"But is the conventional wisdom right?"
An expert panel discussion at UCLA titled "Totalitarian Islam's Threat to the West," examined the question, and came back with a very firm answer. Watch Daniel Pipes, Wafa Sultan and Yaron Brook from the Ayn Rand Institute "provide new and illuminating answers to the most important questions of our time: Is the West ready to concede victory so easily? Are the terrorists a fringe group of fanatics, or are they part of a much wider ideological movement? What threat do they pose to the West? What can the West do to ensure victory? Is peace possible?"The video of the event is here. Naturally, any such event attracts protest, but this time they failed to shut the event down. Coverage of the panel discussion and the protest is at LGF, Infidels are Cool, and Student of Objectivism. [Hat tip Thrutch]
UPDATE: Overwhelming interest in this presentation has the video server at full capacity. If you are having trouble (and it's working fine as I type this), then keep patient, and maybe bookmark the link and come back later when most of America is asleep.
UPDATE 2: Yaron Brook's article in the latest issue of The Objective Standard, The “Forward Strategy” for Failure, "examines the Bush administration’s so-called war strategy and shows that its manifest failure is a consequence not of good ideas poorly implemented, but of the morally corrupt ideas motivating the administration." [Note, this article has been made accessible to both subscribers and non-subscribers.] It's backed up by several seriously good analyses along similar lines, many of which have also been made available to non-subscribers.
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RELATED: War, World Politics, Religion, Objectivism
13 comments:
Islam is a threat to the West just like Global Warming.
As Eterez has said - I don't believe that the Western Civilization is that pansy that we'd suddenly allow ourselves to be ruled by an out-moded and non-Western framework of political governance. Muslims compose, at best, 8% of the West? They couldn't even all get together and vote it in. Stop conjuring up ghost horses. I don't get defensive when I think people are coming after Islam. I get defensive when good secular Westerners start jumping at the slightest invocation of the word "Islam." It's like we got together and hit up on a lot of political-Ecstacy and now the slightest nudge of the trigger words (taqiyah! naqbah!) makes us jump. Have some confidence in your freaking civilization.
More people drown in the bath each year than are killed by terrorists.
What's the biggest threat - radical Islam or its "useful idiot" enablers in the west?
enablers in the west
Spot on. Those enablers are the likes of Keith Locke and the greenies, John Minto, Robert Fisk, Ruth $500,000 Annual Salary, Labour Party MPs, Matt McCarten, et, etc.
Anonymous, perhaps you've missed what's been going on in the last fifty years, and increasingly so in the last dozen or so? Perhaps you've missed the long, long trail of death, destruction -- and western appeasement -- that makes claims of "ghost horses" looks as stupid as the voices from the Dark-Ages who do threaten the west, and have shown they'll do what they can to destroy it.
Like it or not, we're at war. It's a different war than we're used to, an asymmetric war -- a so-called fourth-generation war -- so it's one some people still don't recognise (or still don't want to recognise) but we are under sustained attack.
Your hopes, my friend, lie only in the weakness of the enemy; relying only on that hope will not make that enemy any weaker, quite the contrary, but it will make the west's defenders even more weak than they have been so far.
Islam is a threat to the West just like Global Warming.
As Eterez has said - I don't believe that the Western Civilization is that pansy that we'd suddenly allow ourselves to be ruled by an out-moded and non-Western framework of political governance. Muslims compose, at best, 8% of the West? They couldn't even all get together and vote it in. Stop conjuring up ghost horses. I don't get defensive when I think people are coming after Islam. I get defensive when good secular Westerners start jumping at the slightest invocation of the word "Islam." It's like we got together and hit up on a lot of political-Ecstacy and now the slightest nudge of the trigger words (taqiyah! naqbah!) makes us jump. Have some confidence in your freaking civilization.
More people drown in the bath each year than are killed by terrorists.
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Posted by Anonymous to Not PC at 4/15/2007 02:36:23 PM
What's the biggest threat - radical Islam or its "useful idiot" enablers in the west?
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Posted by leelion to Not PC at 4/15/2007 03:56:44 PM
enablers in the west
Spot on. Those enablers are the likes of Keith Locke and the greenies, John Minto, Robert Fisk, Ruth $500,000 Annual Salary, Labour Party MPs, Matt McCarten, et, etc.
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Posted by Wicket to Not PC at 4/15/2007 04:31:41 PM
Anonymous, perhaps you've missed what's been going on in the last fifty years, and increasingly so in the last dozen or so? Perhaps you've missed the long, long trail of death, destruction -- and western appeasement -- that makes claims of "ghost horses" looks as stupid as the voices from the Dark-Ages who do threaten the west, and have shown they'll do what they can to destroy it.
Like it or not, we're at war. It's a different war than we're used to, an asymmetric war -- a so-called fourth-generation war -- so it's one some people still don't recognise (or still don't want to recognise) but we are under sustained attack.
Your hopes, my friend, lie only in the weakness of the enemy; relying only on that hope will not make that enemy any weaker, quite the contrary, but it will make the west's defenders even more weak than they have been so far.
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Posted by PC to Not PC at 4/15/2007 04:59:10 PM
It's a seriously good analysis, but I can't agree with the conclusions that the US should act unilaterally to put a WW2 solution on Muslims.
It might come to that, but the US, as the principal peacemaker of the last 60 years, has an obligation to work through the processes that it set up and has largely abided by throughout that time.
And if we are to operate with the vision of hindsight, in 2001, the US should have taken out Pakistan with nukes, rendered Waziristan uninhabitable for a thousand years and developed the WoT from there.
JC
You start to make a strong case for a subscription to the Objective Standard pc, that article is very good.
And anon: what's the most popular boy's name in Amsterdam?
On the Forward Strategy article, what do people think?
I'm not sure if the comparison with Japan and Germany really works. Clearly in those cases the majority of the people supported the regime.
But do the majority of the people in Afghanistan and Iraq support annihilation of the US? Terrorism?
I believe in total victory and all options on the table as well, but was/is that warranted in this case?
Not easy.
Berend,
Before coming up with an answer.. does anyone know what the question is?
The US Iraq action looks more and more like an action to actually decide what the problem really is.
What's coming out of Iraq and the region is a mosaic of issues that have been hidden or poorly understood by all of us. Sure, there are parties on both sides who assert they've always known what to do in the Middle East, but I don't think they really count.. the critical issue is to get the issues out there for everyone to see.
Now, there's no resiling from the facts of secret nuclear programmes in at least Libya and Iran, of an enormous unassimilated Muslim problem in Europe, that there's a crisis of will in Europe and much of the West to preserve and live the Western culture, that Muslims in the ME have no understanding of their own deepening depravity and that oil is corroding Western attitudes as much as Muslims.
Solutions? Bush has one, and it seems to me it has to be tried, because these Muslims don't yet the ability to absorb a WW2 solution.
JC
Many of Americas problems in the ME are at least largely of it's own making.
It has a problem in Iraq only because it was dumb enough to invade in the first place, some commentators think that that was precisely what Bin Laden was trying to bait them into doing.
Iran's hostility to the US might just possibly be connected to the 1953 coup that the CIA sponsored, the 26 years of backing for the Shah,a slightly more sophisticated version of Saddam Hussein, and the overt support for Saddam Husseins brutal invasion of Iran in 1980. Just a thought...
Blindly backing Israel as it runs the Occupied Territories like apartheid-era South Africa also dosen't help.
Finally, just who encouraged the Islamists in Afghanistan with all the guns and money etc. that they needed in the 80's? Who? Oh yes, the shining white knight of Liberty...
And anonymous: well said!!
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