How do you explain to normies that Islamic fundamentalism is a direct consequence of US/UK/NATO intervention in the...

How do you explain to normies that Islamic fundamentalism is a direct consequence of US/UK/NATO intervention in the middle east, and would probably be long forgotten to history without this intervention?

Other urls found in this thread:

reddit.com/r/islam/comments/6vk1j0/from_a_muslim_perspective_why_did_so_many_places/
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_military_jurisprudence
twitter.com/NSFWRedditImage

Plenty of normies outside of the US tend to accept it as common knowledge but it doesn't get brought up enough for it to be the focal point of the narrative.

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Normies in europe know this. They don't really care, they just want to be safe or a solution.

the fastest way to stop radical Islam would be to stop supporting it

Imagine if China invaded your country and started randomly bombing weddings and funerals. Would you wanna kill the Chinese? Would the bombings make you more or less likely to fight them?

There ya go. We've been doing it to the middle East for at least 40 years. And now you know why they hate us.

What do you mean by Islamic fundamentalism? Did you mean terrorism? Because strongly conservative Islam (or fundamentalism) has existed long before America became a world power and might well exist long after.

I'm not so sure about that.

user, this is a stupid collocation.

Secular nationalism was on the rise until the eternal anglo got involved.

Not sure what your point is user. Fundamentalism is not terrorism, it is something that might motivate terrorism. I'd say anyone who interprets the Koran and hadiths in a traditional sense is a fundamentalist, same as someone interpreting the Bible in a similar way.

Even though it's entirely true that fundamentalists came into power because of western imperialism, it's absolutely wrong to suggest that the entire Muslim World was ultra-progressive until then.

Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran have always been very fundamentalist (Pakistan is harder to say since it's only been a country for 70 years but still). Those images you see of cute girls in mini skirts from 40 years ago were urban elites, not at all representative of the general populations of said countries. In the Iranian countryside you still had women in full burqas and Afghanistan was really no better (for the record, Afghanistan isn't even run on shariah, but on Pashtun tribal law which is even more repressive).

Here's a discussion on reddit about the subject:
reddit.com/r/islam/comments/6vk1j0/from_a_muslim_perspective_why_did_so_many_places/

My point is that saying "but fundamentalism existed before" is an utterly idiotic and superfluous observation. Every ideology, philosophy and religion has conservative and progressive interpretations, strict and loose interpretations, reformist or fundamentalist interpretations since their beginning. But since we know that these don't ascend and descend in a vacuum, and are instead affected by historical circumstances that dictate which ones become dominant and which ones become irrelevant, we ought to look under which circumstances islamic fundamentalism nowadays thrives. And these are circumstances directly created or facilitated by western policy in the region.

Those progressive interpretations were not something which came from the bottom-up, but from the top-down. Most Muslims in the 20th century had little interest in secularism or socialism; elites, who were mostly educated in European universities, did. The first blow to Arab secularism wasn't the US funding the Taliban or the Iranian Revolution, but the defeat of the pan-Arabists by Israel during the 1967 war. That was when Arabs by in large began losing hope in secular nationalism to defeat imperialism and turned to Islamism.

Imagine having read THIS FEW books. I pity you, OP. Get an education please.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_military_jurisprudence

I should mention, Israel received very little aid from the US prior to their victory in 67. So you can't really blame the US for that either.

You're replying to a point no one made. If the muslim world was ultra-progressive or not is immaterial, what matters is that just like any other 'world' it had conservative and progressive movements, and that the natural tendency of the latter to eventually overcome at least part of the former is no longer at play in most of the region because of the danger they pose to foreign powers.

Iran had a progressive, secular government until overthrown by a conservative monarchy, with the help of a conservative clergy, with support of the west. Pakistan, besides obvious ties to Gulf monarchies, was at one point ruled by a dictator that was trained as a soldier to fight for the British and the US in Jordan. Islamic conservatism Afghanistan doesn't even merit discussion, even regular people now know that there was support by US and US allies to those movements there.

