Islam's problem with democracy (de Tocqueville analysis alert)

Religion has always been linked to political power, often controlled by kings and despots. In a democracy, there's a different kind of link. Freedom allows everyone to raise questions, confront dogma and challenge beliefs. That's why maintaining the complete separation of church and state is crucial.

Alexis de Tocqueville, visiting the United States in the early 19th century, identified this separation as crucial to democratic governance. Religion gave support to democratic political institutions because it restrained the exercise of liberties, appealing to conscience and morality in lieu of imposition by the state.

De Tocqueville's words came to life in the controversy over the cartoons satirizing Muhammed in the European newspapers, and Muslim reaction threw in sharp relief the differences between East and West. Cartoons in Middle Eastern newspapers depicting the Jewish star placed across a swastika and Jews with hooked noses adorned in Nazi helmets, slaying innocents, were widely reviled by Jews, but Jewish mobs did not set out to torch embassies or to kill one another in protest. So where is the outrage of "moderate" Muslims over the way the suicide bombers invoke the name of Muhammed on behalf of the slaughter of innocents?

The Frenchman was surprised by the pervasive religious atmosphere he found here, and in interviews with both clergy and laymen, he never met anyone who doubted that it was this separation of church and state that enabled religious belief to flourish. In times of enlightenment and democracy, he argued, the human spirit does not readily accept dogmatic beliefs except through faith. ". . . [A]t such times above all, religions should be most careful to confine themselves to their proper sphere, for if they wish to extend their power beyond spiritual matters they run the risk of not being believed at all," he wrote in his classic, "Democracy in America" (Ed. Note: This classic is on sale for 25% off this week at the Townhall Book Service.)

The Founding Fathers certainly thought this to be true, which is why God is invoked throughout our early history as the unifying force for equality, without dogma intruding into the specific details of government. The spirit rather than the letter of the law says "we are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights." Like de Tocqueville, we cannot see into the secret places of the hearts of those who express faith in their religion; the benefit of the Judeo-Christian religious tradition is in its inspiration for our small-r republican institutions.

A century and a half before Samuel Huntington expressed concern for the "clash of civilizations," de Tocqueville identified the difference between our inheritance of Western religious values and the teachings of Muhammed that inspired Arabs in the Middle East. Muhammed contributed political maxims, criminal and civil rules and scientific theories to the Koran, mixing religion and politics, whereas the Gospels deal only with the relationship between man and God, and man and man: "That alone, among a thousand reasons," he wrote, "is enough to show that Islam will not be able to hold its power long in ages of enlightenment and democracy, while Christianity is destined to reign in such ages, as in all others."

An "open civilization" once flourished under the rule of Islam, but that was a long time ago, and the current incarnation of Islamic rule is theocratic and usually despotic, demanding that all see the world through the same lens. The Islamic scholar Ralph Ghadban, writing in a Swiss newspaper, argues that "a marked retrogression is observable in the Islamic world." He observes that the strict blasphemy laws being introduced in Muslim countries are intended less to protect Islam than to get rid of other religions. The Islamists are eager to see whether they can transport their theocratic bans to Europe.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Dutch writer and politician who wrote the film script for the movie that inspired an Islamist terrorist to murder filmmaker Theodore van Gogh, told the Danish newspaper that first reprinted the cartoons of Muhammed: "It's important to remember that Islam hasn't undergone all the reforms and adjustment which Christianity and Judaism have undergone over the past thousand years." This controversy brings attention to the Muslim taboos that are incompatible with democratic values. Subjugating women and imprisoning writers is anathema to Western religions.

If religious institutions are to be capable of maintaining themselves in a democratic age, observed de Tocqueville, "their power also depends a great deal on the nature of the beliefs they profess, the external forms they adopt, and the duties they impose." This is history's challenge to Islam.

Beginning with Princip as a potential 'useful idiot' for islam, the leaders of the quite possibly muslim-controlled and motivated 'revolutionary' group he belonged to, must have understood the various alliances of the period, and how it would result in a huge conflict...if the Archduke was assassinated.
Better to allow or persuade a misfit, a consumptive Christian to carry out the deed - persuade him he was striking a blow for Independence from the Austrian Empire, than have a muslim do it...islam has not, will NEVER forget it was driven back from the gates of Vienna!
Under the cover of the Great War, the Turks annihilated the Christian Armenians; that's nothing less than the usual islamic 'cleansing' of territory...which they did whilst Germany was their ally and witness.

While Hitler was in the trenches, fighting beside the Turks, imbibing muslim hatred of Jews and Christianity, learning about islam, reading from the koran...that terror manual, a collection of instructions on how to annihilate human beings. (Tie them up and burn them alive etc. That's what the Turks did to hundreds of thousands of Armenians.)

Hitler returns to Germany after the war. There is to be a brief communist government. He identifies communism with Jews. He has the enemy he needs, he has the indoctrination...he has studied the methods used by the Turks. Two world wars. For and all about islam. The ideology of hatred is infectious! Hitler promises the Mufti of Jerusalem 'no Jew will leave Europe alive'

http://www.cdn-friends-icej.ca/medigest/may00/arabnazi.html

History needs a re-write. We have only touched the surface. We treat the symptoms and have no idea of the cause IMO.

http://www.serbianna.com/columns/savich/006.shtml

The Holocaust in Bosnia-Hercegovina, 1941-1945

by Carl K. Savich
Bosnia-Hercegovina has for over a millennium been a battleground where the world's major religions, civilizations, cultures, and empires have clashed and collided: Catholicism, Orthodoxy, Islam, Judaism, the Ottoman Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the medieval Serbian, Croatian,and Bosnian Empires, the East and the West. Bosnia-Hercegovina was the dividing line between East and West, between Catholicism and the West and Orthodoxy, Islam, and Judaism and the East. The churches, the cathedrals,the mosques, and the synagogues are the remaining symbols of this battle and conflict between cultures and empires.

World War I began in Bosnia, one of the bloodiest and most horrific wars in the history of mankind, ushering in the twentieth century. The Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78Ýsprang from the 1875 insurrection in Bosnia-Hercegovina. During World War II, Bosnia-Hercegovina was one of the bloodiest battlefields of the war and of the Holocaust.

The Bosnian Serbs are representatives of the Orthodox Christian Church and of the Byzantine culture and are part of the larger Serbian nation. The Bosnian Croats are representatives of the Roman Catholic Church and the Austro-Hungarian culture and are part of the Croatian nation. The Bosnian Muslims are representatives of Sunni Islam and were part of the Turkish Ottoman Empire and culture. The Bosnian Jews are representatives of Judaism and are mostly descendants of Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain following the Inquisition and expulsion of the Jews.

From 1941-1945, Bosnia-Hercegovina was part of the NDH, Nezavisna Drzava Hrvatska, the Independent State of Croatia and was one of the bloodiest arenas of the Holocaust and battlefields of the war. With the assistance of Haj Amin el Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, and Reichsfuehrer SS Heinrich Himmler, the Bosnian Muslim leadership undertook the systematic extermination of the Jewish and non-Muslim, non-Croat population of Bosnia-Hercegovina. Two Waffen SS Divisions and other Nazi and fascist formationsÝ were formed to advance the goals of the Third Reich and of Islam. The goal of the Muslims was to achieve autonomyÝ and independence for Bosnia-Hercegovina under Muslim rule. The period 1941-1945 is crucial in understanding and comprehending the Bosnian civil war of 1992-1995.

The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem

Haj Amin el Husseini fled to Europe in 1941 following the unsuccessful pro-Nazi coup which he organized in Iraq. He met Joachim von Ribbentrop and was officially received by Adolf Hitler on November 28, 1941 in Berlin. Nazi Germany established for der Grossmufti von Jerusalem a Bureau from which he organized the following: 1) radio propaganda on behalf of Nazi Germany; 2) espionage and fifth column activities in Muslim regions of Europe and the Middle East; 3) the formation of Muslim Waffen SS and Wehrmacht units in Bosnia, the Balkans, North Africa, and Nazi-occupied areas of the Soviet Union; and, 4) the formation of schools and training centers for Muslim imams and mullahs who would accompany the Muslim SS and Wehrmacht units. As soon as he arrived in Europe,the Mufti established close contacts with Bosnian Muslim and Albanian Muslim leaders. He would spend the remainder of the war organizing and rallying Muslims in support of Nazi Germany.

Haj Mohammed Effendi Amin el Husseini was born in 1893 in Jerusalem, then the capital of Palestine, which was a part of the Turkish Ottoman Empire. In 1917, during World War I, the British occupied Palestine and established the Mandate. On November 2, 1917, British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour announced that Britain was committed to establishing a Jewish homeland in formerly Ottoman Palestine, which was known as the Balfour Declaration of 1917.

Husseini devoted his entire life and career to the destruction of a proposed Jewish homeland and the prevention of Jewish immigration into Palestine. His goal was to create an Arab state of Palestine with the concomitant extermination or marginalization of the Jewish population.

...and so on and so on...

Running through the carnage of two world wars is islam, islam, islam...

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