::::::::
The worldwide web is changing many things about our daily lives on planet earth. Left unfettered, it will preclude the utility, perhaps even the necessity, for maintaining anything like a "national security" apparatus.
I do not know the details of the Koran, nor the practices and differences of all the various Muslim sects. But I am a human being who is watching the performances put on by all the parties in the human family and, as such, do have some "skin" in this game.
Before I start, I'll baseline with what I believe to be true about contemporary history.
False flag attacks by one side of a dispute against itself are now commonplace. The attacks in New York on 9/11 and most recently Mumbai were clearly "false flags" designed to pound the drum beat for global conflict. I do not see Arabs, nor Muslims, as particularly bad people any more than I see Christians as particularly bad people. But there are noteable exceptions.
That's the end of the "good" news, my Muslim and Christian brethren.
The rest of the news has to do with global population demographics, the survival of the human species, commonsense and inter/intra cultural harmony.
I do not know enough about Muslim spiritual practice to make any definite decrees or suggest any targetted sanctions, but the objective of anything along those lines would be in service to species survival, etcetera. To the extent that I know and understand Christian practices and to the extent that those practices are the same for Muslims, my suggestions should still apply.
The fastest-growing demographic of global population is among the Muslim communities of SE Asia. In a world that is choking itself to death with problems related to population, I see no reason why the Muslim community should be surprised that they are receiving undue, and unwanted, attention from western "Christian" powers. Any culture, state or organization that can not operate without fouling the environment needs to be sanctioned so as to bring the global environment back into accord.
Social, cultural, economic or religious policies that serve to oppress any law-abiding segment of the population need to end. Not be "phased out," or "de-emphasized over a period of time," they need to end. Oppression and repression of women and minorities needs to stop. Today. Now. Period. End of story.
Draconian measures such as the public execution of any man, woman or child needs to end as above. The execution of Karla Faye Tucker is one example of a tragic miscarriage of justice, but there are many more within the United States. In Iran, the execution of a sixteen year old girl for the crime of being "weird" and for being raped by an older male, is another example of intolerably repressive social policy. Using cranes designed for construction as death machines is another example of repressive, backward social policy. All bureaucratic institutions designed to implement capital punishments need to be shuttered immediately. They simply create more death and repression.
I see no problem with polygamy or communal living arrangements per se, but for the purposes of population management 1 child per couple should be the norm, with 2 children being the exception, rather than the rule. These norms need to be implemented via tax law and vigorously enforced. Everyone loves children, but few actually know how to rear them to become productive members of society from their first day of adulthood. The more part-time parents a child has, the better.
Even with all these policies implemented and enforced, we still have a problem of population parity and environmental resource management. One could posit that open warfare is one solution, but all the deaths from the 20th century due to war only amounted to 100 million early deaths. Had the level of violence from, say, the 10th or 11th centuries been practiced during the 20th, 2 billion people would have died from warfare and intraspecies conflict.
To further underscore the scale and scope of our present human population problems, if we murdered 8 times as many people as were murdered during the 20th century in a single year -- for five straight years -- we would eliminate 4 billion human beings from the planet's biosphere and provide for a more habitable planet. Remember that a 1% growth in global population per year means that the population doubles within the span of a human lifetime. 72 years is not enough time for a single living environment to adapt itself to the presence of twice as many humans so short a span of time. Living environments ought to be sustainable over 5 or more generations. This can not be accomplished without sensible efforts at population control and management.
So if open warfare will not solve the problem of curbing the growth of the human population, what will?
Before one goes into the useless activity of fixing blame, one need look no farther than their own despicable, environmentally toxic, behavior for reasons WHY we have been left with such tragic and heart-rendering choices. I can think of the spirits of a several polar bears who swam and swam for days on end without finding any ice before they literally drowned doing what they should have had no problem doing, in measured doses, for the rest of their lives. When I consider the heartlessness of any human, or series of humans, who could allow that kind of tragedy to foment for a fellow species of mammals, I am hardly moved to sympathy for our own species. Such behavior is so coldly reptilian, so brashly fratricidal, that the list of names of the first humans to be sacrificed for the good of the species is not hard to contemplate at all.
Not at all, Mr. Rove.
