The ever-perspicacious Andy McCarthy at The Corner:
We've been told for some time now — against common sense and the weight of our own national experience — that the way to defeat international jihadism is to spread democracy.So now the Lebanese democracy can't control Hezbollah (which has been freely elected and controls about a fifth of its legislature), while the Palestinian Authority IS Hamas (the Palestinian people having democratically put them in power).
How much do we figure that Israel is hoping democracy breaks out in Egypt, with the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamic Jihad waiting in the wings? All it needs right about now is yet another democratic neighbor.
Democracy has many enduring benefits, but it doesn't stop terrorists from operating — and in many ways, it makes life easier for them. When are we going to stop talking about it as a national security cure-all?
We have to kill al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas and the rest. This is harder work than the administration's rhetoric is preparing the nation for. We are not going to democratize these savages into submission.
Natan Sharansky's theory only holds good for Infidels. It's irrelevant to Muslims.
Ali Sina analyzed this on his site. I can't link to it at the moment from work, since that's blocked as a 'Hate site'. I can't complain, since free access to any sites isn't a right at the workplace.
There is a darker side to the Democracy effort.
If Democracy fails, it makes it somewhat more ethical to proceed with Plan B.
Democracy Is On the March has received much mocking attention here, over such a long time, and in so many articles and posts. Nonetheless, the posting here of what has now been written elsewhere in the same vein, a posting in coals-to-Newcastleish fashion, is in this particular case a fashion that hasn't gone out of style.
Democracy alone is not the answer to anything. Democracy needs supporting structures such as individualism, rule of law and separation of church and state to succeed. All of the latter are missing in the islamic world in general.
Democracy in the islamic world will only make room for shari'a. Alone, it will not solve the problems in islamic world even if it is successfully implemented.
Democracy will work even in the Dar-al-Islam, if the people accept the other three principles. So far, there is no reason to expect that will happen in the near future. Democracy in islamic world only means counting the votes. It will not make the muslim countries better places to live or more friendly towards the West.
But, I guess, this is something that you already know.
People are confusing democracy with pluralism. The two are not the same. Pluralism over the long haul WILL stop terrorism/jihad because it will dilute the committment people have towards Islam, thinking that it is true.
What should have been don in Iraq is to impose pluralism, secular schools, protection for religious minorities, NO religious political parties, etc.
Democracy could help reform Islamic societies--if true democracy existed there. But what Bush and even some folks here at JW fail to understand, is that there is a vast difference between "democracy" and simple majority rule via free elections.
Look at our own Constitution. If you removed the entire Bill of Rights, the Constitution would still include provisions for elections (those are covered in a different part of the Constitution). But we wouldn't be the democracy we are, without the Bill of Rights.
A true democracy has more than majority rule by election. In a democracy, all minorities have rights, including the smallest minority of all--the individual, who retains the rights to freedom of expression and freedom of conscience. And in a democracy, there is adherence to the rule of law. Even an overwhelming majority of the people can't get things done without due process.
What that boils down to, is that there can be no such thing as "sharia democracy." If Muslims want to live in anything resembling a liberal democratic state, then the Islamic law of sharia must be significantly constrained or modified, if not altogether done away with.
It wouldn't matter if 90% of the Afghan people voted in a free and fair plebiscite to have apostates put to death. That's still not democracy.
As a non-American I can't help wondering how America's political class forgot what was in the Federalist Papers. Time to read them again, perhaps. The writers were much exercised by the thought of what damage majorities might do in a democracy and how the infant US could guard against that.
Here's Federalist X:
"Such democracies" means democracies in the literal Greek sense. But majority opinion can be dangerous whether exercised directly or through representatives. That's something that seems never to have entered some people's heads.
I wonder if the problem may be partly that in our modern secular world people have a tendency to look at political institutions - such as the ballot - in a quasi-religious manner: vox populi, vox Dei. If so, now there's a paradox.
Representation is important in the West. But, as someone remarked above, it is only part of a larger picture, and the whole political culture is not easily transplanted.
American_Palamite writes: "What should have been done in Iraq is to impose pluralism, secular schools, protection for religious minorities, NO religious political parties, etc."
