“I hate Islam and all the clerics because they limit our freedom every day and their instruction became heavy over us,” said Sara, a high school student in Basra. “Most of the girls in my high school hate that Islamic people control the authority because they don’t deserve to be rulers.”
Who woulda thunk it?
I mean these Iraqi’s are so backward they will never desire freedom. Tyranny and dictatorships is all they know and its foolish of Bush to even think about trying to instill basic freedoms into their lives. The dummy.
But with the above quote the New York Times is coming to grips with a change in Iraq, a change they obviously never thought would happen, a change from believing the fanatics to questioning the fanatics and desiring the basic human need of freedom:
After almost five years of war, many young people in Iraq, exhausted by constant firsthand exposure to the violence of religious extremism, say they have grown disillusioned with religious leaders and skeptical of the faith that they preach.
In two months of interviews with 40 young people in five Iraqi cities, a pattern of disenchantment emerged, in which young Iraqis, both poor and middle class, blamed clerics for the violence and the restrictions that have narrowed their lives.
Atheer, a 19-year-old from a poor, heavily Shiite neighborhood in southern Baghdad, said: “The religion men are liars. Young people don’t believe them. Guys my age are not interested in religion anymore.”
“In the beginning, they gave their eyes and minds to the clerics; they trusted them,” said Abu Mahmoud, a moderate Sunni cleric in Baghdad, who now works deprogramming religious extremists in American detention. “It’s painful to admit, but it’s changed. People have lost too much. They say to the clerics and the parties: You cost us this.”
“When they behead someone, they say ‘Allahu akbar,’ they read Koranic verse,” said a moderate Shiite sheik from Baghdad, using the phrase for “God is great.”
“The young people, they think that is Islam,” he said. “So Islam is a failure, not only in the students’ minds, but also in the community.”
A professor at Baghdad University’s School of Law, who identified herself only as Bushra, said of her students: “They have changed their views about religion. They started to hate religious men. They make jokes about them because they feel disgusted by them.”
Granted, this is a article written after 40 interviews with the youth of the country, so a pattern it may not be. But no one on the left believed even this much could be achieved. Many on the right believe the same thing. Democracy just could not take hold in a country filled with backward barbarians right?
Wrong. It turns out they are not all backward barbarians and are actually like every other human on the planet….they desire freedom.
The writer of the article does let her bias seep in a bit by not acknowledging something which is impossible NOT to acknowledge….that the Bush doctrine was responsible for this turnaround. Abe Greenwald:
It is impossible not to infer that the Bush Doctrine and the commitment of the men and women in uniform has facilitated this shift. Far from “creating more terrorists” as the failed cliché goes, the war has helped to nurture an appreciation for liberty among Iraqi youth. A 24-year-old Iraqi college student is quoted as saying she loved Osama bin Laden at the time of 9/11. Now, after seeing the efforts of religious leaders to curtail her daily freedoms, she rejects extremism entirely. While George Bush’s critics can make no useful connection between 9/11 and the war in Iraq, this young woman has no problem doing so.
You also have to give credit to the fanatics themselves. The violence they caused amongst those who were following them gave rise to this backlash which is something we all knew would happen. ChrisG commented on this subject on the earlier Islam thread:
President Bush’s policy has been to allow Islam to reform without the threat of violence from Taliban type IslamoNAZIs. The much under-reported successes of Iraq throwing off AQI and Maadi terrorism (after having to live with the stark reality of an AQ/Maadi style government) lend credence to this view. Using this philosophy, President Bush has formed some of the largest diverse coalitions in world history to fight Islamic terrorism (not that he will receive credit for it). Even the Saudi people, who have tacidly backed Islamic terrorism, are fighting against the islamofacists in their own country for fear of AQ or like organizations instilling their form of Islam on Saudi Arabia.
So while its heartening to see the NYT’s actually acknowledging the shift in Iraq, its not surprising they leave out one important facet of how this came to be…..namely, Bush was right.
Don’t ever expect to see that printed in their paper, but it needs to be said.
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