Investor’s Business Daily supports Separationism

“Perhaps the only sane course … is to separate the West from Islam.”

That is from an editorial in Investor’s Business Daily. It is the first time to my knowledge that any mainstream publication has adopted the Separationist approach, which has been advocated at this website for years.

How IBD reaches this conclusion is as interesting as the conclusion itself. The editorial starts with an observation about Islam that has often been made, and that is further backed up by a recent large-scale Gallup poll, that “The most radical among Muslims—those who support jihad—earn more and stay in school longer. These are the smart ones, not the rubes.”

In other words, education, modernization, and wealth creation—the very things Western liberals including President Bush see as the cure for Muslim fanaticism—exacerbate Muslim fanaticism.

Now, IBD’s editors are not the first people to note the connection between modernization and jihad. Intellectuals such Olivier Roy and Francis Fukuyama have said the same. But those intellectuals never follow through to the logical conclusions of this factual observation. Instead they suggest bandaids, such as easing the radicalization of Western Muslims via greater efforts at assimilation. IBD—and this is what is amazing—does follow through to the logical conclusion. If education and wealth, and thus by implication modernization, spur jihadism, then every additional contact of the West with Islam, whether through the export of our culture, technology, and political ideas to the Islamic world, or the import of Muslims to the West, leads to greater jihadism. And therefore such contacts need to be lessened, not increased. IBD writes:

Inviting more Muslims to our shores in the hopes they’ll embrace our culture and adopt our values also seems misguided.

Yet this is the logic behind the White House’s deal to grant 21,000 student visas to young Saudi men over the next four years. It’s been sold as a cultural exchange program.

But do we really want to educate thousands of Saudis on our campuses if education helps only to radicalize Muslims?

With the above statement, stunningly radical in the context of today’s orthodoxy, IBD has sounded the note of a new, non-liberal politics. The editorial concludes:

Gallup’s survey of Muslims, the largest conducted, puts to rest theories that radicals attack us because they’re poor and alienated from society. Or because they’re dim and easily misled.

Radical Muslims have an education and an economic future, yet they still hate. They’re literate enough to interpret their holy books, yet they still embrace jihad against infidels.

Perhaps the only sane course in this war is to separate the West from Islam.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 23, 2007 08:09 AM | Send