The Obvious Question

In his article, Islam, Democracy & Assimilation, Andrew McCarthy tries his hand at addressing the issues raised by Francis Fukuyama in his article A Year of Living Dangerously. In his conclusion, McCarthy writes:

President Bush, while smoke was still billowing from Ground Zero, insisted that the answer to Islamic radicalism was somehow to be found outside Islam — that 19 terrorists had "hijacked a great religion." Just a week ago, during her "religion of love" encomium, Secretary Rice maintained: "We in America know the benevolence that is at the heart of Islam."

That all sounds very nice. But let's leave aside for the moment that if such things were as routinely proclaimed by high government officials about Christianity or Judaism the ACLU would be stampeding the federal courts with lawsuits decrying Establishment Clause violations. What's the evidence that what the administration claims is true?

At roughly the same time as last week's contrasting Ramadan speeches from Rice and Ahmadinejad, the imam of Mecca's Grand Mosque, Sheikh Abdul Rahman Al-Sudais, was in Dubai being honored by his fellow Muslims as the Islamic Personality of the Year Award. As Don Feder observes, it was not long ago that Al-Sudais was heard praying "that Allah would 'terminate' the Jews, who he benevolently called 'the scum of humanity, the rats of the world, prophet killers ... pigs and monkeys' (the latter comes from the Koran). On other occasions Al-Sudais referred to Jews as 'evil,' a 'continuum of deceit,' 'tyrannical' and 'treacherous.'"

In the Muslim ghettoes of democratic Europe, the likes of Al-Sudais are far more influential than Locke or Burke or Montesquieu. Nonetheless, in sorting out the militants from the moderates, we've made a taboo of the obvious question: Is there something about Islam?

McCarthy does not provide an answer--which is just as well, since the world is still not yet ready for the question, never mind the answer. Instead, we are subjected either to excuses or pat answers that do not begin to look beneath the surface. It was only recently that Bush reformulated the goal of the war, finally identifying Islamists as the enemy as opposed to just terrorism.

In his book, The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror, Bernard Lewis writes that

most present-day terrorists are Muslims and proudly identify themselves as such...Usama bin Ladin and his Al-Qa'ida followers may not represent Islam, and many of their statements and their actions directly contradict basic Islamic principles and teachings, but they do arise from within Muslim civilization, just as Hitler and the Nazis arose from within Christendom, and they too must be seen in their own cultural, religious, and historical context. (p. 137-8)

We have a long way to go.

see Dealing With The Islamist Threat

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