Is Islam the enemy?

Today's New York Times published a news article about how "an attack on a professor at University of the Punjab highlighted a power struggle between an outward-looking, educated class and those pushing an intolerant vision of Islam."

My comment:

Every major religion has its totalitarian wing.

American Christianists have murdered physicians and intimidated so many others.

Jewish hard liners have murdered Palestinians (remember the guy who gunned down as many worshippers in a mosque as he could before others killed him? Not to mention the one who murdered their prime minister.

Hindu fundamentalists have become increasingly violent in India, while Thai Buddhists have cracked down brutally on Muslims in the south.

But Muslims are in a class by themselves, making the worst features of the Dark Ages come alive today.

Sure, it's only a small minority that does the actual violence. But they're in charge--and a lot of Muslims support the violence of the few, even if they don't actively participate.

Liberal Muslims are on the defensive everywhere. Another current NYT article describes how the supreme court of Indonesia--the world's most moderate Muslim country, probably--just upheld a law treating "blasphemy" as a felony.

I've seen this firsthand after traveling in Indonesia half a dozen times in the past decade. I've met a lot of great Muslims in my travels, but everywhere there you can see the iron fist of Muslim cultural imperialism, promoted and directed by Saudi-trained Wahhabis.

So although there are liberal Muslims and illiberal Christians etc., Islam stands head and shoulders above the rest as a force of repression in the world today.

And Muslims who want this to change must bestir themselves, because the voice of their religion today is antithetical to everything the Western world holds dear, and no amount of feel-good multiculturalism can change this hard fact.

And not only is this true, but the Muslim world has been going backward for decades. In Egypt in the 1960s you wouldn't find one woman in a veil. Now you won't find one woman not in a veil on the street--including Egypt's Coptic Christians, who were there long before Islam came into being.

Christian fundamentalists argue that Islam is incompatible with Western values. I despise Christian fundamentalism--in fact I think it's incompatible with Western values, for that matter.

But what I'm saying here is different. I'm not making any claims about Islam as a religion, one way or another. I'm talking about it as a political/social entity, while the fundies are making a blanket judgment.

In practical terms, I'm not too worried about American Muslims. We got the most educated Muslim immigrants, not the semiliterate peasants thronging European barrios. We should monitor what goes on in American mosques and websites, but allow them the same freedom of religion we allow others.

Still, when the Danish cartoons came out, only two American newspapers--not including the NYTimes--had the courage and integrity to publish them. That alone shows how much the Muslim world has succeeded in intimidating the Western world.

That's the kind of kowtowing to primitives that we must stand against, even as we support Muslim moderates as best we can (though we can't do much, because our help makes them Western puppets to most Muslims).

Muslim fundamentalism is at war with the West, and it considers every Western man, woman, child and fetus a soldier in this war. Their militias would kill the most impassioned Western defender of their multicultural heritage exactly as quickly as they'd kill a Christianist.

And they'd view the most modestly dressed Mormon housewife as looking like a hooker.

Not to mention widespread Muslim support across most of Africa for female genital mutilation, possibly the most heinous cultural practice carried out against large numbers of girls today.

I live in a highly multicultural area--Silicon Valley--and have friends of many faiths (and none) and cultures and races. But Americans who live like me often have trouble imagining the depths of division between us and the average Muslim, much less their extremists, who truly do worship death, just as Bin Ladin said.

So please pay attention to articles like this. We all have to realize what we're up against, and rid ourselves of the illusion that all can be settled by an honest exchange of views.

Hope clouds observation.