Maybe I should rename this blog to Best of the Web, but unfortunately that name's been taken. I do love reading it, and miss it on weekends.

Todays' edition takes the NYTimes to task for the moral equivalence fallacy, i.e. the terrorism of the Palestinians against Israeli civilians is no worse than what the Israelis are doing to the Palestinians. I have to wonder if there aren't some Palestinians who are quietly cheering for the Israelis' cleaning out the infrastructure of terrorism. No Palestinian would dare say so in public, but they must notice the fact that their "government" doesn't seem to be delivering the same kind of services and economic development that the Israelis take for granted. No matter how bad they feel Sharon is, what can they say Arafat has done for them, except send their children off to blow themselves up to kill Israelis. It must be like having Al Capone as your president and his mob as the administration.

As I've said, I'm finishing What Went Wrong? by Bernard Lewis. This book and another, The Middle East, a short history of the last 2000 years, leave me with a profound unease. The roots of Islam seem to be fundamentally contrary to living in peace with non-Muslim states or societies, except when they submit to Islamic law as Muslims do. It seems that we cannot expect Muslims to agree to mutual tolerance and respect without asking them to forget some of the most basic injunctions of their faith.

The other thing that makes the task difficult is that Islam has no central structure. No hierarchy except for the scribes and lawyers, who have no real authority and are scattered over the entire spectrum from fundamentalist to Westernizing reformer. Thus, there is no one to negotiate with who can really speak for all of Islam or even a majority. Islam's history has been punctuated with internecine conflicts, especially among Arabs. Islam is especially distrustful of aristocracy or kingship. That doesn't bode well for the House of Sa'ud. It has not been a fertile ground for democracy either. Most attempts have ended with military dictatorship.

To deal with the Muslim world, we need new arguments, based not on the self-evidence of inalienable rights, but on the basic futility of the old concept of jihad, which meant military conquest to bring the Muslim gospel to the world.
Somehow, Muslim peoples must be made to understand that they cannot be part of a modern world and deny the rights and freedoms of other nations and peoples. This would seem obvious from the history of the past 300 years, but they are, in large part, in denial.

Religions are usually conservative, forever calling the people to repent and return to basic principles and scriptures that are thousands of years old, but if they try to cling too tightly to outdated modes of living, or doctrines which are basically impossible, like the Shakers' celibacy, they fail their adherents. In fact, without a faith in continuing revelations from deity, all religions are doomed to be corrupted by "scholarship" and opinions of intellectuals who become jesuitical and jealous over irrelevancies.