According to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, "A small handful of Zionists, with a very intricate organization, have taken over the power centers of the world. According to our estimates, the main cadre of the Zionists consists of 2,000 individuals at most, and they have another 8,000 activists. In addition, they have several informants, who spy and provide them with intelligence information." Furthermore, these individuals are "germs of corruption," who should be targeted for liquidation, or whatever the current term for genocide happens to be.
If you've read Mein Kampf, of course, you could probably fill in the rest of the Hon. Ahmadinejad's rant yourself. Unfortunately, Ahmadinejad sounds like some people I know. It is also the mantra of Muslim extremists and the suicidal terrorists they breed. But, while I think his ideas and rhetoric are Hitlerian and evil, I think he suffers from colossal arrogance and ignorance. He must be countered at every turn with relentless justice-based and powerful enlightened opposition. Otherwise, the killing of innocent lives will never end.
What is as sad as it is counterproductive, however, is the linking of any protest against terrorism to "Neo-conservatism," and the "Neo-cons" to a vague "Islamophobia." The only thing this does is justify rejecting or ignoring any protest against terrorists who happen to use Islam to sanctify their psychotic hatred of the rest of the human race on the grounds of presumably mindless bigotry against all Muslims.
Several of us at CESJ have viewed the one-hour version of a DVD I received in the mail, "Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West." We tried to find any evidence of Islamophobia in the presentation, and none of us came to the anti-NeoCon conclusion that many people seem to take for granted. Yes, I agree that "Islam" as a religion can and probably has been perverted by Muslim radicals, including Ahmadinejad, but, except by the unfortunate semantic use a religious term in the title, none of the Neo-Cons in the video attacked Islam. The Neo-Cons interviewed all seemed to agree that the Muslim radicals and extremists represented a small percentage of Muslims in the countries with significant Muslim populations. But the same could be said of Hitler's supporters among the German people, before those extremists gained power over the German government. The same can be said of the Taliban in Afghanistan. And, as the DVD effectively demonstrated, scores of millions of innocent lives have been lost in consequence by the rhetoric of preachers of hate, like Hitler, Ahmadinejad, Syeb Qutb, and Osama bin Laden.
Without any better evidence than the usual mere assertion I don't think anyone will convince me that Neo-Cons (whose motivations seem to be based on half-baked defensive strategies and legitimate concerns for survival, not based on a strategy to use force and violence to dominate others) are as dangerous as radical Muslims like Ahmadinejad or Osama bin Laden. As anyone who is even marginally familiar with the economic paradigm and language of the Just Third Way should be fully aware, I reject the short-sighted Neo-Con's "democratic capitalist" Keynesian paradigm underlying their policies, as much as I oppose the compassionate but soft-headed paradigm of leftists.
The counter to any dangers of any economic power of the Neo-Cons and their backers is political transformation of the economic infrastructures and money systems of the world, as described on a number of Just Third Way websites, various writings on the American Muslim www.theamericanmuslim.org, and in the website of the International Quranic Center at www.ahl-alquran.com.
Short of total chaos in the world, I have confidence that the poor and propertyless multitudes of the world will wake up and new leaders will emerge through the power of the political ballot to gain political power to change the laws and institutions affecting money power and ownership power. Then and only then can nations apply justice to turn have-nots into haves without taking away property rights from current haves. I don't see any of those in today's money power elite as our main opposition. (I think academia, with its flawed ideas in the law, economics, political science and other soft sciences, is what perpetuates monopoly capitalism.) It is the silence of good people who know of our alternative that perpetuates the deficiencies in academia that are blind to the power-concentrating barriers in current economic systems of the world. This, not the Neo-Cons, hold back the reforms needed to implement the Just Third Way's free enterprise version of economic democracy. Those who now hold a monopoly of money power cannot stop the advance of Justice when the people wake up to demand it. (http://www.cesj.org/thirdway/paradigmpapers/jtw-greengrowth.pdf) Nor can academia. (In my lecture this week at American University no one raised a single point in opposition to this analysis, and I have been invited back to lecture before a bigger audience in November.)
Those Muslims or any others who use the language of violence should be rejected and their advocacy of violence against those who do not advocate violence against non-violent people should be countered with all the instruments of counter-force, especially a justice-oriented vanguard in the war of ideas to counter the extremists. If we win the war of ideas, the breeding grounds of terrorism will be eliminated all over the world.
More Muslims should join true leaders and human rights activists in the war of ideas within the Muslim world like Sheikh Dr. Ahmed Mansour and Saad Edin Ibrahim who have agreed to form the religiously pluralistic Abraham Federation that you and other advocates of the Just Third Way conceived. You have decided to spend your time in other ways, and that's your prerogative. Much of my hope for future victory in the global war against religious extremists rests with clear-sighted leaders like Drs. Mansour and Ibrahim and followers of other faiths who support the Just Third Way.
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