by Jerome du Bois
One subject I needed to add to the list in the previous post about our changing blog is, necessarily, Islam. While rereading Bernard Lewis's The Crisis of Islam, I came across this useful reminder whenever one hears Muslims -- anywhere -- claim the right of tolerance.
[The ideology of democracies] requires them, even when in power, to give freedom and rights to the Islamist opposition. The Islamists, when in power, are under no such obligation. On the contrary, their principles require them to suppress what they see as impious and subversive activities.
For Islamists, democracy, expressing the will of the people, is the road to power, but it is a one-way road, on which there is no return, no rejection of the sovereignty of God, as exercised through His chosen representatives. Their electoral policy has been classically summarized as "One man (men only), one vote, once." [pp.111-112]
(This is our rock-and-hard place in Iraq.)
Never forget: Islam is the last totalizing ideology, so it's doomed to failure, and it will eventually lay its tribalistic bones down with socialism, communism and fascism. But in the meantime it wishes to impose the bizarre fantasy of its world-suffocating manifold on the ever-expanding multifold of the real, modern, complicated world.
If you love your freedom, and your life itself, go study the status of both of those things under Islam and its fantastical Caliphate.
And, of course, this religion is no friend of the future; instead, it has a death grip on the past -- which will eventually drag it down into oblivion. But in the meantime we have to look at it clearly, with no political correction, no diplomatic veiling . . . no cover.
No dhimmis here.
Posted by Jerome at December 12, 2003 12:46 PM | TrackBack