I once attended a business function at which the leader of the largest medical facility in the region began his speech with a joke about Bill Clinton and the Blessed Virgin Mary. Needless to say the joke was the product of a man with very poor judgment and a complete lack of religious sensitivity. Interestingly enough the crowd gave him a few nervous laughs and a tepid dose of applause when he concluded his remarks. The after dinner talk was mostly about how anyone that stupid could be the leader of a large institution. No one however talked about burning down his buildings or murdering him in the street.
The stark differences between other world cultures and the culture of Islam is rapidly coming to a boiling point. Unfortunately we are far away from the ultimate turning point that will ease tensions. September 11th, Afghanistan, Iraq and the cartoon affair are only harbingers of things to come.
In an article and subsequent book titled The Clash of Civilizations http://www.alamut.com/subj/economics/misc/clash.html by Samuel P. Huntington, the Eaton Professor of the Science of Government and Director of the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University argues the following;
"It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural." Written in 1993, the article views the future in a post Cold War, post Soviet Union break up environment.
"This is not to advocate the desirability of conflicts between civilizations. It is to set forth descriptive hypotheses as to what the future may be like. If these are plausible hypotheses, however, it is necessary to consider their implications for Western policy. These implications should be divided between short-term advantage and long- term accommodation. In the short term it is clearly in the interest of the West to promote greater cooperation and unity within its own civilization, particularly between its European and North American components; to incorporate into the West societies in Eastern Europe and Latin America whose cultures are close to those of the West; to promote and maintain cooperative relations with Russia and Japan; to prevent escalation of local inter-civilization conflicts into major inter-civilization wars; to limit the expansion of the military strength of Confucian and Islamic states; to moderate the reduction of Western military capabilities and maintain military superiority in East and Southwest Asia; to exploit differences and conflicts among Confucian and Islamic states; to support in other civilizations groups sympathetic to Western values and interests; to strengthen international institutions that reflect and legitimate Western interests and values and to promote the involvement of non-Western states in those institutions."
Professor Huntington it seems was prescient in terms of identifying the boundaries of conflict now and in the future and has laid out a strategy for the West to deal with it. Up until this point it has mainly been the United States leading the way in trying to buffer rising Islamic militancy. This has resulted in much outrage at home and abroad regarding the American neo conservatives policies against Afghanistan, Iraq and Al Qaeda. It is increasingly apparent however that this militancy exists along all the borders of the civilizations that Islam shares.
Europe which has long been loath to confront the issue and is now faced with it in its full fury. It began with a solitary murder of the Van Gogh, spread to the French riots, the election of Hamas in Palestine, the Danish cartoon riots and will soon culminate in the Iranian nuclear crisis. With Jacques Chirac recently threatening a French nuclear response to any threat of attack, you know that Europe is beginning to take these matters seriously. India and Russia have long been involved in deadly conflict with Islam along its cultural fault line.
None of this will be lost on the American voting public. With Europe now beginning to tow a much harder line, will the Democratic party shift as well? One indication of a reluctance on the part of the Left to confront Islam in any way is the near complete embargo on support for the Danish press in the U.S. All over Europe newspapers printed the offending cartoon's in a show of support for free speech. So far in the U.S. the cartoons have been printed in one major daily. If the Democrats do not move to the center on the issue of confronting militant Islam then there is going to be further damage to the party in the mid terms.
