Actually, Tahrir was the seed that brought the plant of revolutionary Islamist authoritarianism. (I’ll keep the word totalitarianism for later on, when it might be needed.) The liberals were a tiny minority who in their combination of hope and arrogance thought that they were something powerful in the country. Meanwhile, the Islamists used the liberals as cover to climb into power. They were on their good behavior for strategic reasons.
Beautiful dreams often engender horrific realities: the Weimar Republic in Germany, the glorious dawn of the French Revolution, and the idealism of the Russian Revolution gave way to something else entirely.
Ironically, a Coptic refugee — in a sinister echo of Big Pharoah’s Brotherhood doctors treating Christians anecdote — recounts how a Muslim physician treating her daughter at a hospital offered to give her a clitorectomy, absolutely free of charge. It was the “last straw” that made the family flee the country.
Of course, not all Egyptian Muslims think that way by any means. But the problem is that 70 to 80 percent of them are ready to vote that way. The excuses are endless: the Islamists are moderate; the Islamists aren’t really Islamists; being in power will moderate them; there are moderate factions; they don’t really mean what they say; they only mean what they say when talking to Western journalists.
The rationales aren’t based on evidence. They are based on wishful thinking, the same wishful thinking that enabled a tiny group of highly Westernized liberals in a few wealthy districts of Cairo to think that they actually represented the country.
Even today, the Tahrir Square political naifs are spending their energy fighting the army while their future masters entrench themselves in power through organization and the ballot box. In some bizarre dance of death — Tahrir is indeed a “mental state” but in political terms one of mental dysfunction — the liberal demonstrators demand the army turn over power faster. Faster to whom? The Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists?
This is not to belittle the genuine spirit of idealism and the desire for a real and stable democracy of human and civil rights that many Egyptians want. But what’s most important is not what they desire but the actual effect of their ideas and actions.
There are wolves all too ready to profit from the gamboling of the sheep. Indeed, they are even quite willing to put on a wool disguise to lull them further into daydreams. The French aristocrat who converted to Catholicism to be king said that Paris was well worth a mass. The Islamists think that Cairo is well worth inviting dumb American journalists to dinner and being hospitable to them.
It’s the same generally with the West, dreaming of a moderate Palestinian state at peace with Israel; of moderate Islamists happily preserving their religion of peace; of Middle Easterners expressing gratitude to those wonderful Westerners who stopped backing dictators and evil Zionists to support instead the masses’ legitimate aspirations; and all the rest of that man-made global balminess.
Try to explain your good intentions to the firing squad. Blindness and wishful thinking are traits one cannot afford in the Middle East because the price for them is going to be very, very high.
Extra credit: in discussing Big Pharoah’s description of a seed, I suggested it has brought the ugly flower of radical Islamism. That reminds me of the evil flowers (Fleurs de Mal), the book of poetry by the French poet Charles Baudelaire. A community center named after the poet was one of the first buildings burned down in the Muslim riots in Paris.
Fascists in power war to follow
Another on-point post … do you ever feel like Orwell circa 1938?
When on June 30 1934 Hitler dispatched the SS to murder the leadership of the SA (the Nazi Brownshirts, symbol to the world of Nazi radicalism) with the support of the German Army, many viewed this as ultimately an act of moderation. Stephen Koch, in his book, Double Lives, notes in footnote 49 on page 362: “The fantasy that Hitler was merely a front man in danger of losing control of the Nazi government to the SA led the conservatives to seek covertly to assist him in resisting that threat…by underestimating Hitler’s own importance and (perhaps) overestimating the hated SA, they solidified Hitler’s own power…” Stalin literally took note of these events and followed with his purges of old Bolsheviks and eventually millions across Soviet society. Koch notes Hitler moved swiftly and theatrically; Stalin did so quietly and slowly.
The goal of the Muslim Brotherhood is no less than Hitler and Stalin the acquisition and consolidation of power for its own ideological reasons. The MB, as was true of Hitler and Stalin, is viewed by some as moderate, and there are always those more radical on hand to compare and contrast. But the result will be the same in terms of issues of power and control regardless of the particulars of its Middle Eastern sociological and religious context.
