zenpundit.com

[ by Charles Cameron — with irony, skepticism, and just a dash of dry humor ]
.

image from the Ansar forum, h/t to Aaron Zelin

**

You’re probably familiar with the idea of a jihadist flag flying over the White House. Anjem Choudry, the British radical Islamist preacher told Christiane Amanpour on ABC This Week a while back:

Indeed, we believe that one day the flag of Islam will fly over the White House. Indeed, there’s even a narration of the prophet where he said that ‘the Judgment will not come until a group of my Ummah conquered the White House’.

I’ve dealt with this hadith before as it happens, and pointed out that in one telling the Prophet is asked which “white palace” he’s referring to and replies that he’s referring to the palace of Khosrau (Chosroes) I of Persia:

Jabir b. Samura said:

I heard the Messenger of Allah (may peace be upon him) say on Friday evening, the day on which Ma’ez al-Aslami was stoned to death (for committing adultery): A small force of the Muslims will capture the white house. I said: Kisra? he replied Kisra.

**

Never mind, Choudary thinks the jihadist flag will fly over the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue — and like-minded protesters in New York even carried a photoshopped image of the concept (below) as a placard at a 2006 rally in New York.

**

Hey! Put those two ideas together — a little “more of the same” photoshopping should do the trick — and you’d have a magnificent end to the Cold War, eh?

Maybe that’s what Choudary meant when he said, earlier in the same conversation with Amanpour:

Well, just let me say that Islam has a solution for all of the problems that mankind faces.

I suppose that’s one way to avoid a clash of civilizations — have just one guy holding both cymbals, right?

[ by Charles Cameron — our stuff turned against us once again, this time it’s our symbolism ]
.

.

**

Richard Clarke, at that time Chair of the President’s Critical Infrastructure Protection Board and Special Advisor to the President for CyberSpace Security, said in December 2001:

Just as Al-Qaeda used 767s, transforming them into effective missiles, our future enemies will turn our technology against us.

It’s a recurring theme: as Seth Baum noted in April of this year in an article titled When Our Technology Is Used Against Us:

The 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks, which killed 164 people, were made possible by the sophisticated use of information technology.

Baum links to an AP piece by Kathy Gannon, in which she writes:

In an Internet age, al-Qaeda prizes geek jihadis as much as would-be suicide bombers and gunmen. The terror network is recruiting computer-savvy technicians to produce sophisticated Web documentaries and multimedia products aimed at Muslim audiences in the United States, Britain and other Western countries.

**

So far, this is all techno-heavy stuff.

But they’re using our symbolism too, and turning it against us, as Ibn Siqilli notes in his blog post today, IN PICTURES: “Jihad Is Not Terrorism”:

Sad but true: Iwo Jihad.

**

To be honest, I don’t think this works for them. Using clips from the Lord of the Rings works far better, IMO, because it’s a symbol-system that can appeal to youth, and because it draws on a fantasy realm whose “good” and “evil” characters can be mapped directly onto their own identifications.

Propaganda is a subtle business. Still, kudos once more to Chris at Ibn Siqilli for spotting this and posting it.

[ by Charles Cameron — when religious leaders talk of wiping nations off the map ]
.

-Two bearded religious figures face of with what seems like parallel but opposite rhetoric:

______________________________________________________________________________________________

______________________________________________________________________________________________

The Ayatollah Khamenei, left, is the Supreme Jurisprudent of Iran — not merely a senior cleric but Iran’s final authority. Rabbi Ovaida Yosef, right, is the leader of the Shas movement in Israel and a cleric who swings enough power that Prime Ninister Netanyahu consults him and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, briefs him — an influence, then, something akin to an eminence grise perhaps, but by no means the final authority.

You may, loathe one of them you may loathe both of them: I doubt there are many people who admire both. But I’m not here to stir your animosities, I’m here to see what we can learn from comparing and contrasting them by catching them in similar circumstances. Perhaps it will make their differences stand out in high relief — perhaps it will reinforce their similarities.

The two men are both religious clerics, both political players, both getting on in years, both grey-bearded — and both seem to be comfortable using the same rhetoric at this point.

My aim here is to learn from this juxtaposition.

*

So I have two sorts of questions that I’d like to explore here, calmly and with appropriate documentation if you please…

One sort of question probes the differences in position and pouvoir of the two men:

Who has the higher position? Whose side has the most potent weapons? Whose side started this — or is that a moot question?

The second sort is subtler, since it has to do with motives hidden in the hearts and minds of men — and with the differences that sometimes exist between between rhetoric and intent.

Is is an entire people, or simply a regime that they would like to see an end to?

Is either one of them bluffing?

And of course my own favorite: is either one of them, the rabbi or the ayatollah, saying what he’s saying because of an “end times” (Messianic or Mahdist) expectation?

**

Hitler‘s rhetoric in Mein Kampf was pretty clear, and the actions of his Dritte Reich did not belie his rhetoric. Considerable planning was involved, there was documentation.

What, beyond rhetoric, do we know about Israeli planning to take down the Iranian nuclear program? What, beyond rhetoric, do we know about Iranian planing to respond to an Israeli strike — or to defeat and destroy Israel more generally?

Do the logistics back the rhetoric up?

What happens when the word “fire” is itself a match? What happens in an echo chamber, in a hall of mirrors?

[ by Charles Cameron — attempting the unbiased exploration of nuance in often low-nuance discourses ]
.

