A Vision of the Past

Reading the news really irritates me sometimes. It's not what happens, it's the assumptions made. For instance, today I was reading an article about how the Queen of England was being threatened by al-Quaida, and ranted at 'mainstream' muslims who submit to western culture and laws.

It's the mainstream assumption that irritates me. I remember a few months ago when a fatqah was issued by the U.S. and Canadian islamic council or whatever it's called, condemning terrorism. What followed was a lot of news casters and 'experts' talking about how this was the first step of the moderate muslims to take back islam and tell extremists what's what, and how more moderate groups like this would soon be issuing such statements. However, they are in grievous error in one thing, the U.S. and Canadian muslims were not moderates. No, they are liberals, down right radicals. They are about as left leaning as you will find. World wide, moderate muslims may not be terrorists, but they don't necessarily think it's expressly forbidden in the Koran. And you know the 'extremists' and the 'reactionary' muslims we here about? Really, they're just conservative relative to the whole of Islam.

I'm not necessarily condemning the whole of Islam, though I do view it like I view religions other than Christianity as a grievous mistake. I'm saying that if we're going to make any progress in dealing with this problem we need to quit looking at this with rose colored glasses and start aknowledging what's really going on.

It's actually amazing how our society and our news services tend to remake things to how it best fits. For instance take the current stance on how "Bush deceived us all" into going into Iraq. It's amazing the way memory works. If you go back to before the invasion, EVERYONE thought they had weapons of mass destruction. Kerry, Chirac, Kennedy, Annan, even Clinton, they all saw the information and thought that Iraq had bad stuff either active and ready or in the works. The question wasn't that, it was what were we going to do about it? The opposition was based on not wanting to invade but do surgical strikes or sanctions (as if that hadn't already been done and proved fruitless). Yet now it's all about how we were deceived by the White House and Tony Blair, how they knew it wasn't it, blah blah blah. It's also funny that people don't remember the atrocities that were contantly on going that were also a big part. Ask the Kurds or Shi-ites if Saddam, and his near genocidal policies, being gone is a good thing.

I'm not pushing the Iraq war as a full fledged hawk, mind you. What I am doing is questioning the way we perceive things. I'm not bashing Islam, I'm asking if we really understand what's going on. We need to seriously start re-working the way we analyze and assimilate information or we are in serious danger of destroying ourselves through ignorance.