"Democracy", and Islam, are utterly incompatible.

What about Turkey?

Well, "Allah," you see, Kemal Ataturk established secular Turkey in an atmosphere of war with Islam. You can get the details in my book "Islam Unveiled" (pardon the self-promotion.) This is why Osama referred in a post-9/11 videotape to "infidels like the Turks." Turkish democracy has only survived since then through military force against the radical Muslims, combined with an ever-increasing list of concessions to them.

Cordially
Robert Spencer

In any Muslim country or country with a large Muslim population, where there is relative sanity, such as Turkey, Malaysia, or Singapore, the reason for that sanity is that all of the religious clerics are state employees and must teach the Islamic doctrines that the state wants. However, the nature of the Islamic doctrines that the state wants to promote is obviously the key issue. In Saudi Arabia, for instance, although again the clerics are all state employees, what people are taught is completely different from more secularized countries such as the above-mentioned. Because Western countries could never, now, because of the separation of church and state, take control of Muslim religious education so as to ensure only a moderate form of Islam is taught, we are faced with a situation where the type of Islam that is taught is often dependent on funding from the most fanatical Muslim countries such as Iran and Saudi Arabia. In this, Western countries are at a major disadvantage compared to more autocratic countries such as Turkey, Malaysia and Singapore.

bush -- whether he knows it or not -- is putting the islamic world in a position where they must undergo an enlightenment in order to stop the war they started. america will not back down. america is not going away. this is why kerry will likely not defeat bush in november. kerry's only hope it would seem is to embrace the war on terror and cause enough americans to feel that he indeed could more effectively wage the war. of course, this would alienate all of his newfound foreign leader friends.

by the way, if al qaeda attempts a terror attack in the u.s. to sway the elections much in the same manner as what happened in spain, has anyone grappled with what outcome al qaeda would favor? doesn't the obvious answer keep anyone awake at night?

Mr. Spencer,

It seems blatantly obvious that Bush is following the politically-correct path when speaking about the war on terrorism and terrorists that have "hijacked" Islam, and that Islam is a religion of peace...

I'm no expert but over the past couple of years I've been reading everything I can to get up to speed and there is nothing I've found that corresponds with the Bush Administration's public position on Islam.

Do you know if they really believe what they are saying? Do you have an inside track to what the Administration "really" thinks?

I want to believe that they are not fooled by the duplicity but the skeptic in me worries that they have been fooled.

Dear Skeptic,

I have no connections with the Administration whatsoever. I was scheduled to speak to a gathering of military and intelligence officials last week, but the meeting was canceled. That's the closest I've ever gotten. I have no indication that the President doesn't believe what he says.

Best
RS

Skeptic asks a very good question. Are those in Washington as ignorant of the facts about Islam and Muslim intentions as they seem, or are they appearing to be p.c. for "other" reasons? I would like to know as well.

Will installing democracy in the M.E. really moderate Islam? Will our efforts calm the "savage breast" and cause Muslims to see us as human beings, not dhimnis and Infidels? Will Islam withdraw and cease to come after us just because we are, or because they are thwarted, or if we teach them how democracy will help them to achieve "freedom" and learn about its "benefits." I'm beginning to think not.

We are fighting now for us, not for them, self-serving as that may seem. I am sure that Washington must see the big picture, hoping that erecting a wall of democracy might help put off an inevitable horrific clash or the degredation of our society into dhimmitude.

David Warren, whom I like very much, nonetheless is an uncritical admirer, I'm afraid, of Bernard Lewis. Lewis, in turn, who was once an enthusiastic supporter of the Oslo Accords, appears to have been one of those pushing for the Light-Unto-the-Muslim-Nations Project (a title I shall recycle soon). He has consistently understated the full scope of the host of legal, social, political, financial, economic, and other disabilites placed on dhimmis (and has never promoted, in the slightest, the important and original work of Bat Ye'or); his friendship with Muslim colleagues, friends, and patrons may be part of what inhibits him, but he has increasingly alienated those who, like Ibn Warraq, find his views particularly unacceptable because Lewis knows better, or should (one cannot always tell). In particular, Lewis' friendship with the oil Prince Hassan bin Talal, brother of King Hussein, and his political advertisement (written with James Woolsey) promoting Prince Hassan's candidacy as a new "Hashemite monarch" of Iraq (an idea that could only come from someone who simply did not know modern Iraq, except from books).

