What is extremism? Who are the extremists?

The threat to our society from extremism is far greater from the homegrown variety of extremists than from any Muslim radical. These questions and comment are penned by Jerry West and he does make some valid points and while implicating corporate america and Pat Robinson as home grown extremists might be valid comparing them to Bin Laden and Mullah Omar is ridiculous....Pat Robinson has not to the best of my knowledge arranged to have planes fly into mosques in the middle east.

What is extremism? Who are the extremists?

The threat to our society from extremism is far greater from the homegrown variety of extremists than from any Muslim radical.

by Jerry West
January 20, 2007

Last week in a speech, British Prime Minister Tony Blair said it would be a “catastrophe” to withdraw from the fight against extremism in the world and argued that Britain's military interventions around the world should continue. This of course raises the questions: what is extremism, who are the extremists and is there a military solution to the perceived problem?

One can be extreme in many ways, but an extremist according to the Oxford Dictionary is “a person who holds extreme or fanatical political or religious views.” Politics and religion, of course, are often difficult to separate, and are interwoven with economics and other components of the social structure.

For practical purposes here, an extremist, then, would be someone who holds views that are radically different from, and whose implementation can affect, a status quo.

When Tony Blair, George Bush, Stephen Harper and others talk about extremism they mean anyone who poses a threat to the international corporate order and its unhindered pursuit of profits which is the status quo that they represent. Today their designated extremists happen to be Muslim radicals, not merely because they are extremists, but because they have considerable influence in places that happen to be either sitting on or adjacent to major sources of oil.

The radical Muslims are also extremists when viewed through the lens of our modern, progressive, secular western society that has produced such socially defining documents as the Bill of Rights, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Although the progressive documents recognize God, such recognition is lip service in that they also recognize freedom of religion, which by default includes freedom from religion, and place the major emphasis on the rule of law with the final arbitrator of that law being the civil courts, not the representatives of any imaginary deity.

Extremists in this context hold that the rule of an imaginary deity supersedes the rule of real people as expressed in their government, and that the rules of the deity should be the rules of the government.

Furthermore, many of these rules such as those restricting women, defining dress, regulating expression and discriminating against people for their religious beliefs or non-beliefs fly directly in the face of what has become accepted as rights that every person is entitled to. Muslim radicals, of course, are not alone in this. Extremism is a much wider issue than Tony Blair and company would have us believe.

Recently down in the Seattle area a local school board restricted the showing of Al Gore's film on global warming, An Inconvenient Truth because an extremist nutcase who supports the teaching of creationism, among other things, objected to the film on Biblical grounds. The school board, whose members may not be extremists but are certainly intellectually challenged, ruled that the teachers could not show the movie unless a “credible, legitimate, opposing view will be presented.”

That is like saying that one cannot teach that the earth is round unless a credible view that the earth is not round is also presented. Score one for extremism.

The threat to our society from extremism is far greater from the homegrown variety of extremists than from any Muslim radical. Many of the folks who bring us the theory of creationism, who believe that the world is only a few thousand years old, and other supernatural fantasies, also believe that society should be ruled not by its own laws, but by Biblical Law with an authoritarian church instead of the civil courts as the final arbitrator.

There is little that separates the Muslim radicals from the Christian ones. Pat Robertson and Mullah Omar are two sides of the same coin. Osama Bin Laden and the Bushes and Blairs of the world, all who manipulate extremism for one purpose or another, have more in common with each other than with most of the rest of us. And, these at home are far more a threat to our progressive and humane society than any of them in the far corners of the earth.

What causes people to become extremists is a complex issue, but the answers to the problem do not have a military solution. The Bushes and Blairs should know this, but for them, combating Muslim extremism is merely an excuse for expanding the power of the international corporate order.

Jerry West is the editor of The Record, an independent, progressive newspaper published every other Wednesday in Gold River, British Columbia. His columns regularly appear in rabble.ca.