You’re post raises several issues I’d like to respond to, but I don’t have time right now. If you’re going to continue to monitor the thread, I’ll take the time to reply over the weekend. If not, I won’t bother. There’s no use pushing all those bits into the ether if nobody is going to read them.

However, there is one comment in particular I’ll respond to for the moment:

Christian and Jewish communities existed more or less peacefully within Islamic countries for a very long time. This would seem to be conclusive evidence that it is not ?inherently? evil.

This is a common misconception of the status of Christian and Jewish communities within the Islamic world. Christians and Jews under Islamic Shariah law are “dhimmis” with an official, second-class legal status EXACTLY like that of blacks during the Jim Crow era. I’m sure you’ll agree that the Jim Crow south was inherently evil. But it also reforemd – with some outside intervention.

The “intelligentsia” loves to fantasize that Islamic civilization at its height during the middle ages was some kind of utopia of tolerance. That is a myth, of course, of the “noble savage” variety. One could make an argument that Islamic civilization was more tolerant of Jews than Christian civilization during the middle ages. But even if true, that isn’t saying much. In reality, and by contemporary Western standards, that “utopia” was in fact a brutally repressive dystopia.

Thanks for that gracious response. Iíve been known to glance at a book or two, and I read ìWhat Went Wrongî when it first came out. As you noted, Lewis does not agree with your reading of the situation, but with mine.

If you provided an argument then I must have misunderstood it. I was under the impression that you were claiming that Islam was inherently bad, but you sound in your more recent post as if you believe it can be reformed. Inherently bad means that something cannot be reformed, that its badness is intrinsic to what it is.

We are not in fact currently at war with the Islamic world. Some Islamic countries are either neutral or on our side at present. If we announce that our goal is the elimination of their religion then we basically telling Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Turkey, and Egypt that we declaring war on them. Fortunately, Bush has no intention of doing any such thing, which makes the discussion slightly academic.

There is no question that the spread of WMD is cause for concern, and even for war in some cases. This is a separate issue from the question of whether we should try to eliminate Islam. Iraq was not a particularly Islamic country, but was a source of trouble all the same.

Christian and Jewish communities existed more or less peacefully within Islamic countries for a very long time. This would seem to be conclusive evidence that it is not ìinherentlyî evil. It is certainly possible that it can go bad, (just as Germany went bad) and I concede that does seem to be in the process of happening.

The question becomes how to arrest and reverse that process. I believe your proposed solution focuses on a symptom rather than the underlying disease, and that the Islamic world could convert to Zoroastrianism tomorrow and we would have the same problem. History indicates that people who want to hate and kill are never at a loss for justification.

It was an interesting discussion. Maybe weíll have it again on a more active thread sometime and see what others think.

You are claiming that one of the world?s major religions, about 1300 years old and with roughly a billion adherents is inherently bad

My claim is fully supported by the historical record and current events that are perfectly consistent with Islamic theology.

and needs to be extirpated, like Nazism

I’d prefer that Islam evolve past the 7th Century. There are Islamic reformers, but they don’t appear to have the upper hand at the moment. When I see a nearly widespread consensus among Muslims that the Koran is a metophorical creation of man rather than a literal word of God, and they can express these views without fear of murder, then I will know that the Islamic world has evolved.

There is currently a race condition between reformers and Jihadists. The Jihadists are pushing for a full-scale clash of civilizations. If they win the race and aquire nukes, I have no reason to believe they will not use them. If that occurs, we will have to destroy Islamic civilization before they destroy ours.

I?m a reasonable guy, and am persuadable by actual argument. But a list of anecdotes does not an argument make.

My arguments are fully supported by the facts. To dismiss my arguments are a mere list of anecdotes is foolishness. I suggest you do some reading on your own. You should start with “Why I Am Not a Muslim” by Ibn Warraq

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0879759844/103-6869275-1650248?v=glance

I also recommend “What Went Wrong” by Bernard Lewis. Although Lewis resists the logical conclusion that the problem is Islam itself, his point by point contrast between Islamic civilizational features and Western civilizational features betrays his conclusion. I think that as part of the “intelligentsia”, Lewis was constrained – at least subconciously – from drawing the only possible conclusion.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060516054/qid=1116498887/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/103-6869275-1650248

You are claiming that one of the worldís major religions, about 1300 years old and with roughly a billion adherents, is inherently bad and needs to be extirpated, like Nazism.

