I was just settling down to go to sleep last night when I noticed that Fox News was playing breaking news about a foiled terrorist plot in the UK. Intrigued, I switched back to CNN (I try to avoid commercials by flipping back and forth, but sometimes I think they’re on to me, and that’s why they synchronize commercial breaks). They didn’t have it quite then, but about five minutes later they were playing the breaking news, too. More terrorist plots on airlines . . . everyone’s saying “it sure looks like Al Qaeda” but we’re not formally blaming them . . . yet. Actually, that might explain why they didn’t get more involved in the Israel-Lebanon crisis lately. However, it did cross my mind that we’re going to be really floored someday when we realize that it’s not just one extremist Islamist group that is after us, but actually the bulk of them, including even the governments of some countries in that part of the world. Bringing down Bin Laden isn’t going to end it all, unfortunately.
Back a while ago, Iran responded to the U.N. that it would think about taking a package of incentives to end its nuclear program, but that they weren’t going to get back to us about it until August 22nd. I happened across this article about that date’s significance last week as I was keeping up on the crisis on the Middle East. A more comprehensive view can be found in this essay by Bernard Lewis. In it Lewis underlined the likely possibility that Iranian extremists have something apocalyptic planned for that day (or maybe the night before). There’s also a great article by Joel C. Rosenberg about it on National Review Online today, and check out this blog’s take on it.
It is likely that the airline terror plots that were foiled today may have had something to do with this. I’ve noticed a lot of the TV commenatators mentioning that we’re close to the 5-year anniversary of 9/11, but as important as that day was for us in the United States, I don’t think that the jihad calendar is quite as tuned in to the Western perspective. No–the point is, as I mentioned in my thesis earlier this year, that the terrorists are doing this according to their calendar and their agenda.
I had a class last year about information operations and information warfare, and a lot of what we discussed was terrorism and the Global War on Terror (GWOT). What I got out of that class was 1) we are vulnerable in so many ways that there’s no way to adequately protect ourselves against a determined terrorist group and 2) we Americans do not understand the whole of what we’re up against. Of point #2 I’ve become increasingly convinced over time. Until I was in that class, I didn’t even realize that there was an entire Islamic eschatological worldview on a par with the “dispensationalist” worldview that one encounters in Christian circles. Dispensationalism is what we see in the Left Behind series–if you’ve heard of “The Rapture,” that’s what I’m talking about.
Anyway, Islam has its own subset of eschatologically-minded folks (Of whom more liberal Muslims seem to think similarly to the way that non-Dispensationalist Christians think of their Rapture-minded brethren). What makes this particular worldview unsettling for people with a Western perspective is the active role that the radical Islamists seem to think they need to take in bringing on the apocalypse. Now that scares me. It would be scary if fringe Christians decided that they wanted to bring on the apocalypse, too, but so far that movement hasn’t been taken up by any groups large enough to make a difference. Somehow a more fringey perspective has crossed the tipping point in a large part of the Islamic world, and that’s why we’re having to deal with these regional wars of religion.
I watched a documentary recently, called Execution of a Teenage Girl which I found by way of Cox and Forkum Editorial Cartoons. This goes through the story of a 16-year-old girl named Atefah who was executed for “crimes against chastity” in Iran a couple years ago. What we would have called it was statutory rape–and she wouldn’t have been the one on trial.
This reminds me of Reading Lolita in Tehran, which I read when I was in Atlanta a couple weeks ago. We have such a sanitized view, here, of what is happening to people in these parts of the world.
Iran was, before the revolution in the 1970’s, a fairly recognizable place for those of us in the Western world. It was not, perhaps, Western, but it was a fairly “liberal” place, where people could live in a way similar to the way that we do here in the States. I’m sure that this was not true for people within all socioeconomic groups, as is regrettably quite common in most of the world. But there was a middle or upper class of some size that was educated, liberal, and free, and they lived lives that wouldn’t seem a hardship to us.
However, when radical Islamists gained control, they imposed sharia law on everyone–Muslim or not–within the country, and slowly but surely tightened their grip on the lives of people within their borders. Unfortunately, this has meant a horrific loss of freedom for women in particular. You can be arrested for such terrible crimes as having your headscarf slip and showing your hair, for meeting with a man who is not related to you, for wearing makeup or nail polish–subversive things like that.
Iran is what the world would look like if these people got what they wanted. I suspect that most of us don’t want that to happen, whether or not we approve of the freedom of Islamists to follow their ideology as they please. I think that being too blindly Western-centric can harm us here as much as it could to cave in completely to them. We need to understand that, whether we want it or not, there’s a sizeable portion of the world that is at war with us, the West (for lack of a better term), and that if we don’t fight back, they’ll win. Denying that the war exists doesn’t make it go away–it just makes us look stupid.
Posted by Kjirstin 
