ISLAM vs. DEMOCRACY

Jewish World Review Nov. 24, 2003 / 29 Mar-Cheshvan, 5764

ISLAM'S CONSISTENCY WITH DEMOCRACY
By Diana West
http://www.jewishworldreview.com

No doubt President Bush's Whitehall speech will be remembered for its "three
pillars" - Bush's metaphorical framework for the peace and security of free
nations. Maybe more significant, however, are the two "Ifs."

If No. 1: "If the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not
flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation and anger and violence for
export," Bush said. "As we saw in the ruins of two towers, no distance on
the map will protect our lives and way of life."

If No. 2: "If the greater Middle East joins the democratic revolution that
has reached much of the world, the lives of millions in that region will be
bettered, and a trend of conflict and fear will be ended at its source."

The two "Ifs" take us to a crossroads, staring down uncharted paths through
what I take to be our relationship with the Islamic world. After all, the
only non-Islamic country in the Middle East, Israel, long ago joined the
"democratic revolution" Bush invoked. (The president himself indicated the
Islamic-ness of his two conditions when, soon after stating them, he noted,
critically, "We're told that Islam is somehow inconsistent with a democratic
culture.")

If No. 2, obviously, is the preferred destination for all nations resting on
Bush's three pillars. But how to get there from here, and how to avoid the
blind alleys along the way?

According to Bush, "the most helpful" action "is to change our own
thinking" - namely, to change what he called "a certain skepticism about the
capacity or even the desire of Middle Eastern peoples for self-government."
As he put it, "It is not realism to suppose that one-fifth of humanity is
unsuited to liberty. It is pessimism and condescension, and we should have
none of it."

This rather muscular line drew applause, bulging as it does with an
infectious vigor. Still, as someone unconvinced that Islam is consistent
with "democratic culture" - if democratic culture includes freedom of
worship, freedom of speech, and equality of men and women before the law - I
would say the concern is not so much that "Middle Eastern peoples" are
incapable of self-government, but rather that the governments they would
likely form would little resemble the kinds of democracies that now coexist,
finally, in peace and relative harmony.

Why? The president talked about a "freedom deficit" in the Middle East that
has denied nations "the progress of our time." Such a "deficit" refers to a
range of freedoms - democratic culture - that is conspicuously lacking in
Muslim lands. But more than a freedom deficit divides Islam from the West.
In the absence of freedom, a noxious culture of anti-Jewish and
anti-American hatred and delusion has become deeply entrenched, encouraged,
nurtured and fueled by governments, mosques, state-run media, and school
systems.

The ministry of education in the Palestinian Authority encourages this
culture of hatred and delusion when it produces, for example, a new textbook
urging jihad and martyrdom onto 11th-graders. Hezbollah satellite television
(available worldwide) nurtures it when, as during this Ramadan season, it
broadcasts a 30-part, Syrian-produced exercise in anti-Semitism called
"Diaspora" for the holidays. One episode, partly translated (along with a
video clip) at www.memri.org, depicts a group of rabbis and other Jews
engaged in the act of ritual murder.

(Head rabbi to accomplices: "You, pour lead in his mouth. You, stab his body
with a knife before the lead kills him ... ."). Al Riyadh newspaper - also
according to www.memri.com - fuels it by fantastically attributing Islamic
terrorism to Israel, declaring that "Mossad agents recruit young Arabs to
act as Islamists in order to shake the faith and social foundation of the
Middle East." This sanity-challenged theme has endless variations, dating
back to reports across the Muslim world of joint Mossad-CIA complicity in
the attacks of 9/11. A secret ballot can do a lot for the freedom deficit,
but something more drastic is needed to plug the reality gap.

Something more drastic, of course, has taken place in Iraq, where as the
president also noted, 150 free newspapers now circulate, textbooks are
propaganda-free, and incitement-as-government-policy has ended. But laying
this groundwork for democracy has cost us greatly, requiring far more than
merely "changing our own thinking." Even so, now that Saddam Hussein is
gone, everyone's thinking about what's possible in the Middle East has
changed. Will it evolve from a place where freedom doesn't flourish to a
place where democratic culture takes root? The answer is unclear.

What is clear is that any change for the better requires the end of
state-sponsored incitement in the Muslim kingdoms and dictatorships of the
Middle East - in the media, in the textbooks and in the mosques.