...is the title of an excellent commentary from Rod Dreher at NationalReviewOnline.com.

Here goes:

Is Oprah Winfrey a threat to national security? No, but now that the war has begun, I worry about her, and here's why.

The nation cannot afford the naive illusions that have given many Americans comfort in peacetime. Chief among them is the notion, repeated ad nauseam by our leaders and the media, that Islam is a religion of peace. This may not be an outright lie, but it is so far from the full truth as to approach falsehood.

Americans have been told that they shouldn't attack the Muslims among us, and only the lowest of the low would disagree. The American people, with very few exceptions, have risen to the challenge to be humane, decent, and loving toward Muslims in this country. Well and good.

Americans by nature want to think the best of those from other cultures. But we run the risk of blinding ourselves to the nature of the threat facing our country and our civilization. In his 1996 book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Harvard's Samuel P. Huntington warned us of deluding ourselves about the true nature of the Islamic threat.

"Some Westerners, including President Bill Clinton, have argued that the West does not have problems with Islam but only with violent Islamist extremists," Huntington wrote. "Fourteen hundred years of history demonstrate otherwise."

We can sit around making diversity quilts and thinking happy thoughts, or we can, with charity, commit ourselves to soberly assessing the historical and present-day reality of "peaceful" Islam, and its relations with non-Muslims.

Which brings us to Oprah. Last Friday, she devoted her program to "Islam 101," purportedly a crash course in the Mohammedan faith for her vast television audience of clueless Americans. It was grossly imbalanced and extremely dishonest. In fact, given how many Christians and other non-Muslims are horrifically persecuted today by Muslims in the name of Islam, it amounted to offensive propaganda.

Oprah called Islam "the most misunderstood of the three major religions" — yet did her best to add to the confusion by candy-coating the complicated truth about the Muslim faith. If you were to take Oprah's show as your guide to Islam, you would think Muslims were basically Episcopalians in veils and turbans.

- continued -

Take her interview with Queen Rania of Jordan, a lovely, modern young woman who looks more at home in the pages of Vogue than in a hijab. The queen said that Islam "doesn't impose anything" on people — an absurd lie. Oprah asked her about the so-called "honor killings" of women in Jordan, murders committed by men against women in their families who are believed to have shamed the clan. For example, some young women who have been raped are in turn murdered by their male relatives for having stained the family's honor.

Progressive forces, supported by the palace and Jordan's Islamic religious establishment, tried to outlaw these killings in 1999, but were thwarted by the conservative Islamist party in Parliament. Queen Rania, reflecting establishment opinion, told Oprah that honor killings were a "cultural" phenomenon.

If that's true, then why have pre-Islamic Arabic tribal customs been taken up and spread throughout the Muslim world? Moreover, many Islamic religious leaders endorse them, or lesser violent punishment of women for the same dubious offenses.

Anyway, if one grants, for the sake of argument, the queen's contention that the Koran doesn't endorse honor killings, so what? Clearly very many Muslims believe honor killings are Islamic doctrine, and act on those beliefs — and we must be aware of that, and let that reality inform our judgment. If one were a Jew in Torquemada's Spain, it would be useless to be told that the Inquisition was a betrayal of Christianity. Theological disputes would be ancillary to the question of survival: what would matter would be how the local Christians interpreted their faith.

Queen Rania's dismissal of Muslim behavior that brings discredit upon Islam as un-Islamic brings to mind the bankrupt apologies leftists made during the Cold War for Communism. When the wickedness of the Soviets, or other Communist forces, could not be denied, it was claimed that these people did not represent "true" Communism. They may have actually believed that, but those who would be victims of real Communists, not theoretical Communists, didn't have that luxury.

Dr. Maleeha Lodhi, the Pakistani ambassador to the United States, turned up to say that "There is nothing in Islam that does not accord women equal rights." Oprah did not ask her to name one Muslim society in which women enjoy equal rights in the Western sense, because the ambassador would have had to remain silent. Or perhaps not: she had no trouble lying when she asserted that it was "absolutely untrue" that some people in her nation had taken to the streets to celebrate the September 11 attack.

- continued -

Other quotes, from the program (available at www.oprah.com):

— "Muslims do not think that there is a non-Islamic world out there that we have to conquer. That is not the concept in Islam. Our job is to get to know one another, and the more we do that the better off we are."

— "The main thing we would like non-Muslims to know about our religion is that we're not so different from them."

— "I would like to reassure the American public that Islam does not preach violence."

