Quotes About Extremism

For Pol Pot, as for every other kamikaze of Kingdom Come, "the goal was not to destroy but to transmute." We have heard this chiliastic tommyrot before, from a variety of faith-based ethnic cleansers forever seeking to transmute the rest of us to death.

conocía de sobra... los motivos simples por los que un hombre con las dosis adecuadas de fanatismo, rencor o ánimo de lucro mercenario podía matar indiscriminadamente.

Por su parte, Largo Caballero, líder del ala socialista radical, había sido aún más explícito e irresponsable: Si ganan las derechas, tendremos que ir a una guerra civil declarada.

Las guerras civiles son otra cosa, oye. El salvajismo llevado al extremo. La ausencia de reglas.

Las guerras civiles son otra cosa. El salvajismo llevado al extremo. La ausencia de reglas

When you say things like, 'We have to wipe out the Taliban ' what does that mean? The Taliban is not a fixed number of people. The Taliban is an ideology that has sprung out of a history that, you know, America created anyway.

we in the West have not bothered to develop an effective counternarrative because from the outset we have denied that Islamic extremism is in any way related to Islam. We persist in focusing on the violence and not on the ideas that give rise to it.

There is in fact no good reason al-Ghazali and his ilk should have the last word in defining Islam. Muslims around the world cannot go on claiming that "true" Islam has somehow been "hijacked" by a group of extremists. Instead they must acknowledge that inducements to violence lie at the root of their own most sacred texts, and take responsibility for actively redefining their faith.

Bin Laden's quotes from the Quaran resonated in my brain: "When you meet the unbelievers, strike them in the neck." "If you do not go out and fight, God will punish you severely and put others in your place." "Wherever you find the polytheists, kill them, seize them, besiege them, ambush them." "You who believe, do not take the Jews and Christians as friends; they are allies only to each other. Anyone who takes them as an ally becomes one of them.

If it's worth doing, it's worth overdoing.

If they wanted to know why she had tried to go, why were they asking about the "Islamic thoughts" in her head? Didn't they realize a naïve, broken-bird of a girl might follow a beloved brother to the very ends of the earth? Didn't they realize abused girls were easy prey for charismatic men with dubious intentions?

They prey on the most vulnerable, exactly at the moment when they're not educated enough to know better, but religious enough to feel the impulse," he said. "They ply them with YouTube sheikhs and fatwas and nasheeds, and six months later the guy finds himself in Syria, smoking weed, convinced it was the right thing to do.

If anything, Prevent, the government's counterterrorism policy charged with identifying young people at risk of extremism, was primed to overreact.

The jihadists come from many European countries, Russia included, and some even from the United States; hundreds of them - if you take Europe, Russia and the U.S. - are fighting in the ranks of extremist groups.

Political prodigies are rare in a nation that grooms top leaders through decades of Communist Party road-testing and pageantry. And because Chairman Mao's cult of personality led the country into extremism, the Party spent the next three decades engineering its politicians to be as indistinguishable as possible.

I don't think any extremism is rational.

We have learned - or at least we should have - that seeing Islamist extremism purely as a reaction to what we do is fundamentally mistaken. Indeed that view - Western centric as it is - belittles the threat we face. It implies we can somehow opt out of this fight, that if we hide maybe they will leave us alone.

By 'radical,' I understand one who goes too far; by 'conservative', one who does not go far enough; by 'reactionary', one who won't go at all.

Our enemy is not Islam. Islam is not the enemy of America; Americans are not the enemy of Islam. Our real enemy is extremism and radicalism.

People want to protect their way of life, and when they think it's in danger they start grasping for more extreme-seeming alternatives.

I mean you can learn how to build a bullet or build a gun or build a bomb on the Internet.

I'm an all-or-nothing kind of guy, I guess.

Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.

Educated women armed with computers have defeated extremists by denying them a monopoly to define cultural identity and interpret religious texts. No extremist can say that women are inferior to men without being made a laughingstock on Al Jazeera. Islam insisted on equality between everyone.