Extremists

Heather at Driftwood has been rewatching some West Wing. Now, I’ve never seen it (not really into American drama on TV) but this quotation she mentioned struck me as good.

A group of high school students are visiting the White House and question the senior staff about terrorism and Islamic extremism. Josh Lyman asks them, “Islamic fundamentalism is to Islam as BLANK is to Christianity?” His answer? The Ku Klux Klan. Fundamentalist terrorists are to Islam as the KKK is to Christianity.

pax et bonum

Article posted at 10:06am on 03 August 2006
Category: Links, Politics, TV, General

Ah, I would that it were true. If so, 15%-50% of the world’s Muslims wou.. …unless you think that 15%-50% of self-proclaimed Christians support the KKK.

Hammertime () (URL)
7:02pm on 03 August 2006

The problem with that sort of thing now is that the “War on Terror” has made the whole thing an “Us vs Them”, so that our War has driven the extremists into the mainstream (or, rather, has driven the mainstream to the extremists). In facing the monster, we have created a monster.

Even that article you link to makes much the same points. A high proportion of muslims support actions we regard as terrorist – under certain circumstances. And, of course, the main circumstance is US and British soldiers in Iraq. Attacking soldiers occupying a country is quite a long way from what most of us would regard as hard-core “terrorism”. And attacking civilians gets a firm thumbs-down in that very survey from most places.

It’s certainly not true that “Islam” = “terrorism”. And I’d actually be rather interested to see the results of a similar survey carried out in the West – given our governments’ current activities against civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq (however lofty their aims may be, civilians are being killed and injured in numbers that dwarf anything being done by the “terrorists”).

pax et bonum

[John] () (URL)
8:10pm on 03 August 2006