Are radical Islamists Sunnis or Shiites?
Trump is preaching to Sunnis in Saudi Arabia about radical Islamists. Read: Iran, a Shiite Fundamentalist Islamist State, thus radical by American definition.
Syria, also, is a Shiite associated regime with many minorities, but Assad himself and his regime seem to be less radical Shiite Islamist than a secular military dictatorship per se.
You can't have a union of church and state, under American foreign policy, without being radical.
We have long forgotten how truly radical (and in many ways profoundly unfortunate) a separation of church and state was, and really still is. It takes reading something like Butterfield's brief but pithy account in The Whig Interpretation to get some sense for how difficult, long in coming, ideologically and theologically awkward and unintended, bloody, problematic, unhelpful, and unnatural, was the transition to, and is life under, a separation of church from state.
Osama: a radical Islamist Sunni. The United States fought radical Islamist Sunni Osama. We had taught Osama to fight the Rooskies. We did that for him.
Trump announces 100bn arms deal, like this is a triumph. Where do you think those arms are going to end up my friend?
Syria, also, is a Shiite associated regime with many minorities, but Assad himself and his regime seem to be less radical Shiite Islamist than a secular military dictatorship per se.
You can't have a union of church and state, under American foreign policy, without being radical.
We have long forgotten how truly radical (and in many ways profoundly unfortunate) a separation of church and state was, and really still is. It takes reading something like Butterfield's brief but pithy account in The Whig Interpretation to get some sense for how difficult, long in coming, ideologically and theologically awkward and unintended, bloody, problematic, unhelpful, and unnatural, was the transition to, and is life under, a separation of church from state.
Osama: a radical Islamist Sunni. The United States fought radical Islamist Sunni Osama. We had taught Osama to fight the Rooskies. We did that for him.
Trump announces 100bn arms deal, like this is a triumph. Where do you think those arms are going to end up my friend?
The US hates radical Islamist Shiite Iran.
We fought two enormous wars against secular Sunni controlled Iraq, where nonradical Sunni Saddam had ruled over a presumably radicalist fundamentalist Shiite majority.
Thus:
On the one hand, if they run a secular dictatorship (say, Saudi, Iraq, Syria), usually Sunni, (how they have to do it over there), we nail them on human rights, or military aggression, or both (Saddam, Assad).
On the other hand, if they run a religious state (Iran), we nail them on radical Islamism, and human rights.
Heads I win, tails you lose.
When Trump tells Muslims to drive extremists out, where is he telling them to send them, Europe?
Remember the Ayatollah? Where did the old bastard come from, out of exile, in the end? Paris. He had been allowed in on a tourist visa.
When Trump exhorts Muslims to attack extremists, isn't he telling them to attack a fundamentalist Islamic State, Iran?
What does he want? He wants them to reinstitute, presumably by war, a separation of church and state among states of the Middle East, on the model of the separation of church and state in the West.
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