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Sunday, January 18, 2009

The root causes of the Gaza conflict in less than 6 minutes

Take common words in the English language and give them a decidedly non-Western perspective. Justice, peace, evil, darkness... and mean enslavement, war, non-Muslim, and Western values. Then stop wondering why Western nations can't seem to establish their version of peace in the Middle East.

From: Occidental Soapbox:

Forget everything the mainstream media tells you about the "cycle of violence" and the "peace process." The conflict in the Middle East boils down to one issue; the imposition of Islam upon the world. Hamas, as a Muslim Brotherhood affiliate, is perfectly open about its desire for a global Islamic caliphate. Such an enemy by definition can never be appeased, and must be destroyed.



Full transcript with links follows:
From the dawn of Islam the universal Muslim community has been known as the Ummah, literally “the nation” . From the 7th century through the early 20th century the Ummah was ruled by a Caliph, who was considered to be the legitimate political successor to the Prophet Muhammad on earth. His domain was known as the Caliphate. The capital of the Caliphate and the amount of territory it controlled changed with the geopolitical currents of the day. In the 7th and 8th centuries the Ummayad Caliphs ruled from Damascus. From the 8th to the 14th century, the Abbasid Caliphs oversaw Islam’s "Golden Age" from Baghdad. The capital moved away from the Arab world to Constantinople with the ascendance of the Turkish Ottoman Empire in the 16th century.

No matter what form the Caliphate took in a particular era, it was always ruled by one adaptation or another of Islamic Shariah law. The Koran was the highest legal authority, and Christians and Jews lived as insecure Dhimmis, inferior guests in the domain of Islam. Zoroastrians, Hindus and polytheists at the fringes of the Caliphate were considered even lower.

From the 19th century on, as the Western world modernized and industrialized, the obsolete Ottoman Empire steadily declined. Western concepts of nationalism influenced Arabs in the Middle East who wondered why they were being governed from a faraway Turkish capital, and influenced Turks to wonder why they were governed by an ancient religious empire rather than a Turkish nation-state.

It was this morally and physically weakened Caliphate that opposed the Allies in WWI, uniting with the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary. From the ashes of the Ottoman defeat at the hands of the Allies, the nationalist leader Mustafa Kemal Ataturk declared the modern state of Turkey. On March 3, 1924 he constitutionally abolished the institution of the Caliphate, the first time this had happened in the almost 1300 years since the Prophet Muhammad walked the earth.

It was just four years after this spiritual-political blow that the Muslim Brotherhood was founded in Egypt in 1928 . The brotherhood railed against the new tide of nationalism in the Middle East. Their primary goal was to reinstate Islamic rule and Sharia law in the modern nations that used to belong to the Caliphate, and eventually extend that rule over the entire world .

The officially stated objectives of the Brotherhood are :

-Building the Muslim individual
-Building the Muslim family
-Building the Muslim society
-Building the Muslim state
-Building the Caliphate
-Mastering the world with Islam

Today the Brotherhood has branches in 70 countries. Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the architect of 9/11, was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood preacher, was the mentor of Osama Bin Laden. Bin Laden’s lieutenant Ayman al-Zawahiri got his start in the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood at the age of 14.

In 1991 the Muslim Brotherhood recognized some 29 “likeminded” organizations in the United States, including the Muslim American Society, the International Institute of Islamic Thought, The Islamic Society of North America, the Muslim Students Association and the forerunner of the Council on American Islamic Relations .

Meanwhile, Israel is struggling against the Gaza branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. In the 1987 Hamas Charter they explicitly refer to themselves as a wing of the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine.

And if we read Article 9 of the Hamas Charter, we can examine the Muslim Brotherhood influence:

“Hamas founded itself at a time when Islam had disappeared from life. Thus, rules were shaken, concepts were upset, values changed and evil people took control, oppression and darkness prevailed, cowards became like tigers: homelands were usurped, people were scattered and were caused to wander all over the world, the state of justice disappeared and the state of falsehood replaced it. Nothing remained in its right place. When Islam is absent from the arena, everything changes."

This of course refers to the fall of the Islamic Caliphate.

"As for the objectives: They are fighting against the falsehoods, defeating them and vanquishing them so that justice can prevail, that the homelands be retrieved and from their mosques the voice of the mu'azen would emerge declaring the establishment of the state of Islam, so that people and things would return each to their right places, as Allah is our helper."

The western concepts of peace and truces and territorial compromises are not relevant to the conflict with Hamas. No territorial concession will whet their appetite, as the violent reaction to the Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza strip in 2005 has shown. Hamas’s stated goal as a Muslim Brotherhood organization is to establish the rule of Islam on earth. First over the Gaza Strip, then the West Bank and Israel, then the rest of the world. They believe the world was organized properly in the era of the Caliphate, and that the past 85 years of secular rule in the Middle East have been a hideous aberration. In their eyes Israel is not marked for destruction because it occupies this or that piece of territory, but because it exists at all as land not governed by Sharia. As such, a permanent settlement can never be reached with Hamas. The current conflict between Hamas and Israel will end when Israel accepts Islam, or when Hamas’ ideas of Islamic supremacy are obliterated… whichever comes first.

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