Some fret over semantics, that to say “Islamic terrorism” creates terrorism. Or that to have a detention facility like Guantanamo Bay creates terrorists, or to say that we should not bring refugees into our
nation from Islamic countries until we can properly and securely vet them is not only racist, but foments terrorism. Some even say the Crusades almost 1000 years ago causes modern terrorism.
Religion is neither a race nor a nationality, self preservation is not bigotry, to accurately describe threats is not discriminatory, and if one wishes to trot out history perhaps one should start from the beginning of the book rather than selectively pick and choose from the middle of the book.
Are all Muslims terrorists? Not by any means. However , virtually all of the religious butchery from Morocco to Indonesia, from Sweden to sub Saharan Africa has an Islamic face on it. Obviously, there is a world
wide problem when proponents of a religion, a few or all, fundamentalist or not, create such widespread, indiscriminate havoc among so many diverse peoples.
Surely semantics hasn't caused all of that, and when was the last time anyone heard of a fundamentalist Amish suicide bomber killing people in the name of God?
Mohamed forbade the nomadic, desert dwelling clans of the Arabian peninsula from raiding one another, disrupting their economy, and those nomads burst out of the desert perhaps as much to make a living as to
spread a religion, and lucrative conquest can be addictive.
People speak of Islamic terrorism in France as though it is a recent phenomenon. However, an Islamic army penetrated perhaps as much as half of what is now France and was defeated in 732 in the Battle of Tours.
It took some decades to pound them all the way back across the Pyrenees into what is now Spain, where they remained for nearly 800 years before they were gradually expelled, which was accomplished not long after Columbus first approached Isabella and Ferdinand to bankroll his voyage west.
About 650 AD there was a schism in the new religion of Islam over whether Mohamed's successor should be a relative of Mohamed or chosen by the Islamic body as a whole, Sunnis and Shiites have been
persecuting and killing each other ever since.
The United States first dealt with negative Islamic issues during President Jefferson's term. The northwest African Barbary nations demanded tribute from the United States in order for American merchant ships to operate in the Mediterranean, seizing ships and holding the crews for ransom. The “to the shores of Tripoli” part of the Marine Corps hymn originated with the American response.
As Jews and Palestinians are genetically very close, I regard the Israeli / Palestinian conflict as a four thousand year old family fight over the inheritance going back to Esau, Jacob and the temporary worth
of an inheritance being a bowl of soup. To cut it very short, the Jews occupied the inheritance for about 1500 years until the Romans dispersed them in AD 70, and they were largely absent while the Palestinians had the inheritance to themselves until the 20th century.
The larger Islamic role in the cousin's conflict is that since other Muslim peoples detest Palestinians less than they do Jews, largely because of outside religion versus inside religion, they back Muslim Palestinians.
The 1973 Arab Oil Embargo was an attempt to economically break the United States for it's support of Israel during the Yom Kippur War and a 70% increase to America's allies was to up the pressure on America.
President Jimmy Carter, naively believing everyone else on earth thinks like us, misread and meddled in Islamic Iranian politics against the Shah, which led to the 1979 revolution and the taking of US Embassy
personnel as hostages. Turns out the Shiite Ayatollah Khomeini was a fundamentalist who despised people like Carter as well as the west in general.
It is very important to understand that Wahhabi Islam, an extreme fundamentalist version of Sunni Islam, attached itself via the founder to the Saud Clan during the 16th century. The House of Saud saw it as a
path to political power, and Wahhabism is the reason Saudi Arabia is understood to be “conservative”. It is also important to note that the overall Middle Eastern culture as a whole has a tribal mentality which
lends itself to a bazillion shifting alliances in which treachery can be a virtue, to an extreme that is hard for us to culturally comprehend.
For a myriad of self serving reasons the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979. There were a large number of Muslims from diverse places and sub cultures who went to Afghanistan as Mujahideen to fight
the Russians, which provided Wahhabist Osama Bin Ladin an opportunity to build a network unavailable to him in Saudi Arabia. The US got involved to bleed the Soviets in a cold war proxy fight, providing arms and other support to what would become the core of Al Qaeda.
Starting in 1980 there was an 8 year war between Sunni Iraqi despot Saddam Hussein and Shiite Iranian despot Ayatollah Khomeini. Hussein was backed by Sunni gulf states, including Saudi Arabia, with the United States providing some intelligence to Iraq.
In 1983 a peace keeping force of US Marines as well as a French unit were suicide truck bombed with a large casualty count. Shiite Hezbollah, Shiite Syria and Shiite Iran were involved.
Saddam Hussein thought it would be a good idea to invade and annex Kuwait in 1990. GHW Bush made a deal with Saudi Arabia to place US forces on Saudi territory in a position to kick Hussein out of Kuwait.
This angered Bin Ladin, as he thought this profaned holy Islamic soil, and he declared jihad on the United States.
Iraqi intelligence forces were behind a failed attempt by Saddam Hussein to have GHW Bush assassinated with a car bomb during a 1993 visit to Kuwait.
The “Blind Sheik”, who was a personal buddy of Bin Ladin, was responsible for the 1993 truck bombing of the north World Trade Center. The “Sheik” preached a lot of hate sermons against the United States in
mosques within the US, urging every sort of violence leading to death and destruction of Americans.
Al Qaeda was behind the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia against US Air Force personnel billeted there - Saudi Arabia initially tried to pin the attacks on Shiite Hezbollah; two 1998 US Embassy
bombings in Tanzania and Kenya; and the 2000 USS Cole bombing in a Yemeni port.
Note that Bill Clinton was President from 1993 to 2001 and that current Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is all pretend horrified in 2016 about being politically incorrect about Islamic terrorism.
Of course Bin Ladin green lighted the 9/11/2003 airplane attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and probably the White House, that plane crashed in a field.
President Bush demanded that the Taliban ruling Afghanistan hand hand over Bin Ladin, who was under the protection of the Taliban. They refused, so Bush sent the troops into Afghanistan as well as Iraq in
2003.
Perhaps the most likely explanation for the invasion of Iraq is the news clip of GW Bush looking the most emotional and angry I have ever seen him where he said of Saddam Hussein, “He tried to kill my daddy!” GW wasn't putting on a show for the camera.
It turns out that Hussein, ruling with a brutal, Stalin like iron fist, kept wanna be Islamic terrorists out of Iraq, and who knows the validity of the theory that Hussein packed "weapons of mass destruction" off to Iranian ally Shiite Syria? He sent his air force to Shiite enemy Iran to keep it from being destroyed.
Bush finally realized he couldn't run wars on the cheap while expecting democracy to stick to tribal societies like spaghetti tossed on the wall went nowhere, Abu Bakr Al Bagdadi returned to the roots of Wahhabism
with ISIS, and Obama pretends that if we play kissy-poo nice with apocalyptic terrorists while handcuffing the troops and telling ISIS everything he knows they will quit playing patty cake with us and go away.
In the meantime, like President Bill Clinton used Jimmy Carter to give North Korea the bomb, President Obama used John Kerry to give the bomb to Iran. And, like Ayatollah Khomeini rewarded President Carter for backing him against the Shah by taking the US embassy staff as hostages, so Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei kidnapped 20 American sailors and put them on humiliating worldwide display – and Kerry thanked him for it.
Hillary Clinton was around for much of it, and she's a lunatic for saying that Trump breeds terrorism.
What dumb asses they are for how they deal with Shiite Persians, and double dumb asses for how their nut ball world view thinks they can reason with 7th century, Sunni Wahhabist killers like ISIS.
-- Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary
