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Islamism Quotes

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Islamism Quotes

“I knew,' said Orwell in 1946 about his early youth, 'that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts.' For Orwell, this meant an ability to face not only that which troubles or disturbs us, but that which directly challenges our deepest convictions and assumptions: thus a power of facing. It is often the case, therefore, that to be 'in denial' is not only to commit an epistemological error, but also a moral one: a refusal or unwillingness to critically examine one’s own beliefs and value-judgments. "What the left needs, quite clearly, I think, is just such a 'power of facing.' Not only must it summon the nerve and courage to reconsider the idea that terrorism is a natural consequence of inequality and injustice; it must also acknowledge the equally disorienting fact that militant Islam is a foe with which compromise is not only undesirable, but axiomatically impossible. Even more decisively, it must attempt to fashion a less reductive and more dialectical understanding of American power and the world within which it operates. What it must materialize, in other words, is the antithesis of the fundamentalist world-view: a firm sense of reality and a certain openness of mind to face that which is deeply troubling.”

HonestyIntegrityIslamGeorge OrwellIslamismLeft Wing Politics
Author:Simon Cottee
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“In the pragmatist, streetwise climate of advanced postmodern capitalism, with its scepticism of big pictures and grand narratives, its hard-nosed disenchantment with the metaphysical, 'life' is one among a whole series of discredited totalities. We are invited to think small rather than big – ironically, at just the point when some of those out to destroy Western civilization are doing exactly the opposite. In the conflict between Western capitalism and radical Islam, a paucity of belief squares up to an excess of it. The West finds itself faced with a full-blooded metaphysical onslaught at just the historical point that it has, so to speak, philosophically disarmed. As far as belief goes, postmodernism prefers to travel light: it has beliefs, to be sure, but it does not have faith.”

LifePhilosophyReligionFaithBeliefAtheismCapitalismIslamMetaphysicsPostmodernismWestern WorldPragmatismWestern CultureIslamic TerrorismIslamismIslamic FundamentalismGrand NarrativesPhilosophical Scepticism
Book:The Meaning of Life
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“Needless to say, there are people who hate Arabs, Somalis, and other immigrants from predominantly Muslim societies for racist reasons. But if you can’t distinguish that sort of blind bigotry from a hatred and concern for dangerous, divisive, and irrational ideas—like a belief in martyrdom, or a notion of male “honor” that entails the virtual enslavement of women and girls—you are doing real harm to our public conversation. Everything I have ever said about Islam refers to the content and consequences of its doctrine. And, again, I have always emphasized that its primary victims are innocent Muslims—especially women and girls.”

ThinkingIdeasReasonPhilosophyScienceReligionRaceProgressRepublicanRacismLogicDemocratIslamConservativeThoughtBigotryMuslimAdvancementCritical ThinkingRational ThinkingLiberalIslamophobiaImmigrantIslamism
Author:Sam Harris
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“As to the 'Left' I'll say briefly why this was the finish for me. Here is American society, attacked under open skies in broad daylight by the most reactionary and vicious force in the contemporary world, a force which treats Afghans and Algerians and Egyptians far worse than it has yet been able to treat us. The vaunted CIA and FBI are asleep, at best. The working-class heroes move, without orders and at risk to their lives, to fill the moral and political vacuum. The moral idiots, meanwhile, like Falwell and Robertson and Rabbi Lapin, announce that this clerical aggression is a punishment for our secularism. And the governments of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, hitherto considered allies on our 'national security' calculus, prove to be the most friendly to the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Here was a time for the Left to demand a top-to-bottom house-cleaning of the state and of our covert alliances, a full inquiry into the origins of the defeat, and a resolute declaration in favor of a fight to the end for secular and humanist values: a fight which would make friends of the democratic and secular forces in the Muslim world. And instead, the near-majority of 'Left' intellectuals started sounding like Falwell, and bleating that the main problem was Bush's legitimacy. So I don't even muster a hollow laugh when this pathetic faction says that I, and not they, are in bed with the forces of reaction.”

DemocracyIslamHumanismTerrorismAfghanistanWorking ClassEgyptNational SecurityPakistanSecularismAl QaedaTalibanSaudi ArabiaJihadLeftismAlgeriaIslamismGeorge W BushSeptember 11 AttacksCentral Intelligence AgencyPat RobertsonJerry FalwellFederal Bureau Of InvestigationDaniel Lapin
Book:Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left
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“We don't have the luxury to say that, there is no hope for reform in Islam, because by saying this, we would be disavowing the entire peace-loving Muslim population of the world. We cannot leave our Muslim sisters and brothers behind to be oppressed by their own priestly tyrants, while the rest of the world keeps progressing with an open mind. The entire civilized society of the world, must put their heart and soul to get Islam liberated from the shackles of fundamentalism. Conscience must triumph over orthodox barbarianism, otherwise there would be no hope for the progress and wellbeing of humanity as a truly wise species.”