— "Islam and Christianity and Judaism, and all the world's religions share a common heritage. We come from the same root. And our prophets and the characters in our holy books are the same. In Islam, all the religions are permitted to exist in peace with these others until Judgement Day."

That Oprah let these statements be broadcast unchallenged is appalling, an absurd fantasy that ignores the enormous suffering actual Muslims are inflicting on non-Muslim populations worldwide. "Wherever one looks along the perimeter of Islam, Muslims have problems living peaceably with their neighbors," Harvard's Huntington wrote. "Muslims make up about one-fifth of the world's population but in the 1990s they have been far more involved in intergroup violence than the people of any other civilization. The evidence is overwhelming."

In Sudan, the Muslim government in Khartoum imposed Islamic law nationwide in 1993, and has killed 2 million Sudanese Christians and animists, and enslaved countless more, in an attempt to Islamize the country. Coptic Christians in Egypt, whose presence in that country predates the arrival of Islam, have been slaughtered by fundamentalist Muslims, with authorities doing little or nothing to stop them.

In the Philippines and East Timor, Christians are being massacred by Muslims. Churches and Christian homes in Nigeria are being burned, and Christians murdered, by Muslim extremists. Arab Christians are oppressed by Muslims in the Holy Land, too. In Nazareth, Muslims are building a mosque just steps from the Basilica of the Annunciation, and make no secret of their intent to provoke and intimidate Christians. An imam in Gaza earlier this year broadcast a sermon over Palestinian Authority radio calling on Muslims to murder Christians and Jews as their Islamic duty. The ancient Christian presence in many Arab lands — Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, among others — has been decimated in the last century by Muslim persecution.

- continued -

The list goes on and on. While it is true that there are relatively peaceful Muslims who wish us no harm — the Sufis of Turkey come to mind, but there are others — it is unarguable that very many Muslims and their leaders despise non-Muslims, attack us rhetorically in religious terms, and wish to see us die for our infidelity to Allah. To these Muslims, many of whom are Wahhabi (the Muslim sect that, according to Islam scholar Stephen Schwartz, accounts for 80 percent of the imams in the United States today), there are two worlds: that of Islam, and that of war. No compromise is possible between them.

What can possibly be gained from ignoring this ugly reality? Nothing — and a great deal to be lost. As Andrew Sullivan notes in Sunday's New York Times Magazine, our leaders' "laudable" post-9/11 efforts to discourage seeing the conflict in religious terms "doesn't hold up under inspection."

"The religious dimension of this conflict is central to its meaning," Sullivan writes, adding that it would be "naive to ignore in Islam a deep thread of intolerance toward unbelievers, especially if those unbelievers are believed to be a threat to the Islamic world."

It's naive to ignore it on a macro level, and it's naive to ignore it on a micro level, too. We know that the Muslims who carried out the 9/11 attacks lived for years peacefully among other Americans. We also know that they couldn't have carried out their operations without the support of others. Further, we know that some mosques and Islamic institutions in this country have been helpful to the jihadists. Believing that the threat to America comes simply from foreign Islamic extremists may make Oprah viewers feel better, but it's dangerous — and it lets moderate, patriotic American Muslims evade their responsibility to repudiate and root out fundamentalists among them. In Sunday's New York Times, a reporter wrote of interviews she had with Muslim American students right here in my own Brooklyn neighborhood. One of the male students said, on the record, that he would abandon the United States and give his own life to back an "observant Muslim who is fighting for an Islamic cause." Oprah honey, this is called sedition, and if there is an Islamic fifth column in this country, the American public needs to know about it.

American Muslims understandably feel pressured now to show the non-Muslim majority that they are no threat, and well-meaning dolts like Oprah are key to this effort. Watching Oprah's "Islam 101" program, I thought of the Lebanese Catholics at my church, who stopped me after a prayer service for the World Trade Center dead to talk, on the record, about the anti-Arab persecution they feared coming.

- continued -

They all said they knew plenty of Muslims here in New York who were peace-loving people, and that it would be wrong to think ill of them. I asked these Arab Christians if these Muslims supported terrorist organizations, monetarily or otherwise. Every one of them said yes, sheepishly. After the interview was over, the group asked me not to use their last names. They were afraid of being physically attacked by Muslims in their neighborhoods — this, for standing up for America in print.

"That's amazing," I said to them. "You are all Christians living in the United States of America, yet you are afraid to have your names attached to patriotic statements, out of fear that your Muslim neighbors, the same people you are defending to me, will attack you. What does that say about the reality of Islam in America?"