What a crazy post: in what world is mass political murder viewed as an act of moderation. For all the talk of the “madness” of the Muslim Brotherhood and salafis in Egypt it’s kind of weird to talk about them for what they’d “like” to do or what they “will” do.
What is NOT happening in Egypt is as important as what IS happening; it was not in Egypt that 14 bombs went off in one day but in the enclave of sanity known as Iraq. Conflating mass political murder by Hitler and two Muslim groups that have shown a dedication to resorting to the vote is childish, wishful thinking.
The usual response then is “Well, just you wait” and “It’ll be one-time, one-vote” and blah, blah, blah… here comes Iran. THE END.
Well, my question is, “Wait for what?” If the salafis and MB are NOT moderates, what are they waiting for? It’s been 11 months since the fall of Mubarak – why the time lag for such powerful and deadly entities? Are they waiting for the right moment? Did Hitler wait for the right moment?
I get a lot more juice out of seeing what is actually happening than bootless speculation that is not a natural or logical outgrowth of what we see happening in Egypt. The great surprise everyone seems to spring is that Egyptians are conservative Muslims. Well, get over that one; just because you weren’t aware they have already been so for decades is no reason to treat it as an epiphany. Mubarak kept opponents down, whatever their ilk and there is no reason to suppose “radical” Islam has suddenly come out of nowhere as, contrary to popular belief, sharia has been the main source of law in Egypt for decades and has been enshrined in their Constitution.
The entirety of the Middle East is conservative and Muslim; there is no reason to act as if this is the surprise revelation of the decade.
Mr. John Irgun: I’ve taken to reading your posts. Although I disagree with you 150% of the time, I see that you’re able to “think”. You’re a thinker. I think you said you’re a thinker in another post somewhere. Any hoo, I think you’re wrong about Egypt and the ME. People just want freedom. Me thinks the Muslim Brotherhood is simply misunderstood. Westerners are scared of difference, like turbans and falafel, so they autmomatically distrust people of a different nature. I mean, those Hamas guys probably eat a lot of roast goat. You probably frequently dine at places like McDonalds and Arby’s (like most fat Americans). So, intuitively, you distrust the Hamas crowd. There’s no roast goat on the Wendy’s menu, John! Think about how such simple things have led you to distrust others. Now, I will not fall into that sort of trap. That’s why I don’t automatically distrust others. I like French cuisine. I think the Muslim Brotherhood will bring great hope and change to the ME. I’m sure of it. Positive.
Thanks for reading all 6 of my posts. Although I am capable of thinking I lack the forensic skills to ferret out the joke in your no doubt clever post.
I know this post is a joke, but speaking of cultural differences it’s interesting to note that Middle Eastern Jews (most of which live in Israel today after fleeing or being expelled from Arab and other Muslim states) on average tend more to the right than Ashkenazi Jews and trust the Arabs and Muslims less, in spite of sharing the same music styles and food (both of which are popular in Israel in general). They often say it’s because unlike the Ashkenazim, they know the language and mentality. Of course, there are also far-leftists among them, and the West likes the Israeli far-left, but they are a tiny minority that don’t represent the overwhelming majority who still have more or less accurate memories. BTW, the Ashkenazi community was founded by Jews who immigrated from the Middle East to Europe (some of which married Europeans, so they are racially mixed) 1,000-1,300 years ago, which just happens to correspond with the rise, spread and consolidation of Islam. Could be just a coincidence though.
With all due respect I disagree with you. Muslims Brotherhood are on the same track of comming to the power as Iranian Mullah were in 1979. In those days , Islamist promissed people that consumption of electricity and water were free of charge for Iranians if they would come to power by toppelling the late Shah.
After they came to power, Iranians enjoyed only 2 months free water and electricity. Then after, they were charged 1.5 times higher than what late Shah charged them before the revolution.
Dark days for Egyptions are on way if you have read their Iranian version of Brotherhood.
Don’t tell any of this to President Obama. If he is disturbed in his happy place he’ll become aggravated and start blaming Bush, the Likud or someone. We all suffered enough of that already.