ReligionHumanitySpiritualityInspiringHarmonyBrainy QuotesIslamHumanismHumanitarianIslamicHumanistThinkerFundamentalismSageMuslimPeace On EarthQuranLove And KindnessFundamentalistReligious HarmonyLove And CompassionReligious ExtremismIslamic QuotesAllahReligious FundamentalismReligious ToleranceHumanitarian EffortsMuslimsService To MankindIslamophobiaHumanitarian InterventionIslamic TerrorismHarmony QuotesIslamismHumanitarian ActivitiesMuslims LifePeace MakersMuslimahBismillah
Author:Abhijit Naskar
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“Terrorism has nothing to do with religion, Islam or otherwise. Terrorism is born of fundamentalism not of religion.”

InspirationalHumanityWords Of WisdomBrainy QuotesIslamHumanismFundamentalismMuslimReligious HarmonyReligious ExtremismIslamic QuotesJihadReligious FundamentalismReligious ToleranceThinkersMuslimsIslamophobiaIslamic TerrorismReligious ViolenceMuslim WomenMuslim BrotherhoodReligious TolerationIslamismReligious TerrorismMuslims LifeMuslim WomanPeace LovingJihai
Author:Abhijit Naskar
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“You must remember, the so-called Jihadis who are in reality, mentally unstable individuals run by Quranic fundamentalists, do not represent the whole Muslim population of the world.”

InspirationalHumanityWords Of WisdomBrainy QuotesIslamHumanismFundamentalismMuslimReligious HarmonyReligious ExtremismIslamic QuotesJihadReligious FundamentalismReligious ToleranceThinkersMuslimsIslamophobiaIslamic TerrorismReligious ViolenceMuslim WomenMuslim BrotherhoodReligious TolerationIslamismReligious TerrorismMuslims LifeMuslim WomanPeace LovingJihai
Author:Abhijit Naskar
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“Terrorism is born of fundamentalism not of religion.”

InspirationalPhilosophyTruthHumanityWords Of WisdomBrainy QuotesIslamHumanismTerrorismWise SayingsFundamentalismMuslimReligious HarmonyReligious ExtremismIslamic QuotesJihadReligious FundamentalismReligious ToleranceThinkersMuslimsIslamophobiaIslamic TerrorismReligious ViolenceMuslim WomenMuslim BrotherhoodReligious TolerationIslamismReligious TerrorismMuslims LifeTerrorism QuotationsMuslim WomanPeace LovingJihai
Book:Illusion of Religion: A Treatise on Religious Fundamentalism
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“Remaining for a moment with the question of legality and illegality: United Nations Security Council Resolution 1368, unanimously passed, explicitly recognized the right of the United States to self-defense and further called upon all member states 'to bring to justice the perpetrators, organizers and sponsors of the terrorist attacks. It added that 'those responsible for aiding, supporting or harboring the perpetrators, organizers and sponsors of those acts will be held accountable.' In a speech the following month, the United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan publicly acknowledged the right of self-defense as a legitimate basis for military action. The SEAL unit dispatched by President Obama to Abbottabad was large enough to allow for the contingency of bin-Laden's capture and detention. The naïve statement that he was 'unarmed' when shot is only loosely compatible with the fact that he was housed in a military garrison town, had a loaded automatic weapon in the room with him, could well have been wearing a suicide vest, had stated repeatedly that he would never be taken alive, was the commander of one of the most violent organizations in history, and had declared himself at war with the United States. It perhaps says something that not even the most casuistic apologist for al-Qaeda has ever even attempted to justify any of its 'operations' in terms that could be covered by any known law, with the possible exception of some sanguinary verses of the Koran.”

WarLawJusticeUnited StatesPakistanUnited NationsSelf DefenseAl QaedaQuranAssassinationOsama Bin LadenInternational LawBarack ObamaIslamismSeptember 11 AttacksUnited Nations Security CouncilKofi AnnanRight To Self DefenseDeath Of Osama Bin LadenAbbottabadUnited States Navy Seals
Book:The Enemy
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“It was sometimes feebly argued, as the political and military war against this enemy ran into difficulties, that it was 'a war without end.' I never saw the point of this plaintive objection. The war against superstition and the totalitarian mentality is an endless war. In protean forms, it is fought and refought in every country and every generation. In bin Ladenism we confront again the awful combination of the highly authoritarian personality with the chaotically nihilist and anarchic one. Temporary victories can be registered against this, but not permanent ones. As Bertold Brecht's character says over the corpse of the terrible Arturo Ui, the bitch that bore him is always in heat. But it is in this struggle that we develop the muscles and sinews that enable us to defend civilization, and the moral courage to name it as something worth fighting for.”

