, linguistically, and otherwise. That does not change the fact, however, that when all 4 show up in Iraq willing to strap on a suicide vest (and all 4 varieties have at some point), they all shout some variation on
Allahu'akbar!, and all of them have ties back to their point of origin that support them.
Khross wrote:
You're not forced to speculate. You chose to speculate. And it is pre- and post-colonial issues that drive this conflict. And I haven't made any half-assed assumptions about your training. You're making statements that occlude or ignore the broader concerns.
You A) haven't specified what broader concerns you mean and B) are simply making bare assertion about pre- and post- colonial issues driving conflict. Do you seriously think that many terrorists or insurgents are thinking about the behavior of the U.S. or Britain in 1950 or 1960 or 1970? You'd be lucky to find many that understand Bin Laden's resentment of U.S. presence in Saudi Arabia during Desert Storm. To the vast majority, it's about "infidels" and "Americans" and whatever otherizaion they can apply.
I am not occulding broader concerns. I understand the broader concerns, but I understand them in strategic terms. If you're talking about different broader concerns, you need to discuss what they are, not just claim I'm ignoring them.
Diamondeye wrote:
Then perhaps you should have paid more attention to that thread, since you obviously failed to grasp or failed to read the commentary on social constructivism and how it impacts/shapes/forms individual identity. Your positions on Islam and the conflict with radical jihadism, however, demonstrate the point of that thread quite clearly. You've internalized certain assumptions, labels, and lines of reasoning of which you are unlikely to find yourself divorced. So, I'll try to explain this again: "Society" is its own entity and ultimately takes very little from the individuals within it. Rather, society imposes its will on the individual regressively. And our education (that is the U.S.) reflects this reality pretty poignantly. Values and norms, mores and convention are all internalized the same way we internalize language as children. It is primarily osmotic, as opposed to the result of any active training or educative process.
On the contrary, I read it, and I found this crap about "social constructivism" to be a load of overanalyzed social sciences tripe. I simply do not buy any of this, and I consider a great deal of it to be a case of sheer nonsense being represented as serious academic pursuit. In scientific terms, it suffers from consisting of unfalsifiable hypothesis. I trust you are more than well-acquainted enough with the scientific method to understand why unfalsifiable hypothesis are bad ones.
Code:
In regard to the current conversation, think of how many times a car bombing in Iraq or suicide bomber in Israel or an IED in Afghanistan gets mentioned by our media without the words "radical Islam" or "jihadist" or "terrorism." We don't have to mention the intentionally xenophobic literature of Ann Coulter or Michelle Malkin, but that adds to the effect, too; especially when media outlets like Fox News or Newsbusters.org or their own blogs start gaining traction (We can add Michael Savage and Rush Limbaugh and a few others to that list).
Your points on Savage, Coulter and the others are well taken, but the fact of the matter is that such things very frequently get mentioned without such reference, or with reference only to "insurgents". More to the point, if it is, in fact, radical Islam, jihadists, or terrorists doing such things (which it is) then those terms are pertinent. What, exactly, would you describe such people as, if not jihadists or terrorists?
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As for "propaganda machine", that's meant to implicate the unconscious and mechanical propagation of these ideas. It's not some overt initiative to make Islam the enemy; it's simply the reality of how information disperses through Western society. Consequently, what I chafe at is otherwise reasonable and intelligent people making statement and continuing that line of thought without conscious knowledge of doing so (yourself, for example). You should and do know better, but it doesn't change the fact that you, like myself and most everyone else, have internalized the thought processes. I suppose the big disconnect is the term propaganda, because most people think it denotes some sort of deliberate mechanism; no deliberate mechanism exists in this case.
I'm not seeing here anything except begging the question, although your acknowledgement that it is not deliberate at least clarifies your position. I don't see any good reason to think that the idea that Islam acts as a catalyst to the violent tendancies of radical people is incorrect. Pointing out that the tendancies of western media and politicians perpetuate this is well and good, but I don't see any good reason, based on the facts, to think it is essentially inaccurate. I see far too many people that are acting based on a stated motivation that is about Islam.
