To say Islam is a failure, and it is, is not to state that the people themselves are failures. When you are brought up in a climate of Islamo-Fascism, hate, poverty, obedience is your culture. Islam is fragmented of course but the political reality is that the Mullahs have fastened fascism onto a religion. Bernard Lewis who is an expert on Middle East affairs calls Baathism and fundamentalist Islam, a European import. The current extremist Islamic ideology is the fusing of Nazi ideology around a religious identity. This fusion of national socialism [which is abundant in Canada] with religion is a particularly obnoxious admixture. It ensures conflict. Not only is religion perverted to support the state and its leaders, but society is rigidified with all the economic and intellectual atrophy such a process suggests.
Islam has failed due to a number of reasons:
-Fusion of fascist nationalism with religious ideals
-No separation of powers between church and state
-No respect for individualism
-Imprisoning of the female population
-Little respect for innovation
-Little respect for the profit motive
-No inclination at mass involvement in politics
-No debate on the supernaturality of its religion
-No regard for outside influences
-Little interest in other opinions and concepts
-Willful blindness to change
Compare the Islamic world with the Christian. The entire structure of Islam is totally different than Christianity. In the list above, the Christian world, aided by Judeo-Christian values enjoys exactly the opposite set of conditions. There is little comparison post-Reformation between the 2 religions. Islam has never experienced the same mental, spiritual and economic revolutions that have roiled the West. One important reason for this is because Islam is not nearly as riven by sects, interpretations and debates as is or was Christianity. It is simply untrue to state that Islam is a diverse religion – sure the sects might differ but the underlying nature of their religiosity and the totalitarian nature of the religious orthodoxy is quite similar – regardless whether one is Sunni or Shiite.
Islam has never produced social and economic goods. Some people will point to the golden age of 1000 AD and Mediterranean Arab hegemony. The nomadic Arabs took over more advanced cultures and left them largely alone and learned quite intelligently to manage a polyglot empire by focusing on administration and organization of their empire – not conversion, economic control or cultural genocide. Trade, production and wealth accretion was too vital to allow the Arabs to tamper with the conquered states. But that was a long time ago and this period of enlightened management lasted but a few centuries. In the modern world the Arab/Islamic world is a mess. The GDP of all Muslim states in the Near East is still less than Spain's. Discrimination, hate, death, Fatwa's, no outside news or book reading, ignorance, crime, unemployment, anger, and attitude all emanate from this monolithic construct that forces people to believe in outdated and antiquate religious constructs. It breeds failure.
Some people state that Islam cannot be a failure since it has 1 billion adherents. This is akin to stating that 95 % of Germans voted for the Nazi in 1938 or that 180 million Russians supported Communism, or that 800 million Chinese profess to belong to the Communist Party. Even if the foregoing are true one would not draw the conclusion that these ideologies were or are acceptable and positive. In fact all these ideologies are indefensible and because populations are coerced into supporting such despotic organizations does not legitimize them.
How do we get Islamic nations and people into the modern age ? The Bush doctrine is the only way forward. Rebuilding the Middle East first in Iraq and Afghanistan and then in other nations, is the only realistic method of forcing change on the Arab world. The Muslim world has proven catastrophically unable to reform itself. It is now left to outside powers to do the job
CraigRead.com(c)