This is perhaps a straw in the wind. Stephan Schwartz (schwartzreport) says we are watching Islam in the process of a reformation, much as happened to Christianity 500 yeas ago. It is more than a matter of religious organization. It goes to the heart of the relations between the sacred and the secular in everyday life. It touches on the question of tolerance of dissent. It ultimately boils down to what people are willing to kill and die for — and what they are willing to refuse to allow others to kill and die for.
It will be a while sorting itself out, probably. But usually, everything wrong in the Muslim world is blamed on the West and on Israel. When is the last time you can remember a Muslim statesman calling another Muslim group (accurately enough) murderous terrorists? Sure, it’s a political squabble among other things. But the point is, Muslims are here being attacked as too extreme! That in itself is good news.
From http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/story.html?id=b6b4c1e7-66c5-4fad-a468-10fed2cc4065&p=2
Islamic Resistance Movement ‘murderous terrorists,’ Abbas says
Hamas seeking ‘Kingdom of Gaza,’ Palestinian president claims
Matthew Fisher, CanWest News Service
Published: Thursday, June 21, 2007
JERUSALEM — Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, whose secular Fatah movement was routed by Islamist Hamas in a battle for control of the Gaza Strip last week, denounced the Islamic Resistance Movement on Wednesday as “murderous terrorists.”
What Hamas sought, Abbas said in a speech on Palestinian television, was a “Kingdom of Gaza” which would be ruled by those who use “assassination and killing to achieve their goals.”
His remarks personalized the growing war of words between Hamas and Fatah, which now have firm control of Gaza and the West Bank respectively, creating the prospect or rival Palestinian mini-states. Abbas announced he had proof Hamas had tried to murder him by planting a bomb under a road on which he was about to travel.
Hamas, which refuses to recognize the Israel, is listed as a terrorist group by Canada and other western nations.
As Hamas and Fatah squabbled, Israel opened its border with the Gaza Strip a little more on Wednesday to allow hundreds of foreign nationals trapped by last week’s fighting between Hamas and Fatah to escape and permitted dozens of Palestinians who had been wounded to receive emergency treatment in Israeli hospitals. Islamic Jihad, which is not formally affiliated with Hamas but shares its radical Islamic ideology and its ambition to destroy Israel, answered this slight softening of the Israeli position by firing five rockets into the Jewish state.
Israeli warplanes, in turn, struck at rocket launching sites in Gaza and Israeli ground troops killed four suspected terrorists in separate firefights near the Egyptian border.
Israel’s competing responses to the tense situation in Gaza underlined the difficulties that confront Israeli policy makers determined to counter a radical Islamic movement on their southern doorstep. There had been guarded hope in some circles that last week’s dramatic developments in the coastal strip might provide fresh impetus for peace talks between Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Abbas, both of whom are regarded as relatively moderate. It was announced on Wednesday that they intend to meet for the first time since Hamas conquered Gaza, most likely next week at the West Bank oasis of Jericho.
“Both of them are very weak and cannot make any moves towards a comprehensive settlement,” said Meir Litvak who specializes in Middle Eastern history and Islamic radicalism at Tel Aviv University’s Dayan Centre.
The central issue for Abbas is also his Achilles heel, Litvak said. It was the right of return for several million Palestinian refugees.
For Olmert it is the necessity to withdraw Jewish settlements from the West Bank, which is politically impossible for him at this time, Litvak added.
Hillel Frisch, a historian at Bar-Ilan University who specializes in the politics and religion of Palestinian nationalism, said Israel now faces threats on four fronts — Gaza, Lebanon, Syria and Iran.
Olmert and U.S. President George Bush agreed in Washington on Tuesday to offer financial and diplomatic support for Abbas’s emergency government, which replaced the Hamas-led parliament. This was intended to demonstrate that the only way forward was for Palestinians to forsake Hamas for Fatah.
The policy of trying to isolate Hamas internationally was “a repeat of what Olmert tried to do when Hamas was elected,” Frisch said. “I don’t think that an international boycott of Hamas will succeed and Israel will have to go into Gaza militarily.”
“To conquer Gaza again now would be a mistake that would threaten the existence of the Jewish state because it would undermine more serious and difficult challenges on its northern borders and elsewhere,” Litvak said. “When you have a lot of problems, you have to have priorities.”
Menachem Klein, a political scientist from Bar-Ilan University who favours substantive peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians, said that a resumption in blocked financial aid that Olmert, Bush and the European Union had agreed to “was not really anything substantial. It’s impossible to do anything dramatic without considering final status issues.”