Unholy War in Cyberspace

http://www.acus.org/new_atlanticist/unholy-war-cyberspace

By Fatima Rizvi

What a tornado of a read this is. No wonder none has found this worthy enough of a comment. Not that I do, but this kind of stuff can be a sure fodder to a Steven Spielberg flick I’d say.

It is sad to find that the writer happens to be a learned person, “editor at large at UPI and Washington Times” as he professes to be. Yet nowhere in the article can be found an educated argument or at least a convincing substantiation for ideas flouncing around, likening Jihad to some viral phenomena of pornographic proportions in the cyberspace that has consumed the best of individuals parenting toddlers and teens in the ‘global jungle’.

Amusingly, I’m a Muslim. Not just that I am also from Pakistan. I have lived quarter of a century in this notorious country professing a seemingly horrible, regressive religion that the world must fear, as per this article. And I have never tread the websites the writer is referring to or known about any such chat rooms. Disappointingly, of all the people I have met in life, teachers, colleagues, school mates and friends, I do not know a single ‘extremist’ or fundamentalist’ in person. I don’t even think a considerable community of this country can even tell the two terms apart.

Our household problems are poverty, hunger and unemployment, yes but this does not exponentially translate to extremism and destruction on the scale the writer seems to imagine.  That of course, does not lead me to a conclusion that extremists or fundamentalists do not exist.  Especially since I am no authority or err “Editor-in- large” of leading newspapers, I’m clearly incapacitated to make such sweeping statements.

My favorite snippets of this article are not only hilarious but are also noteworthy on account of their absurdity and utter loss of bearings the writer appears to be experiencing between what is virtual, real, possible and/or is happening today on this planet, outside his mind.

The writer is hopelessly divided between cyber space and real world, chronically confused over Muslim history and has a raving for urban mythology. Or maybe he just wants to say a few favorite things out loud to the jungle in order to win general approval of the herd. Whatever was on his mind, it is coming off incredibly silly and I believe now is time that writers must define their genre’s and refrain from writing under influence when they choose to write on subjects that require academic research and responsible argumentation. Conversely, I request this website to have another archive for fictional delights.

“Born in this humongous mix, long before Sept. 11, 2001, was a virtual electronic caliphate, or a global radical Muslim community whose main enemy is the United States and its Israeli ally, whose principal objective is to push back the frontiers of Islam by crushing Muslim governments and denying the Palestinians the right of statehood.” Virtual Electronic Caliphate???

And this

“The caliphate is a unique global entity that would unite all Muslims under the rule of the caliph. Shiite and Sunni Muslims presumably would spend decades fighting over an appropriate caliph who would then rule over a global dictatorship with an advisory Shura, or the Muslim equivalent of a College of Cardinals. Pie in the Muslim sky, but all too real on the Internet, and pretty heady stuff and certainly more exciting than the drab existence of looking for jobs that are not available.”

And this!

“Moderate Arab leaders from Morocco in North Africa to Saudi Arabia to Pakistan, interviewed by this reporter, invariably come up with the same wet-finger-to-the-wind stats: No more than 1 percent of their populations are religious extremists, and 10 percent fundamentalist, essentially in sympathy with the extremists' agenda. Extrapolating these figures on the global scale of 1.3 billion Muslims, we get 13 million extremists and 130 million sympathizers.”

Is the writer trying to tell Muslims of Moderate Muslim countries (which I sincerely believe I hail from despite volumes of such articles alleging otherwise, stacked in hundreds of LoCs, spanning endless miles of shelf space) that they have no idea what the people in their country are doing and to what extent?

How would a writer justify that it is only a handful of terrorists breaking havoc on this planet as opposed to the total population of this world? Can we please also have a (comical?) extrapolation of how many terrorists vs victims are there on this planet? One will be amazed to find the ratio to be fractions  to billions –  unless some academic authority like this writer comes up and proposes another conspiracy theory like the “Caliphate in the Parallel Universe” to explain for the massive destruction of life and property taking place due to this remotely holy war.

Simply put, we did not have this problem before Soviet War in Afghanistan. Something happened at that time. Can we please concentrate on the problem other than stampeding the jungle with absurd theories of elephantine proportions? Please.

Article Source : http://fatima-rizvi.livejournal.com/283.html