Radical Muslims favor democracy more than moderate Muslims

Looking at the same Gallup poll of Muslim attitudes that led Investor’s Business Daily to call for the separation of the West and Islam, Niall (I wish I knew how these irregularly spelled British names were pronounced) Ferguson, writing in the Telegraph, points to a further finding that contradicts a basic assumption of the Bush Democracy Project:

The Gallup poll (which surveyed 10,000 Muslims in 10 different countries) also revealed that the wealthier and better-educated Muslims are, the more likely they are to be politically radical. So if you ever believed that anti-Western sentiment was an expression of poverty and deprivation, think again. Even more perplexingly, Islamists are more supportive of democracy than Muslim moderates. Those who imagined that the Middle East could be stabilised with a mixture of economic and political reform could not have been more wrong. The richer these people get, the more they favour radical Islamism. And they see democracy as a way of putting the radicals into power. [Emphasis added.]

But it’s not perplexing at all. Islamists now know that their path to power lies through democratic elections. Meanwhile, President Bush and his followers keep thinking that the procedure of democatic elections must somehow result in the good substantive results that we like, such as liberal rights, support for the West, and acceptance of Israel’s existence. There’s no reason for thinking this. It is a magic formula the falsity of which could be grasped by a split second of thought. From which one can conclude that Bush and his followers have not engaged in a split second of thought for the last five years.

Not that this is their personal fault. Just as the problem with a Muslim who believes in jihad is not that he’s a bad person, but that he’s a good Muslim, the problem with a liberal who believes that all men are basically “just like us” is not that he’s a stupid person, but that he’s a good liberal. In both cases, the only cure is apostasy.

- end of initial entry -

In 2005, VFR’s Indian reader living in the West laid out the reasons why Muslim democratization if it occurred was likely to be a bad thing not a good thing.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 25, 2007 03:00 PM | Send