They did not answer me, because they had no answer. Think about that next time you're told that Islam is a religion of peace. There's more to the story than what Oprah is telling you.

Eric The(Helpful)Hun[>]:)]

Yup!

Thats a big 10-4 Eric! Well put! Golf clap.

An excellent post.  BTT!!!

What you said about Sudan is 100 percent TRUE, I work with a very devout christian from Sudan, he came to Arizona to escape certain death at the hands of Islamic fundamentalism.  

Eric, you hit the nail on the head.  Oprah is soooooo full of sh*t.  I'm sure some here on this site will call you racists or insesnitive, but you just told it like it is.  [:\]

Loved it all but what about the Spanish Inquisition led by the Catholic Church.  They (in my opinion) interpreted the Bible in the wrong way as do the fundamentalists such as Osama.
We all know about Joan of Arc and others from England to Italy that suffered at the hands of the Church.  

Everyone keeps saying that we're not at war with "Islam".
All these apologists are out there trying to explain WHY they attacked us.
"our unfair policies"
"American arrogance"
"America's support of Israel"
"American Imprialism"

Bullshit.

Ask Osama why.
He'll tell you it's Islam vs. the infidels (us).

We might not be at war with Islam, but Islam certainly seems to be at war with us.

Oprah needs her Prozac strength upped. [:D]

Eric,

I would agree with the information that you have stated, excepting that there is one missing piece, and that is that it seems to me (start opinion) that it is the way that Islam is being taught that is causing the issue.

In the comparative religon course that I took (admittly it was only one quarter of college and really did not delve too deeply into the religons), the God of Islam, of Judiasm and of Christianity is the same God.  With in the book of Islam, it does state that the act of jihad is allowable, but only when there is a threat to Islam itself, and only against the government that is threating.

After conquring the opposing land, an Islamic government may, or may not be set up, depending on the people who live in the conquered land.  If in face the people request Islamic rule, conversions to the Islamic faith are allowed.  However, people of the christian and jewish faiths should not be prosecuted if indeed they refuse to convert over to Islam.  In fact, the Koran lists individuals of these faiths as "protected".  I believe this is due to their same belief that there is only one God, which is the same God of Islam.

Taking that into account, along with the tenet of the taking of innocent life is hateful in the eyes of Allah, it is rather hard to be able to understand how the current Islamics continue on their path of war, celebrating the deaths of many thousands of innocents.

Perhaps this will bring up the good old arguement of the environment that one is brought up into can be a deciding factor on how one views the world.  Face it, people of the christian and jewish faith have cause a lot of damage in the past to those who pratice Islam.  With that occurring so dramatically in the past, perhaps a racial memory is causing the rather interesting interpetation of the Koran that we see today.

Yes, and WHAT makes us the "infidels" in Osama's mind???

ALL the "bullshit" reasons you list above.

Don't kid yourself - Usama did NOT just wake up earlier this year and decide to hate America. He has his reasons - NONE OF WHICH justify his actions.

Let's take a look at those individually.

[b]unfair policies [/b]

Well, America created Usama, funded him, trained him, to be their anti-Soviet puppet. he was a convenient ally against teh "more evil" Soviets. But them we changed allegiances from Usama to the Arabs millennium long enemies.  Now, 20 years later, he is the impersonation of evil, even BEFORE Sept. 11. If your gov't (or ANYONE) did that to you, would you be pissed?? Well, don't expect Usama to be the "bigger man" than you are.

[b] American arrogance [/b]

America IS the best nation the world has EVER known. We have reason to be arrogant. Deal with it Usama. You are an America wannabe / nevergonnabe.

[b]American support for Israel [/b]

Arabs have been fighting Israel for 1,000 years. Now that we lately have sided with Israel, that coulldn't POSSIBLY have anything to do with Usama's hatred of America. No, ONLY the naieve would think that. I mean, my enemies friends are MY freinds, right??? [rolleyes]


[b] American imperialism [/b]

Often shows itself as benevolence. Bailed our Russia saving thousands from starvation, saved Europe from Hitler, economic aid to every nation on the face of the earth, provide a haven to repressed peoples of all nationalities, and the means and opportunity to achieve the American dream. If that makes us "bad" people, call me the baddest of the bad.

Rather than change any of these policies that Osama finds so problematic, we should continue AND intensify them.  None of his demands should be heeded.  

