Tag: Islamism

2,500 words

George Friedman
The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century
New York: Anchor Books, 2009

George Friedman’s The Next 100 Years is an intriguing forecast of how the twenty-first century will play out. Friedman gets a lot of things wrong, but there is nevertheless a method to his analysis, and we have much to learn from what the broader center-Left, of which Friedman is a part, gets right. It’s also interesting because glowing reviews in the mainstream media suggests that the book has been guiding the establishment’s thinking, and thus explains some of their odd decisions. (more…)

2,707 words

Censorship is not always about hiding secrets. Sometimes it is just an assertion of raw power. — Nick Cohen, You Can’t Read This Book

There is something special about being ten years old. Every child knows this on his tenth birthday, crossing the shadow line from single to double digits. It means you’re all grown up. A similar thing happens to books, particularly those which concern themselves with politics and metapolitics. We read them again a decade after they were born and ask, “Well, you’re a big boy now. What have you got to say for yourself?” (more…)

2,406 words

Jeffrey M. Bale & Tamir Bar-On
Fighting the Last War: Confusion, Partisanship, and Alarmism in the Literature on the Radical Right
Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2022

Professors Jeffrey M. Bale and Tamir Bar-On have taken a look at the response to the increasingly vocal political Right in the Western world. What they found is that the establishment has used the specter of fascism as a shadow to box against since 1945. Politics is the application of the friend/enemy distinction, so shadowboxing against a phantom enemy is a good way to go about domestic politics without stumbling into a civil war. (more…)

5,184 words

Part 2 of 2 (Part 1 here)

Fróði Midjord: Another thing that you bring up here is to make a point that in attacking the American ideology, Dugin paints a ridiculous and cartoonish picture of Americans; and as you point out, correctly I believe, the same can be done about Russians. (more…)

2,491 slov

English original here

Vyzývám k okamžitému zákazu filmu Gravitace – ukazuje totiž „Zemi“ jako objekt kulovitého tvaru, což je proti Koránu a tím pádem urážka muslimů – dr. Zakir Naik.

Robert R. Reilly: The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis
Wilimington, Del: ISI Books, 2010

Vzpomínám si na úsměv, který mi na tváři vykouzlila výše citovaná slova, když se dotyčný film skoro před deseti lety objevil v kinech. (more…)

3,291 words

Kim Ghattas
Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Forty-Year Rivalry that Unraveled Culture, Religion, and Collective Memory in the Middle East
New York: Henry Holt & Company, 2020

Kim Ghattas is a Lebanese senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She is a journalist with a stellar reputation and once accompanied Crooked H on one of her junkets to the Middle East and Pakistan when Hillary was US Secretary of State. (more…)

2,884 words

Czech version here

I call for an immediate ban on the movie Gravity as it shows “Earth” to be spherical, which is against the Quran, and thus insulting to Muslims. — Dr. Zakir Naik

Robert R. Reilly
The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis
Wilimington, Del: ISI Books, 2010 (more…)

5,399 words

English original here

Roxanne L. Euben and Muhammad Qasim Zaman, eds.
Princeton Readings in Islamist Thought: Texts and Contexts from al-Banna to Bin Laden
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009

Parmi les gens préoccupés d’une manière ou d’une autre par l’islam, il y a une tendance à recourir à divers enseignements et citations coraniques choisis intentionnellement pour démontrer que l’islam est « bon » ou « mauvais ». (more…)

5,136 words

French translation here

Roxanne L. Euben and Muhammad Qasim Zaman, eds.
Princeton Readings in Islamist Thought: Texts and Contexts from al-Banna to Bin Laden
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009

There is a tendency among people concerned one way or another with Islam to resort to various cherry-picked Quranic teachings and quotes in order to demonstrate that Islam is either “good” or “bad.” (more…)

2,994 words

2018 qualifications: While I still stand by the general points made in this essay, both the world and me personally are very different from what they were in 2011. First, I am less certain about 9/11 not being an “inside job” than I was then. (more…)