Newt Gingrich and the War on Islam, er... Terror
Yesterday morning, my mom forwarded this video to me of Newt Gingrich speaking on the upcoming horrors of the War on Terror.
If you don't feel like watching all 6 minutes of it, I'll give it to you in a nutshell.
He basically says that he is really worried about the future, in that the Muslim extremists are going to do whatever they can to attack the United States on its home turf, and that we can't pull out of Iraq because we would be opening ourselves up to a world of hurt. He also says that we need to be more aggressive in going after countries like Iran, who 'have a great desire to acquire nuclear weapons and use them on us'.
Below was my response to all of this. You'll see that there were some things that I agreed with that I didn't mention above:
Right, I think I do agree with a couple of the things that he is saying, but he (like a lot of other people) is missing a big point. I'll get to that in a second.
First, I do agree with him when he talks about the seriousness of the situation… mostly. It's true that there are about 1.2 million Muslims in the UK and about 2 or 4 million in the US which could be sympathetic to the Taliban's cause. There are a lot of possibilities when it comes to a serious terrorist attack against a US city, even though it's odd that there haven't been any inside the US since 9/11 (and there are an aweful lot of unanswered questions about what really happened there- whether or not the government was involved or just turned a cold shoulder to it).
Secondly, he is absolutely right when he says that we should be worried about our civil rights/liberties and what might happen to them if there is another attack within the US. We already saw some of that with the Patriot Act, Homeland Security, and the many other policy changes that the Bush adminsitration put into effect after 9/11. Another attack would certainly bring more of that.
As far as his comments go about Muslims being a threat in general, I think that he is misrepresenting the religion as a whole when he makes it sound like all people who practice it are a threat. It is true that just about every country in the world (other than the United States) absolutely hates Israel, not just Muslims, and they would love to see it disappear. There's more to say about that, but I think it's a mistake to fan the flames of the "Chistians vs. Muslims" Religious War. If you ask me, the "War on Terror" may as well be called the "War on Islam", and I'm sure there are a lot of Christians who feel that that's what it is even though they may not admit it. I don't think that just because the bible says that, for example, the Palestinians are the eternal enemies of the Jews, means that the "Christian Nations" have to have the attitude that we have a devine right to the planet and everyone else is our enemy, without a second thought.
This all makes me fell like people who talk like this are like Doctors who are only looking at and attempting to treat the symptoms of a disease, while completely ignoring the cause. The people who want to destroy us don't "hate us because of our freedom" (the biggest line of crap ever- thank you Mr. Bush), they hate us because we:
1. Support Israel by giving them Billions of dollars in aid (our tax money BTW) every year, which they turn around and use to attack and kill Palestinians and Lebonese.
2. Are constantly threatening to go to war with countries who have not even begun to fully develop nuclear technology for power plants, which is a far cry from developing nuclear weapons. While at the same time supply Israel and their nuclear arsenal to the point where they have more undeclared warheads than the UK even has.
3. Invaded Iraq and have brought that country to ruins, where hundreds of thousands of civilians have been killed and millions more have fled as refugees (less than a few hundred of them have been allowed into the US), when it's plain as day that we had absolutely no reason to go in there and do what we did but to control the country's oil wealth and/or carried out revenge on it's leader because our President's father was once given a death threat by him. Apart from all of that, the people who still live there, on average, have very little clean drinking water and about 2 hours of electricity everyday.
4. Since the beginning of the Cold War (at least), have been involved in overthrowing Democratic/Socialist governments all over the world so that we could put leaders in their place that were sympathetic to our causes. This is also why many other countries around the world, not just Muslims, aren't very found of the US. We have overthrown at least 14 governments in the past 100 years or so. Many people think that our country is innocent and doesn't deserve the hate that is directed toward our government, but they're either ignorant of these facts or are just in denial. This looks like an excellent book on the subject. This is also a big reason why people in Venezuala rally behind someone like President Hugo Chavez as long as they have- he's very anti-American and has been extremely innovative in helping South American countries in their attempt to rebound from the economic and social peril that can usually be blamed on the US or one of it's entities/corporations.
I could go on, but my point is that I believe we all really need to stop for a moment, take a step back, and try to look at things from as many different perspectives as possible. Maybe if our foreign policy wasn't what it is and maybe if we weren't so narrow-minded we could find a peaceful solution to all of this, without just automatically taking the Rambo approach to everything.
