Re: Our survival depends on understanding Bernard Lewis - MUST LISTEN!
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Posted by Bill Narvey on 15:45:19 2007/03/22
In Reply to:
Re: Our survival depends on understanding Bernard Lewis - MUST LISTEN! posted by Al Gordon
Bernard Lewis' lecture points to the vastly different ways of being and seeing between Judeo-Christian religions and culture and Islamic religion and culture.
What should be apparent to clear headed Westerners and Muslims is that those differences are not compatible with one another.
While Christianity long ago lost its fervor for world domination through conquest and conversion, Islam has not lost that fervor at all.
Lewis points to the strengths of our Judeo-Christian society and culture and that such strengths are absent within Islamic culture, rendering the majority of the Muslim world impoverished in wealth, knowledge, ingenuity and freedoms.
To be sure, the Arab oil nations are wealthy, however that wealth is at the top and does not in any meaningful way trickle down to bring Muslims the various strengths Judeo-Christian culture and society is noted for.
Prof. Lewis' closes with the following words and caution:
"the idea of freedom in its Western interpretation is making headway (In the Muslim World). It is becoming more and more understood, more and more appreciated and more and more desired. It is perhaps in the long run our best hope, perhaps even our only hope, of surviving this developing struggle."
These thoughts raise some questions:
1. Given that the religion as understood and practiced in the Muslim Middle East and the culture that derives from that continues to see the destiny of Islam being to rule the world, that each Muslim is impressed with a duty to see that happens, and there is so much violence and bloodshed wrought by radical Islamists on the West as well as on other Muslims, to the cheers of a great many more Muslims, why should the West invest the time to try to change the Muslim Middle East to be compatible with Western ways when the process will be long, hard and of uncertain success while the path needed to be taken to try to achieve that outcome will continue to be wet with blood and strewn with bodies that Muslim radicals will continue to inflict along the way?
2. If the West continues to be stronger then the Muslim Middle East, why would the West want to strengthen the Muslim Middle East more in any way such as changing perceptions in Muslim culture to cherish freedoms as much as the West does, unless it was absolutely assured that Muslims would abandon their vision of Islamic domination through conquest and conversion and peace would be the outcome?
Clearly more deaths and bloodshed at the hands of radical Islam is far more certain then the possibility of peace and mutual tolerance being achieved.
3. Why should Westerners want to change to accomodate the Muslim world, as opposed to demanding that the Muslim world change to accomodate the non-Muslim world?
4. The Western view that to bring freedoms to the Muslim Middle East will bring that culture closer and more compatible to Western culture. Why should the West care what the Middle Eastern Muslim world thinks or how they want to live their lives, except to the extent that it does not negatively impact on or harm the West in any way. In other words, why does the West, confident in its own superiority and being only concerned with maintaining its superiority for Westerners, not adopt a live and let live policy vis a vis the Muslim world?
5. While Christianity has given up on the desire to dominate and convert the world, it behooves the Judeo-Christian world to awaken to a desire to protect and preserve their way of life and with that to engage the radical Islamic enemy with the one goal of unequivocal victory, meaning taking from the Muslim radicals and their supporters any will whatsoever to enforce their views on the non-Muslim West.
Reflecting on these questions suggests that Lewis is very wrong to say that spreading Western freedoms to the Muslim world and getting them to accept same is possibly the best hope for the West surviving this war being waged against it by many in the Muslim world.
What Lewis suggests is possibly the best hope is really only one of a number of possible hopes the West can have to not only survive, but to come out victorious in its struggle against the radical forces of Islam.
The West hoping to just survive is simply not enough to hope for.
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