You may think the protesters in Tahrir are wasting their time while legitimate parties pursue legitimate aims but those protesters are saying it is those who think the elections have changed anything that are the naive ones and that nothing has really changed.
As for voting for radical parties, what is considered radical in America is another thing in Egypt; no matter how wrong-headed from the Western point of view, these are simply different people from us. Sometimes it seems half of Americans are dedicated alcoholics and not wanting that doesn’t make one a radical. We should keep in mind our own attempt at totally banning alcohol and massive drugs wars South of America due to our own endemic drug use.
Once again you’re missing the larger point that the events in Egypt are not a call to once again reestablish religion but to have a life where one is not utterly trapped by lack of money. Sure, a large part of the problem is that Egyptians have trapped half their own population, namely women, into roles that, aside from children, are utterly non-productive and therefore more of a burden than help other than an initial dowry. In Egypt a man needs money for two people to even begin a relationship while in the West women mostly have their own lives and money and the family has no say. Try having a girlfriend in Cairo on 80 dollars a month let alone get married and that 80 dollar salary may be half the people in Cairo, some 10 million souls. You think they won’t vote for at least the perception of a more caring point of view rather than your-on-your-own civil gov’t?
Well Barry, when all hell breaks loose shortly, nobody will be able to say that you did not do your part to warn everyone and to try to prevent the coming catastrophe. I cannot imagine better articles than what you write.
All hell broke loose in the 7th century: the difference between then and now is that Islam lost steam, failed to keep finding power vacuums to occupy, fell behind technologically and socially and went to sleep.
If Islam had the military capability there is no doubt in my mind they’d attack Europe. A leopard doesn’t change its spots if its claws become dull; it just can’t hunt as well. Along these lines, I often think of Louis Farrakhan as Hitler without an army.
But there’s also the question of how the power balance or the chances of winning in the long run are perceived by the powers to be. Every serious person in the Middle East knows the West is militarilly stronger, but there’s also a pretty common delusion that the West is a paper tiger, that the US is a paper tiger, that Israel is a paper tiger. That they have the power weapon-wise, but much less the will to use it and the stamina to sustain a prolonged period of war or hostile activities. That Westerners love life too much to be willing to sacrifice their lives to win a war, while the soldiers of Allah know that death is actually a promotion and a huge upgrade for the shahid who will enjoy eternal bliss, which is what they mean when they say they love death as much as infidels love life. In short, that with determination they can win a war. These kind of thinking considers the Amrican withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan an Islamic victory and American defeat. They also consider the Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000 and from Gaza in 2005, as well as the 2006 operation in Lebanon that left Hizballah still standing, and the 2008 operation in Gaza that left Hamas still standing, military victories for the Islamists and Israeli military defeats. All of these cases are seen as proof that with determination the Muslims can defeat much stronger armies, particularly through the use of terror and guerrilla tactics.
Generally speaking, the Islamic Middle East, which sees itself as great students of history, know nothing of American history; one need only look at the Muslim Brotherhood member Sayd Qutb’s childish and almost retarded interpretation of U.S. history in the essay he wrote about his time in America. During the American Civil War and World War II, the resolve of the Federal leaders came down to not accepting negotiated surrenders. Unfortunately for the Japanese, this hope was their ace in the hole, or so they hoped since they well knew they couldn’t win a prolonged conflict. There were attempts by the Germans in WW II and by the Confederate South to stage attacks that might bring their opponents to the conference table but the Feds were having none of it.
Resolve is a funny thing and will be applied differently in different situations. Suffice it to say that Bin Laden is dead and so is Gadaffi and Hussein. The U.S. has limits to its patience and the leadership in Gaza and Iran are playing a stupid game as that leadership could disappear in a spate of violence. Arab entities are the ones that have shown a lack of resolve in recent conflicts against Israel. This is probably the source of shame and anger in Egypt over their wars with Israel outnumbering Israel as they do.
My point was that if they perceive their target as weak, if they believe they can win, they are far more likely to attack. The West can win a war, even a terrorist war, but it’s best to prevent it if possible. Demonstrating what’s interpreted by the other side as weakness wouldn’t prevent it.
