On intifada

Submitted by Archimedes2 (Canada), Aug 18, 2007 at 22:04

Intifada indeed appears to mean something like "shaking off". (We could all benefit from a bit of instruction in Arabic; I'll be first in line.) But the meaning, as I take it from the general usage, is not as Debbie claims: "shaking off oppression" per se, but "shaking off the culture and rule of the filthy Kuffar".

Thus these T-shirts contain a fairly obvious slogan, not necessarily directly advocating violence but surely in direct defiance of the surrounding civilization. It is in complete harmony for the Islamist goals of sharia rule under an Islamic government, and thesupplanting of the U.S. Constitution with empirial Muslim overlordship. They are rather brazen, but I can't see that it means anything less than this. "Oppression" is an Islamist euphemism for any kind of societal system that is not governed by Islamic Sharia Law.

So with this in mind I say Debbie may not have been lying -- simply using a deliberate device to cloak her understanding of the slogan: doublespeak. On the idea of Arab instruction in American schools, or schools devoted to this, I agree with Daniel that the basic idea is good. The U.S. needs more arabic speakers to penetrate more deeply into the arabic mindset and make some of the rather overtly arabic supremacist chit-chat that goes on around the world and on the internet better known.

Since few muslims appear to be compliant it seems we also need a generation of non-muslim people well-schooled in certain arts, such as language and Islamic behavior, that would make them useful moles in mosques and other Islamic organizations here, and in hostile nations in the middle east. Perhaps the school should be dedicated to this goal, and should also offer courses that provide resources (to both muslims and non-muslims) for anti-islamist and anti-terrorist careers. If that could be achieved it would make a lovely end-run for this story. And, being a non-muslim (and in a certain sense, anti-islamist) arab himself, Khalil Ghibran is not a bad person after whom to name such a school. To make it a den of Islamists would be a real irony.

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