In fact, I could discuss supposedly non-radical muslims that have caused the death of American troops while in a status of considerable trust by us, but that information is, unfortunately, classified.
Diamondeye wrote:
Except those reasons merely repeat the cultural myths of the West about Islam. It ignores that approximately 40% of Muslims are Sufi, but rarely get counted because popular media tends to focus on Shia and Sunni branches of Islam (this is usually achieved by subdividing Sufist sects to point of almost obscurity). Conversely, they also tend to ignore the subdivisions of Shia and Sunni sects out of laziness. Consequently, the media, whether intentional or not, tries to unify Islam into a single coherent entity despite reality the religion is at least as varied and disparate in practice as Christianity.
In fact, Islam is not as disparate as Christianity (which actually speaks positively of Islam, not Christianity) because of its inherent legalism. There may be a comparable number of subdivisions, but the inherent degree of disparity of belief is considerably less.
The problem, furthermore, is that while there are subdivisions of Islam within the major Sunni/Shia divisions, the fact of the matter is that these are no more pertinent to most Western dealings with the issues at hand that would the difference between a Baptist and a Pentecostal were the situations reversed.
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And this is further compounded by the history of Israel and its rather hostile neighbors. The Western Media, for the longest time, simply lumped Palestinians into more overt and explicitly anti-Semitic groups. It's glossed over legitimate grievances in the name of covering terrorism. And, at least in the United States, that's had a rather negative effect on perception and ethnic identity when it comes to the Middle East. Hence, the term Islamic Fundamentalism has been around since the late 70s. Rather attempting to identity and specify the "enemy", the enemy was painted with the broadest brush possible. And, after 30 years, doing so has become second nature to the media, the general public, and even "cloistered academics" such as myself. The War on Terror hasn't helped. Islam and Radical Islam have become synonymous terms in general use.
I find it amazing that you can say this, in view of the sympathy that Palestinians regularly recieve in the media, which ranges from considerable to the appallingly biased. I simply do not see such presentation int he media which goes to great lengths to differentiate between the militant muslim and the regular muslim, and for which castigation of Israel is
de rigueur. In fact, Islamic Fundamentalism, Terrorism, and the like have become ways of creating an artificial divide in the mind of the public that glosses over the fact that the radical depends on the support of the non-radical to make his efforts logistically possible.
Diamondeye wrote:
No, you haven't used those terms; incidentally, that's why I chafed at your used of the "Haaji" as a pejorative. You don't see it at one; you want to see yourself as open to and tolerant of disparate cultures. Consequently, that makes it all the more problematic. Appropriating an Islamic term of respect as a generic label for all Arabic combatants or people speaks to precisely the xenophobic problem I mention. And it is a very specific example of the "propaganda" I mention. You know what the term means and what it references, but you still used it in the reductive capacity that de-personalizes the "enemy". And, as I mentioned then, I'll mention again: that's what made it all the more disturbing, because you are generally smarter than that. The fact that is actually has become a widespread term of ethnocentrism and bigotry among enlisted and armchair combatants makes that more frustrating.
Khross, it is not me who is smarter than this, it is you. "Hajji" is a term for the enemy. Note the underlined portion. It is not a term for Arab, Muslim, Iragi, Afghani, or anything else. The term is appropriated for the same reason "VC" appeared; it is a play off the appelation of the enemy to himself.
Yes, it de-personalizes the enemy. There is a reaosn for that. The enemy is the enemy. He is trying to kill you. You de-personalize him because quite frankly, it is not fair to expect people in combat to be fair and equitable in regarding the enemy as "just like me", and doing so is psychologically harmful. You are reading ethnocentrism and bigotry into a tem that has nothing to do with either, esepcially since American troops have a wide variety of ethnicities and even include muslims themselves. It is neither; it has to do with holding the enemy at psychological arms length.
There's a reason "gook" and "slant" are racial pejoratives and "VC" is not. The same applies to "Hajji" as opposed to "towel head".
