I've been thinking about it, and there is a crucial distinction between current events and previous headbutting between the West and Islam/its political entities. The historical conflicts have occurred between competing civilizations.
What we're dealing with today is a war between civilization and barbarism. There is no negotiation with someone for whom the concept of negotiation is a display of weakness.
Indeed, it is a clash of civilizations. And those who insist on seeing it as just the latest politics in the vein of Metternich will constantly follow the wrong path.
The problem with that is that it assumes military power can be used to wipe out people of that particular viewpoint, which really isnt the lesson of history, and comes with its own very considerable moral costs.
http://theblackcordelias.wordpress.com/2008/08/27/the-difference-between-dominicans-and-jesuits/Two men considering a religious vocation were having a conversation. “What is similar about the Jesuit and Dominican Orders? ” the one asked.
The second replied, “Well, they were both founded by Spaniards — St. Dominic for the Dominicans, and St. Ignatius of Loyola for the Jesuits. They were also both founded to combat heresy — the Dominicans to fight the Albigensians, and the Jesuits to fight the Protestants.”
“What is different about the Jesuit and Dominican Orders?”
“Met any Albigensians lately?”The point being that a combination of religio-philosophical and military might can do the trick. And leave the fighter better off afterwards.
It also tends to ignore the very real reasons why people might feel the need to back the (usually very small) number of true believers in any particular group; for example, it is surely no mere coincidence that the two main areas of Sunni fundamentalist expansion right now (Iraq and Nigeria) are going on in the two of the most corrupt countries on the planet.
Order vs Chaos. Most folk in most societies prize order. All those places you mention are basket cases where the central gov't can not provide order. In steps a better-organized group that displays an ability to provide order.
Saw something similar as the western half of the Roman empire tottered. Christian bishops stepped up and provided order and relief as the Roman gov't dissolved into chaos. It is why during Russia's mess after the COld War, many in Russia looked back at Stalin with longing.
It is also perhaps not surprising that they feel able to criticize democracy when the one main Islamist group to actually engage with that process - the MB in Egypt - got overthrown in a coup that resulted in thousands of deaths, with nary a peep out of the West. Nor is it really that hard to argue in favour of any moral superiority for Western values when the media (at least in this country) have spent much of the past week talking about the X-Factor, leaked naked pictures of various celebrities and our football clubs spending nearly a billion pounds on players.
They criticize democracy because democracy's supporters in the ME are almost invariably the weakest of the rival powers. It deserves no respect because it is not a serious player as the authoritarian secularists and authoritarian Muslims are. Pinhead western journolists and dumbass diplomats think ME democratic movements are larger than they really are because the journos & diplodunderheads can more easily communicate with the pro-demo activists (because they are more likely to speak English).
Since the overthrow of the MB, not so much turmoil in Egypt. The secular authoritarians are providing more & better order.
Of course, the real way to defeat such things is to do what we did to get rid of our fundamentalists - to educate as many people as possible, to adopt science in order to actively disprove many erroneous religious-based beliefs, and to encourage social progression towards freer, richer, less corrupt societies. Of course not everywhere in the West did that to the same level, but the countries which did were the ones that ended up on top.
Um, the most influential scientists in the West with the greatest breakthroughs that helped usher in modernity were orthodox Christians. They would be considered very fundy nowadays.
The trend to a fee-er less corrupt society was the work of a couple millenia in the West and is not transferable to other cultures without going "clean slate" on them. Athens, Rome, Jerusalem, and Germania. The nation-state also requires a nationality, not a notionality. Notional polities eventually require mass murder and oppression to exist, as any student of multi-ethnic empires could tell.
The West traded Christian-inspired culture for a Marxist-inspired culture at the top. Has been a sucker's deal. We now have had and still have even more nasty and closed-minded fundies at the levers of power. Or is the 20th Century's megadeath lost in the mists of history? Fascism in the Wilson and FDR administrations (imprisonment for belief and speech or national origin). Fascism in Spain & Italy (How many murdered by the regimes?). Naziism is Germany (Millions murdered). USSR & China & Nork & Cambodia (Made the Nazis look like retailers of death while they worked death wholesale).
Those would be the same Romans that spent most of the next hundred years after Carthage fell consuming themselves in civil wars, domestic strife, unimaginable corruption and whatnot?
As I said, there are costs when you want to do what they did.
A stretch to say that Cathage's destruction was the cause. Plenty of other countries & civilizations have prospered after overthrowing great rivals and nearly blotting them from history.
The multi-cultist cultural marxists have worked so hard to tamp down western self-regard and making any such expression outside the purview of peaceful and orderly politics. We ought not be surprised then that when it does burst forth, it will manifest itself as violent. Leave no legal & respectable outlets and you guarantee what comes next is illegal and disrespectable.
