Ilana Mercer has an excellent column in WND, with thanks to The One Who Must Not Be Named.
Those who talk up the root causes of Muslim disaffection are cultural relativists with a difference. For example, they’ll be the first to point to how ignorant we are of the centrality of honor in Arab culture. And they’d be right. “It is better to die with honor than live with humiliation,” goes an Arab saying. To Muslims, there’s no pride in being democratized by the West–only humiliation and shame. Conveniently, however, these Rousseauists ignore the less flattering aspects of a culture and a religion that has yet to undergo an Enlightenment.
Individualism is, at best, negligible. The ummah — the community of believers or the “Nation of Islam” — is pre-eminent. Infinitely less eminent is the infidel, whose inherent inferiority, codified in elaborate dhimmi jurisprudence, makes him fair game. Responsibility is always externalized. Muslim savagery toward innocents has been felt from Beslan to Bali, from Kashmir to Casablanca. Yet, they’ll invariably shift the blame (successfully, I might add) to Israel, America, Russia and other “occupations.”
Helping to make the “Islamikazes'” case are countless liberals and libertarians, as well as elements on the American right. They lay the blame for the killers’ latest actions exclusively on American and British foreign policy: foreign forays begat the suicide bomber; case closed.
Our adventurous foreign policy might be a necessary condition for Muslim aggression but it is far from a sufficient one. Muslims today are at the center of practically every conflict in the world. They were slaughtering innocent, pacifist Jews in Israel well before the Jewish state was a figment in the fertile mind of Theodor Herzl (and well before the “occupation” of 1967: in 627, Muhammad decapitated 900 Medina Jews. The women were only raped). Governments, abetted by the Fourth Estate (and a fifth column), have framed strife in Sudan, East Timor, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Nigeria, Indonesia, Pakistan, Kashmir, the Philippines, Lebanon, Egypt, Israel, the Balkans and Russia as sectarian or regional. The struggle in these spots, however, has more to do with the overriding refusal of the one faction to abide the others (unless they’ve been conquered or preferably killed)…
Please read it all.