Stopping the Contagion

Fareed Zakaria hits the bullseye with this piece of analysis in Newsweek. Zakaria notes that the ideological irrationality of the radical Islamists is similar to that of ideologues everywhere. He recounts a bit of history by way of illustration:

If you want to understand what motivates suicide bombers, watch the recent movie "Downfall." Based on eyewitness accounts, it chronicles the final days inside Hitler's bunker. In a particularly harrowing scene, Joseph Goebbels and his wife are given the opportunity to have their six young children flee to safety. But Magda Goebbels refuses and instead drugs the kids to sleep. Then she inserts a cyanide capsule into each child's mouth and presses the jaws until the capsule breaks. When explaining why she won't allow her kids to escape, Mrs. Goebbels explains, "I can't bear to think of them growing up in a world without national socialism."

This is the power of ideology. Magda Goebbels had embraced a horrific world view that made her believe that murdering her children was a noble act.

Zakaria rejects the conventional explanations that terrorism is a consequence of economic deprivation, lack of education, or American foreign policy:

What this is about, as Tony Blair has argued, is fanaticism. Radical ideologies of hate and violence have often seduced disaffected young men searching for some great cause. Forty years ago they would have embraced Leninist revolutionary dogma, with Che Guevara as the bin Laden of his day. Today, for Muslims, it is a violent interpretation of Islamic fundamentalism. Born in the Middle East, it has spread like a virus across the Muslim world and into the Islamic diaspora in the West.

He might have added that the hatred and violence are a consequence of the feelings of inadequacy, inferiority, and jealousy joined to a dogmatic, intolerant religion that countenances extreme violence as a means of spreading its ersatz "gospel" and which demands that the religion be imposed upon the entire world.

Other than that the only quibble I have with Zakaria's essay is when he says this:

But Western countries can do more as well. We're fighting a military battle against a phenomenon that is largely nonmilitary. In a battle of ideas, no one bullet will win. We must present a positive vision for Muslim societies, be seen as a friendly and progressive force by them and thus strengthen the moderates and liberals.

The problem with this is that it is contradicted by what he has said earlier in his piece. The 9/11 and London bombers were educated and the latter lived their whole lives in England. They were not ignorant of England's progressive, tolerant society. They had every reason to believe that England is a haven for, not a threat to, Muslims. Yet they wished to destroy it.

I disagree with Zakaria that Western countries can do more. We went to war in the nineties to rescue Muslims from Christians in Serbia and al Qaida thanked us by bombing the U.S.S. Cole and the World Trade Towers. We have given billions to help Muslims around the world, most recently the victims of a devastating tsunami. Osama bin Laden demanded we get our troops out of Saudi Arabia and we did. Western nations have provided refuge, opportunities, and freedoms to Muslim immigrants unheard of in Muslim nations, but all these things make no difference.

Despite all that the West has done to help save Muslims from themselves in the last fifty years Islamic nations in the U.N. refuse even to condemn the suicide bombers because to do so is to repudiate people they see as heroes of the faith.

There really is nothing more that the West can do to appease Muslims, who are intoxicated with an inexplicable sense of their own moral and religious superiority, except convert to Islam and abandon Israel. Only then would the jihad subside.

So Zakaria is incorrect in saying that there is more that the West can do. The West has done enough. The scalpel is in the Muslim's own hands, and it is they who must remove the suppurating corruption in their own flesh.

Otherwise, Zakaria's article is very good. Give it a read.