What do you think is the long term solution to radical Islam?

i w: What do you think is the long term solution to radical Islam?
How should this threat be dealt with today and in the future? Can it ever be eliminated? What will it take for this school of thought to be erradicated from the world? Is their such a thing as peacefull co-existance with radical Islam?

Answers and Views:

Answer by NutstersChick
I’m not sure they want a peaceful co-existence.
They want dominance & eradicating Western Heathens.

Umm, this is going 2 B either slow long drawn out & quick & over with.
Over the Whitehouse/Downing Street/ Moscow etc etc they’ll B an Islamic Flag.
Well That’s what they want & whether they get it or not…………………………
Shrug shoulders, I’m clueless.

Answer by bucky beaver
ban all holy books like the commies did for 50 years till you get a handle on the situation.

Answer by shania
JUST WAIT until they become old and feeble, then they will become more non-radical . .
and wait until they died of old age ( like KHOMEINI ), then they won’t bother anyone anymore . .

Answer by Rob M
Sidewinders up their tailpipe. You can’t reason with or negotiate with these people.

Answer by lingua06437
Try and have responsible governments over see the people. That way people would not feel they have to resort to something as ineffective as Islam.

Better education. If muslim youth learned to think for themselves more they would not fall prey to freako clerics.

Better economic opportunities.

See to it that muslim women get political freedom.

Answer by The Bulletproof Monk
I think the key lies in what they get when they commit acts of terrorism. The IRA was a terrorist organization that for many years gained more through fear and terror that they did with diplomacy. Well, finally their own people (and the rest of the world) had had enough, and they weren’t getting what they wanted anymore through terrorism. They disarmed.

I think the same sort of thing could eventually work for radical Islam, but it will take much longer and be much more complicated. Rather just one terrorist organization in one country, there’s hundreds of terrorist nets in dozens of countries. Terrorists continue to commit terror because they gain power and glory. If we can eliminate the incentive, maybe the terrorist acts will stop.

What makes it further difficult is that these people’s fanaticism allows them to believe that by blowing themselves up, they will gain glory and acclaim for their family, and some bizarre accumulation of incentives in the Afterlife (there is nothing about this in the Koran, to my knowledge). Terrorists who are going to die anyway are unlikely to see any advantage is pursuing diplomatic options.

Answer by Idina
The ideas come from the Koran. It sounds intolerant to say that the religion endorses it, but it’s true. It says to slay non-believers where you find them and that those who die in holy war get paradise and virgins. You can water the religion down, like some peaceful muslims, but this will not work for most of them. You can’t ban the Koran or the religion, that’s just wrong. The only way is to change their thinking with education, or convert them to something else/change their hearts. I can’t see us doing the former, it’s too big of a project. The latter is an even bigger one, but hearts have been changed before.
Until then, we should defend ourselves the best we can and not be intimidated by violence. We should fight the evils of terrorism with force, if necessary, to protect ourselves and send out a message of don’t-mess-with-us.

Answer by Brett
Pray for them and love them like Christ does, even if they may be our enemies.

Answer by Tim
The only peaceful co-existance with radical Islam is if you’re Muslim yourself. That’s why we call them radical. To defeat them, we have to give them something to lose. If their economies pick up, and they have money, and cars, and houses, most of them will have to think a lot harder about whether they wanna give all that up and go blow up a bus. Even with 72 virgins waiting for you, materialism is a powerful foe to religious fundamentalism.

Answer by my_backups2
I just want to say that most of the people who gave the previous answers didn’t even bother themselves to collect a slight bit of information about what Islam is and what radical Islam represents. To me, this means that most of the previous answers are biased and naiive. I am muslim and I admit that there are so many extremist muslims today causing a great deal of terrorism and annoyance to the whole world, and I would add that most “true” muslims do NOT agree with these sick extremists. BUT you must take into consideration that:

1-America and the west played a central role in the past in nourishing radical islamist groups (such as Taliban and Al-Qaeda) in order to achieve some balance against communism and the Soviet Union in its hey-days.

2-Today, the US government is still funding and aiding some non-democratic governments in several middle-eastern countries (eg: Saudi Arabia). The result of this is a mix of human right violations, hatred to the USA, and rise of terrorist groups in these countries.

3-The USA is also extremely biased in favor of Israel in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and this is making most people in the middle east extremely angry at the USA and forces many Arabs even to back the terrorist actions committed by some muslims against the US and Israel, even when these violence actions kill non-soldiers (which is of course something unacceptable and horrible, but the problem is that you cannot say so in any Arab country because you will always receive such comments as: “but Israelis also do kill innocent Palestinian women and children”, or “but can’t you see that the USA today is militarily occupying two Islamic countries which are Iraq and Afhganistan, and is blackmailing and harrassing two other ones which are Syria and Iran?!”).

4-Extremism is not a peculiar feature of Islam alone. There are extremist neo-nazis in Germany, and there are extremists in Japan (those who want to destroy China and S.Korea, and those who still want to retaliate from the US), and there are extremist latinos (such as Hugo Chafez), and there are nasty extremists in Israel (eg: virtually all members of the current and the former Israeli cabinets), and even in the USA (eg: those who still want to kick the black people and the Mexicans out, and those who support and defend Israel even more than some European jews do).

So, in brief, I want to say that radicalism is both an Islamic problem and a western problem because the west (and mainly the USA) greatly contributed to it. The west is always motivated by its narrow economic interests and agenda. When backing extremist muslims was compatible with that agenda, the west backed these extremists real hard. But when the danger of communism was over and the USA abruptly found itself a single dominant force in the whole world, it suddenly found that the new enemy is radical Islam. A famous proverb says: “In politics there are no eternal friendships or eternal antagonies. There are only eternal interests.”

And to those who have suggested in their answers changing the educational contents and systems in Islamic countries, I say: This is totally unacceptable because no nation will ever accept such censorship or control-from-above because it implies that the western civilization is more rational and sophisticated than the Islamic one, which is untrue because in the realm of civilizations there is nothing called “my civilization is better than your’s!”. Each civilization has its own points of strength and drawbacks. I am sure most of the people who submitted the previous answers do not know that Islam in the middle ages was the number one developed civilization in all fields (science, fiction, political hegemony, military power, etc) and that the European Medieval Renaissance was almost impossible without the translations from the Arab and Islamic books.

Effective and true change must stem from inside you and cannot be forced on you from above. The Islamic civilization of today needs to be modernized and taught to be more open and forgiving, and at the same time the western one needs to be taught how to become less arrogant, less materialistic, more faithful, and more “giving”.

Answer by memo226
oh snap! my_backups2 you put it eloquently. a marvelous answer to so many unreasonable comments.

People really need to know all the facts before they can form an opinion. if you believe what people tell you to believe, then you may as well not have a mind (and a mind is a terrible thing to waste). People never get the whole story, especially from the US government because they have their own agendas. Most history is fact, and some people don’t forget what others have done to them. Then, they get the bad image, because nobody has any clue why they’re upset.

Bottom line is, get the straight facts and use your logic.