If you want to learn more about Islam, nobody better to learn from than Andy Bostom. The links to de Toqueville should also be studied. Well worth your time.
McChrystal, Tocqueville, and the Koran: The Postmodern ‘COINage’ of a Failed Policy
Just over nine months ago, on September 20, 2009, the Department of Defense released a declassified version of Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal’s assessment of the war in Afghanistan. The Washington Post published a version of this report with minor deletions of material that officials maintained could compromise future operations, rather than a copy of the document marked “confidential.” Although Gen. McChrystal’s counterinsurgency (COIN)-based analysis, “updated” for the Afghanistan theater, at least mentioned the “Koran” (a word omitted entirely from the December 2006 COIN manual co-authored by Gen. David Petraeus), the Koran’s motivational relevance — consistent with a over a millennium of jihadism within Afghanistan (or “Ghazni”) — was completely misrepresented. Negating doctrinal and historical realities, past and present, McChrystal’s uninformed, panglossian Koranic gloss rationalized an ostensibly “more forceful” strategy:
whereby INS [insurgents] are exposed continually for their cultural and religious violations, anti-Islamic and indiscriminate use of violence and terror, and by concentrating on their vulnerabilities. These include their causing of the majority of civilian casualties, attacks on education, development projects, and government institutions, and flagrant contravention of the principles of the Koran. These vulnerabilities must be expressed in a manner that exploits the cultural and ideological separation of the INS from the vast majority of the Afghan population. (emphasis added)
McChrystal’s superficial, bowdlerized pieties on the Koran, and Petraeus’ complete neglect of this foundational Islamic text, contrast starkly with the contemplative, firsthand observations on the Koran (and Islam) made by Alexis de Tocqueville. Shortly after his return from America, Tocqueville studied North African Islamic culture and history — which included an analysis of the Koran (“Notes on the Koran,” March, 1838) — and made two visits to Algeria (in 1841, and 1846), becoming one of the foremost experts on these matters, while serving as a French parliamentarian.
Fistel
addendum:
The spiritual depth, ethics, and morality of many rabbis are unparalleled. Their devotion to the Torah, which they study in poverty with the utmost dedication, is mind-boggling. But the hard question is whether their Judaism is true. Should Jews be nice? Torah scholars? Or should we live a full-bodied national life with secular studies, secular jobs, and wars? The Bible offers no indication that G-d wants Jews to live monastic lives. We’re repeatedly commanded to settle the land, work it, and fight.
Indeed, there is no choice: religious Jews launched massive settlement of the Land decades before Zionists, and Arabs repeatedly targeted the religious Jewish communities, which had no Zionist presence or aspirations to statehood. Subservience to nations is a disgrace of G-d’s name, and negotiations with enemies who claim the land promised to us testify to our rejection of G-d’s promises. He did his miracles in 1947 and 1967, but Jews refuse to follow through with our part of the job. So far!!
Judaism of the Lanfd of Israel had few laws and even fewer restrictions over the Jews. Judaism of the Land of Israel revolved around the Land and it’s cycles and the Temple rites. 90% of what you call Judaism is Rabbincal Judaism and has at most only a remote connection to Torah and the Land of Israel.
I can understand the need for much of this extra legislation in the galut living among the gentiles but not here. Judaism in the diaspora was about personal purification and the Judaism that must be resurrected here is a Judaism mostly based on the purification of the Land of Israel.
The religion of the Torah is first of all practical. The authors of the priestly source went out of their way to simplify observances and to part with complex pagan superstitions and rites. The law was so simple that the Hebrews lived according to it in the Sinai steppes.
Jews have an experience of living without a Temple or the Tent of Meeting. When Samson was conceived rather supernaturally, his father made a sacrifice right in the field without a thought of going to the Tent; visiting angel approved his offering. Jews in the Kingdom of Israel could not possibly have conducted purification rites in the Temple, a month’s journey away from them. For the same reason, they could hardly have gathered in Jerusalem thrice annually for the major festivals, but were obligated to bring the offerings nonetheless. Recognizing this situation, Deuteronomy allows Jews who live far from the Temple to slaughter animals away from its gates. Now, in the absence of the Temple, we must reinstate offerings, including animal slaughter. Besides being the right thing religiously, that would also serve a great political purpose: the Jews who bring animal sacrifices to G-d, even as a matter of picnics, are not liberal interfaith people like everyone else. Such Jews cannot be asked to leave Judea or Jerusalem.
