I didn't mean the US so much in this instance as Saudi Arabia.
I don't think we will see the US in Yemen.

I think the jihadists doing the bidding for Saudi Arabia is hardly much different than the IRA doing things in support of Ireland.
Only difference was the Irish wanted their country back and the Brits out, where the Saudi's are just being imperialistic.

//Islamic State attacks Yemen, when will you see they are a Western tool?//

You're a Western tool.

Hi AC,

Maybe ISIS is not strictly a Saudi tool, it's going its own way: yes, way back, their ideologies spring from the same reactionary sources, but that's no guarantee that they are all now on the same page.

The nature of schismatic ideologies, ideologies which break away from some more mainstream one, are that they themselves risk schisms: even the Methodists split within a generation or two of the Wesleys into rival 'Methodists'. Trotskyites have been especially fruitful of spawning schismatic groups - I recall one group, allied to the Fourth, or maybe the Four and a Halfth International, called something like the Revolutionary People's Party of the Uninterrupted Revolution (RPPUR), which spawned a break-away group called something like the RPPUR-Spasmodic. No doubt other smaller groups have split away from that as well by now. He lives in Bowral.

The upshot of this is that the deal two hundred years ago that one Arabian tribal clan made with the Wahhabi sect, to set it up as a royal family [caesarism] in return for enforcing Wahhabism throughout the kingdom [papism], was just a power-sharing deal within what became a Saudi kingdom: we get power, you'll support us, and in turn you can dictate the behaviour of everybody in the kingdom. A sort of grotesque 'separation' of church and state.

Now, perhaps the Wahhabi leaders have wider ambitions, to spread their 'message' across the world, as it is ordered in the Koran, but from the Saudi royals' point of view, that would destabilise their situation: they have no power-base outside of Saudi Arabia after all. So perhaps we should be looking for the dead hand of Wahhabism as an instigator of ISIS, a sort of Dr. Frankenstein whose monster has got slightly out of control.

The Saudi king is officially called the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques: tourism AND oil, he's happy. But perhaps the Wahhabis want to re-take Jerusalem (since, after all, Muhammad flew there on a horse, therefore it's Moslem), and then the world. So perhaps there is tension between the Saudi royals and the Shoura ?

Joe

Loudmoth & Others;
Are we over philosophising all this too much ?
All the talk we hear, here & there, is bound up in making sure no one
is offended and it seems to becoming a new academic field of study by
those who want to make their mark as being very humanitarian and the
desire to be more proper than the general run of the mill people.
We are struggling to separate those that plan & take action from those
that are their families and their community. We just cannot do that.

Surely it just comes down to someone wants to cut your head off or
force you to adopt their religious/political system.

That is the bottom line, everything must encompass that !

Hi Bazz,

Yes, I agree that we, the West, Australia, whatever, is facing forces which would use any brutality to prevail. And I think that struggle will go on for a very, very long time, long after I'm gone and the worms have got me.

But no, I don't think we are putting enough thought into the problem at all: I'm beginning to think the differences between the two paradigms, the Western Enlightenment and Islam, are so fundamental, on so many levels, that we could be witnessing the beginning of a very bitter clash of civilizations as Huntington outlined twenty years ago. The two have dramatically different value systems, different notions of what constitutes discussion or 'proof', different aims and notions of progress.

How the populations supporting those two paradigms can be reconciled - if it's even possible to reconcile them, ultimately - is something we don't think enough about. Side issues like global warming or gay marriage are going to be like those annoying little summer flies in comparison.

Cheers,

Joe

Yes Joe basically in agreement except you said;
that we could be witnessing the beginning of a very bitter clash of
civilizations as Huntington outlined twenty years ago.

Actually the clash started a long time ago as the citizens of Tours in
France, Vienna and Spain can attest when they defeated the Islamic
Army invasions.

Until recently I had not realised that the Islamic army invaded France
some 800 years ago. Must look it up and find the dates.

It is a continuing clash of civilisations. Every so often the west has
to turn around and smack the moslems down.
Because moslems occupied
France, or part thereof, they believe that France is moslem land.