And as for knowing or understanding history, I think it goes both ways. We intuitively understand other people by projecting our own experience, but it may not work that well between people from two different cultures with different concepts, different histories, different belief systems and value systems, differnt mentalities. It’s likely to create many misunderstandings and misinterpretations. Westerners don’t necessarily understand Islamic history, or how the Muslims perceive their own history, all that well.
The question for America isn’t that we don’t understand Islamic history but whether our policy makers understand it. Grass roots anti-Islamism in America is not enabling terrorism against the Middle East; for example, in another arena, Timothy McVeigh had no support in America and one can only wonder what would happen to us if he did.
On the other hand historically challenged terrorists in the Middle East do not operate in a cultural vacuum but in a sea of support where their mothers, sisters and brothers declare them martyrs and even strangers give tacit support and approval and so the issue within Islam is many headed and completely different from America; thus a grass roots view of history does matter. But in a sense history doesn’t matter within Islam as regards the West; using facts reason and logic is a shill unless one is vulnerable to facts, reason and logic. The point is that Islam sees itself as never wrong and there are no cultural tools available to them to self-criticize; that is not an Islamic thing but a Western one and it should be noted far overused in the West.
What you are left with is a successful paradigm in the West which nonetheless buys into stupid notions of Western imperialism and colonialism in the face of the much worse, by an order of magnitude, example of the history of Islam itself. Then within Islam, it is completely opposite, where their view of their own history is much friendlier to themselves than facts and history show.
We need to send our ambassadors and Presidential advisors to schools that educate them about the country they are working in. They should speak the language and be encouraged, where applicable to ride the city transit system at least twice a week and travel throughout the country without an entourage and speak to the people rather than only hold or attend dinner parties
http://www.tabletmag.com/news-and-politics/85746/after-the-fall/
“… the vice-chairman of the Wafd said in an interview last July that the U.S. government carried out the September 11 attacks and Ann Frank’s diary was a fake. At least he doesn’t like Iran, though he thinks it is right about the Holocaust being phony. And he’s the liberal.”
This shows what the relevant relativities are in the Pandora’s box opened up improvidently via the supple elicitations of the administration of Barack Hussein Obama – beginning with his “Cairo Speech” which explicitly equated the olocaust with “Palestinian” statelessness.
Egypt cannot feed itself without outside aid. It lacks natural resources, like oil. It has weak manufacturing sector. What happens when the U.S. stops floating its military and its granaries? And the foreign investment attracted by the stability offered by the Mubarak regime pulls up stakes?
Why would the aid stop? (Unless the USA decides to stop foreign aid due to its own financial difficulties). In a political constellation where the Salafists will be seen as the greatest threat due to being the most extreme, the Brotherhood will be seen as at least the lesser evil, standing up to the Salafists the best it can under the circumstances, and therefore should be strengthened rather than weakened. And if both the Salafists and the Brotherhood will be seen as a threat, the army will be the only restraining factor who therefore must not be weakened.
Egypt might adopt the Arab-Palestinian model where there’s a “good cop” and a “bad cop”. In such a model there are the “moderates” who supposedly want peace, and the radicals who do the terrorism and rocket firing. The “moderates” would supposedly want to stop these activities with the occasional arrests (and often quick releases) of the perpetrators, but supposely will not be able to. They will not even be able to control the activities of some of the factions of their own “moderate” party (like the Tanzim and Al Aqsa Brigades in the case of Fatah). They will certainly not educate the children and population to be peaceful moderates. However the West would still want to strengthen the “moderates” and weaken the extremists, so the money will continue to flow.
One way the foreign aid might effectively stop without a deliberate decision: If the dollar is seriously devalued over the next few years (due to inflation) then the effective value of the foreign aid might plummet even though the nominal values remain the same.
Cessation of the billions of foreign aid by the US would probably be the most significant factor in reducing long-term poverty in Egypt than anything else that could be done. Has it done anything more than sustain dictators’ ability to keep down the economic potential of the people as they arbitrarily dispense favor? Let the Saudis do the contributing to the repression of the Egyption people by their new masters.
