[LAF] LAF Digest, Vol 47, Issue 17

[steve ash]

The Seattle idea sounds good, I hope to be able to get to Curry house again Saturday so we can discuss more then.


My point about Islamophobia was twofold, firstly I think its wrong to confuse political 'Islamism' (literally a form of fascism developed in WWII, note specific spelling to distinguish it) or Arab mediaevalism with religious Islam, which in its modern form is not dogmatic or repressive. It's like attacking the C of E over Christian fundamentalism or the Conservative party over the BNP. The danger in not doing that and conflating them is that you empower the fundamentalists by acknowledging them as the 'true voice' of Islam. Given that for all its faults religion will always be with us in one form or another, and Islam is likely to be its dominant form in the Middle East for generations to come, this creates a big political problem for global libertarianism. Instead we should be siding with popular, liberal forms of Islam and helping it to gradually evolve and become more secular, as well as eliminating archaic Arab customs and Islamist distortions and
 their promoters. I think the article makes that much harder and thus helps Islamist movement you can't take on an entire civilisation and hope to 'win'.

The other point is that given the American Military Industrial Complex / Security State has always needed to invent enemies to justify itself and maintain its power, as it did with 'Communism' in Latin America, and at home, there is good reason to believe that they are now doing this with 'Islam' and funding anti American 'Islamist' groups to this end, just as they did 'Communist' groups in Latin America and 'Leftist' terrorist groups in Europe. In fact Kissinger implies just this in his 'unifying' rants on the 'War of Civilisations' in the Middle East. To side in with such a pro American agenda in the name of an ill thought out Humanism seems counter productive to me. The aim of people like Kissinger is not to remove the negative aspects of religion, after all they mostly support Zionism, but rather to secularise the Middle East in a way that makes its exploitable as another purely Capitalist zone.       


Steve