If you don't feel like watching all 6 minutes of it, I'll give it to you in a nutshell.
He basically says that he is really worried about the future, in that the Muslim extremists are going to do whatever they can to attack the United States on its home turf, and that we can't pull out of Iraq because we would be opening ourselves up to a world of hurt. He also says that we need to be more aggressive in going after countries like Iran, who 'have a great desire to acquire nuclear weapons and use them on us'.
Below was my response to all of this. You'll see that there were some things that I agreed with that I didn't mention above:
Right, I think I do agree with a couple of the things that he is saying, but he (like a lot of other people) is missing a big point. I'll get to that in a second.
First, I do agree with him when he talks about the seriousness of the situation… mostly. It's true that there are about 1.2 million Muslims in the UK and about 2 or 4 million in the US which could be sympathetic to the Taliban's cause. There are a lot of possibilities when it comes to a serious terrorist attack against a US city, even though it's odd that there haven't been any inside the US since 9/11 (and there are an aweful lot of unanswered questions about what really happened there- whether or not the government was involved or just turned a cold shoulder to it).
Secondly, he is absolutely right when he says that we should be worried about our civil rights/liberties and what might happen to them if there is another attack within the US. We already saw some of that with the Patriot Act, Homeland Security, and the many other policy changes that the Bush adminsitration put into effect after 9/11. Another attack would certainly bring more of that.
As far as his comments go about Muslims being a threat in general, I think that he is misrepresenting the religion as a whole when he makes it sound like all people who practice it are a threat. It is true that just about every country in the world (other than the United States) absolutely hates Israel, not just Muslims, and they would love to see it disappear. There's more to say about that, but I think it's a mistake to fan the flames of the "Chistians vs. Muslims" Religious War. If you ask me, the "War on Terror" may as well be called the "War on Islam", and I'm sure there are a lot of Christians who feel that that's what it is even though they may not admit it. I don't think that just because the bible says that, for example, the Palestinians are the eternal enemies of the Jews, means that the "Christian Nations" have to have the attitude that we have a devine right to the planet and everyone else is our enemy, without a second thought.
This all makes me fell like people who talk like this are like Doctors who are only looking at and attempting to treat the symptoms of a disease, while completely ignoring the cause. The people who want to destroy us don't "hate us because of our freedom" (the biggest line of crap ever- thank you Mr. Bush), they hate us because we:
1. Support Israel by giving them Billions of dollars in aid (our tax money BTW) every year, which they turn around and use to attack and kill Palestinians and Lebonese.
2. Are constantly threatening to go to war with countries who have not even begun to fully develop nuclear technology for power plants, which is a far cry from developing nuclear weapons. While at the same time supply Israel and their nuclear arsenal to the point where they have more undeclared warheads than the UK even has.
3. Invaded Iraq and have brought that country to ruins, where hundreds of thousands of civilians have been killed and millions more have fled as refugees (less than a few hundred of them have been allowed into the US), when it's plain as day that we had absolutely no reason to go in there and do what we did but to control the country's oil wealth and/or carried out revenge on it's leader because our President's father was once given a death threat by him. Apart from all of that, the people who still live there, on average, have very little clean drinking water and about 2 hours of electricity everyday.
4. Since the beginning of the Cold War (at least), have been involved in overthrowing Democratic/Socialist governments all over the world so that we could put leaders in their place that were sympathetic to our causes. This is also why many other countries around the world, not just Muslims, aren't very found of the US. We have overthrown at least 14 governments in the past 100 years or so. Many people think that our country is innocent and doesn't deserve the hate that is directed toward our government, but they're either ignorant of these facts or are just in denial. This looks like an excellent book on the subject. This is also a big reason why people in Venezuala rally behind someone like President Hugo Chavez as long as they have- he's very anti-American and has been extremely innovative in helping South American countries in their attempt to rebound from the economic and social peril that can usually be blamed on the US or one of it's entities/corporations.
I could go on, but my point is that I believe we all really need to stop for a moment, take a step back, and try to look at things from as many different perspectives as possible. Maybe if our foreign policy wasn't what it is and maybe if we weren't so narrow-minded we could find a peaceful solution to all of this, without just automatically taking the Rambo approach to everything.
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