And for some reason you're speaking as if intervention in the region began a few decades ago. Britain has been siding with conservative monarchies there since the 19th century. They already had ties with the Muslim Brotherhood before WW2. What you're describing is a pattern of conservative behavior that would hardly have survived into modernity without a foreign sponsor benefiting from it, which is exactly my point here.

That doesn't mean the general Iranian population was progressive and wanted secularism though, which is the point I was trying to make.

Absolutely, but again, Afghanistan was never a "liberal secular country". Most of it isn't even run by the federal laws, but (once again) but tribal laws (Pashtunvali).


Read the reddit thread I linked to which features a conversation by actual Muslims on the subject. They see those secular and socialist movements as the products of European thought and not paradigms indigenous to Muslim populations.

Stopped reading right there. The Iranian government was capitalist- albiet as a consequence of the geopolitical paradigm of the 20th century- but capitalist nonetheless. Forcing women to wear burkas in the dirt is not especially different from allowing women to dress as they please so long as they remain faithful consumers.

Same thing could be said about the movement that spearheaded enlightenment and liberal values in Europe. Since we're being good materialists, we know that there's a historical role to be played by an enlightened middle-class ascending among religious, feudal and conservative arrangements. If we were to play populists with political movements in 18th century Europe the liberal revolutions that made the modern world would have never happened.

Not only is the movement lead by Nasser only one of many secular/progressive movements that have ascended in the Middle-East and beaten into submission by a combination of conservative islamic and monarchist groups tied to the US, but also I shouldn't even have to point out that Israel is there with the aid of the west and helping fulfil its regional designs.

Progressive movements in the ME were far beyond Nasser, btw. Many considered him relatively a conservative, even. You have Marxists being beaten in Yemen, democrats in Iran, secularists and nationalists all over the place. The west even fears liberals in the region.

First, even if that was the case that means nothing. Different classes play different historical roles, it's not always the masses leading the path towards social change, and at several movements a narrower group of educated people takes the lead. In Europe you had merchants, the bourgeoisie and bureaucrats leading this path towards secularism and democracy, ffs.

And second, we can't underestimate the popular appeal of those groups either. If monarchists and fundamentalists were the majority, they wouldn't have felt so threatened by democratic participation as they did in the past. And let's not forget that fighters used in these mini-wars and destabilization projects throughout the region are almost never entirely made up of natives, but mercenaries and jihadists from other countries that are armed, trained and transported with the help of conservative governments in networks. Both indicate that the majority does not side with these people either.

Virtually no country there was ever a secular liberal country because every attempt of moving the smallest step towards that is met with reaction.

Read Marx, theorylet.

I've made this exact argument and the response I get is "No, I wouldn't do anything. You'd be crazy to do anything." Lots of people are cowards. I think the ones who aren't probably get why radical Islam is a thing. It's the herds of sheep that can't imagine taking politics into your own hands.

You don't because it's been a direct consequence of their spooked religion for the entire 1,400 years of its existence

I imagine people would start changing their tone when a bomb goes off inside the local school or hospital. I imagine things start to get very nasty after something like that happens.

/thread. Believing otherwise is just conspiratorial nonsense, on par with "cultural Marxism is why white women fuck black guys"

wut? The Shah did much, much more to curb the power/influence of the clergy and modernise Iran than anything Mossadegh was involved with.

Why must those movements be 100% native to "prove" that fundamentalism is a foreign concept? That's like saying the presence of the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War "proves" that native-born Spaniards weren't interested in socialism

/thread

Well yeah but if we're talking about the realms of the hypothetical, a lot of people just can't imagine scenarios that would be earth-shattering to them to change their mindset like that.

I remember something weird like this with Gaddafi too. For a brief period the west were clamoring over him, then shit hit the fan and he was suddenly an awful ebul dictator.

Because he agreed to dismantle his (practically worthless) chemical weapons in the wake of the invasion of Iraq he became the neoliberals /ourguy/ for a time

I'd like to know when, iirc they have always hated Gaddafi but I'm not that familiar with Libya's history