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The Radical Politics of Islamic Fundamentalism

(New Republic) Daniel Jonah Goldhagen - Political Islam is now fully on the offensive. We are witnessing a new multipronged, intercontinental intifada. A Sunni Muslim cleric, having helped organize anti-cartoon protests in Beirut, explained the protests' significance: "The war [with the West] has already started." In Gaza, demonstrators demanded the hands of cartoonists be cut off, and an imam at the Omari Mosque declared, "We will not accept less than severing the heads of those responsible." This is not normal politics. This is not even the normal excess of normal politics. Some will want to believe that Hamas will tame itself now that it faces the responsibility of governing. Hamas, under crippling diplomatic and financial pressure, is seeking to do the minimum necessary to get the willfully gullible in the West to sign onto its political legitimacy. By identifying political Islam (not Islam itself but a political Islamic movement with a coherent and distinctive political ideology and goals), we emphatically do not implicate all Muslims or all Islam. The phenomenon includes only Islamic-grounded political regimes and organizations that share a common ideological foundation about Islam's political primacy or its need to systematically roll back the West. Therein, political Islam resembles the international communist movement in its heyday. Political Islam is totalitarian, aggressive, conquering, cocksure about its superiority and destiny to rule, intolerant, bristling with resentment, and only tenuously in touch with aspects of reality. What marks it most distinctively are its religious consecration of its tenets, emotions, and goals, which are putatively grounded in Allah's will and to which slavish (indeed literally mindless) devotion is due; and its cult of death, which produces its extreme danger. The Iranian and Palestinian elected leaderships' support for the destruction of Israel shows that Israel's conduct is simply not the issue for political Islam. Its hostility to Israel is not, and never was, based on Israel's policies. It is Israel's - and an independent Jewish community's - existence in the Middle East that political Islam wishes to obliterate.
2006-03-07 00:00:00
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