Political Islam at a crossroads

Political Islam explained

Almost every modern religion has faced a clash of ideologies of some sort. However, none is so far-reaching and momentous than the challenges facing the Islamic religion today. Ever since 9/11, Islam has become the epitome of extremism and radicalism in the religious divergence.

The effects of Islamic extremism in the world have been substantial and influential. Muslim radicals have managed to hijacked airplanes and used them as weapons of mass destruction, rallied entire villages and factions against US and foreign troops, kidnapped, attacked and invaded sovereign nationals and territories, and managed to influence political and religious discourse in the Middle East, temporarily unifying at least, other Muslims to rally behind their cause.

However, we keep asking ourselves, where are the moderate Muslims? Why have not they come forward by publicly condemning this wing of Islamic radicalism. Moderate countries lost a very good opportunity to come forward during the 34-day war between Israel and Hizbollah. The situation is very complex. Muslims are a very traditionalist culture. Many nations are plagued with sectarianism even under the skirts of ‘democracy’ and the religion itself has many branches of ideology from very moderate to very orthodox. Nevertheless, the Islamic religion is in a historical crossroad; change won’t come easily, but it is worth the try, and many are already doing so.

The real thing Muslims have to acknowledge is which faction of Islam will get them to form better, peaceful societies with strong foundation of governance and democracy and which allows them to be full participants in world affairs. Unfortunately, the message being carried by the radicals is: “you will never accomplish anything without violence”. Communication between different Islamic factions is at a low and it is up to moderate Muslims in the region to commit themselves to bringing peaceful discourse and negotiation. The clergy can also provide a dash of wisdom as they still are a strong, staunch voice in Islamic politics.

Airport security has a new name

Finally after four and half years of its creation the TSA has finally come up with a comprehensive program for detecting terrorist activities at airports. The program is called SPOT - Screening Passengers by Observation Techniques -a race-neutral profiling program designed to deter terrorist activities. The program will be tested out at JFK, LAX and O'Hare after sucessfully been tested at Logan Airport for the last three years. It has led to the arrest of 50 or so people guilty of having fake ID's, illegal documents and drug possession.

SPOT employees will be trained to observe human behavior for incongruities. Those identified as suspicious will be further examined and interviewed by local police and/or other officials.

I seem to recall an article I read a few years ago about the effectiveness of TSA when it was first created. Passengers were not allowed to carry lighters, scissors, and other instruments. But we had managed somehow to leave out the human element at the security checkpoints. As far as I am concerned, the human aspect is a critical aspect of intelligence gathering, and it ranks high within the CIA and the FBI. So we seemed to have left it out when the Department of Homeland Security created the Transportation Security Administration. The article said we needed to learn from Ben Gurion, Israel's international airport and the safest in the world, on how their security officers are efficiently trained to spot abnormal human behavior for the purposes of terrorists attacks and how they have managed to run an efficient and secure airport.

Finally we are learning something.

Pentagon plane crash

The State Department has finally released a video capturing the crash of the American Airlines plane the morning of 9/11. However, the State Department has not yet released the videos recorded by other cameras in the perimeter of the Pentagon including Sheraton National Hotel, Nexcomm/Citgo gas station and the State of Virgina DOT cameras. A watchdog group called Judicial Watch has requested several times the release of these videos partly because there is a growing need to establish among the mainstream public what is speculation and what is reality. Sources said that the FBI had confiscated the videos back in 2002 and since then some conspiracy theories have been created by public opinion that the airplane was brought down by the military and that a missile instead crashed into the Pentagon.

I personally do not think this Administration could be that clever to pull such maneuver and keep it a secret for so long. We are taking about the most incompetent administration in the history of the U.S. Even if the threat was so critical that the only solution was to bring down the planes (Pentagon or Pennsylvania) to avoid a bigger catastrophe, this government still after 9/11 does not have the resourceful line of thought to coordinate such national security tactic.

Check out the video at

http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/05/16/pentagon.video/index.html