Talk Islam

muse

• 09:19:18 pm on July 13, 2008 | # | |
  Tags: Barack Obama, Fareed Zakaria, foreign policy, politics

  O gave a wide-ranging foreign policy interview to Fareed Zakaria. I liked his response to Z’s query about how he views the “problem within Islam” regarding terrorism. I think after hearing asinine comments from the administration for so long, a common sense response like this seems downright brilliant.

  …what we also want to do is to shrink the pool of potential recruits. And that involves engaging the Islamic world rather than vilifying it, and making sure that we understand that not only are those in Islam who would resort to violence a tiny fraction of the Islamic world, but that also, the Islamic world itself is diverse.

  And that lumping together Shia extremists with Sunni extremists, assuming that Persian culture is the same as Arab culture, that those kinds of errors in lumping Islam together result in us not only being less effective in hunting down and isolating terrorists, but also in alienating what need to be our long-term allies on a whole host of issues.

   

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