Must America’s Islam policy inspire Muslims?

A correspondent who supports President Bush’s democratization policy wrote:

And what positive suggestions do you have for a strategy that would inspire our potential allies in the Muslim world?

Here’s my reply:

If you had read my article “The Search for Moderate Islam” at FrontPage Magazine last January, especially the second half of part two where I lay out my own strategy, you would understand that my concern is not to inspire Muslims with the thought that they can reform themselves, but to inspire Westerners with the thought that we are not helpless before the Islamic threat, that we have a valid and great civilization, and that we can defend and preserve it by recognizing that Islam is our eternal adversary and eschewing ideological fantasies about a “moderate” Islam. The Europeans for a thousand years survived jihad invasions because they understood that Islam was their eternal adversary. Modern liberal Westerners lost that understanding, and so have admitted millions of Muslims into the West, and now, under Bush, have gone even further, by making the democratization of the Islamic world the transcendent purpose of U.S. policy .

In that article, I quoted Bat Ye’or:

Bat Ye’or, author of The Decline of Eastern Christianity under Islam and the soon-to-be published Eurabia, has said that our aim as Westerners should not be to save the soul of Islam but to save ourselves, our values, and our civilization

So, if your main test for any policy recommendation in this area is that it must inspire and save Muslims, rather than inspire and save ourselves, then I’m afraid I won’t be able to satisfy you.

But I will say this. If we followed something along the lines of my proposal, the result would be greater peace and less jihadism in the Muslim world, and a chance at a better life. This is because our attempt to intrude into the Muslim lands with our alien and non-Islamic notions can only stir up greater and greater jihadism, from which everyone suffers. But if we followed the idea of containing Muslims within their lands rather than trying to transform their societies, combined with quick and temporary action to topple any terror-supporting regimes, the result would be a quieter Islam which would be better for Muslims and better for the whole world.

So my approach would be to say forthrightly to the Muslim world:

“Because you are Muslims who are commanded by your religion to spread sharia by jihad, you are a danger to us. You will always be a danger to us. You cannot help but be a danger to us. Therefore we cannot allow you to live in our societies. We know this. And we want you to know that we know it. However, we have no intention of trying to change you, if you remain peacefully in your own lands. We intend to make sure that you stay within your own lands. As long as you do not threaten us, we will leave you alone.”

That is the inspiration my plan would offer to Muslims, who can never be our allies, but whom we simply want not to endanger us. If they understand that we must protect ourselves from them, and that through our superior strength we will do so, but that at the same time we have no imperial global ambition to change the inner nature of their societies, they will understand the boundaries that we must erect, and they will come to accept them, and will not feel threatened by us. Within those boundaries, a more decent and productive Islamic society may evolve. But that is the Muslims’ concern, it is not our concern, and cannot, by the very nature of things, be our concern.

Given the nature of Islam, any interaction between Islam and the West will spark greater jihadism. This applies both to immigration of Muslims into the West, and intrusion of the West into the world of Islam. You speak of winning over our potential allies in the Muslim world. Don’t you know that many of those potential “allies” hate us even more for our attempts to help and reform them? Read this:

But Laith al-Taei, an Iraqi who owns a coffee shop near Edgware Road’s underground station disagreed.

“You kill a snake by chopping its head off, not by hitting the tail,” he said. “The head of terrorism is not (al-Qaida chief) Osama bin Laden, but it is America and Britain’s policies against Arabs and Muslims.” “Change them: Terrorism will end.”

And from the same article:

Many Muslims regard the U.S.-led 2003 invasion of Iraq, backed by Britain despite broad public opposition, as a campaign against their faith.

Thus many Iraqis, far from being inspired by and feeling friendly toward the West for its democratization effort in Iraq, see it as a reason to terrorize Westerners!

Do Bush and Blair and their supporters such as yourself HEAR what the Muslims are actually saying? No, because you’re only hearing your own ideology. You’re not paying attention to what the Muslims themselves believe, what the Muslims themselves ARE.

Again, ANY interaction between Muslims and the West MUST result in an increase in Muslim hostility to the West. That is why the way to peace is not to try to change the Muslim world, but to disengage from it and isolate it in its own sphere. Good fences make good neighbors, or at least tolerable neighbors. But in order to understand this truth, people must give up their fantasies of a global American-led democracy.

Correspondent to LA:

This is so negative, fatalist and wrong that I don’t know what to do with it. Your approach makes no distinction between a Hussein of Jordan and Saddam Hussein. If we followed your strategy, we would declare war on 1.5 billion Muslims and deny ourselves the advantages e.g. of the cooperation of any intelligence services in the Islamic world.

LA to correspondent:

Not at all. If there are moderate regimes such as Jordan (though that is overstated) we can work with them in appropriate ways. I’m all for that. But the point is that such cooperation not be on the phony basis of some Rodney King / Martin Luther King dream that we’re all the same under the skin and we can all get along.

The most important thing is that Westerners face the reality of what Islam in its essence is. Once that is understood, I am perfectly open to sensible prudential arrangements. But as long as we don’t understand what Islam is, we are placing ourselves in endless dangers and perplexities.

It is so ironic. You’re assuming that we must live in an ecumenic fantasy about Muslims in order to have mutually beneficial relations with them. But the Muslims themselves don’t believe that. They remain Muslims, and they know that we are Other from them, and they have no ecumenical fantasies at all. If they can have relations with us, without imagining that we are like them, why can’t we have relations with them, without imagining that they are like us?

The frame of your thinking remains at bottom liberal. You assume that everyone is just like us, and that we must see them as being just like us because the only alternative is universal war. But it’s not true. Good fences make good neighbors. Global ecumenism leads to global war.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 27, 2005 09:20 PM | Send