Care to guess how many U.S. troops it would have taken, and how much blood would have to be shed, to ram pluralism and secularism down the throats of the Shi'a? One million troops? Three million troops? And how many hundreds of thousands of Iraqis would we have had to kill?
Here's a benchmark for you: To suppress a Shi'a uprising, Saddam gassed 200,000 of them with nerve gas.
The spread of democracy, the empowerment of ordinary muslims over and against their mullahs, their imans, their tribal leaders, IS PART of the solution.
BUT CONCURRENTLY WITH THAT DEMOCRATIZATION, there has to be the widespread obliteration of many, many jihadists.
I'm coming to the belief that the very SYMBOLS of islam must be treated with the EXACT SAME DETESTATION as the NAZI regalia of decades ago. The crescent moon must be seen to be as hateful as the swastika.
When Sherman went romping through the deep south, he was making war against the very wellsprings of Southern society.
WE NEED TO FIND THE EXACT same wellsprings in islam, and likewise, unleash a Sherman, a Patton, to romp his way through them, and in his wake, leave a completely altered and changed islam.
After we leave VAST areas of arab islam a desolation and a wasteland, we should seize certain areas to begin the democratization project. NOT ALL AREAS MIND YOU, but some.
Our war effort has to aspire to more than just a series of random punitive expeditions. To be sure, punitive operations have their place, but they can't be the be all and end all.
Moreover, both you and Fitzgerald don't seem to see, or at least acknowledge the importance to the West of annihilating the guerrilla mystique. The WEST MUST prevail in one of these modern guerrilla wars. Otherwise, we'll be seeing them burgeoning out all over.
Iraq is as good a place as any, in many ways, BETTER THAN MOST.
Yojimbo writes: "I wonder if the problem may be partly that in our modern secular world people have a tendency to look at political institutions - such as the ballot - in a quasi-religious manner"
No, it's just that developed Western societies have been internally peaceful for so long that they have largely forgotten about settling domestic political disputes with violence rather than the ballot box.
The U.S. Civil War ended in 1865. Except for a brief period of political rioting in 1965-1968, politics in the U.S. has been peaceful and free of political violence. We have never been seriously threatened by a military coup or political revolution.
The only civil wars we ever hear about today, where politics is handled by coups and revolutions and civil wars, is in the Third World.
"both you and Fitzgerald don't seem to see, or at least acknowledge the importance to the West of annihilating the guerrilla mystique. The WEST MUST prevail in one of these modern guerrilla wars. Otherwise, we'll be seeing them burgeoning out all over.
Iraq is as good a place as any, in many ways, BETTER THAN MOST."
-- from a posting above
It is you who refuse to see that the American forces are hardly being let loose in Iraq. They are hemmed in by all sorts of considerations, not least the desire not to offend the locals -- it's called "winning hearts and minds." It can't be done, but here and there, a smiling and plausible local leader or a former Iraqi captain, now willing to accept American training and military equipment, in order to fight for "Iraq" (but how many such people are there, and when the Americans leave, will they continue to fight for "Iraq" or will they slowly or quickly divide into those who will fight for "Kurdistan" and those who will fight for the rights of the "Sunnis" and those who will fight for "the rights of the Shi'a"? What do you think?
Furthermore, Iraq is not "Better than most" places to present Muslims with an exemplary defeat because that could have been done when Iraq was invaded, but every opportunity was taken for surgical strikes, for distinguishing that "regime" from the so-called "Iraqi people" whose support we desired.
In Iraq, the whole situation is for the Americans almost too confusing. They know they wish to defeat the so-called Al-Qaeda forces, that is those who are Sunnis who come from Saudi Arabia and Egypt and Yemen and Jordan and Syria, and who wish to fight both Infidels and the Shi'a in order to keep Iraq pure for Islam, and for Sunni Islam. But then there are all those local Sunnis, and local Shi'a, who are involved in a struggle for political and economic power, for the Shi'a want to have the power their numbers have earned them, and the Sunnis do not wish to relinquish it, becasue to them it would not be right, it would not be just. Only the Kurds have no desire to kill Americans -- unless they are the kind of Kurds whose Islam outweighs their Kurdishness.
