Yoshie writes:   <div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">We cannot honestly say that intellectuals on the secular left are intellectually superior to those on the religious left.  If anything, discussions on Islam, religion, and the Middle East here and elsewhere, demonstrate that secular left intellectuals are woefully more ignorant and prejudiced than religious left intellectuals. (Frankly, some of the recent remarks on the subjects here belong better in the secular and religious right-wing environment than the religious left-wing one.)  Given what they are, I'd have to say that it's a good thing that secular left intellectuals have no leadership position anywhere at all in the USA.  :-></blockquote><div> Yoshie, it's unreasonable to call Leftists "ignorant" when you ignore and ignore and ignore and ignore THE central concept of Islamism and Islamic Revolution: Sharia. Do you have ANY evidence that there is some modified Sharia? Iran has some policies that are a compromise between modernity and Sharia. But because the clerics who interpret Sharia are the supreme juridical authority, Sharia can be enforced at any time. In other words, the Islamic republics are designed so that the reactionary, religious forces can re-impose the "revolution" whenever they want power. <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">The "greener pastures" theory implies that you already have a pasture you can call your own, and then look elsewhere in search of a bigger, more verdant pasture.  That is not the case in the USA.  The question is where to begin and what to do when you have no pasture at all. Such socialist organizations as exist in the USA (from the DSA to the Spartacists to anything in between), even relatively better ones, do not play any useful role, and Americans would not notice their disappearance if they just all dissolved tomorrow.  The very fact that there are so many of them, and that there exists no inter-socialist organization after all these years, proves their irrelevance: they are inferior to religious organizations, which have got around to working on ecumenical and interfaith organizations.</blockquote><div> But this assumes that the Islamists ARE a pasture of any kind. Why would Islamists go in our direction at all? Why is it more likely that the Islamists will go towards us and not the capitalist power elite? Why is Islamism not something that drives the people of these nations FARTHER from socialism? Sharia is not a flexible basis for a society. The idea of building a modern society on Sharia seems so absurd and so unwise, I have no idea why you would support it. It just seems nonsensical. boddi  </div> </div> </div>