Iím a reasonable guy, and am persuadable by actual argument. But a list of anecdotes does not an argument make.

People have tried stamping out religions in the past, for example Christianity and Judaism. You can see for yourself how successful those attempts were. Given the disparity in military power between the West and the Islamic world, we may be able to succeed in what you propose, although at a cost of scores of millions of dead. But if Iím right, than it would gain us nothing. In fact, it would leave us worse off than when we started. So setting aside any moral issues with what you propose, Iím against it on practical grounds.

Which is not to say that the moral problems are insignificant. Wasnít there some movement in Europe in the twentieth century that felt that a certain religion was inherently evil and needed to be stamped out? That genie is best kept in its bottle.

You won’t find me defending sixteenth century Christianity except to say that even that is better than Islam. But that is beside the point.

I agree with you about the “isms” spawned by Western intelligentsia as long as you are referring to Marxists. Even Islam can’t exceed secular Marxism and its Fascist and Communist mutations for sheer unsurpassed horror.

As for the Islamic world rediscovering the tenets of its faith, nobody is “forced” to make that argument. That is exactly the argument the “islamists” are making on their own accord. And they are finding widespread theological and popular support for this argument.

That’s unhelpful. Someone in sixteenth century Europe could have observed all that and more about Christianity.

The twentieth century was the bloodiest on record, and no religion was the culprit. If you want to look for causes for our current troubles, examine the various -isms produced by the Western intelligentsia over the last few centuries.

Otherwise you are forced to argue that for the last few hundred years the Islamic world has been ignoring the tenets of it’s faith, and that it suddenly rediscovered them in the last generation.

I don’t think there is anything inherent in Islam that is directly responsible for the troubles we’re seeing.

Nothing? Not anything? Are you blind? If not, go have a look:

http://www.faithfreedom.org/

I don’t think there is anything inherent in Islam that is directly responsible for the troubles we’re seeing. Until recently the Islamic world had followed the common pattern of military conquest, golden age of empire, then a long period of decline. Unfortunately today it is being acted on by a combination of forces.

I’ve met five separate college educated Muslims, mostly Pakistani, who were all fans of Noam Chomsky.

That obviously begs the question of whether they were “normal” people who fell under Noam’s spell. or if they were pre-disposed to anti-Americanism in the first place. I’d guess the latter myself. Even so, as Bernard Lewis noted, many of the pathologies wracking the Muslim world have Western origins. I’ve spent some time checking out various Islamic web sites, and many of them seem to be channeling Ward Churchill. The upper middle classes from their society are typically educated in the West. We may roll our eyes at the idiocy of our tenured professors, but they can have a lasting effect on those whose only other knowledge of our culture is gleaned from television.

To my non-expert eyes reading the news, it would seem that Islam is slowly but steadily radicalizing. For example, there is a rise in “honor killings” and an increase in the adaption of traditional Muslim dress, especially by women. This is generally considered to be due to Wahabism. While disturbing in it’s own right, especially as regards the future of Europe, I don’t think that extreme religious practices in themselves are grounds for Americans to be concerned. It is the marriage of these disparate ideas, the religious fanaticism and the Western nihilism and hatred of modernity acquired from the American intelligentsia, that forms such a toxic brew.

When you add to this the vast unearned wealth from oil, and the failure of their societies to establish a just and peaceful order, you get the situation we’re trying to deal with.

I believe that to solve our problem we need to put a stop to the Wahabi madrassas, which provide the cannon fodder for our enemy, and also to close down our own madrassas, which provide the “officers”, if you will. We are taking halting steps towards the first, and doing nothing about the second. So a struggle lasting a generation or two seems about right.

Steve J….well I saw Karzai demand all Afghani prisoners at guantanamo be returned. I saw Karzai distance himself from the Americans. What does Karzai know that you don’t? It’s more likely that Eichenberry is trying to diffuse the situation.