Chris Navin

Michael Totten at World Affairs Journal (majority of the piece behind a registration wall)-‘The Trouble With Turkey: Erdogan, ISIS, And The Kurds.‘

Erdogan’s coalition and political stability look to be in some trouble, recently, as a bomb kills nearly a hundred at a pro-Kurdish peace rally:

‘Turkey fears and loathes Kurdish independence anywhere in the world more than it fears and loathes anything else. Kurdish independence in Syria, from Ankara’s point of view, could at a minimum escalate a three-decades-long conflict and at worst threaten Turkey’s territorial integrity’

Charles Hill on Islamist movements:

‘The answer to the primary question about political Islam’s compatibility with modernity is that political Islam’s purpose is to not only be incompatible with modernity but also to oppose it, demolish it, and replace it in every regard.’

My take: There are jihadis with specific skill-sets, acting as members of militant groups, seeking to bring the fight against foreign forces (wherever the American military has operated recently, especially). Often, these groups have borrowed from Western ideologies and grafted fascistic branches onto Islamic roots.

These groups often find greatest room to operate in failed and failing states, or in some corner of the Islamic world invaded by outside forces. Here, they join local fighters, maintaining pan-Arab, radical appeal, seeking to ‘drive the infidel from the Arabian peninsula’ and to maybe even attack the West…in the West. Other Islamist radicals operate in the West, or online, shaming and enticing young Muslim men to take-up arms; offering identity, purpose, and a piece of the action.

There are deep wells of sentiment in the Islamic world for a renewal of Islamic traditions, institutions, faith, language and law against Western and ‘modern’ intrusion, and such groups fill-in to pursue their own aims under chaotic circumstances and the banners of such sentiment.

Given the West’s colonial activities, the achievements of Western political, commercial, technological, economic, and military institutions, and how well such institutions have traveled, both less and more intrusively the past few hundred years, many folks in the Islamic world are trying to resist ‘modernity’ mightily.

Outcomes uncertain….but current American policy involves nearly withdrawing entirely and leaving the Shia-Sunni split as well as the instability in the region to flare up into a two- or three-alarm fire.

On that note, some Islamic immigrants to the West seek to attain ‘victimhood’ and ‘oppressed class’ status, appealing not only to multicultural tolerance, but competing amongst the more radical Leftist groups to champion their own activism and silence the speech of others.

Some people in the West are quite fine with that, apparently, as their own ideological sympathies align well enough with such activism and Left-liberal idealism.

As posted: Mark Steyn discusses complaints brought against Macleans, Canada’s largest publication, by the President of the Canadian Islamic Congress (who sent three representatives) to TVOntario. They were upset at the pieces Steyn had published there. The complaints went through the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal for alleged “Islamophobia” and “promoting hate:”

The connection here is what happens in Canadian society beneath the umbrella of more Left liberal ideas: