Moslems in Europe, Turkey in EU, Iraqi democratization: one paradigm

Some thoughts about the current crisis from an American reader living in Europe:

Blair is offering more of the same non-response to Islamic aggression as the intellectuals peddling the idea of moderate Moslems and the notion that spreading freedom and democracy to Islamic lands can restructure the psychological/intellectual matrix of Moslem mentality.

What he is asking the British people to do is cope with a warrior class incubating more of the same in British communities throughout the United Kingdom.

While Moslems grow ever stronger he hopes that a long-term policy of flattering them will one day, long from now, see the emergence of a Westernized Islam that is compatible with Western ideals.

Even assuming it is possible, which any study of Islamic expansion plainly shows it is not, the leaders of Britain are asking British citizen to accept the prospects of living in perpetual danger ad infinitum for no other reason than to nurture a sworn enemy in the hopes that he will change his nature.

It is doomed to failure.

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Isn’t the EU doing with membership promises to Turkey what we are aspiring to achieve in Iraq? Trying to transform a Moslem society into a faux Western style society?

Didn’t Ataturk’s reforms, after a century, only place a veneer of civilization onto an otherwise Islamic storm always brewing just beneath the surface, and illustrated by the “democratic and Western leaning” Moslem population electing an Islamist prime minister?

Turkey with internal reforms forced by what we could loosely call an “enlightened Moslem leader” from within Turkish society itself, only succeeded in suppressing the jihadist manifestations for a under century.

How can we expect to transform Iraq before America loses the will to continue pushing for this dream that Turkey shows is temporary and so-so at best?

Now the comparison: If the EU’s dream is a democratic, Western-style Turkey, a nation which is joined and living in harmony with the European Union based on superficial reforms, and which could be demolished in a Iranian-style revolution at any time once their population is welcomed into continental Europe, how different is that from the neocon dream of democratizing the Middle East by spreading democracy and freedom by force and compassion?

In both examples Islamic ideology is the misunderstood nature of the beast; it is the Other that is being ignored in every modern analysis of the Islamic menace. Short-term reforms for appearance’s sake are viewed by the West as potentially absolute and lasting.

But to Moslems, the underlying nature of Islam (again the West ignores the nature of Islam) permeates the culture as a default setting. A current that Moslems are immersed in from cradle to grave, which carries them towards increasing world domination, is capable of being released at any time.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 13, 2005 09:05 AM | Send