Islam has yet to taste of the Scottish Enlightenment. No Enlightenment means no tolerance, no notion that tolerance is essential to civilization.
What are we to do with this insight? If you are a rabid Muslim hater (there are such people after all) you are inclined to say, "see, I told you so, there is no dealing with these people, negotiation means appeasement and appeasement means only defeat, Islam must be defeated which means that Islam must be annihilated." If you are a liberal, you react in horror to such a stance, you call it the equivalent of racism, and proclaim that the root causes of Muslim intolerance must be dealt with. If you are a conservative, you reject the first as morally wrong and physically impossible (there are after all 1.4 billion Muslims in the world), and the second as impractical (we are in a war in which crazed Islamo- fundamentalists would cheerfully blow up or cities and murder us by the millions and there is not that much time or money or even patience in the enlightened world to get the job done).
So what is the conservative solution? The problem is that the world of Islam is so intolerant that it is dangerous and mortally dangerous at that to our civilization, our democracy, and our children's very lives. But the Muslim does not see himself as unenlightened. He is sure he is possessed of all of the Enlightenment there is to have and it is divine enlightenment. He denies that he is intolerant and insists that he is righteous. There is no scientific method, no idea of the marketplace of ideas, no receptivity. Just as the medicine of oncology cannot kill the cancerous cell if it cannot gain entry, so the intolerant Muslim cannot hear if he will not listen.
The honest truth is that there is no conservative solution to this dilemma. If the problem were an incorrigible criminal, conservatives would know what to do: lock him up, quarantine him. But we are dealing with a fifth of the planet here. There is an entity which showed itself quite capable of dealing with huge portions of the world's population who were ignorant, violent, and in many cases, Muslim and that entity was the British Empire operating in all the glory of its enlightened imperialist age. How did the thin red line manage the uncivilized world so successfully for so long until the royal Navy passed the baton to the American Navy?
Well, they did not do it the French way, the Brits did not go native. For the most part, they maintained their standards, they provided an efficient bureaucracy, a rule of law, and an essentially honest administration. In short, they operated within the lights of their own enlightenment. The caricature of the British colonialist of the Victorian age is of an Englishman so insular and so arrogant that he was incapable of understanding or adapting to local conditions and cultures even to the extent that he would go out into the midday sun. This is wholly unfair and a misreading of history. In fact the Brits were quite observant and really good listeners. Clive did not conquer India with only 800 men by overwhelming millions, he achieved this stupendous victory by setting his enemies against each other. He read each faction carefully and manipulated them.
I have posted time and again on these threads my belief that ultimately this intergenerational, world war against 1.4 billion Muslims for the very survival of our civilization and our democracy and our children's lives must be lost if it is not won by Muslims themselves. We must become as wily as the British and mobilize what is sane in the Muslim world to save us because they must save themselves.
But in the long haul it is only Muslims who have the keys to their brothers. If the medicine is to kill the cancerous cells in the body Islam, the medicine must somehow find the portal into the cell. We cannot enlighten the Arab street by exhorting them to be enlightened. He is deaf and blind to these Western ideas. He does not feel himself any bit enlightened but rather threatened. He is, however, likely to be receptive to ideas which are couched in the language and the idiom of Islam. Like Clive, we had better learn the idiom.