You write that Iraq is "Better than Most" places to demonstrate how Muslims can be crushed militarily. You are wrong. Iraq is the best place, not merely "better than most," to demonstrate something else: that the ethnic and sectarian divisions within the camp of Islam, presented to us on a platter in Iraq, should be exploited to the fullest, and other such divisions within the Camp of Islam, focussing above all on the resentment of non-Arab Muslims at the Arab supremacist doctrine of which Islam is the vehicle. That would be a way to dampen the appeal, to weaken the unity, of Islam.
The American army is not "crushing" anyone. It is deliberately being overly scrupulous in the application of force. It knows it is being watched by everyone: by opponents of the war in the United States, by the local Arabs, eager to find fault, by cameramen from Al-Jazeera. The rules of engagement that the American soldiers are forced to live (and die) by would horrify soldiers in any previous war. Iraq is not the place to defeat Islam -- Islam is back, stronger than ever, because the Americans defeated Saddam Hussein. Iraq is the place to let the divisions within Islam work their magic, do their stuff.
Quote:
We have to kill al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas and the rest. This is harder work than the administration's rhetoric is preparing the nation for. We are not going to democratize these savages into submission.
Here Here!
Couldn't have put it better myself.
I've been waiting for an opportunity to post a fatwa from Pelayo's Super Fantastic Fatwa Folder.
Question: What is the islamic understanding about democracy, Is there any place for it in islam.?
Answer 15522
The common form of democracy prevalent at the moment is representative democracy, in which the citizens do not exercise their right of legislating and issuing political decrees in person, but rather through representatives chosen by them. The constitution of a democratic country will be largely influenced by the needs and wants of its people. Thus, if its people want casinos, bars, gay marriages, prostitution, etc. then with sufficient public pressure, all these vices can be accommodated for. From this, it becomes simple to understand that there can never be scope for a democratic rule from the Islamic point of view.
and Allah Ta'ala Knows Best
Mufti Ebrahim Desai
I don't know how much influence the Imam Desai has with the rest of Mohammedan world but it explains a lot.
I forgot to include the source - AskImam.com
There
WE NEED TO FIND THE EXACT same wellsprings in islam, and likewise, unleash a Sherman, a Patton, to romp his way through them, and in his wake, leave a completely altered and changed islam.
We could start with that cave where the 12th inman is hiding. No civilian damage, and a major "wellspring" eliminated.
Re: How's That Democracy Project Going?
To Sharia law. A Palestinian-Arab journalist once said "Arab democracy is like a medicine which if taken all in one dose kills the patient and embarrasses the doctor."-quoted Page 4, Inside the Arab Word, Michael Field.
Hitler managed to galvanize and mobilize a "Volkocracy", which is the only kind of "Democracy" Muslims are capable of. An Islamic "Democracy" is the most virulent expression of Jihad, not its dilution. The Islamic "Volk" and "Demos" is the Ummah. Do we want the Ummah to have more cohesion, more power, or less?
Democracy has failed in palestine and in lebanon and will fail in iraq.
A people have to wish to be free before than can be free.
Free people and democracy will never be compatable with islam.
You may find the following from a posting on an Israeli newspaper very interesting:
Can a good Muslim be a good American?
I forwarded that question to a friend that worked in Saudi Arabia for 20 years.
The following is his forwarded reply:
Theologically - no. Because his allegiance is to Allah, the moon God of Arabia.
Religiously - no. Because no other religion is accepted by his Allah except Islam (Quran, 2:256)
Scripturally - no. Because his allegiance is to the five pillars of Islam and the Quran (Koran).
Geographically - no. Because his allegiance is to Mecca, to which he turns in prayer five times a day.
Socially - no. Because his allegiance to Islam forbids him to make friends with Christians or Jews.
Politically - no. Because he must submit to the mullah (spiritual leaders), who teach annihilation of Israel and Destruction of America, the great Satan.
Domestically - no. Because he is instructed to marry four women and beat and scourge his wife when she disobeys him (Quran 4:34).
