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Comment by miraj | Hacker News Reader

>> Politicians really don't know how to tackle this problem, because no one from our culture room really understands the problem....

- ah but that is not entirely true! politicians do know what to do, but it is a tricky path. 》 move away from the Saudis & their cohorts in gulf arab countries. ISIS, AQ, AL Shahab etc are all ideological offshoots of Salafist/Wahhabist nexus. Counter this at the root (financially/ideologically/politically) and almost certain that 90% of the so called islamist extremism would flicker out.

this is going to be a multi year / multi pronged approach, and would need co-ordinated efforts by all kinds of actors (i.e. western + muslim governments, NGOs, religious groups etc). also a stellar idea would be to start giving more support to pluralistic streams of Islam i.e. Sufi, Ismaili, (some of the) Hanafi & like-minded faiths.

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That's a very narrow minded historic view of "extremism" in Islam.

It is not centered around Salafism/Wahhabism even if it seems like so today. If you look at Afghanistan then before AQ/Taliban and Salafism moved in the "extremism/terrorism" started with Shia groups like the Hazara attacking the socialists in Afghanistan, when the soviets stepped in and cleared them out it left power vacuum that drew in the Salafists and the flavor of Islam changed (Afghanistan was far from religious, it was tribal and illiterate people couldn't read the quran and mosques outside of the major cities were rare than wells).

Israel's operations against Sunni groups in Lebanon and their alliance with the Christian Lebanese government and later on with the SLA left a power vacuum for groups like AMAL and later Hezbollah form which were Shia.

The "ratio" of Shia to Sunni groups can be attributed to the power struggle between Sunni and Shia Islam and between Saudi Arabia and Iran but 90% of the extremist organizations in the world won't die out if you focus on Wahhabism alone, you would only bolster their "opposition". There are nearly 100 Shia militias in Syria and Iraq today, they are fighting ISIS but they aren't "the good guys", neither are the Huties or Hezbollah.

Separating yourself from other people isn't exactly a path to good friendly stable longterm relationships.

Currently the West is building relationships and trying to influence these countries. You can see it succeeding with Saudi Arabia, in that Women are allowed to work there now. That's still a long way off from where we would like them to be but it shows that the strategy is working, it just takes time.

You just can't change people's values that quickly, it takes generations for that to happen.

If you want to accelerate that to a timeline that is measured in years, you're going to have to start what amounts to WWIII and occupy the middle east or make sure there's nothing left to occupy afterwards.

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