A good question
You Islamophobes have yet to answer me a simple question: how can you possibly support what America is doing in Afghanistan and Iraq if you believe that Islam and Muslims are inherently incapable of modernity and tolerance and democracy?
Leaving aside the ‘when did you stop beating you wife’ aspect of this question, at it’s core there is an interesting thing to discuss here. This is what I said in the comments to that post:
First, I would rephrase the question slightly to be Islam or Muslims rather than Islam and Muslims. Islam is a religious (and often political) belief system, Muslims are people who follow that belief system. It is possible to believe that Communism is incompatible with democracy, but that Communists (people who believe in Communism) are not inherently incompatible with Democracy.
The real answer to the question is that I believe Democracy will change Islam, just as it has changed Christianity and Judaism and other political, social and religious beliefs systems (see Japan for example.)
I don’t know if Dean and others believe that or not. If they do, it seems that they think it best not to mention that, to ‘trick’ Muslims into accepting Democracy and not tell them that it will change them. I think most Muslims know this already though. Some welcome it, others absolutely hate it, but concealing this fact doesn’t seem useful to me.
There is I think, a legitimate question as to how much Islam will have to change to be compatible with Democracy. I think that the ‘core’ of Islam will not have to change, but that many of the culteral connections that have been attached to Islam will have to change.
The idea that Islam must be compatible with Democracy or that Muslims will have to be destroyed in mass seems a totally false choice. It presumes that Islam must always remain static and is incapble of changing. That seems to me to be a profoundly racist viewpoint.
Christianity, when coupled with the divine right of Kings, is incompatible with Democracy. Christianity as it has evolved, mostly because of Democracy, is not.
Anyone else have any answers to this question?
You have given him the characteristically thoughtful and rational reply we’ve come to expect of you, Dave. But his question is as simple-minded as it is inflammatory. It is a no-brainer that true Islamophobes (or others who have essentially consigned muslims to the Hopeless Troublemaker category) wouldn’t be particularly put-out by the idea of bombing them into the paleolithic era. Thus such people would mindlessly support any warmaking that affected Them and not Us, with a sly wink in the general direction of spreading Democracy.
But that kind of characterization of neo-cons displays insight no more acute than that of the average six-year-old, and debate no more refined than the average sandbox hissy fit. Your patience for slumming continues to amaze me.