Intellectually - no. Because he cannot accept the American Constitution since it is based on Biblical principles and he believes the Bible to be corrupt.
Philosophically - no. Because Islam, Muhammad, and the Quran do not allow freedom of religion and expression. Democracy and Islam cannot co-exist. Every Muslim government is either dictatorial or autocratic.
Spiritually - no. Because when we declare "one nation under God," the Christian`s God is loving and kind, while Allah is NEVER referred to as
heavenly father, nor is he ever called love in The Quran`s 99 excellent names.
Therefore after much study and deliberation....perhaps we should be very
suspicious of ALL MUSLIMS in this country. They obviously cannot be both "good" Muslims and good Americans. Call it what you wish....it`s still the truth.
It will be total war between islam and all of the other religious believers, athesits, agnostics ------- all infidels unitl only one survives.
God gives us the strenght and abilities to win this war.
The war with islam is underway in the middle east.
Prepare now before it is to late.
Be armed to defend and protect your family, beliefs and country.
Be ready for it will be hitting America and the only notice that we will have are the mushroom clouds by the nukes planted by islam in America.
The Texican.
Freedom, the only choice at any cost and the cost will be immense.
Please refer to my posting above, without a wide-spread movement within the Islamic clerical hierarchy, there will be no democracy as we know it in a predominately Muslim country. Perhaps Turkey is as close as it gets, and Turkey's semi-secular government is hanging by a thread, that could break at any moment and send it into the abyss of Islamism.
How did Dubya come to be influenced by Natan Sharansky?
Proof that Dubya is a doofus (actually he doesn't read, as he has ADD and reading comprehension problems)..is that he would pay attention to a doofus like Natan Sharansky.
America should be embarassed that they have elected a man like Dubya, and every conservative and right winger should be hiding in a hole from embarassment.
I'm a Goldwater Conservative..but that makes me (in light of the proclivities of todays crop of morons who call themselves conservative) a leftist. Sadly considering who and what calls themselves conservative today, it makes me ashamed to even mention it out loud (thank god for internet anonymity).
Moronic right wingers, moronic left wingers and for my descendants a fascistic world.
The U.S. has only to leave iraq for it to blossom as another perfect islamic paradise like somalia. muslims do not understand democracy. And in any case, sharia being the law, there is no democracy anywhere in any islamic state. One only has to travel to muslim democracies to find that out, if one is fortunate enough to make it back alive. Most find it out when there is a knife at their throat, realize that all that crap about 'small minority' was just that.
The following is an old (March 2000, LA Times), somewhat outdated article on Islam and Democracy, written by (surprize, surprize) a Pakistani muslim. He talks about fundamentalist Islam, but his observations are true with all Islam.
___
Can Fundamentalist Islam and Democracy Coexist in a Country?
No: Nothing could have been more irrelevant to Muhammad than consent of the governed.
http://www.latimes.com/news/comment/20000320/t000026559.html
By AUSAF ALI
It has been well said that those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it. I offer Pakistan as a case in point. In its 52 years of history, Pakistan--created on Aug. 14, 1947, out of British India, which became independent a day later--has been placed under military rule after the overthrow of the civilian government by the Pakistani army in 1958, 1977 and 1999. Even during civilian rule, the army has called the shots from behind the elected leaders of Pakistan. While India is the most populous democracy in the world, Pakistan has miserably failed at any kind of democracy, including Islamic. It is clear that along with democracy, all the Islamization programs have failed. Islam and the Sharia, or Islamic law, simply do not have the conceptual resources, flexibility and dynamism to suffice for the governance of a modern state and operation of a rational economy and an expanding civil society.
By now, Pakistanis have developed a sad conviction that democracy as we know it is just not a workable form of government for their country, because Pakistanis do not have the social psychology, the political culture, the social ethics or the common decency for making democracy work.
