He was an American citizen with a three-bedroom suburban home, a wife and two kids. He shopped at Macy’s and ate Oreos. His picture was on Facebook. He had an MBA and a job as a financial analyst. His wife liked to watch “Friends.” And then, authorities contend, Faisal Shahzad tried to set off a bomb in Times Square.
A decade after 9/11, it increasingly seems to have come to this: We have met the enemy — and he is carrying an American passport.
For generations, assimilation has been the story told by the United States — the recipe for making Americans. Irish and Italians, Catholics and blacks, Japanese and Jews joined the mainstream even as they maintained their unique cultures and traditions.
But today, with the world a mouse click away and most every country in the world accessible in little more than a day, globalization is competing fiercely with assimilation. People who have a foot in two strikingly different cultures no longer leave one behind for the other. Now they can move between them easily, fluidly, quickly.
The article cites Muqtedar Khan, a University of Delaware political
scientist as stating : “You can’t abuse Muslims while you try to assimilate them.”
But, hey, it worked on the Irish and Italians, didn’t it …?
Seriously, though, how can someone come to this country and
attempt to bludgeon American society into submission through the use
of indiscriminate mass murder ? Muslims are taught that the world is
divided into two parts, “Dar El Islam” ( = “House of Islam”, meaning
those countries where Islam holds sway ), and “Dar El Harb”
(=”House of War”, where Islam does not yet hold sway ).
The U.S. is firmly part of “Dar El Harb”, so Muslims are allowed to
view America as fair game for a Muslim onslaught. The fact that
Jews hold prominent positions in American society adds all the more
to Muslim fury. What happened to the flourishing north African
Christianity of St. Augustine of Hippo and many others ? Recall that
it took Spain more than a half millenium to remove the foot of
Islam from the neck of Spain. And Pope Urban II in 1095 didn’t
set in motion the 1st Crusade because he woke up one morning and
thought that a Crusade would act as a “stimulus package” for
unemployed knights in Western Europe. There were reasons for
all those actions. Not so much actions, as reactions to Muslim
incursions.
#1 Spot on! People go on and on about the Crusades without knowing the first thing about them.
Palestine was part of the Holy Roman Empire. Islam invaded. The Crusades were a reaction to Islamic aggression. The Islamic war machine’s marched across North Africa and into Spain and also up the Balkan Peninsula into Italy.
Islamic aggression up the Iberian Peninsula wasn’t stopped until the Battle of Tours in North Central France in A.D. 732!
Turkish Muslims were stopped outside the gates of Venice!
So, all this nonsense about Christian aggression toward the poor innocent Muslims is just that…nonsense!
No one talks about the Islamic practice of demanding levies of children that were taken away and forced to be soldiers (the Janissaries). No one mentions that Islam was and is involved in slavery. (Islamic endorsed slavery is documented as presently active in the African republics of Chad, Mauritania, Niger, Mali and Sudan.)
Honest reporting would be a good place to start!
Given his American citizenship and reported connections with foreign elements with which we are at war, why can’t this terrorist be tried for treason and face the possibility of capital punishment? That might help clear up the confusion in the minds of some recently coined American citizens as to where they really belong.
Well honest reporting would also include the fact – as Philip Jenkins [url=http://catholicandreformed.blogspot.com/2010/05/holy-war-unholy-peace-chalcedonian.html]recently pointed out[/url] that Monophysite Christianity put up little resistance to Islamic conquest of Egypt and Syria, sensing that its churches would enjoy more freedom than under the Chalcedonian-inclined imperial administration. That it proved to be a devil’s bargain doesn’t alter that reality.
Furthermore, a history of Christian Spain needs to acknowledge not only the fact of Muslim invasion and occupation but the impact of the [i]Reconquista[/i] on Moriscos and Marranos. That’s one Christian legacy in which I have no great desire to assert a share.
Perhaps more illuminating concerning eastern christians’ response to the rise of Islam is is Sidney H. Griffith [url=http://www.amazon.com/Church-Shadow-Mosque-Christians-Muslims/dp/0691146284/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1273556611&sr=8-1]The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque[/url]. It is certainly true that from the very beginning Islam was used in intra-christian polemic thus, to quote, “the Christians of all communities unanimously regarded the conquest as a disaster, and when they were not blaming it on their own sinfulness they were citing the sins of their Christian adversaries”.
Let me add – more astonishing is the complete disappearance of christianity from one of its heartlands – Latin speaking North Africa. In the land of Perpetua, Tertullian, Cyprian and of course Augustine the church, eventually, completely disappeared. Perhaps Augustine’s campaign against the native Donatist church, followed by Arian invasion, isolation, Arab invasions, flight and forced conversion weakened the christian communities such that they finally spluttered into non-existence sometime in the Middle Ages.
So, getting back to the article…Islam does not get “assimilated”. Islam conquers where it occupies.
One need only look at Great Britain where sharia law is beginning to be practiced rather than British law.