Diamondeye wrote:
Religion isn't the issue of this thread. A group of idiots acting violently in response to a known provocateur is the issue of the thread. That Vilks used a religious provocation is only incidental: he could and has achieved the same result with other "art" for other audiences in the past. My initial condemnation was of the reductive and careless generalization that Islam was to blame for the behavior of those students/observers. It's not the religion's fault they're violent assholes any more than it is Western society's fault Vilks is a douche.
Religion very much IS the issue of the thread. You're begging the question again. The group of idiots is acting violently in response to a percieved insult to their religion. He may have been able to provoke nonreligious audiences with other presentations (and yes, he is a first-class *******) but the fact is that while Islam is not to balme for the
outrage of the obsevers, it is, in fact, the catalyst that turned that outrage into violence. You've alluded to the same sort of thing being shown to Christians, but we've seen no Christian lynch mobs at the display of "Piss Christ."
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There are plenty of reasons Islam is neither catalyst nor cause for violence; namely, the vast majority of Islamic followers live and coexist peacefully in multi-ethnic and multi-religious societies across the world. That said, researching the various forms and teaching of Islam indicates that very few actual Mosques or Clerics actually teach violence. Indeed, the "radical" elements that do support and incite terrorist activities actually appropriate the language of the Quran and other writings much like Phelp's appropriates the Bible for his own wing-nuttery. The more mystical forms of Islam, including Sharia Sufism, resolutely deny violence toward your fellow man, for any purpose. And some splinters of Sufism and Shia Islam are explicitly pacifist. Consequently, jihad refers to spiritual conquest and battle in a manner more akin to evangelism than any actual reference to combat. But, there's little, if any, exposure or explanation of that large bloc of Muslims anywhere. Rather, they are overshadowed by agenda driven clerics and secular groups that use religion as both tool and weapon.
I don't think you quite understand what I mean by catalyst. I mean precisely that, a catalyst. People who are larely inclined to leave their fellow man alone to begin with won't be seriously affected because there is no reaction for a catalyst to accelerate.
The fact of the matter is, however, that relatively few people are content to leave others alone even if they demand being left alone themself. The very concept of "Jihad" as struggle is easily interpreted, even in the absence of overt teaching of violence, as a call to struggle against the "unbeliever". Sympathy to the radical is far easier to come by than actual radicalism.
Diamondeye wrote:
It's not a cultural bias in the least. I dislike cultural hegemony for a wide variety of reasons, not the least of which is the inexorable march of "progress". As for how my study of anything makes the mainstream Western opinion "wrong," it's because everyone has a right to self-determination. You'll note that I speak crossly of Edward Said, despite his renown as the world's foremost scholar on the Middle East. Said, like so many other people, attempt to understand other cultures, societies, religions, beliefs, theories, languages in terms of their own. Rather than accepting that all of these things are fundamentally beyond translation, the West, especially its academics and politicians, tend to force things to conform to their model or expectation of how things are. (Sorry in advance Aizle) A good example is Aizle's issues with religion in general. He disapproves and dislikes religion, consequently he projects very negative views about its practice and purpose. That Aizle cannot know what it means to an individual to be Catholic or Lutheran or non-denominational Christian doesn't matter, because Aizle is projecting his understanding onto their experience and judging them through that lens.
While I don't fundamentally disagree, you seem to be at odds with your own posting history here. You've in the past castigated the lumping of "white" people of widely varied ancestry into one group, but now you seem to want to accentuate the subtle differences of Muslims and Arabs while lumping Western thought together as one whole.
As to cultural hegemony, the concept itself I find highly suspect as another unfalsifiable hypothesis. Not only that, but in the interaction between western cultures and middle eastern ones the fact of the matter is that each side has its own viewpoint, and has no choice but to use that to try to understand the other. When clashes occur, this inevitably results in the winner being castigated for winning by people who feel it's unfair to have technological or other advantages.
