{"id":4105,"date":"2005-08-02T02:14:00","date_gmt":"2005-08-02T02:14:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/?p=4105"},"modified":"2019-11-22T16:58:04","modified_gmt":"2019-11-22T16:58:04","slug":"insomnia-and-islam","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/?p=4105","title":{"rendered":"Insomnia, and &lt;Islam"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Got woken by eldest son wanting to use the loo, but not being able to see in the pitch dark, and therefore panicking. Sorted him out, but woke myself up in the process, and now can&#8217;t get back to sleep.<\/p>\n<p>Still thinking a lot about the clash of cultures that we are experiencing at this present time. And it occurs to me that if, when I write, I use the &#8216;<' symbol before the word Islam, ie 'less than', then I'm being suitably politically correct, and distinguishing between the faith\/civilisation as a whole - which is much too diverse to be characterised as good or bad, evil or blessed - and that sub-group of Islam, coming down via the Wahhabis and Qutb, which has a violent hatred for the West.\n\nI have two lurking concerns about the consequences of <Islam.\n\nThe first is whether it succeeds in so escalating the conflict, and identifying itself with Islam as a whole, that the West begins to perceive itself as in conflict with Islam as such. That would not be good. I think the West needs to be scrupulous in establishing that this is in fact a conflict between Islam and <Islam - and that the West is not itself responsible for the outcome.\n\nThe second is whether China gets involved. There was a headline in Jane&#8217;s Security briefing (I get the headlines; can&#8217;t afford the actual articles) last week to the effect that China is positioning itself to exploit the present conflict between the West and Iran. Now that really is scary.\n\nI&#8217;m very downbeat about the prospects for peace in the next ten years. I would put a 90% probability on a nuclear war in the Middle East in that time, and no better than 50:50 that the conflict widens.\n\nI&#8217;m still hugely influenced by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.fourthturning.com\/\">the Fourth Turning idea<\/a> which makes a lot of sense to me. But it means that we need to start circling the wagons, and preparing for life where oil is in short supply.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m sure I&#8217;ll write more about this in the coming months.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Got woken by eldest son wanting to use the loo, but not being able to see in the pitch dark, and therefore panicking. Sorted him out, but woke myself up in the process, and now can&#8217;t get back to sleep. &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/?p=4105\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[36],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4105","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-islam"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3npsc-14d","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4105","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4105"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4105\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6849,"href":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4105\/revisions\/6849"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4105"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4105"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/elizaphanian.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4105"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}