Comments to Paul E Marek’s piece: “Why the peaceful majority is irrelevant”
My attention was drawn into a piece in the Internet by Paul E. Marek who is a second-generation Canadian, whose grandparents fled Czechoslovakia just prior to the Nazi takeover. In that 2006 piece (an old article), only recently much circulated, he said that the fanatics are on the march and they are essentially controlling the world affairs. He said, "Peace-loving Muslims will become our enemy if they don't speak up, because like my friend from Germany, they will awaken one day and find that the fanatics own them, and the end of their world will have begun." [Ref: http://inrepair.net/2008/01/20/why-the-peaceful-majority-is-irrelevant/]
Here below is what I wrote in response to the piece:
I believe that the original author has a somewhat too simplistic and distorted image of our world, esp. the Muslim world. Facts are more complicated.
In his view, it is the silent majority that are to be blamed for the rise of the extremists. It is a historical fact that only a small number of organized folks have been able to shape our world politics. The silent majority later goes with the winning party. They are never organized and don’t become the change agents.
What is happening across the Muslim world is nothing new since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. We have all kinds of problems at every strata in our society. What we inherit today is a colonial legacy in which the nation states were curved out of peoples that did not live together, and then people were divided between states. In the vast majority of the cases, the new emerging leaders were no representatives of our people, they were puppets of special interests. In the name of democracy, what we have is failed democratic institutions that have little representation where the political power behaves as if they own the state that they rule with monumental thuggery. It is a messy internal situation.
Then we have the external components. To make things worse, we see ourselves humiliated in Israel with some of the worst human rights violations committed by the savage Zionist regime, not only uncontrolled but actually aided and sponsored by the Christian West and World Jewry. The failure of our leaders to combat external threat and their spineless servitude to the tunes of western masters have alienated their own support base – the masses. The silent majority have seen the defeat of Kemalism, Nasserism, Ba’athism, etc. in tackling daily problems that matter to them. Thus, they are looking for deliverance. And this vacuum is increasingly filled by Islamic parties, religious groups with their NGOs and social-centric activities. That is what essentially led to the success of Hamas and many such groups within the Muslim world. Not all of these religious groups are violent. As a matter of fact they are often more democratic than the other secular democrats in our Muslim world. But they are now conveniently dumped by the stooges and lackeys of foreign interests, the Mafias that rule our world, as the "bad" guys, even “terrorists.” With such an epithet it is now so easy to pin them down – blessed and financed by the western masters.
A section of Muslims, mostly young folks, however, are restless and they want to hit the hornet’s nest no matter how ill prepared they are. They are the OBL-type followers, mostly now depicted as the so-called Jihadists, fanatics, etc. They are a very small group in our Muslim world who think differently than the vast majority.
It is paralysis of one’s wits to assume that these fanatics now are on the march and have taken the mantle of Muslim leadership. No, not yet. As such, I have problem with the so-called German view. More problematic is his silence about the factors which had contributed to the rise of those fanatics. Would Hitler have emerged if it were not for the Versailles Treaty? Would OBL emerge if it were not for the Afghan battleground in which the CIA itself had recruited him and others, and the monumental abuses of human rights and Israeli war crimes in Palestine, or the occupation of Muslim lands by the USA? I doubt that.
Here below is what I wrote in response to the piece:
I believe that the original author has a somewhat too simplistic and distorted image of our world, esp. the Muslim world. Facts are more complicated.
In his view, it is the silent majority that are to be blamed for the rise of the extremists. It is a historical fact that only a small number of organized folks have been able to shape our world politics. The silent majority later goes with the winning party. They are never organized and don’t become the change agents.
What is happening across the Muslim world is nothing new since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. We have all kinds of problems at every strata in our society. What we inherit today is a colonial legacy in which the nation states were curved out of peoples that did not live together, and then people were divided between states. In the vast majority of the cases, the new emerging leaders were no representatives of our people, they were puppets of special interests. In the name of democracy, what we have is failed democratic institutions that have little representation where the political power behaves as if they own the state that they rule with monumental thuggery. It is a messy internal situation.
Then we have the external components. To make things worse, we see ourselves humiliated in Israel with some of the worst human rights violations committed by the savage Zionist regime, not only uncontrolled but actually aided and sponsored by the Christian West and World Jewry. The failure of our leaders to combat external threat and their spineless servitude to the tunes of western masters have alienated their own support base – the masses. The silent majority have seen the defeat of Kemalism, Nasserism, Ba’athism, etc. in tackling daily problems that matter to them. Thus, they are looking for deliverance. And this vacuum is increasingly filled by Islamic parties, religious groups with their NGOs and social-centric activities. That is what essentially led to the success of Hamas and many such groups within the Muslim world. Not all of these religious groups are violent. As a matter of fact they are often more democratic than the other secular democrats in our Muslim world. But they are now conveniently dumped by the stooges and lackeys of foreign interests, the Mafias that rule our world, as the "bad" guys, even “terrorists.” With such an epithet it is now so easy to pin them down – blessed and financed by the western masters.
A section of Muslims, mostly young folks, however, are restless and they want to hit the hornet’s nest no matter how ill prepared they are. They are the OBL-type followers, mostly now depicted as the so-called Jihadists, fanatics, etc. They are a very small group in our Muslim world who think differently than the vast majority.
It is paralysis of one’s wits to assume that these fanatics now are on the march and have taken the mantle of Muslim leadership. No, not yet. As such, I have problem with the so-called German view. More problematic is his silence about the factors which had contributed to the rise of those fanatics. Would Hitler have emerged if it were not for the Versailles Treaty? Would OBL emerge if it were not for the Afghan battleground in which the CIA itself had recruited him and others, and the monumental abuses of human rights and Israeli war crimes in Palestine, or the occupation of Muslim lands by the USA? I doubt that.
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