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The same thing applies to most Westerner's views of the various ethnic and religious groups in the Middle East. You're attempting to understand the history and values of a culture and people who are not your own through the values of Western society. And that simply doesn't work. While some things, of a more scientific nature, might yield reasonable facsimiles of that reality, you (even myself) are still fundamentally encumbered by the world as you have come to know it. For the West, this means we reduce the radical Muslims and the jihadists and the terrorists into single, collective group for means of making them the enemy. And, the evidence as we have it, suggests that they do the inverse (although, that's a bit more complex). And some assumptions about the enemy are flat impossible: the religion is a catalyst or a cause or a root cause or what have you, because their society doesn't work that way.
I really don't think that this is the case at all. For example, as I ahve pointed out to Monty in the past there is not one insurgency in Iraq, there are (or were) over thirty, and they fought with each other over various matters, not just with us. We really do not reduce them to a single group to make them the enemy. What we do is recognize that, despite their differences, they do, in fact, have on overriding commonality. The evidence does not, in fact, suggest the inverse, or, more correctly, I don't know where you're gtting evidence that does.
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The biggest problem the West faces is the issue of information control and information warfare. And, at least from what I gather of your experience, you found that the Hearts and Minds strategy worked (for the most part). Middle Eastern and South Asian countries involved in this conflict are poor; the populations are spread out; literacy is mostly non-existent in any sense the West would use the term. Consequently, Radical Clerics and Terrorists can use religion as a tool or weapon in this conflict, but the religion of Islam itself doesn't predispose anyone to violence. Rather, the enemy as you know it uses message control much like Obama does in the White House. If you control what your supporters know, you don't have to deal with the inconvenient realities facts might make of your goals. And even then, the radical elements we're facing are probably better at message manipulation than we are, as evidenced by the ability to co-opt college students and graduates and other reasonably well educated individuals into their fold.
I don't think you fully understand then, the degree to which sympathy for violence has spread. You are correct, that radical elements are excellent at message manipulation, but the problem is, where do the radicla clerics and the like come from? We see no rquivalent in equally poor but non-muslim areas.
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Arabic literature is pertinent for a lot of reasons, but it's a mistake to assume I haven't thoroughly researched the history of Islam and Islamic nations from a variety of viewpoints (including those I find dogmatically offensive). What literature does do, especially pulp literature, news papers, comic strips, and even high literature/art (films, paintings, etc.) is augment the study of history and language. I won't say it gives insight into "why" or "how" a culture things, but these things provide snapshots of what a culture/ethnographic group thinks. The problem here is that there is no one Islam. So while Iranian art indicates X and Y, Jordanian art indicates Y and Z. And, for the most part, western researchers still only have access to things amenable to western conventions.
Your own example indicates my point; while Iranian and Jordainian thought have differences, they also have commonalities. They both include "Y" and "Y" is centered on Islam. This is why you will find both Iranians and Jordanians inserting themselves into Afghanistan and Iraq in the name of Jihad.
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Except, that's not what I've done. I've commented an element of American society as it impacts you and me. You somehow think this is a condemnation of something explicit and overt, rather than the phenomenological development of a cultural identification within our own nation, its media, and its population. And to that end, I don't think you really grok the conversation we're trying to have.
Amusingly, I don;t think you know what conversation we're having. You seem to be going down this rabit hole of claiming we're not understanding Islamic cultures because we see them through our own lenses. Regardless, we have't got a choice. We have problems with Islamic terrorism
now. That has to be dealt with. From
our persepctive, Islam is the catalyst, although not the cause, of radical violence, and since it's us that these radicals insist on attacking and whom their sympathizers approve of the attacks on. I see no evidence that Muslims, in general are making any effort whatsoever to understand us through anything other than their own lens, so I see no reason to accept that us failing to do so is a valid cricticism, espcially when we are not the ones insisting on perpetuating post-colonial conflicts by flying ariplanes into buildings.