I think it’s used to help subsidize bread and gasoline so that the masses can afford them. Maybe not directly, but indirectly.
It isn’t just the administration that is lost in wishful thinking. I heard Christiane Amanpour yesterday refer to “moderate Islamists” again and again while moderating Face the Nation yesterday (thankfully, she’ll soon be off the show). The Western elites have convinced themselves, and rather than admit error, will simply redefine moderation down until whatever the Muslim Brotherhood is doing in Egypt qualifies as moderate. Unpleasant realities, like a flood of Coptic refugees, will be ignored.
Correction: Christianne Amanpour moderates This Week, not Face the Nation.
Actually, she is being replaced by another leftist shill, George Stephanapolous. If they were interested in it being a news program, they would have picked Jake Tapper, but their goal is to re-elect the Moshiach, and clearly Tapper was not left-wing enough for them.
What beautiful dreams? The one thing uniting all the so-called advocates of democracy in Tahrir Square, the one thing, was the passionate desire to slit Jewish throats. A pox on them, every last one.
Jewish throats, but the throats of all of us infidels, every last one of us, UNLESS we convert, of course
Yes, that’s why 50,000 Americans live in Egypt with unslit throats. Where do some of you people get your info from, “Beau Hunks?”
That’s nonsense.
“The people get the government they deserve.”
Those who carry water for Islamic tyranny deserve to be RULED by a corrupt fascist Islamic police state that strip mines the wealth from it’s citizens whilst delivering beatings and pogroms against those who dare question the whims of their ruling class masters. Those who refuse to learn from the lessons of history get to relive it until they do or are destroyed.
I am confident that the Muslim Brotherhood will deliver starvation, economic collapse, repression and pogroms on a scale that would make Stalin proud.
It took decades of socialist horror in the Soviet Union before the people finally hit breaking point and revolted, it will be the same with Egypt, Libya and other Middle Eastern countries that vote in Islamic fundamentalists.
Countries, societies and people as a group generally have to hit rock bottom before CHANGE can occur. Reality is a harsh taskmaster.
NO foreign aid for Egypt and NO FREE FOOD. The Egyptian people WILL never reject Islamism until they get to experience it’s wonders undiluted over and over again until they are starving under a bridge with broken limbs due to beatings.
They made their bed, now lie in it…
As for Democrat supporters, Egypt is the change Obama wants for us all.
Muslims are often called radical Islamists and moderates. But there is NO moderate Islam.
“Almost 80 percent of Egyptian Muslims in nine provinces voted for radical Islamist parties.” The Muslims voted for THEIR religion!
Turkey’s Prime Minister Erdogan on “moderate Islam”: ‘These descriptions are very ugly, it is offensive and an insult to our religion. There is no moderate Islam.” Milliyet, Turkey, August 21, 2007.
In November, 2011, the king of Jordan said in a Washington Post interview that nobody could depend on America any more.
None of our allies or the American people can depend on our government to protect us from our enemies.
Obama made a special point of inviting his BIG favorites, the Muslim Brotherhood, to his speech in Cairo. Behind the scenes, America worked to oust U.S. ally, moderate Mubarak, and bring to power the Muslim Brotherhood whose stated goal is global Islamic conquest and the DESTRUCTION of civilization.
28 Jan 2011. The Telegraph: Egypt protests: America’s secret backing for rebel leaders behind uprising. The American government secretly backed leading figures behind the Egyptian uprising who have been planning “regime change” for the past three years, The Daily Telegraph has learned.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/egypt/8289686/Egypt-protests-Americas-secret-backing-for-rebel-leaders-behind-uprising.html
When could they count on us?
Look at the Shah of Iran. Jimmy Carter pulled the rug out under him like we did to Mubarak.
Look at how we treated the Shia when they revolted against Saddam the first time?
Heck, look at the Bay of Pigs mess.
Fr
From the document of the Muslim Brotherhood in North America:
The process of settlement is a “Civilization-Jihadist Process” and all the word means. The
Ikhwan [Arabic for brothers] must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad to eliminate and destroy the Western civilization from within, and sabotage its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers, so that it is eliminated, and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.
