A Clash of Civilizations?

Wow, I was impressed with how well this article was written. It just lays it all right out for everyone, the good, the bad, and the ugly. What do you think?

"Were the September 11 attacks part of a clash between Islam and Western civilization?
Osama bin Laden and his terror network see it that way, but most Western foreign policy experts disagree. Al-Qaeda considers its terrorist campaign against the United States to be part of a war between the ummah�Arabic for the �Muslim community��and the Christian and Jewish West. But al-Qaeda�s extremist, politicized form of Islam represents only one strain within a diverse religion�and a radical one that many Muslims reject as a grotesque distortion of their faith. Many Muslim-majority countries are members of the U.S.-led coalition fighting al-Qaeda. Moreover, al-Qaeda also targets Muslim governments, such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia, that it sees as godless. Many experts therefore say the September 11 attacks cannot be reduced to a �clash of civilizations.�

What is a �clash of civilizations�?
In an influential 1993 Foreign Affairs article titled �The Clash of Civilizations?� the Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington argued that in the wake of the Cold War, the main pattern of global conflict would probably be cultural, not economic or ideological. Civilizations, in Huntington�s thinking, are broad groupings organized around language, history, religion, and self-identification. �In the coming years, the local conflicts most likely to escalate into major wars will be those...along the fault lines between civilizations,� wrote Huntington, who listed eight �major civilizations��Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American, and African�that might clash with one another.

Does al-Qaeda think it�s engaged in a clash of civilizations?
Yes. Bin Laden openly seeks a clash between Islam and the West. �This battle is not between al-Qaeda and the U.S.,� the al-Qaeda leader said in October 2001. �This is a battle of Muslims against the global crusaders.� From bin Laden�s perspective, it is a clash that has been under way for centuries, with the Americans as the latest incarnation of the Christian Crusaders�arrogant Western interlopers out to oppress Muslims. In an October 2001 interview on al-Jazeera, the Arabic satellite news channel, bin Laden talked about the �clash of civilizations� thesis.

Muslims, bin Laden argues, must reverse a series of humiliations that they�ve endured since the Ottoman Empire, the last Muslim great power, was dismantled after World War I. Al-Qaeda�s 1998 declaration of a jihad, or holy war, against �Jews and Crusaders� urges Muslims to attack �the Americans and their allies, civilian and military,� supposedly as a response to U.S. policies that al-Qaeda feels oppress Muslims: the stationing of troops in Saudi Arabia; the backing of U.N. sanctions against Iraq; support for repressive Arab regimes; support for Israel; alleged complicity in Russian attacks on Muslims in Chechnya; and interventions in Bosnia, Somalia, and other Muslim regions that bin Laden sees as attempts to spread America�s empire. These Western policies, according to al-Qaeda, add up to a �clear declaration of war on Allah, his messenger, and Muslims...

Do all Muslims see things al-Qaeda�s way?
No. Most Islamic scholars interpret jihad as a nonviolent quest for justice�a holy struggle rather than a holy war. (Bin Laden is not a credentialed Muslim scholar, and most Muslims do not recognize him as a religious authority.) Moreover, mainstream Islamic teachings prohibit the killing of civilians. Islam has a tradition of religious tolerance and moderate leadership, exemplified by the Muslim caliphate�s ninth- and tenth-century rule of Spain and by the pluralism and diversity of the Ottoman Empire. Still, many scholars today worry about the growth of fundamentalism and anti-Americanism in Muslim countries...

Is the West waging a war against Islam?
Western leaders insist they are not, and their choice of partners and policies backs this up. Although President Bush did once refer to the U.S. campaign against al-Qaeda as a �crusade��a comment he hastily retracted�Bush and other Western leaders have repeatedly said that the U.S.-led coalition is waging war against al-Qaeda�s brand of global terrorism, not against Islam. �The enemy of America is not our many Muslim friends; it is not our many Arab friends,� Bush said shortly after September 11. �Our enemy is a radical network of terrorists, and every government that supports them.�

Moreover, several Western military interventions in the 1990s came to the defense of Muslims�from the 1991 Gulf War, which ended the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait, to the ill-fated U.N. peacekeeping mission in Somalia, to NATO�s 1999 war to stop the �ethnic cleansing� of Muslims by Christian Serbs in Kosovo. Likewise, the U.S.-led ouster of the Taliban has improved the lives of most Afghans..."

The article continues here:
www.terrorismanswers.org...


[edit on 9/17/2004 by ThunderCloud]