Islam and democracy -- a solution or part of the problem?

By Aussiegirl

Andrew McCarthy has a must-read column in today's NRO on the prospects for democracy in Islamic countries, and the outlook for Muslims living in the western democracies. I urge you to read the entire article. Fukayama's points are interesting, but McCarthy rightly takes exception to Fukayama's statement that western societies are going to have to be more tolerant. How can we be tolerant of an Islamic president calling for the annihilation of the Jewish state? This is a declaration of war by one member state against another. Where exactly is Kofi Annan stand on all this? Or is he too busy counting his Food for Oil dollars? And what is Condoleeza Rice thinking in her increasingly starry-eyed statements about Islam? Have we got another potential convert on our hands? Why not have the Secretary of State under Franklin Roosevelt state that National Socialism was really a philosophy of national aspiration and inspiring cleanliness and efficiency?

Andrew C. McCarthy on War on Terror on National Review Online

On the one-year anniversary of the brutal, Euro-shattering murder of Theo van Gogh in the Netherlands, Prince Charles — future sovereign of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and possessed as ever of that special knack for doing the right thing at the right time — has come to the United States to lecture President Bush about America's "confrontational" approach to Islam.

The visit comes as the United States, having freed 50 million Muslims from tyranny (with stalwart help, it must be added, from our flinty British allies) assesses the progress of is project to democratize the Middle East. It also comes fresh from last week's series of Iftaar dinners, at which official Washington now annually, and with all due ostentation, marks the end of Ramadan, the holiest month in the Muslim calendar. Including one such event at which Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, in an effusion of treacle startling even by Foggy Bottom's cloying standards, elevated Islam from its previous heady status of "religion of peace" to an even loftier — if rigorously unexamined — station in our public discourse: "Religion of love and peace."

The same week, of course, also saw the Iranian mullahs' new frontman, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, reiterate Khomeini's promise that Israel would be destroyed (a goal he sees "attainable" in the "very" short term). As if that were not enough, we further witnessed a suicide bombing by Palestinian Islamic Jihad in the Israeli coastal city of Hadera, killing five innocents and wounding dozens — an attack staged from the West Bank, the cornerstone of the Palestinian State that is the obsessively coveted pot of gold at the end of the Bush administration's roadmap rainbow.

With "love" like this, it will be intriguing to hear what His Royal Highness supposes a less affectionate disposition might look like. In any event, the president and his foreign service would do well to look elsewhere for the lessons to be drawn from Europe. Francis Fukuyama would be an excellent source to start with.

Professor Fukuyama has a very insightful op-ed in Wednesday's Wall Street Journal. (See here, subscription required.) The administration and thinkers like Natan Sharansky prioritize conversion of the Islamic world to democracy in the conceit that it will increase our security. Yet, there's much more to it than that. Fukuyama points out, compellingly, that the threat posed by Islamism spawned inside democratic countries themselves, in Europe in particular, is at least as perilous as that coming from Muslim countries. And this is, of course, borne out — from van Gogh, to Madrid, to London.