--- Marvin Gandall <marvgandall at videotron.ca> wrote:
> The appearance and spread of millenarian Islam
> within the Middle East is not
> surprising given the great stresses to which its
> populations are being
> subjected, notably the military occupations and
> threats of a wider war
> emanating from the US and Israel. But you and others
> may be greatly
> exaggerating the appeal of these movements to the
> urban middle and working
> class populations in Tehran, Baghdad, Cairo, and
> Beirut which are more
> secular in outlook and support the Islamists for
> nationalist rather than
> mystical
> religious reasons.
I think we're muddling together several different groups under the same term with the use "Islamist." I am refering specifically to an expansionist, violent and uncompromising variety that first came to prominence in the Afghan-Soviet War. This group is ideologically committed to extremely (insanely) maximal demands that have been put into place (with disastrous consequences) in Afghanistan, Chechnya and Sudan. They are professional revolutionaries who travel around the Muslim world trying to hijack local conflicts involving Muslims into their own agenda. The same people go to the North Caucasus, to Iraq, to Kasmir, to China, to the Philippines.
Then there are local theocratic Muslim groups like Hezbullah and Hamas, whose ideology may coincide with the above-mentioned group's to greater or lesser extents but are primarily concerned with local problems.
The two groups interact, but they are not synonymous. I am was refering to the former.
The Iranian government would be a third group.
I think we sometimes forget how much
> others are very much like
> us, except caught up in vastly different
> circumstances.
Well Germans in the 30s were a lot like us too, and look what happened there.
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