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Fitzgerald: Islam compatible with democracy?

Apr 24, 2006 5:27 pm By Hugh Fitzgerald

Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald discusses the dhimmi Dutch report asserting the compatibility of traditional Islam with Western notions of democracy:

The Dutch Scientific Council for Government Policy recently recommended that “instead of exporting democracy to Muslim countries, democratic attempts harmonious with their own traditions and cultures must be supported.”

Yet the traditional laws of Islam flatly contradict every single principle of individual rights enshrined in the American Constitution and in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. That is why the Muslim nations of the world ultimately came up with their own, very different, version of that Universal Declaration — the “Cairo Declaration of Human Rights.” Put the documents side by side. The “universal” one, and then the “Islamic” one. You can track precisely the changes made from one to the other. And then you can study, in the texts of Islam, the reasons for those changes. Every single course given on Islam, or on comparative law, should have this as one of its required exercises for students.

Above all, the Cairo Declaration asserts that Sharia is the ultimate arbiter of human rights. If you don’t know what consequences that assertion has for women and non-Muslims, as well as for apostates from Islam, you haven’t been paying attention.

The most complete study of how Islam is incompatible with human rights, as these are understood today in the Western world (and which took two millennia, and more, to achieve), can be found in a book by an Iranian professor in exile, Reza Afshari. His tone is mild. His evidence is massive. His conclusions are irrefutable.

As for the statement from the Dutch Scientific Council for Government Policy, notice that there appear to be only two alternatives: either we, the Western world, continue “exporting democracy to Muslim countries” OR we try to encourage “democratic attempts” (what is a “democratic attempt,” exactly?) “harmonious” with “their own traditions and cultures.” And of course we will be treated to all manner of assurances that Islam is fully compatible with Western principles of human rights — despite all the evidence marshaled by Professor Afshari, and despite the clear evidence of the systematic rewriting and gutting by Muslim legal experts of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and what that tells us about the Muslim view of such things. We will continue to be assured, always in the abstract of course, never in any deigning to dwell on detail, that Islam is “compatible” with “democracy.” See Amartya Sen, now doing his Nobel-Prize-winner-who-becomes-an-expert-on-everything imitation (it didn’t work for Linus Pauling or George Wald, and it won’t work for Amartya Sen). See Bernard Lewis in one of his overenthusiastic moments, back in the fall of 2003.

Let’s agree: Islam can be “compatible” with head-counting, but only, in the end, temporarily, and only by those Muslims who have the most heads to count. That is why the Shi’a in Iraq supported that purple-thumbed Experiment in International Misunderstanding, but not the Sunnis. The Shi”a did not support it out of principle. The Shi’a Arabs constitute 60-65% of the population; naturally they were all for this kind of “democracy.” The Sunni Arabs constitute 19%; they, therefore, were against this kind of “democracy.”

And let us further agree that “imposing democracy on Muslim countries” is impossible. But there is another way, a way that the Dutch authors of this report failed even to consider.

And that way is this: leave the Muslim countries to their own devices. Buy what oil you must, but limit all other contacts. No Jizyah of foreign aid. Let the rich Muslims help the poor Muslims, and leave the Infidels (who are getting poorer by the minute, what with the rise in oil prices, and the huge costs associated with monitoring, and then sometimes prosecuting, or jailing members of, the Muslim populations within their own, Infidel lands) out of the equation.

Let them, in other words, with the Infidels removed, be forced — as Ataturk was forced by circumstances — to consider carefully the belief-system of Islam, the inshallah-fatalism of Islam, the habit of mental submission of Islam, the limits on artistic expression and scientific inquiry of Islam, the morally unacceptable treatment of women and non-Muslims in Islam — let them, over many decades, start to wonder about whether or not, just maybe, it is elements of Islam itself that explain their political, economic, social, intellectual, and moral failures.

And in the Infidel lands of the advanced West? Study your own histories. Return to those thrilling days of Spinoza and then Hume. Go back in time, or forwards. Be a bit more grateful, and a bit less interested in the doings of starlets and rock stars — less interested, even properly contemptuous.

That will be good, all way round.

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