WarTotalitarianismNihilismSuperstitionAl QaedaWar On TerrorAuthoritarianismOsama Bin LadenIslamismWar In Afghanistan 2001Bertold Brecht
Book:The Enemy
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“Shrouded as he was for a decade in an apparent cloak of anonymity and obscurity, Osama bin Laden was by no means an invisible man. He was ubiquitous and palpable, both in a physical and a cyber-spectral form, to the extent that his death took on something of the feel of an exorcism. It is satisfying to know that, before the end came, he had begun at least to guess at the magnitude of his 9/11 mistake. It is essential to remember that his most fanatical and militant deputy, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, did not just leave his corpse in Iraq but was isolated and repudiated even by the minority Sunnis on whose presumed behalf he spilled so much blood and wrought such hectic destruction. It is even more gratifying that bin Laden himself was exposed as an excrescence on the putrid body of a bankrupt and brutish state machine, and that he found himself quite unable to make any coherent comment on the tide—one hopes that it is a tide, rather than a mere wave—of demand for an accountable and secular form of civil society. There could not have been a finer affirmation of the force of life, so warmly and authentically counterposed to the hysterical celebration of death, and of that death-in-life that is experienced in the stultifications of theocracy, where womanhood and music and literature are stifled and young men mutated into robotic slaughterers.”

LifeDeathLiteratureMusicFeminismIraqTerrorismPakistanSecularismAl QaedaOsama Bin LadenTheocracyExorcismArab SpringIslamism2011September 11 AttacksDeath Of Osama Bin LadenSunni IslamAbu Musab Al ZarqawiAl Qaeda In Iraq
Book:The Enemy
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“Hitherto, the Palestinians had been relatively immune to this Allahu Akhbar style. I thought this was a hugely retrograde development. I said as much to Edward. To reprint Nazi propaganda and to make a theocratic claim to Spanish soil was to be a protofascist and a supporter of 'Caliphate' imperialism: it had nothing at all to do with the mistreatment of the Palestinians. Once again, he did not exactly disagree. But he was anxious to emphasize that the Israelis had often encouraged Hamas as a foil against Fatah and the PLO. This I had known since seeing the burning out of leftist Palestinians by Muslim mobs in Gaza as early as 1981. Yet once again, it seemed Edward could only condemn Islamism if it could somehow be blamed on either Israel or the United States or the West, and not as a thing in itself. He sometimes employed the same sort of knight's move when discussing other Arabist movements, excoriating Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party, for example, mainly because it had once enjoyed the support of the CIA. But when Saddam was really being attacked, as in the case of his use of chemical weapons on noncombatants at Halabja, Edward gave second-hand currency to the falsified story that it had 'really' been the Iranians who had done it. If that didn't work, well, hadn't the United States sold Saddam the weaponry in the first place? Finally, and always—and this question wasn't automatically discredited by being a change of subject—what about Israel's unwanted and ugly rule over more and more millions of non-Jews? I evolved a test for this mentality, which I applied to more people than Edward. What would, or did, the relevant person say when the United States intervened to stop the massacres and dispossessions in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo? Here were two majority-Muslim territories and populations being vilely mistreated by Orthodox and Catholic Christians. There was no oil in the region. The state interests of Israel were not involved (indeed, Ariel Sharon publicly opposed the return of the Kosovar refugees to their homes on the grounds that it set an alarming—I want to say 'unsettling'—precedent). The usual national-security 'hawks,' like Henry Kissinger, were also strongly opposed to the mission. One evening at Edward's apartment, with the other guest being the mercurial, courageous Azmi Bishara, then one of the more distinguished Arab members of the Israeli parliament, I was finally able to leave the arguing to someone else. Bishara [...] was quite shocked that Edward would not lend public support to Clinton for finally doing the right thing in the Balkans. Why was he being so stubborn? I had begun by then—belatedly you may say—to guess. Rather like our then-friend Noam Chomsky, Edward in the final instance believed that if the United States was doing something, then that thing could not by definition be a moral or ethical action.”

United StatesIslamIsraelOilPropagandaIranFascismNational SecurityImperialismSpainFanaticismCiaNazismChristiansReligious ExtremismGazaLeftistsHamasWar CrimesMuslimsChemical WeaponsTheocracyAntisemitismKosovoBalkansPalestiniansBosnian WarHenry KissingerIslamismBill ClintonCatholicsSaddam HusseinEdward Said1981Noam ChomskyBosnia And HerzegovinaPloIsraelisAndalusiaKosovo WarBaath PartyCaliphateAriel SharonAzmi BisharaFatahHalabjaHalabja Poison Gas AttackKnessetPolitics Of IsraelTakbir
Book:Hitch 22: A Memoir
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“Identity politics is killings free speech on campus, silencing Muslim women struggle, boosting both Islamism and the far Right and pushing reconciled Muslim voices to the fringes. It makes implicit assumptions about Islam - from an Islamist, Left or Right- perspective - and insists all Muslims must adhere to that definition or be regarded not truly Muslim. It ignores the fact that most ordinary Muslims are not in favour of a violent and that in surveys and polls they support British values more than the general UK population. Yet the myth persists that the ideology of Islamism is the true expression of what it means to be Muslim.”