Diamondeye wrote:
Viet Nam has the largest known bauxite reserves on the planet. That said, you're trying to compare a mostly homogeneous nationality (mostly, as I'm keenly aware no nation is without ethnic diversity) to a bunch of disparate and often tribal ethnicities that are lumped together because of their religion. And I think that's what frustrates me the most. Your response continue to indicate a reductive line of thought that groups Palestinians into a single "cultural unit" with the myriad ethnic groups most people have never heard of between the West Bank and Islamabad. This sort of reductionism doesn't lead to understanding the "enemy", it leads to otherizing a whole slew of other peoples based on the lowest common denominator: "They're all Muslims, so Islam must be responsible (to some degree or another)."
Once again, these supposedly disparate groups have, collectively, lumped
themselves together through their insistence on behaving as a commonality because of their religion. We've seen all of these groups stick their noses alternately into the Bosnia-Croatia-Serbia conflict, the Afghan-Soviet conflict, the Israel-Palestine conflict, and both U.S. conflicts in the region. The differences you cite seem awfully trivial in light of this. In fact, no one cares if they are a cultural unit, and it's a topic of common understanding that, for example, Iranians are neither Arabs nor Arabic speakers. I think you are seriously underestimating the level of understanding the average person has of the differnces between muslims and ascribing an inflated level of importance to those differences.
Diamondeye wrote:
And that indicates Muhammed behaved as many charismatic leaders throughout history behaved. It provides radicalized clerics, who use the poverty and ignorance of their followers against the masses, to misrepresent what is written and believed. It doesn't, however, establish violence as a core value/means within the religion.
I think that it does, since the periods in the first few hundred years following Muhammed's death involved high levels of religiosly-based aggression, and the fact that Muhammed found it convenient to add Quranic verses to justify his military actions.
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It was reported; hence, I said "precious little". But it's an anomalous report, as is the link Dashel provided earlier. Think of it like behavioral training in the sense of Pavlov. If 80% of all news containing the words Islam and Muslim refers to some violent event or occurrence, what will the basic cultural assumption about Islam be?
I'm not sure why you think it would receive more reporting since it was A) an anomoly in and of itself and B) really wasn't pertinent to the issue at hand which was mainly are we going to: **** around, invade, or drop a B83 on Kabul?
Diamondeye wrote:
You haven't substantiated this one bit. The otherizing road goes both ways. Just as the West is currently in the business of otherizing Islam, that Radical Clerics and Jihadists have been in that business for far longer. Stanley Cohen would suggest as far back as the early 60s (at the very least). Individuals have used the most effective tool they have to convert ignorant masses into mindless drones for slaughter. The Elite in the American South did it in the lead up to the Civil War (how do you think the great American Racism came to be?)
I should point out that the basics of what a society can physically support dictate that ther must be far more people supporting the radicals than there are radicals. The U.S. maintains less than 1% of its population under arms, even counting reserves, but this is percieved as somehow outsized. In WWII, what percentage of our population was under arms? Otheriztion is not the issue here. It's simple logistical need. I can substantiate this by the simple fact that radicals need to eat and drink.
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And this tacit support has precious little do with any religious or Islamic beliefs. Before they were all Islamic, they were all subjects of the British or Ottoman Empires. They were all subject to the military and economic atrocities of Colonial powers. People approve of the targets not because they believe in Allah; people approve of the targets because Winston Churchill ordered the gassing of Baghdad; the East India Trading Company used slave labor to farm poppies in Pakistan, tea in India, and strip mine Afghanistan.
I don't believe their subjection to either the British or Ottomans predates their being Islamic. I also do not see how the actions of the Ottomans translate to today. Finally, the fact of the matte is that these resentments are really not on the mind of the averge person in such areas. What's on thei rmind is "unbelievers" who they may be friendly to, but ultimately regard as people not going to Paradise. If they remember these events at all, they remember them in terms of "unbelievers".
Finally, even the most uneducated person is not unaware that the U.S. is not the Ottoman Empire nor Britain. Their translation of such grievances onto the U.S. is evidence only of their own bigotry.
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