A typically excellent recent Victor Davis Hanson essay spends a number of paragraphs refuting Islamist claims about the West. Here is an example:
Then there is moaning that the West treats its Muslim immigrants unfairly, despite evidence to the contrary. After all, Muslims build mosques and madrassas all over Europe and the United States; yet Christians cannot worship in Saudi Arabia or have missionaries in Iran. Western residents or immigrants in most Arab nations would not dare demonstrate on behalf of Israel. But in Michigan last week, largely Arab-American crowds chanted "Hezbollah" -- despite that terrorist organization's long history of murdering Americans.
I would like to quibble a bit with a section of the conclusion:
The one thing, however, that the United States cannot do to please Islamists is change its liberal character and traditions of Western tolerance. And isn't that the real story behind all these perceived grievances and phantom hurts: the intrusive dynamism of freewheeling Western, and particularly American, culture?
Both its low form of girly magazines and punk rock as well as its impressive literature, art, commerce and technology now saturate the world. And why not? American radical individualism appeals to the innate human desire for freedom and unbridled expression. Westernization subverts most hierarchs, especially in the reactionary world of Islamic fundamentalism, where the mullah, family patriarch or state autocrat can't keep a lid on it. Instantaneous communications have also brought to an insecure Middle Eastern society firsthand views of how much wealthier, freer and more tolerant the outside world is when it is democratic and transparent.
But instead of providing a blueprint for reform, these revelations only incite envy and anger from millions who are advised that parity with the West is found instead by retreating further into 7th-century religious purity.
Hanson is still answering the question "Why do they hate us?" I don't necessarily disagree with his analysis, but I think his emphasis is misplaced. The bottom line is that we in the West and the Islamists are natural antagonists, just as we and the Communists were natural antagonists during the Cold War. As a matter of fact, the war on terror can be seen as a continuation of the Cold War, with the remaining Communist states allied with the Islamists. They want a world ruled by theocratic dictatorships as much as possible. We are not just advocates of liberal democracy; we are fish living in the pond of liberal democracy. Their goal is the drying up of that pond, whatever emotions go with that goal. Victories for them are defeats for us by definition. That, quite simply, is why appeasement will never work. I am a member of the choir that Hanson is preaching to, but I don't know if we are going to convince the left of the reason of our viewpoint by fine-tuning the "They hate us for our freedom" remark.
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