PoliticsStruggleIdentityIslamBritishMuslimStrugglesMuslimsFar RightIdentity PoliticsUkMuslim WomenIslamismIslamistBritish Muslim
Author:Tony McMahon, Sara Khan
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“It can certainly be misleading to take the attributes of a movement, or the anxieties and contradictions of a moment, and to personalize or 'objectify' them in the figure of one individual. Yet ordinary discourse would be unfeasible without the use of portmanteau terms—like 'Stalinism,' say—just as the most scrupulous insistence on historical forces will often have to concede to the sheer personality of a Napoleon or a Hitler. I thought then, and I think now, that Osama bin Laden was a near-flawless personification of the mentality of a real force: the force of Islamic jihad. And I also thought, and think now, that this force absolutely deserves to be called evil, and that the recent decapitation of its most notorious demagogue and organizer is to be welcomed without reserve. Osama bin Laden's writings and actions constitute a direct negation of human liberty, and vent an undisguised hatred and contempt for life itself.”

ReligionEvilLibertyHistoryIslamTerrorismOsama Bin LadenJihadTheocracyStalinismAdolf HitlerNapoleonIslamism2011September 11 AttacksDeath Of Osama Bin LadenCults Of Personality
Book:The Enemy
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“I am not one of those who believes—as Obama is said to believe—that a solution to the Palestinian statehood question would bring an end to Muslim resentment against the United States. (Incidentally, if he really does believe this, his lethargy and impotence in the face of Netanyahu's consistent double-dealing is even more culpable.) The Islamist fanatics have their own agenda, and, as in the case of Hamas and its Iranian backers, they have already demonstrated that nothing but the destruction of Israel and the removal of American influence from the region will possibly satisfy them. No, it is more the case that justice—and a homeland for the Palestinians—is a good and necessary cause in its own right. It is also a special legal and moral responsibility of the United States, which has several times declared a dual-statehood outcome to be its objective.”

ReligionUnited StatesAtheismIslamIsraelIranForeign PolicyMiddle EastPalestineHamasIsraeli Palestinian ConflictBarack ObamaIslamismUs Foreign PolicyBenjamin NetanyahuObama Middle East PolicyObama Foreign Policy
Author:Christopher Hitchens
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“President Barack Obama and many liberal-minded commentators have been hesitant to call this Islamist ideology by its proper name. They seem to fear that both Muslim communities and the religiously intolerant will hear the word “Islam” and simply assume that all Muslims are being held responsible for the excesses of the jihadist few. I call this the Voldemort effect, after the villain in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books. Many well-meaning people in Ms. Rowling’s fictional world are so petrified of Voldemort’s evil that they do two things: They refuse to call Voldemort by name, instead referring to “He Who Must Not Be Named,” and they deny that he exists in the first place. Such dread only increases public hysteria, thus magnifying the appeal of Voldemort’s power. The same hysteria about Islamism is unfolding before our eyes. But no strategy intended to defeat Islamism can succeed if Islamism itself and its violent expression in jihadism are not first named, isolated and understood. From: Maajid Nawaz's article titled, 'How to Beat Islamic State', December 11th, 2015.”

IslamTerrorismReformIsisIslamismVoldemort Effect
Author:Maajid Nawaz
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“This division is not one by religious affiliation, rather it separates the extremists and the peace-loving people. Therefor I'm optimistic: now a humanistic Islam is getting shaken awake. Moderate Islam needs now to finally break cover and explain how to deal with the violence-glorifying parts of the Quran. The (psychological) repression that this has nothing to do with our belief doesn't work anymore. We have to face this challenge.”

ReligionPeaceChangeIslamExtremismReformationQuranModernizationIslamismCharlie HebdoKoranParis AttacksCharlie Hebdo AttacksModerate IslamCharlie Hebdo AttackReligous Reform
Author:Mouhanad Khorchide
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“Counterinsurgency rests on the assumption that the enemy has significant support in the communities from which it recruits. The aim of counterinsurgency strategy is to deny the enemy any propaganda victories that can further fuel its recruitment. Insurgents must be isolated from their targeted host communities. This requires a combination of psychological, physical and economic warfare, all with the aim of undermining the insurgents’ ideological, operational and financial capabilities. From: Maajid Nawaz's article titled, 'How to Beat Islamic State', December 11th, 2015”

TerrorismCounter TerrorismIslamismCounterinsurgency
Author:Maajid Nawaz
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