Return to Jewish fundamentalism in the Land of Israel
The religious enforcement according to the Torah rather than Shulhan Aruch won’t be intrusive. What Jew in his right mind can protest the prohibition of exhausting work on Sabbath or leaven on Pesach? Even secular people would gladly agree to this mild coercion, which would form Jews into a nation. And we can always select the ultra-left traitors for exemplary execution.
Fundamentalist Judaism signifies a return from being nice persecuted Jews to real-life existence. Rabbis ban evil speech, but the Torah prescribes that we confront evildoers, reproach them, and stop their wickedness—by force if necessary—lest we share in their guilt through our inaction. The real Judaism, you see, is anything but nice; indeed it is rather militant. It is a religion for club-wielding Jews who are equally ready to wield their clubs on their enemies’ heads and on those of Jewish transgressors. Indeed, the Torah commands average Jews who happen to witness a crime to execute the transgressors once they are condemned.
Jewish fundamentalism sheds the man-made and resumes the man-abrogated in the theology of Judaism.
Better Judaism without Israel than Israel without Judaism:
1. 80% of American Jews have stopped being observant. Estimates say that they will assimilate and disappear from the Jewish People within a generation.
2. 10% of secular “Jewish” Israelis (600,000) have made yerida (emigration) from “Jewish” Israel to live with the goyim in greater Los Angeles. 100% of them marry shikses and disappear from the Jewish people.
3. In “Jewish” Israel, the secular “Jews” call the Torah-true Jews “parasites”. Yet at age 13 they have a bar-mitzvah, and then their only connection with Judaism is not to drive on Yom Kippur. So it looks like the secular Israel “Jews” are the spiritual parasites who get whatever spark of Judaism they maintain from the Torah-true Jews they despise.
4. Secular Israeli “Jews” would prefer to have Jew-hating muslims rule over them than Torah-true Jews. And when HaShem grants them their wish, they will all become muslims, while the Torah-true Jews will become dhimmis, but will remain Torah-true. Torah-true Jews have survived christian hitler, communist stalin, and muslims, and they will survive the Hebrew-speaking goyim: Ben-Gurion, Netanyahu, Livni, Barak, Beinish, et al.
Ahnee ma-amin b’emunah shlaima: Ohd ahmaynoo khai. Ohd Ahveenoo khai.
Liberals are nothing but a bunch of dumb SOB’s, they live in a world of their own.
Here is one gentleman who know Obama for what he is worth.
Fistel I agree with the first part re; Liberal and I would add virtually all westerners who view the world through a narrow prism of their own culture and world view. Call it the ignorance of arrogance.
You idealize Most Torah observant Jews in the same way the West views most non westerners especially those of what we call 3rd world cultures.
I maintain that most Torah observant Jews are Hypocrites even apostate Jews. They choose to live in the diaspora, they cling to petty rituals but ignore the most important commandments and have made Judaism into a religion that is was never meant to be. Almost all of the haredim are still anti-Zionist but take from the Zionists all they can. They are utterly and totally immoral. They are parasites by any description and the secular Jews have every right and reason to hate their guts. It is they who daily commit chilul hashem, Those living in the diaspora and those in Israel there is little difference between them and that speaks for itself. Judaism practiced in the Land of Israel should not resemble the Judaism observed in Boro Park.
The Exile has ended. Jews have witnessed a string of miracles: salvation from the Holocaust, establishment of a state, victory in all our wars, the Temple Mount falling into our hands, and Jewish economic and social influence in the world peaking. Not all Jews returned to Zion, but that’s a familiar problem. Most Jews remained in Egypt during the Exodus, and most Jews remained in Babylon when Nehemiah showed us that the Exile had ended.
To adhere to the Rabbinical fence law is to renounce the divine plan made clear to us. Jews have been taken back to Zion, and now have to revive the true Judaism of the Holy Land. We need to build the Temple and conduct purification ceremonies to absolve us of inadvertent violations. We need to wash the foreign influence out of the Holy Land so that Jews can walk our country freely without isolating ourselves from the community. Jewish ritual isolation, havdala, means we’re “the people who shall dwell alone.” We already dwell alone—or rather, we were given the option of expelling the foreigners and having the country to ourselves. Havdala ends at Israel’s borders.
