Muslim Heretics Conference

The seven years since 9/11 reveal an old truth: Problems are usually not solved, they are just overtaken by other problems. Those of 8/8, for example. On Aug. 8, 2008, two mighty nations announced their return. Russia, invading Georgia, did it with tanks. China, launching the Beijing Olympics, did it with acrobats. The message was the same: World, we’re back.
Don’t get me wrong. A grave threat from jihadist terrorists, potentially armed with atomic, biological or chemical weapons, hangs over us still. Even as you read this, another hard-to-detect groupuscule, working from the back room of a house close to you, may have taken the occasion of the Sept. 11 anniversary to try again. They won’t always be foiled. Protecting us from “another 9/11″ while not destroying our freedom in order to save it remains a major challenge to political leadership in every free country.

What has proved false is the neoconservative claim that this single threat now defines the whole pattern of world politics; that, as Norman Podhoretz puts it, the struggle against Islamofascism is World War IV.
Two other giant changes define the world we’re in. The first, made manifest on 8/8, is how non-Western powers challenge the dominance of the West. They are beating the West at the game it invented. Analysts at Goldman Sachs predict that by 2040, Brazil, China, India, Mexico and Russia will have a larger combined economic output than today’s G-7. And the economic is rapidly translating into the political.
At the same time, worldwide economic development based on the free movement of goods, capital and services (a.k.a. globalization) is exacerbating a whole set of trans- national problems. Carbon dioxide emissions that accelerate climate change, mass migration, the risk of pandemics: All these cry out for international, cooperative responses. Yet, by contrast with the 1990s, when President George H.W. Bush hoped to replace the Cold War with a “new world order,” the prospects of achieving liberal international order no longer look so good. Power is diffused to too many competing states, many of them illiberal, as well as elusive networks such as Al Qaeda.

So we of the FLIO (friends of liberal international order) must now soberly confront the prospect of a new world disorder. Or rather old-new, for disorder is the more natural condition of international society. International order, which may also be called peace, is always a fragile achievement.
Russia and China are not simply great powers challenging the West. They also represent two alternative versions of authoritarian capitalism, or capitalist authoritarianism. Here is the biggest potential ideological competitor to liberal democratic capitalism since the end of communism.
Radical Islamism may appeal to millions of Muslims, but it cannot reach beyond the faithful, except by conversion. More important, it cannot plausibly claim to be associated with economic, technological or cultural modernity. By contrast, the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics, like the skyscrapers of Shanghai, show us authoritarian capitalism already staking that claim.
In the Bird’s Nest stadium, the latest audiovisual high-tech was placed at the service of a hyper-disciplined collectivist fantasy, made possible by financial resources that no democracy would have dared devote to such a purpose. Zhang Yimou, the artistic director of the Olympics ceremonies, said that only North Korea could have matched such feats of mass synchronization.
For close to 500 years, modernity has come to the world from the West. In 20th century Europe, liberal democracy faced two powerful versions of modernity that were Western but illiberal: fascism and communism. Part of these systems’ appeal was precisely that they were modern. (”I have seen the future and it works,” said one enthusiast returning from Moscow.) Liberal democracy finally saw them both off, though not without a world war, a Cold War and a lot of help from the United States.
Now, in China, we glimpse the prospect of a modernity which is both non-Western and illiberal. But is authoritarian capitalism a stable, durable model? That, it seems to me, is among the greatest questions of our time — which is still a post- 9/11 time, but also a post-8/8 time and, ecologically, a five-minutes-to-midnight time.
As we of the FLIO think about how to respond to this multiple-front challenge, I have more sympathy than many Europeans do for the notion, canvassed by American policy intellectuals supporting both John McCain and Barack Obama, of a “concert of democracies.” We should look first to those countries who share our values in the way they govern themselves. But only with several vital caveats.
First of all, we should not kid ourselves that we can have only liberal democracies as partners. Our values may pull us that way, but our interests will necessarily push us to relationships and even partnerships with currently illiberal states as well. So any institutionalized League of Democracies, arrayed against an Association of Autocrats (Robert Kagan’s vivid term), is a seriously bad idea — even assuming you could agree who merits inclusion in the League. Bipolar disorder would be no improvement on multipolar.
It’s also not the smartest idea to identify this vision of a concert of democracies too emphatically with the West, as in the former French Prime Minister Edouard Balladur’s proposal for what he calls a Western Union.
Historically, both modernity and liberalism have come from the West. But the future of freedom depends on new versions of modernity evolving — whether in India, China or the Muslim world — that are distinctly non-Western yet also recognizably liberal, in the core sense of cherishing individual freedom. I wouldn’t bet on this outcome, but working toward it is the best long-term chance we have. Pessimism of the intellect must be matched by optimism of the will.
Timothy Garton Ash, a contributing editor to The Times’ Opinion pages, is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and the professor of European studies at Oxford University. His most recent book is “Free World.”

China, Russia and the new world disorder - Los Angeles Times

With Wall Street convulsing, and the White House race intensifying, the question “Who lost Europe” is on no one’s lips, let alone minds. Indeed, the question begs another: “Is Europe lost?”

