Understanding the Muslim World by the Way its Factions view Jihad!
November 19, 2006
http://www.tribulationperiod.com/
One has but to select a book describing the countless denominations classified by most as “Christians,” to quickly understand there are many different factions and variations of belief within its ranks. The same principle is true within the name “Muslim.” Before I began my contacts with Muslims in the AWS and NSA, my understanding of the variations within the practice of Islam was extremely limited. I taught, went to school with, worked with, and associated socially with Muslims from Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia. I found a recent article by Barry Rubin, in the Jerusalem Post, which beings out some of the different ideologies among the Muslim factions. He is a well known writer and director of Global Research in International Affairs Center.
I did find a common thread among all the many Muslims my path has crossed – a vivid hatred for Israel.
I found much distrust among them for each others belief and nationality, but nothing to compare with their common desire to eliminate Israel as a nation.
This is the obsession we see spiritually drawing them together for a great Jihad.
The latest United Nations resolution condemning Israel, which passed the General Assembly by a vote of 156 to seven, without any remarks condemning the Palestinian rockets that caused the IDF military action at Beit Hanoun, is a vivid example of the growing number of nations turning against Israel without reasonable justification. It is significant that all the European nations, including Britain, voted to support the resolution. It is just another sign that the time of Jacob’s tribulation trouble is at their doors. The spirit of antichrist has been in the world for a long time, but the last 10 years has seen it accelerate in strength and purpose among the fanatical Islamic clerics, and it will soon spread through all the tenants of Islam.
Begin Jerusalem Post Article
The Region: Meet ‘National Islamism’
Barry Rubin, THE JERUSALEM POST
November 6, 2006
In July 2006, Muhammad Abd al-Sattar, a deputy minister in Syria’s government, made a very strange statement on that country’s state-controlled television. Jihad, he said, is the duty of every Muslim, Arab and Christian in order to kill the Jews.
But wait a minute.
Why did Sattar say Muslim, Arab and Christian? After all, jihad is an Islamic religious notion. Why should Christians wage Jihad? And the word Arab here means the non-Muslim, non-Christian Alawites who rule Syria and pretend to be Muslims.
What’s happening here is a new ideology, the doctrine of Hamas, Hizbullah, Syria; and the Iraqi insurgents, behind what Syrian President Bashar Assad calls the “resistance” philosophy.
It is the blend of two radical world views: Islamism and Arab nationalism.
Call it National Islamism. The last time there was such a synthesis it brought together right-wing nationalism and left-wing populist socialism.
The doctrine called itself, appropriately enough, National Socialism. It is best known by the German version of those two words, Nazism for short.
I’m not making this comparison for shock value. It’s a perfect parallel. National Islamism fits the interests of many key political groups in the Middle East. For Iran, it constitutes a bridge into the Arab world, overcoming a big problem. They are Persians, not Arabs, and Shi’ite, not Sunni Muslims.
As long as Arab nationalism rules, they are outsiders. But even with pure Islamism, the Shi’ite-Sunni gap still limits their influence.
With National Islamism, though, the problem disappears. Iran can claim to lead the Arab-Islamic people – a designation filling all those gaps – against the evil Western-Crusader-American-Jewish-Zionist-imperialistic-satanic conspiracy.
Then there is Syria, the world’s first National Islamist state. While the Western media is still full of talk about Syria as a “secular” regime fighting Islamists, that is quite obsolete thinking.
Bashar has been running an Islamization campaign since he took power six years ago. Of course this does not mean Syrian society is going to be transformed into rigid piety. But it does mean the non-Muslim Alawite rulers can play at being good Muslims, keep their Sunni Muslim majority happy, and extend their influence as the great patron of Islamist revolution in the Arab world.
HERE’S ONE small example of the benefits. In 1998, the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood which hates the regime and wants to overthrow it, held a meeting in Jordan to mobilize support from other Islamist groups. One Jordanian Islamist told them off. Syria was the only Arab state fighting their enemies, he said. “Therefore, it is impossible for an Arab or a Muslim to attack it and try to harm it and its leadership.”
