We Infidels Are Good For Something
By Victor Davis Hanson
NRO
Radical Islamists love to scream about the “decadent” West. Everything from our operas to our attitudes about women outrage these loud pious critics.
As part of their condemnation, fundamentalist Muslims say they put a higher premium on family values and reverence for the past than crass modern Americans and Europeans do. But that is hardly true.
In Wahhabist Saudi Arabia, unforgiving sharia law administered by stern state clerics dictates the cutting off a hand for theft.
Is there less stealing then? Not at the highest levels at least. Sheiks from the ruling House of Saud are notorious for gambling and squandering abroad their nation’s collective petro-wealth. But few such royals walk around Riyadh with missing limbs from “judicial amputation.”
Recently on a British Airways flight to London, members of Qatar’s royal house were outraged that its princesses had been seated next to male passengers who weren’t related to them. Was this a clash of civilizations?
Not quite. The entire entourage was, in fact, returning from an all-day shopping spree in Milan, Italy. The angry members of Qatar’s royal house may claim outrage at gender equality, but they seem to have no problem with the libertine West when it comes to splurging their kingdom’s wealth on luxury items.
This type of hypocrisy in the Muslim world is not limited to supposedly devout oil-rich Gulf sheiks who cherry-pick Western sin. Terrorists — with one foot in the 7th century and the other in the 21st century — want it both ways, too.
How often have we heard Ayman al-Zawahiri, the mouthpiece of al Qaeda, damn the disruptive culture of the West? Yet he has no reservations about broadcasting his infomercials using video technology made possible by a secular science unique to Westernized culture. And does the observant Zawahiri object that his pals, the pious Taliban, are linked to heroin traffickers?
Jihadists champion sharia law, too. But when captured, they hire sophisticated secular Western nitpicking lawyers to sue over conditions in Guantanamo or incarceration in British prisons. Al Qaeda, of course, complains about everything from American troops once stationed in Saudi Arabia to even the U.S.’s failure to sign the Kyoto accords. Meanwhile, by blowing up religious shrines across Iraq, they show far less respect for mosques than we do.
There is a general pattern in these various paradoxes of fundamentalist Islam, both its violent and non-violent manifestations.
Supposedly Western sins, such as drugs, bribery, and rampant consumerism, turn out to be as common in the Muslim world as they are here. In Saudi Arabia, homosexuality even seems to be tolerated as long as it is not overtly discussed in public. Indeed, the only real difference may be our Western tendency to talk freely in a secular context about controversial topics rather than hide or repress their presence.
Moreover, it is not always what we do in the Middle East, or even who we are, that infuriates the radical Muslim world. Its frustration also rises out of fascination with the West — and the ensuing religious embarrassment over wanting what we enjoy.
It’s worth noting that the United States is not hated in numerous other places, such as sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia, where it has had a military presence or adopted controversial foreign policies.
In contrast, the peculiar furor at the U.S. in the radical Islamic world arises because our culture, when viewed on DVD, satellite television, and the Internet, is judged to be incorrect in the ideal world of 7th-century Islam — and impossible for conflicted Muslims to enjoy fully in the 21st.
Of course, our foreign policy, or even the crassness of Western pornography, can inflame this preexisting anti-Americanism. But, ultimately, there remains this divide between vibrant modern life that is the product of the Western Enlightenment and a static tribal order that is not.
What to do? The time is over both for coffee-table talk in the West about a pie-in-the-sky “reformation” needed in Islam, and the endless habit in the Middle East of blaming others for self-inflicted miseries.
Instead, right now we should hold the Muslim world to the same standards of tolerance that we demand of ourselves — no more apologies for things like our insensitive cartoons or excuses for their insane anger against novelists. In turn, the Middle East must grow up and accept, like the rest of the world, that there are social and cultural costs and consequences for any who wish to embrace the benefits of modernism.
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people are people..the good, the bad, the ugly…for the most part we all just want to get along, and live in peace, slow to anger, being respectfull, and having compassion…BUT, its pretty clear that the muslims want it their way and their way only, and that aint gonna fly..we bowed to the atheist, and look where that got us..now we have to bow to the aclu and cair..we are bieng pushed in a corner, by our own government
August 2nd, 2007 at 4:41 ampoignant article as usual. unfortunately, holding Muslims to the same western standard would be considered “culturally insensitive.” ironic how we are forced to respect their culture as ours gets shit on daily. maybe if we all pick and choose what laws and customs we want to follow we can have a global return to a wild west version of the middle ages.
August 2nd, 2007 at 6:24 amWow an article on the dubious moral Muslim culture. A rare study in the hypocracy of the Islamic World. Very well said VDH.
August 2nd, 2007 at 7:10 amYet another demonstration by VDH that he possess more thoughtful brainpower in his little pinky than the entire sum total of all the demoncrat representatives and senators.
August 2nd, 2007 at 7:38 amI agree, what a very well put no nonsense speech..We need to go back to the days when everything didnt have to be ‘politically correct’..Just call a damn spade a spade. Im not PC with my family and friends who I love and respect, why should i have to show strangers more respect than them? just a thought
August 2nd, 2007 at 10:19 amThe islamofacists are as phoney as a $3 bill. That episode on the BWA plane was a set up. As Brigitte Gabriel, a islamofacism critic and native of Lebannon has said: moslems have been riding planes for 40 years and no problem. They used to buy a seat row if they didn’t want to sit near strangers, as she said. They are doing this for publicity and to push for more “accomodations” that the rest of society doesn’t get. We have opened the floodgates when we started building footbaths. I didn’t see school cafeterias starting to serve kosher food or allowing sikhs to wear their knives to school.
August 2nd, 2007 at 1:10 pmI am always amused at how people how insult us always love our movies, books and clothes and food-they really are hypocrites.
August 2nd, 2007 at 1:50 pm