Peace, Justice and the Ultimate Crime

The emergence of a seemingly endless parade of radical Islamist groups, whose immediate goals vary to the point of confrontation but whose general long-term objective would appear to be the disruption and eventual destruction of Western civilization as we know it, often seems to have materialized overnight. But the fact is that this ostensible optical illusion is the result of widespread Western ignorance about Islam in general and about “radical Islam” in particular. I should hasten to say that one has little to do with the other. The first is one of the major monotheist religions, with many similar teachings to those of Judaism and Christianity, which formed part of its origin, including, most notably, its messages prescribing peace, love, forgiveness and the brotherhood of humankind. The second is a multi-faceted, worldwide, extremist movement, which—although utilizing religion as its pseudo-philosophical base, drawing card, and justification for acts that are unjustifiab...

ISIL: a clear and present danger to world peace. Since the beginning of 2014—the year in which the world was to mark the one-hundredth anniversary of the start of World War I by leaping headlong into new situations fraught with grave threats for world peace—several regional conflicts have morphed into worldwide concerns. All of these are critical, difficult to solve and risky in that they pose a catalyst for world conflict: the war in Syria, the war in Ukraine, the exchanges of missile fire between the Israeli government and Hamas extremists in the Gaza Strip, all of these have this year shaken the foundations of world peace. But perhaps the most immediate and high-profile of these threats has been the swift rise of the fundamentalist terror organization known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant or ISIL. Without a doubt, ISIL is a clear and present danger to world peace and democracy. But it is worthwhile reflecting that it is as much an indirect threat, because of how...

The lightning surge of the Sunni militant ISIL (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, a.k.a. ISIS) that took shape earlier this month appears to demonstrate that both Western-leaning Iraqi authorities and US intelligence have sorely underestimated this fundamentalist threat and extremist leaders’ capability to make good on it. In Mosul, the Arab country’s second largest city, over the past few days many defending officers and troops have thrown down their weapons and fled before the advance of a few thousand determined and well-seasoned militants, many of whom are believed to have previously been fighting in Syria’s civil war—neither on the side of the  repressive Bashar al-Assad regime nor for the pro-western rebels of the Syrian National Militia, but against all comers for their own cause: the establishment of a pan-Arabian fundamentalist Islamic state. Embattled Iraqi PM Nouri al-Maliki By the end of this week, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki was under pressure to ...