It is a Muslim’s destiny to perform Jihad and work wherever he is and wherever he lands until the final hour comes, and there is no escape from that destiny…”
I don’t think you can blame them. This was inevitable – the same results have happened basically everywhere in the Middle East.
Pakistan was ruled by a “friendly” dictator who gave it up and let people vote. The result? Islamists in power. They also hid Bin Laden, collaborate with the Taliban. And BTW, they have nukes.
Turkey was basically a democracy, with the military occasionally stepping in if the Islamists took too much power. But they were voted in again, but this time dismantled the military before they could do anything again.
So by a popular uprising or just staying in power and trying to transition to a democratic government, Islamism was headed to Egypt.
Face it – the Western world is in decline. Two losing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have only hastened our eventual defeat, as they’ve exposed us for being weak.
We’re not having enough children, we don’t have any pride in our culture or civilization (the opposite), we spend too much on corruption (the bailouts, Solyndra, etc, etc, etc, etc), we have prison states (speaking of the US at least – we have more people in jail per capita than Russia and China combined). We can’t build anything anymore – 10 years later and the WTC is still rubble. Our military industry is a joke – everything we try to build costs 10x as much as originally planned and doesn’t work as well (and just gets copied by the Chinese). There’s no more space program. I could go on and on and on.
Face it, we have maybe 50-100 years left. We’re where the Romans were in their last days. Do we pull back the legions and try to hand on further? Or do we completely exhaust ourselves in a war with Iran and bring the collapse sooner?
I think you’re right on the mark but kicking out the Dems won’t solve the problem. Immigration is our biggest danger and it is a bureaucracy that operates day and night independent of control. Then there is the American view of Robin Hood’s take from the rich and give to the poor but distorted beyond recognition. That’s because the “oppressed” and “exploited” in America in fact don’t exist. But go into a YWCA or Community College in America and the bulletin boards and programs would have you think America is Bosnia and both the idea of success and white Europeans are the evil Serbs.
This is very, very hard to fight since it runs right through so many levels of American culture. Members of the Rainbow Coalition are incapable of bigotry and that’s the end of the story. Flash mobs can beat up all the white people and commit crimes out of proportion to their cultural numbers they want and the stereotype of the evil, lynching white man will endure in film and literature for what seems a long time to come.
That is the situation you are stuck in until collapse. But that’s how these ideologies work, and nothing can really change that.
Even in bacteria you see the same dynamic at work. You can divide all survival tactics into two categories :
1) robbing, raiding, stealing, … whatever you want to call it. Destroy others to improve your own situation
2) building, growing, taking the high road, … again, call it what you will
Now here’s the sad part. Once a huge structure is established, tactic (2) will predominate, but it cannot bring large gains to anyone. By contrast, the bigger the structure, the more success (1) will have. Usually you will see the structure fight off tactic (1) a number of times, but never successfully.
The sad part is that the thieves will never win, except for during very, very short periods. Often they lose because the structure they’re attacking successfully defends itself, and indeed, the state structure that was islam until 1921 was destroyed to the last man, woman and child. Likewise, what is left of communist states today is pitiful, as far as the ideology is concerned.
But at one point the robbers, thieves and massacrers will win. There will be a very short, very plentiful period where they digest the husk of the fallen structure. Sometimes the first line of massacrers actually creates a state, like the muslims did, however that never works because their own people will immediately turn to attacking the new state, destroying it. This is why muslim/socialist states don’t have any stability of government, whether as democracies, dictatorships or whatever you like.
However once the situation collapses entirely, and there is simply no state left at all and the carcas is stripped bare, the building tactic will vastly outperform everything else. I seriously doubt it’s a coincidence that the longest lived state structure was a Christian theocracy.
What people don’t understand is that it’s not “The West” that will fall. It’s pretty much every state on the planet that will fall synchronized, in a decade or so. This has happened half a dozen times since the fall of the roman empire, and we’re just living the next iteration.