The fact that usama finds these policies problematic is irrelevant.

The fact that these policies are WRONG and NOT in Americas best interest are what necessitates that we change them.

Whether any benefits accrue to Usama is also irrelevant. He'll be dead long before he would ever get to benefit from them. See, i believe in capital punishment for murderers like Usama.

...and for that matter, I couldn't care less how angry Osama is with the US.  I couldn't care less why he is angry, either.

Knowing why, NOW, is completely irrelevant.
NOW we have a war to win.

This idea that we need to better understand Islam, or re-evaluate our policies, in the wake of the attack, suggests that we are to blame, OR WORSE, DESERVED IT.

The only reason to try to better understand them and their motivations, NOW, is so that we can better understand how to crush them efficiently and swiftly.

Many who previously opposed our support of Israel, now say: "Look, see what those policies have gotten us! If only we didn't support Israel none of this would have happened..."

Osama would partially agree with them.

The attack shouldn't be used to strengthen one's argument.

I know what you are trying to say, but you contradict yourself in this post, the intended point of which I agree with.

But I'll go beyond that and say "Let's learn what we did wrong in CREATING Usama (see above), who now is our "arch enemy."

"Those who will not learn from histories mistakes are condemned to repeat them."

--Unknown

Simply put, America is NOT without blame here. But nothing anywhere near deserving Sept 11, 2001.

The blame that lies with us is in that we shouldn't have allowed them the ability and means to accomplish this attack.

I don't buy the idea that we shouldn't have angered them so.

A couple of quotes from Sun-Tzu "The Art Of War"

"...Thus the highest realization of warfare is to attack the enemy's plans; next is to attack their alliances; next to attack their army; and the lowest is to attack their fortified cities."

"Thus there are five factors from which victory can be known:
     "One who knows when he can fight, and when
        he cannot fight, will be victorious.
     "One who recognizes how to employ large
        and small numbers will be victorious.
     "One whose upper and lower ranks have the
        same desires will be victorious.
     "One who, fully prepared, awaits the
        unprepared will be victorious.
     "One whose general is capable and not
        interfered with by the ruler will be victorious.
"These five are the Way (Tao) to know victory."

And, in this thread, the most important:

"Thus it is said that one who knows the enemy and knows himself will not be endangered in a hundred engagements. One who does not know the enemy but knows himself will sometimes be victorious, sometimes meet with defeat. One who knows neither the enemy nor himself will invariably be defeated in every engagement."

Which are we?

Don Out

We will never truly understand them.  The arabs have a sense of reality that doesn't make sense to western minds. But we will still defeat them, because they don't understand us, either.

Beware of those who think they fully understand the arab way of thinking.  

I think the meaning implicit is the same as the difference between "empathy" and "sympathy", in that we can never understand that kind of blind hatred (as civilized persons), but can through study of their teachings, reference material and culture, at least be aware of some of the thought processes involved, and use them (teachings and thought processes) to utterly crush them.

My old CSM was in 1st SF Grp, spent about 20 years in Southeast Asia (4 combat tours in Viet Nam). He said they could never be truly understood because they are culturally wired differently. He also said that in Viet Nam, given the above, they understood well enough to defeat the communist forces well enough to defeat them at their own game.

It's very difficult to engage in business and diplomacy with people from the middle east.

They truly have a different way of thinking. After the Gulf War, palestinians believed that 100s of thousands of Americans and Israelis were killed in battle.  They thought that Saddam's retreat was tactical.
Today they belive that thousands upon thousands of palestinian children are being killed by the Israelis.
They live in a culture where myth and reality are one and the same.  Their stories begin with a phrase that translates as, "The was and there wasn't...".
People mistakenly believe that they are being fed propaganda, and that's why they believe such things.
Not so.  They know what they believe is what they believe.

The best way to understand them is to know that you'll never truly understand them.

Read T.E. Lawrence, "The Seven Pillars Of Wisdom"

Agreed-(as Don runs off to the bookstore)

Havy you seen John Carpenter's "In the Mouth of Madness"? great quote there, something about "What if the minority world view of the insane suddenly became that of the majority?"

Warning, the book is a monster.

What a F*ing mess.

btt for Al and Babe-Sue

Just remember that the leaders of those arab countries very often have lied to their people and create all of this madness you see as their quirkiness we will never understand.  Think about it Major.

"Oh the Humanity!" This is sucking my will to live.

Guz

Yes, but you know, that advice ain't all bad! :)

btt