J. B. Kelly, who knows the Arabs up close and over many decades, and not because he has been busy arranging symposia to which they will be invited, and never felt the need, as Lewis obviously does in his last books, to address two audiences simultaneously -- non-Muslims, whom he is trying, within limits, to enlighten, and Muslims, whom he is trying, within limits, not to offend. It doesn't work.

The destruction of the Iraqi regime was completely justified. One might even justify sticking around to make sure the disarming of the country was complete, that the major figures around Saddam were killed or captured, and that a start was made on establishing institutions that represent the most decent government Iraq has ever had -- or ever likely to have, because Ambassador Bremer, doing his impersonation of Jack Armstrong All-American Boy, is morally superior, as are every one of the American generals there, to the collection of villains Sadr, al-Sistani), cheats Pachachi) and charmers (the only slightly louche Chalabi) who are part of the passing parade.

It is idiotic to risk American soldiers' lives to "win hearts and minds" -- stony hearts, primitive minds. The fact that most Kurds, and all the Iraqi Christians, for their own good reasons, welcome the American presence, and some among the Muslim Arabs would like us to stay to promote their own wellbeing (just as the most plausible among them, Kanan Makiya, Chalabi, and so on, who wanted Saddam Hussein out, but are not reformers in the Ataturk line, who dare to recognize that Islam, not a "lack of democracy" or "modernity," is the problem) -- and an old crook like Pachachi, of course, wants that
American money flowing in, and flowing in, unstaunched as the blood of the American soldiers for whom he cares not a whit.

Let us leave Iraq not because we have failed, but because the Iraqis have failed. They proved to be just as violent, meretricious, and thoroughly unpleasant, whether it is the frenzied mobs in Falluja, or Sadr's Mahdi Army, or the men and officers trained and equipped by the Americans who leave their posts, or run away, or even turn their weapons on Americans, including the civilians some of them have helped to kidnap and kill.

But as Iraq is left, make sure that a series of measures are taken so that no one will mistake for a defeat. Make sure it is seen as, instead, part of a final realization that the problem is Islam, and so we, in consort with other Infidels whose support we will woo and win, will work to create precisely those conditions which permitted Ataturk to constrain Islam. Instead of prosperity, the opposite. Instead of yielding to Arab demands, no yielding on anything. American marines, when they leave the Sunni Triangle (or even before) should seize control of the southern Sudan -- here popoular opinion must be prepared, by spotlights being focused on the 20 years of Arab Muslim genocide. It might take 5,000 marines, to wipe out the Arabs engaged in massacre. Let it be known that self-determination has finally come to the blacks of the southern Sudan, who have been persecuted and murdered for decades. The oil of the south will belong to them. It will be impossible even for the Euro-Arab Dialoguists to come out on the side of genocide against blacks -- who are, after all, truly impoverished, and unlike the Arabs, represent the real Third World. It will be a measure supported by black AFrican states, particularly those who will see it as representing a way to stop the further Islamic conquest, through money funded to mosques and madrasas, of black Africa. It will, above all, show that the dar al-Islam can, and will be were appropriate, simply thrust back, parts of it cut off and reintegrated into dar al-Harb.

And if this is combined with other measures, such as: 1) raising taxes on gasoline, and explicitly linking such a tax to the need to "deprive the Jihad" of the "money weapon" 2) ending all foreign aid to Egypt, Jordan, and any other Muslim country, if those countries persist in having military forces beyond rifles and jeeps, and if, further, they allow their media to foment anti-Americanism and antisemitism 3) shoot down the satellites that make possible Al-Jazeera and similar propaganda stations. It is absurd to allow them to continue to operate; they are directly responsible for American deaths in Iraq through their lies 4) deny visas to all those in the Arab and Muslim ruling circles, and to all their family members, so that that which they so desire -- to both attack the United States, and harm its citizens, and promote the Jihad, even as their own children receive educations in the United States, or they get medical care, will no longer be possible. The kissing has to stop.

There are many more measures that might be taken, so that when we leave Iraq to become the new Somalia -- and look at Somalia today, it represents no threat at all -- we will make it clear we are leaving not because we have listened to Dominique de Villepin, but because the supposedly "hard-headed" measures we are taking in Iraq are in fact naive, and we have hardly been sufficiently hard-headed at all. Paul Wolfowitz, I'm afraid, is credited with being far more tough than he is; a believer in the "two-state solution" -- the phrase itself shows an utter ignorance of Islamic jurisprudence, and the model of Al-Hudaibiyya -- he is, as Richard Pipes told a Boston Globe interviewer some months ago, a weapons specialist, not someone who understands the importance of culture and ideology on people.