For other Arab states, even relatively moderate ones, National Islamism is great if they can manipulate it to their own benefit. They need a mechanism to defuse their own Islamist oppositions. By playing up their piety and using Islamist slogans to justify their policies, they can cut the ground from under their enemies at home.
With Hizbullah and Hamas the story is a truly remarkable one. Hizbullah was established in Lebanon in the 1980s to bring about an Iranian-style Islamist revolution in that country. To this day, though it is often forgotten, Hizbullah leader Hasan Nasrallah is the official representative of Iran’s chief cleric in Lebanon.
But then in the 1990s, partly due to Syrian tutelage, came a big change. Hizbullah reinvented itself as the leader of the Lebanese national resistance, a great patriotic organization.
Being patriotic while representing the interests of Teheran and Damascus was not an easy trick, but Hizbullah pulled it off.
Today it is seeking to take over the Lebanese government with its local Syrian-backed ally. In fact, Hizbullah is now preparing to launch its own Chr
istian candidate, Michel Aoun, to be president of Lebanon.
Hamas is in a roughly parallel situation. It has successfully outbid its nationalist rival Fatah as the best exemplar of Palestinian patriotism.
Most of those who voted Hamas into office in January 2006 were not Islamists, but they did like the Hamas program of terrorist violence and absolute refusal ever to make peace with Israel.
FOR THE WEST, the onset of National Islamism is bad news.
The radicals, whose whole appeal is based on their militancy, are not about to settle the Arab-Israeli, Lebanese or Iraqi conflict peacefully. And if Iran gets nuclear weapons, thousands of Arabs will jump on the National Islamism bandwagon.
True, “resistance” is a purely negative slogan. But if enough hysteria is built up, pure demagoguery will close people’s ears to the real issues. What kind of society would this build? Who knows? Doesn’t this make peace, democracy and economic progress impossible? Who cares?
With its visionary utopian plans for the future and glorification of violence, this is not a movement that’s going to be characterized by moderation or pragmatism. Appeasement will be no more successful than it was with its European predecessor.
It will be defeated in the end – but for now, the believers in National Islamism are singing “The future belongs to me.”
The writer is director of Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center.
End Jerusalem Post Article
I could not agree more that this Islamic obsession “will be defeated in the end,” and Israel will be delivered by her God after a time of great tribulation, to which the following Old Testament Scriptures attest.
Jeremiah 30:7 – Alas! for that day is great, so that none is like it: it is even the time of Jacob’s trouble; but he shall be saved out of it.
Zechariah 13:9 – And I will bring the third part through the fire, and will refine them as silver is refined, and will try them as gold is tried: they shall call on my name, and I will hear them: I will say, It is my people: and they shall say, The Lord is my God.
Ezekiel 39:23-29 – And the heathen shall know that the house of Israel went into captivity for their iniquity: because they trespassed against me, therefore hid I my face from them, and gave them into the hand of their enemies: so fell they all by the sword. [24] According to their uncleanness and according to their transgressions have I done unto them, and hid my face from them. [25] Therefore thus saith the Lord God; Now will I bring again the captivity of Jacob, and have mercy upon the whole house of Israel, and will be jealous for my holy name; [26] After that they have borne their shame, and all their trespasses whereby they have trespassed against me, when they dwelt safely in their land, and none made them afraid. [27] When I have brought them again from the people, and gathered them out of their enemies’ lands, and am sanctified in them in the sight of many nations; [28] Then shall they know that I am the Lord their God, which caused them to be led into captivity among the heathen: but I have gathered them unto their own land, and have left none of them any more there. [29] Neither will I hide my face any more from them: for I have poured out my spirit upon the house of Israel, saith the Lord God.
Genesis 15:18 – In the same day the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, Unto thy seed have I given this land, from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates:
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