The answer to the second question is, “No, not yet.” And losing Europe, I would add, is by no means inevitable. But that doesn’t mean the continent isn’t currently hell-bent to accommodate the dictates of Islamic law, bit by increasingly larger bit. Such a course of accommodation, barring reversal, will only hasten Bernard Lewis’ famous prediction that Europe will be Islamic by century’s end.

And what do I mean by “accommodation”? Well, to take one tiny example, one snowflake in a blizzard of such examples, there are schools in Belgium that not only serve halal food to Muslim and non-Muslim alike (old news), but, according to a recent French magazine report, no longer teach authors deemed offensive to Muslims, including Voltaire and Diderot; the same is increasingly true of Darwin. (Don’t even ask about the Holocaust.)

For a more substantial, indeed, keystone example of accommodation, we can look to England, where, it pains me to write, Sharia courts are now officially part of the British legal system. According to press reports this week, the British government has quietly, cravenly elevated five Sharia courts to the level of tribunal hearings, thus making their rulings legally binding.

It may be difficult to quantify the impact of a Voltaire vacuum on the continent, but we can instantly see the inequities of British Sharia (I can’t believe I’m writing that phrase). Among the first official verdicts were those upholding the Islamic belief in male supremacy. These included an inheritance decision in which male heirs received twice as much as female; and several cases of domestic violence in which husbands were acquitted and wives’ charges were dropped.

In a decidedly minuscule minority, I say we ignore the spread of Islamic law across Europe, from the schoolroom to the courtroom, at our peril, particularly given that in so doing, we also ignore the vital political parties that have arisen in reaction to this threat to Western civilization. Why at our peril? Because the same type of liberty-shrinking, Sharia-driven accommodation is happening here.

Is advocating freedom of speech “extreme” or “fascist”? Is opposing Islam’s law, which knows no race, “racist”? Is supporting Israel (which these parties do far more than other European parties) “Nazi”? The outrageously empty epithets of the Islamo-socialist left seem calculated to stop thought cold and trigger a massive rejection reflex. In this way, resistance becomes anathema, and Islamic law, unchecked, spreads across Europe.

Does that sound “Islamophobic”? You bet. How can anyone who values freedom of conscience, equality before the law and other such Western jewels not have a healthy fear of Islamic law, which values none of these things? Incredibly, this is an emotion that is supposed to be suppressed — and, in Europe, on pain of prosecution. Indeed, because Filip Dewinter admitted to such “Islamophobia” in an interview, his party, the Vlaams Belang, has been taken to court in Belgium on charges of racism, and, if convicted, will be effectively shut down through defunding by the government.

That hasn’t stopped Dewinter, who, in accepting an award at a memorial event dedicated to Oriana Fallaci in Florence, last week, said: “Islamophobia is not merely a phenomenon of unparalleled fear, but it is the duty of every one who wants to safeguard Europe’s future.”

Of course, even as Dewinter admits to fearing the Islamization of Europe, he and his colleagues act with exceptional political — and physical — bravery in rallying voters against it. This coming weekend, he joins several other politicians on the Sharia-fighting right in Europe — among them two other men I interviewed, Mario Borghezio of Lega Nord, which is part of Italy’s ruling coalition, and Heinz-Christian Strache of Austria’s Freedom Party, which is expected to become part of Austria’s ruling coalition after elections this month — in Cologne, Germany. In that ancient cathedral city, where the city council recently approved the construction of a long-controversial mega-mosque, these men will address a rally against European Islamization. (Contrary to initial reports, Jean-Marie Le Pen will not be at the demonstration.) The Sharia-fighters expect 1,500 demonstrators. Police expect 40,000 counter-demonstrators.

These are frightening odds — a metaphor, perhaps, for Europe’s chances of staving off Islamic law. Who lost Europe? If it does happen, we certainly won’t be able to say we weren’t warned.

Diana West is a columnist for The Washington Times. She can be contacted via dianawest@verizon.net

Leader Call - We are losing Europe to Islam

HASAN BÜLENT KAHRAMAN
Sabah

  I am of the opinion that being a Muslim today is less to do with Islam.

  Islam has its unique philosophy, an indepth content so the Islamic culture affects high culture.

  The culture of Islam was shaped up as the cultural superstructure of the Ottomans yet partially was focused in the Republic period.

  If we talk about a unique esthetics of Islam this goes hand in hand with the Ottoman esthetics but culture of being Muslim is part of popular culture and nothing to do with culture of Islam.

  Esthetics of Islam is urban; esthetics of being Muslim is provincial.

  With the republic, Islam left people’s agenda.

  And today there is this esthetics of being Muslim which is disliked and complained by the most. Number one reason is that the culture of being Muslim originates from the rural. It is today partly provincial and partly urban, mimicking something that it doesn’t belong to.

  Another reason is that the culture of being Muslim is not nurtured by high cultures so prone to degeneration.

  The culture of being Muslim lacking philosophical depth of Islam should be seen partly as popular culture.

  It broke away from Islam and started to degenerate. A culture of being Muslim without Islam can only be this much shallow.

Being Muslim without Islam - Turkish Daily News Sep 23, 2008