As usual, billboards, pamplets and ads on the sides of buses are worth watching. Let’s start with the Shariah twins:

The similarities are pretty obvious — what are the differences?

Well, the upper one was put up first, while the lower one was a response to it — that’s one difference, and it accounts for the similarities. Another difference has to do with the URLs each of them provides for further inquiry:

http://www.defendingreligiousfreedom.org
http://www.defendingreligiousfreedom.us

Again, the second is a response to the first and mimics its URL, although it switches automagically to http://freedomdefense.typepad.com/leave-islam/ when you click through. And “defending religious freedom” is clearly a double-sided coin…

The actual situation is neither that “Islam is a religion of Peace” nor that “Islam is a religion of War” — I would suggest it is that Islam is a religion that believes in opposing injustice in the name of peace, for the sake of eventual peace. In this regard, Islam is not unique.

Islam also has adherents who would like to see the entire world under Islam’s banner. In this again, Islam is not unique. Islam has given the world great poetry, history, architecture, philosophy, music, mathematics, science. Again, Islam is not unique in this. In one of my own fields of special interest, social entrepreneurship, Islam has given use Muhammad Yunnus and the Grameen Bank… The Islamic world also includes many religious leaders who espouse virulent anti-Semitism. In short…

Islam as expressed for better or worse in a vast diversity of human lives and situations neither renders each and every adherent an angel nor a beast. God may be perfect, but Muslims are only human. In this again, Muslims are not unique.

**

Let’s turn from religion to patriotism:

According to the lower image, the Tea Party is not the enemy. That’s fine by me — I have friends who are Tea Party stalwarts. According to the upper image, which was put up by a local Tea Party related organization using the Tea Party name, the sitting President of the US is the equivalent of Hitler and Stalin. And if they weren’t seen as enemies by the US, I don’t know what the Second World War and Cold War were all about…

So let’s just say that when Obama‘s death camps pass the five million mark in Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, poets, Christians or whoever killed, I will no longer think the comparison a trifle overheated. To put it mildly.

But hey, I have a question for the Oath Keepers among our readership.

If you are supposed to fire on the enemy, and the illustration in your ad specifically features British red-coats, but you’re not allowed to fire on American citizens, and Col. Kevin Benson, who wrote the disputed article in Small Wars Journal, is an American citizen whom you consider a “red-coat” — are you supposed to shoot him? Please note, I also have friends who are SWJ stalwarts.

What about droning Anwar al-Awlaki? I suppose these paradoxes of double identity all belong in the same category as Bertrand Russell‘s celebrated paradox of the Spanish barber:

There was once a barber. Some say that he lived in Seville. Wherever he lived, all of the men in this town either shaved themselves or were shaved by the barber. And the barber only shaved the men who did not shave themselves.

All of which is fine, until you begin to wonder, as Russell did, whether the barber shaves himself?

**

Back to religion (jihad) — or are we still on politics (Israel)? — for a quick look at the San Francisco Muni advertising discourse, which has now reached the point where I need to amend my usual two panel format:

Pamela Geller paid for the first ad, which encourages US support for Israel, okay, but also seems to call some group or other “savages” — we’re not quite sure who that group consists of since she doesn’t specify it — but she could plausibly be meaning all Palestinian suicide bombers, all Palestinians, all Arabs, all Muslims, even perhaps all those who support Israel… we just don’t know.

Given the amount of hatred floating around on the Israeli-Palestinian issue, I’d suggest the ad is indeed inflammatory, and that the Muni — who didn’t think they could refuse it under applicable US law — was acting appropriately if somewhat surprisingly in posting its own ad in response, seen here in the middle panel.

Now Geller has announced her intention to respond to the Muni’s ad with one of her own, seen here in the third panel — and all eyes will be on Muni if and when she does — to see if they will continue the back and forth.

**

The world is the cinema. There actually are people setting fires in several parts of the cinema, and others whose words could be the sparks that ignite yet more fires. Some of the fire-setters have names like Ajmal Kasab and Osama bin Laden, some like Timothy McVeigh or Anders Breivik, some like Vellupillai Prabhakaran. The theater is crowded, and some people are yelling “fire”…

Furthermore, there’s a difference between panic and precaution.

A while back, Charles Cameron had a post on the Ghazwa E Hind that served as my introduction to an oddball Pakistani agitator named  Zaid Hamid.  The colorful Mr. Hamid seems to be Pakistan’s fully militarized version of Glenn Beck fused with an Islamist George Friedman, with perhaps an astrologer and Rip Taylor thrown in for good measure. In discussing this figure, ZP commenter Omar offered:

….But this clown has serious backers. The deep state systematically uses these clowns to prepare the “information space” for their plans. ..and they are not kidding around. 

Zaid Hamid made a recent appearance in another post by Charles, so I felt inspired to look at him more closely and discovered that Hamid, who has a fondness for 4GW verbiage, has his own think tank, Brasstacks which publishes “geostrategic analysis”, largely about alleged “Hindu Zionist” (?) conspiracies to destroy Pakistan. These papers are fascinating, in a car-crash sort of way, much like a political intelligence letter from the LaRouchies. There is also a blog by Hamid, where his latest post remarkably declares Pakistan’s late dictator, the ruthless General Zia ul-Haq, a “shaheed”.

My question, since Hamid appears to stir controversy and criticism within Pakistan, is what is his real level of influence in Paskistani society? Comments welcome.