Men, materiel, money, and poltical capital are now mis-allocated to Iraq. Better, having rescued the largely ungrateful and completely untrustworthy Iraqis, from a mass murderer, having shown every effort to build and rebuild, repair and re-repair, the roads, schools, hospitals, oil wells, having been offered, in requital, at best indifference and passivity (yes, Americans, you fix up the country -- and wake us when it's over), at worst the murder, mayhem, and hamza-halted torrents of hysteria and hate, that one can find everywhere in the Arab Muslim world.

Iraq is not a quagmire, but it is a tarbaby. It is not true that "democracy" will self-evidently help constrain Islam. What will constrain Islam is the creation of conditions which will force its own adherents to recognize, in some way, that Islam itself, the source of the hatred of all non-Muslims and hence of the JIhad, with all of its instruments, must be limited as Ataturk attempted, because the texts of Qur'an and hadith cannot be changed, and the doctrine of abrogation, which deals with the contradictions in the texts, always works in favor of the later, much more uncompromisingly malevolent suras.

"Stay the course" -- yes, the course of anti-Jihad, and that requires an exit from Iraq, understanding that divide and conquer remains the first principle of dealing with an enemy. The Marshall Plan model is not of universal application; it fit, in fact, only the conditions of Western Europe in the post-World War II period. It makes no sense while the ideology that is most hostile to us -- Islam -- is now as powerful, or even more powerful, than it was before. Iraq has been disarmed; so has Libya; those are great achievements. Nothing else in that line can be accomplished by remainnig in Iraq. Time to leave, and at every level, with low cunning and high, to thwart or push back the enemy, by reversing the "Euro-Arab Dialogue" mentality in Europe, by exposing the Islamic infiltration in the U.N. (Edward Mortimer, Kofi Annan's Director of Communications, for example, deserves investigation for his islamisant and anti-Israel sympathies), by silencing major Arab satellite channels, depriving Arab states of military hardware, working hard to diminish Saudi oil revenues in every possible way, and as both humanitarian intervention, and a way to push back the dar al-Islam in the most politically palatable manner, securing the southern Sudan for the southern Sudanese, who will then provide, should we need it, a boost to the anti-Islam forcdes in Nigeria, Kenya, and elsewhere in black Africa.

President Bush seems to have had an idea; now the idea has him. He must see that to remain in Iraq now gets in the way of the counter-Jihad; letting Iraq decline, or disintegrate, is from the Infidel point of view, a matter very much to be encouraged. Letting conditions in the Muslim world reach a state where local Ataturks will arise (all the while, through airpower, including missiles, making sure that Bin Laden-style camps will never again be permitted to exist untouched) is the course that, history teaches, is the only way to constrain or limit Islam.

When I see the discouragement that comes from finding that Muslims are not really enlightened western classical liberals with a slightly primitive, bloody minded religion in which they don't really believe, I have to wonder how much historical understanding the discouraged have of our own intellectual and cultural history.

It is easy to see how we got the idea that Islamics could be easily turned: in years past, most of them with whom we had contact with were exchange students or Saudi princes on shopping trips to New York or business meetings in Houston or London. These people were already westernized. Unfortunately they are not yet numerous enough to make much difference to their culture.

A worse source of discouragement, I think, comes from too little appreciation of just how primitive and refractory our own thinking was just a few centuries ago. We look back from the perspective of a culture that instinctively and unconsciously groundtruths our ideas against reality. We were not always thus. Once we had a mentality -alien to us now- in which we KNEW that ideas were true because an authority of some sort said that they were true.

-We burned witches at the stake and believed we were being compassionate to them! This certainly is comparable to the cruelties that are inflicted on the more unfortunate Islamic women. And women were not generally deemed worthy of education right up to a century ago.

-We held auto-de-fe's for apostates, presided over by various national Inquisitions. When faced with theological differences, exterminations like the French St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre decimated protestants who differed with the official church.

-Galileo was just as muzzled as any Saloman Rushdie. And it was effective. Descartes, as one example, made sure to tack to the prevailing breezes in his writings exactly to avoid Galileo's fate.