Just like small groups of thieves and murderers like muslims can survive a rebuild of civilization, small groups farmers and honorable people can survive the collapse of civilization and start the rebuild fase. And there is nothing that can be done to protect our luxury.
Predicting that countries that don’t have a Bill of Rights will proceed to tread, smash, and ignore the cries for human rights and eventually signal the firing squads for the last brave believers is hardly a stretch. The problem I have in reading your analysis of what is always proven is that there is never a mention about the dollars flowing into the country. Where are our tax dollars going now? To the Muslim Brotherhood arsenal fund? The anti-Zionist extermination squad? What? Until we stand up for our belief in freedom, our belief in OUR Bill of Rights there will forever be some corporation/politician willing to sell hope to Congress in exchange for a few billion more tax dollars. NO AID, NO VISAS, NO SUPPORT at all for any country that cannot espouse support for our First Amendment!!!
Egyptians and foreign observers now have two choices: face reality or retreat into comfortable fantasies about moderate Islamists.
Given past history, I choose….Door #2!
Islam will not change its stripes just as tigers cannot. So, burning this library is nothing with a couple hundred thousand volumes of modern writing, compared th Islams burning of the library of Alexander, with its myriad volumes from antiquity. In both cases, the writings did not comport with the Koran, Sira and Hadith so Islam was doing the world a favor, right.
Most people are aghast at the acts perpetrated by Islam but if they studied the history of Islam, they could ber forewarned and able to protect themselves.
No one knows what happened to the Library of Alexandria.
No ? (from wikipedia)
(please, yes there were plenty of disasters hitting the library of alexandria before this event happened. Those disasters range from military defeats, over politics and religious edicts (don’t be so quick to convict those religious edicts as they mostly concerned outlawing of live animal and even human sacrifice. However this law caused a battle between christians and pagans inside the library, eventually settled by the army, with disastrous results). However from all of these events, the library recovered.
This is the event the library didn’t recover from :
In 642, Alexandria was captured by the Muslim army of Amr ibn al `Aas. There are five Arabic sources, all at least 500 years after the supposed events, which mention the fate of the library.
Abd’l Latif of Baghdad (1162–1231) states that the library of Alexandria was destroyed by Amr, by the order of the Caliph Omar.[33]
The story is also found in Al-Qifti (1172–1248), History of Learned Men, from whom Bar Hebraeus copied the story.[34]
The longest version of the story is in the Syriac Christian author Bar-Hebraeus (1226–1286), also known as Abu’l Faraj. He translated extracts from his history, the Chronicum Syriacum into Arabic, and added extra material from Arab sources. In this Historia Compendiosa Dynastiarum[35] he describes a certain “John Grammaticus” (490–570) asking Amr for the “books in the royal library”. Amr writes to Omar for instructions, and Omar replies: “If those books are in agreement with the Quran, we have no need of them; and if these are opposed to the Quran, destroy them.”[36]
Al-Maqrizi (1364–1442) also mentions the story briefly, while speaking of the Serapeum.[37]
There is also a story in Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) which tells that Omar made a similar order about Persian books.[38]
Since it is 5 centuries after a “supposed” event it is not then an event but speculation with no more traction than the other 3 “events” cited in Wiki as possible causes.
Shortly after the turn of the last few centuries the world marches towards another world war. The reason for is that a new generation of leaders achieve power without any experience or memory of the last great war. They all have the hubris of people who constantly reinvent the wheel and think
they are smarter than anyone who came before. The world war for this generation
is the one between the civilized world and the world of radical Islam. Unfortunately neither the US nor Europe have the will or the leadership to
lead. Essentially they are academics who are moral, ethical and physical cowards,
who are willing to compromise on everything so long as they can avoid a fight.
Obama is losing Egypt to Islamic radicals.
Obama is losing Libya to Islamic radicals.
Obama is losing Iraq to Islamic radicals.
Barack Hussein Obama may not be a Muslim, but man, they sure owe him a bundle!
OUTSTANDING VIDEO:
Islam was not for me – Amil Imani (Free Iran)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=w4_BfhrIxg8#!
Same Old Shit