The difference in the fortunes of democracy in India and Pakistan is that the world view of Indians is derived from Hinduism and that of Pakistanis from Islam. Ideologically, Hinduism is quite compatible with secularism, democracy and democratic values. Islam is hostile toward all three. As the founder and chief executive of the first Islamic polity at Medina in what is today Saudi Arabia, Muhammad ruled in accordance with the will of Allah as revealed to him and translated into his own will. Nothing could have been more irrelevant to his rule than the consent of the governed. There was no room for "we the people" or for legislation by elected representatives of the people because the whole body of laws as laid down in the Sharia was valid and binding for all times. That is the reason why parliaments in Muslim countries even today are rubber-stamp bodies. Neither citizens' right to criticize nor to dissent from their rulers are recognized. Islam admonishes Muslims to obey Allah, his prophet and those in power, as it admonishes women to obey men, because "men are a degree above them."
Islam puts women, minorities and nonconformists at a disadvantage. Muslims do not recognize the idea of diversity in their own countries, though they take the fullest advantage of it in the West. To be sure, a woman rose to the position of the prime minister in Pakistan, but this was resented by fundamentalist Muslim men, because Muhammad prophesied that any nation or organization with a woman as its leader is headed for disaster. Non-Muslims, heretics, apostates and homosexuals are regarded as fit for persecution.
Given the attitudes Islam imparts to Muslims, it is apparent why democracy failed in Pakistan: because fundamentalist Islam and democracy are not compatible. Once this is realized, an honest search for a suitable form of political system, even if less satisfactory than democracy, can begin. As a Pakistani, I find it sad that a people who can master the rules of cricket should have failed so miserably at learning the rules of democracy, which are far simpler. So long as Pakistanis insist on applying the uncompromising demands of fundamentalist Islam, democracy has no chance in Pakistan. Sadly, democracy seems to be doomed in the foreseeable future in the whole world of Islam.
- - -
Ausaf Ali, a Former Professor at the Graduate School of Business
Administration of the University of Karachi, Is the Author of "Broader
Dimensions of the Ideology of Pakistan" (Royal Book Co., Karachi, 1988)
I didn't say it was the only reason. I said "partly" and, furthermore, I said that "I wondered". You, however, are sure that you have the sole and only reason - an obvious enough one anyway - and can put me right, although you don't actually address what I said and don't give any reasons at all for thinking that, to the contrary, no-one looks at the ballot in a quasi-religious manner and not analytically. Perhaps you have never encountered that. Fine. Your experience (or perhaps your capacity for listening to other people and analysing what they say) is obviously sufficiently limited for your not to have noticed that. From what I hear many people say I'd say that many people do look at universal suffrage in that way.
I'm always amazed how many Western politicians and pundits seem ignorant about the basics of Democracy. You hear people like Bush and Blair talk about the "democratic" elections in the Palestinian territories, and people like Jimmy Carter putting his stamp of approval on the election's "fairness". (I'm not dumping on Bush here--this seems to be a bi-partisan problem.)
The fact is that elections without back-up of a proper constitution and rule of law guaranteeing minority safeguards (gender equality, separation of Church and State, property rights, rights of the individual, etc) is nothing but a more orderly form of *mob rule*.
I would *love* to see more genuine Democracy in the Middle East, but elections are just one small part of this.
Democratic elections are the key to our fifty-year strategy. Some societies are ready for them (Kurdistan) while others may not be (Iran).
If true democracy takes hold and these societies become productive members of the world, more power to them.
If true democracy fails or if it takes hold and results in a militant nation, it makes it ethically easier for me (and more importantly the American electorate) to violently execute the tasks that would be necessary to eliminate those who stand in the way of a responsible society, regardless of their numbers.
One more thought (after two beers):
There are several ways to defeat one's enemy. Israel is rightously doing it tonight with firepower, Europe is slowly reacting with immigration reform.
I see Islam's greatest strength as the conservative, nationalistic beliefs of the young masses. These sentiments were largely lost in the West in the late 20th Century. I don't see why we can't target them now in the middle east.
I was part of a delegation sent to meet with the Saudi princes and, when the doors were closed, out came the Jack Daniels. We all know Arabs like blondes.
We've got the tools: Brittany Spears, MTV, Budweiser, Trojans, democracy. What about a culture war spread by the internet and strategically located transmitters? Young Arab men might aspire to a blonde bombshell instead of one filled with C-4. They would also have the power of their vote.