-The universities of the West were exclusively religious schools - just like the madrassas. In fact, Trinity College at Cambridge, where Isaac Newton was educated and later was a teacher, was about the only institution in Europe that did not slavishly teach the catholic version of Aristotle as the basis of all knowledge. The coffee houses of the enlightenment arose as an alternative venue to the useless universities, just as the internet is becoming a modern alternative to the older media. The universities just kept on teaching the same old medieval aristotelian dogma, oblivious to the revolution going on around them.

-And most importantly, for both those in power and those who supported them, things WERE as they were ordained to be. We didn't change willingly to modernity either. Horrible bloodlettings were necessary before the West's culture could make the transition. I am inclined to believe that nearly all the carnage of the wars, liquidations, tortures and massacres from at least the time of William the Silent up to the fall of Soviet communism can be ultimately explained as the effects of the cultural change from a feudal attitude of accepting various authorities as the final basis of truth -as Islam still does- to the modern attitude of basing truth on experience. The horrors could not have occurred just because the various 'authorities' were willing to kill millions to maintain their authority, but because their convinced hordes of followers, insecure without someone to tell them what to believe, made these exterminations possible.

I find the subversion of an authority based Islam and its change to some sort of modern experience-based Islamic culture not only probable but unavoidable - just as our own Christendom had to change to a culture based on testing beliefs against reality. It isn't a matter of culture but a matter of reality. One way works, the other doesn't. What is discouraging is the incredible amount of human agony that was involved in our change. If Bush's campaign in Iraq can short circuit this agony for Islam, history, ironically, may someday see him as a greater benefactor for the Muslim world than any of their other leaders could ever be.

Doug Collins - Muslim change would be good, and we all hope that it will happen. The fast-paced modern world with weapons that could eliminate thousands or even hundreds of thousands doesn't give us the option of waiting for the gradual changes that happened to Christianity over thousands of years. The change has to come about NOW before the insanity of mass murder of Biblical proportion begins.

There seems to be no will on the part of Islam to make the change. It will indeed be a miracle if Bush can, as you say, short circuit the inexorable march toward destruction that most hope to avoid. The truth is that some on both sides long for the destruction as a fulfillment of prophecy and for political advantage. They are indeed MAD.

Muslims want just one thing and one thing only world domination and their islamic state. Bush though a great president does not realize this like all christians, he holds out hope for the iraqui people. He is naive to think that the muslims will let this happen in iraq, it will not, it will probably become like iran and fall to the muslim islamic creed of hat and killing. President Bush will soon have to realize that it is the muslim we are fighting not simply a wish for democracy in the middle east.

Historically, Europe and North America, industrialised capitalism has crushed and restructured organised religion to meet it's needs.

And that is what Karl Marx was referring to when he talked about the destruction of religion. Not so much the rise of communist thinking, but capitalism need to destroy religious ideals and social relations for the advancement of capitalism.

The seperation of church and state in America is a classic example of that historical trend at work. A revolutionary break through for the escalation of capitalism and the standing down of religion in civic affairs.

Alas, even Allah cannot make time stand still in the mid-east. These same historical trends will play them selves out. Industrialised capitalism will crush, destroy and rework Islam to make it subserviant to it's self.

" An Americanized Islam" as some fanatics call what is happening in the region. Call it what you will. Remember the Pope once ordered the burning of Englands Parliament. Muslim institutions find themselves in a similar position as the Vatican did during the accent of capitalism in Europe.

Today it is understood to be Globalization. And that economic reality will impose it's self on the Islamic world sweeping aside all resistace, either idealogical or institutional.

As for the Muslims flocking to the West, they will find themselves becoming more Western than the West is becoming Islamic. From the recent conflict in Iraq, not to mention Afghanistan, one has to admit the Muslims left behind in the holy lands are degenerating into vile pathetic loathsome shadows of what once was a dominant culture over a thousand years ago.

Todays Islamic culture is precisely what millions are running from not flocking to. The Islanmic world will either Westernise or die. Die underneath the weight of it's own barbarism, backwardness and fanaticism.

Wesley

to wesley: i beg to differ on your interpretation of america's separation of church and state as being some inevitable trend that occurs from capitalism subjugating religion. rather, america's separation of church and state arises out of the historical memory of religious persecution that so many early colonialists in new england had experienced in europe from the state churches. it is indeed the seeking of resolution to our culture wars that is driving the razing of the church/state wall in america now -- i.e. issues such as gay marriage and abortion -- and one only needs to read the Bible to find a blueprint of how this trend will continue to gain momentum.