A few emails indicate I didn't quite make myself clear here & here when I raised questions about Islam & its compatibility with democracy. "Aren't you contradicting your support for the war?" they ask in so many words. Well, no. My point was not to say that Muslims can't be democrats, but that the "democracy" we promote has to have a certain content. In a debate about Crunchy-conism's love of Edmund Burke & Russell Kirk I was having via email last week, one of my "opponents" objected that many South American dictatorships virtually copied the U.S. Constitution, but weren't able to copy its free society. He holds it's because South Americans weren't ready to be free. I hold it's because the Constitution is nothing but a form of government. A good one, but nevertheless simply a form. The content of the American character is to be found in the Declaration's commitment to the natural rights of man.
Mark Steyn addresses this question in his WaTi column this morning:
At some point, we have to face down a culture in which not only the mob in the street but the highest judges and academics talk like crazies. Abdul Rahman embodies the question at the heart of this struggle: if Islam is a religion one can only convert to not from, then in the long run it is a threat to every free person on the planet.
Then he pulled from history this wonderful anecdote from a time when the West had more self-confidence. Here's what Gen. Sir Charles Napier had to say to Indian practitioners of suttee:
You say it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.
