The Real Issue

James Q. Wilson writes about The Reform Islam Needs and asks, "The West reconciled religion and freedom. Can Muslims do the same?"

We are engaged in a struggle to defeat terrorism. I have no advice on how to win that struggle, but I have some thoughts as to why it exists. It is not, I think, because Islam is at war with the West or because Palestinians are trying to displace Israelis. The struggle exists, I think, because the West has mastered the problem of reconciling religion and freedom, while several Middle Eastern nations have not. The story of that mastery and that failure occupies several centuries of human history, in which one dominant culture, the world of Islam, was displaced by a new culture, that of the West.

This is a point I've tried to make several times, though not nearly as well as here. I tend to simply say, "They must don't like us." I don't believe there is anything the west could do to prevent Osama, Arafat, and other Islamists to "like" us, or even leave us alone in the long run. Listen to what they preach. It's not all just anti-American or anti-Israeli rhetoric, though that's all their apologists want to hear; makes things easier for them.

This "religion of peace" -- nearly implying that other religions aren't -- has its teachers saying that it's all right to rob, steal, kill, etc., from "non-believers." It rejects out of hand the entire notion of equal rights for women, as Maureen Dowd recently found out first hand.

I find it amazing that the very people who recoil in horror from Christian fundamentalists, who want them shut up and shut away, are perfectly happy listening to the rantings, mutterings, proclamations, and sheer hate speech of Islamic fundamentalists. And in my book, the Islamists make those Christian overachievers look positively liberal.