The rabbinical legislation was hugely beneficial when Jews lived among gentiles, but it is counterproductive now.
The entire Israel is one eruv, a community with a degree of common ownership. All Jewish citizens of Israel jointly possess the country on the divine mandate, and therefore Jewish Israel is properly considered one eruv—especially now that we wall ourselves away from the Arabs with a separation barrier. A Jewish Israel—an eruv—would have few restrictions on the movement of people and goods on Shabbat.
But most religious Jews prefer living with the Exile Judaism even in the Land of Israel. They wait for the Messiah to bring them the Third Temple from heaven instead of building it themselves from scratch—as King Solomon and Ezra did—and creatively solving the resulting theological ambiguities as the Maccabees did. Religious Jews isolate themselves in the neighborhoods instead of expanding Judaism over the entire country. In practical terms, there is no difference between the Jews of Mea Shearim in Jerusalem and Boro Park in Brooklyn. Their religious practices are the same even though the Judaism of the Holy Land and the Exile are vastly different.
Paganism is a theological system which places rites and symbols between men and their Creator. The Jews who speed-mumble standardized prayers three times a day, every single day, who plead for return to Zion instead of buying an air ticket there, who wait for the Messiah instead of voting for real Jewish leaders, who supplicate for the Temple instead of building it—they surely have a big obstacle in the way of their communication with G-d.
But most religious Jews prefer living with the Exile Judaism even in the Land of Israel. They wait for the Messiah to bring them the Third Temple from heaven instead of building it themselves from scratch—as King Solomon and Ezra did—and creatively solving the resulting theological ambiguities as the Maccabees did. Religious Jews isolate themselves in the neighborhoods instead of expanding Judaism over the entire country. In practical terms, there is no difference between the Jews of Mea Shearim in Jerusalem and Boro Park in Brooklyn. Their religious practices are the same even though the Judaism of the Holy Land and the Exile are vastly different.
Religious Jews shamefully concentrate on technicalities, however important, rather than on the big issues. I find it scandalous when religious parties in the Knesset scream over the court’s refusal to fine a handful of establishments which sold leavened bread on Pesach in Jerusalem, but stay in the government which admits to negotiating the giveaway of Jerusalem to Arabs and has actually abandoned the Temple Mount to Muslims. In one reformer’s words, “Hypocrites! For you tithe mint, dill, and cumin [which the Torah does not require], but neglected the weightier matters of the law.” He saw correctly that many religious Jews concentrate on the easy rites of superfluous observance instead of dealing with the really hard issues of core Judaism. It is obscene for a religious Jew in Jerusalem to wrap his kitchen with foil on Pesach to avoid microscopic crumbs of leavened bread, while his Knesset representatives did nothing about the daily shelling of Shderot.
The other side of the COIN:
The concept of counter-insurgency in Afghanistan is based on the idea that the Pashtun people living in southern Afghanistan are tyrannized by a small group of Taliban, and that if America only shows the Pashtuns how great multi-cultural, multi-ethnic atheistic liberalism is compared to nationalistic islam, then the Pashtun people will work with America to overthrow the Taliban once and for all.
Liberals believe that they are the only truly enlightened people on earth, that their system is the only valid one, and that when any non-white people finally gets to see liberalism close-up, they will inevitably be instantly converted.
So the white liberals in europe refuse to believe that the muslim immigrants want to remain muslim, and white American liberals refuse to believe that Iraqis and Afghani Pashtuns will not be eternally grateful to America (just like they thought with regards to the south Vietnamese peasants).
But what’s most amazing is how liberal Jewish Israelis can still have a perfect belief that the arabs, after sufficient exposure to liberal Israelis, will give up being muslim and will become liberal arab israelis living happily ever after side by side with liberal “Jewish” Israelis.
It is this fanatical delusion, championed every day by HaAretz, much of the current Israeli government, its judiciary, and academia, which will lead to the destuction of Jewish Israel the longer it stays in power. More and more, the “jewish” Israeli liberals say they would prefer to live in a state ruled by savage Jew-hating muslims than by Jews who still believe in G-d.
The essence of liberal “Jewish” Israel: they refer to Torah-true Jews as parasites, to Jewish settlers as terrorists, and lovingly pay welfare to polygamous unemployed Jew-hating arabs with forty kids.