Bumped To Top – Too Historic To Miss

I just finished posting on some indications that al-Qaeda is losing support amongst Islamic Extremists when I ran across this article showing al-Qaeda has lost the next generation of Muslims in Iraq – which is wonderful news for mankind and America:

After almost five years of war, many young Iraqis, exhausted by constant firsthand exposure to the violence of religious extremism, say they have grown disillusioned with religious leaders and skeptical of the faith that they preach.

In two months of interviews with 40 young people in five Iraqi cities, a pattern of disenchantment emerged, in which young Iraqis, both poor and middle class, blamed clerics for the violence and the restrictions that have narrowed their lives.

“I hate Islam and all the clerics because they limit our freedom every day and their instruction became heavy over us,” said Sara Sami, a high school student in Basra. “Most of the girls in my high school hate that Islamic people control the authority because they don’t deserve to be rulers.”

Atheer, a 19-year-old from a poor, heavily Shiite neighborhood in southern Baghdad, said: “The religion men are liars. Young people don’t believe them. Guys my age are not interested in religion anymore.”

The shift in Iraq runs counter to trends of rising religiousness among young people across much of the Middle East, where religion has replaced nationalism as a unifying ideology. While religious extremists are admired by a number of young people in other parts of the Arab world, Iraq offers a test case of what could happen when extremist theories are applied.

Fingers caught smoking were broken. Long hair was cut and force-fed to its owner. In that laboratory, disillusionment with Islamic leaders took hold.

President George Bush knew that when faced with the choice between Islamo Fascism and the freedoms of Western Culture (and yes, the warts as well) that people would chose the latter. What was unforeseen was the depth of depravity that permeates the Islamo Fascism and their uncontrollable urge to murder people. It is the cult of death embodied in al-Qaeda that is destroying Islam’s hold on the people.

And humanity needs the next generation to spurn the violence of the previous generations and work together to build a real, lasting peace based on democracy and freedom. It seems that opportunity is now upon us. Thank you President Bush.

Addendum: I should mention the personal stories in this piece are indicative of people across Iraq, and will become part of the cultural history of Iraq and Islam. It will be a story of deceit and lies that covered up an inhuman level of violence:

Religious Sunnis, for their part, also experienced a heady swell in mosque attendance, but soon became the hosts for groups of religious extremists, foreign and Iraqi, who were preparing to fight the United States.

Zane Muhammad, a gangly 19-year-old with an earnest face, watched with curiosity as the first Islamists in his Baghdad neighborhood came to barbershops, tea parlors, and carpentry stores before taking over the mosques. They were neither uneducated nor poor, he said, though they focused on those who were. Then, one morning while waiting for a bus to school, Muhammad watched a man walk up to a neighbor, a college professor whose sect Muhammad did not know, shoot him at point-blank range three times and walk back to his car as calmly “as if he was leaving a grocery store.”

The article is replete with such accounts. The country is awash with them. They are setting the tone in Iraq and the ME – not the antiquated media sitting in studios in DC and NY City. History is happening whether CNN and CBS acknowledge it or not. In the case of CBS they are too busy making up their own version of reality to notice anyway.

Addendum: I truly enjoyed this statement from a young Iraqi woman:

“I used to love Osama Bin Laden,” proclaimed a 24-year-old Iraqi college student. She was referring to how she felt before the war took hold in her native Baghdad. The Sept. 11, 2001, strike at American supremacy was satisfying, and the deaths, abstract.

…

“Now I hate Islam,” she said, sitting in her family’s unadorned living room in central Baghdad. “Al Qaeda and the Mahdi Army are spreading hatred. People are being killed for nothing.”

Take that Bin Laden – your true nature repulses humans.

Update: Seems this story is running in the NY Times.