The president's editorial

Our fight against violent extremism

On the whole, not silly though, at times, prudently deceptive.

The problem really is Islam, the real thing, the fundamental texts and traditions, the historic faith.

The handful of Muslim liberals calling for a more tolerant and much less violent understanding of Islam, far from proving the contrary, prove the point by deploring that there has been no Muslim Enlightenment and trying themselves to somehow get one off the ground.

A Muslim Letter Concerning Toleration

(Locke was not prepared to tolerate Catholics or atheists, by the way. Not such a great example of modern liberality as all that.)

Think as well of Sisi's exasperated call at al-Azhar University for a "religious revolution" in Islam.

To demand it is to confess one is needed and there is not, right now, anything in authoritative Muslim teaching or theology that supports liberalism and toleration.

It is to admit that everything in authoritative Muslim teaching and theology opposes both and lies ready to hand as what it has always been, an ideology of violence, slaughter, and conquest in the name of God.

But I don't see that anything is to be gained - and much could be lost - if the national political and cultural leaders of the West start to say so.

But this is silly liberal nonsense.

[G]roups like al Qaeda and ISIL exploit the anger that festers when people feel that injustice and corruption leave them with no chance of improving their lives. 

The world has to offer today's youth something better.

Governments that deny human rights play into the hands of extremists who claim that violence is the only way to achieve change. 

Efforts to counter violent extremism will only succeed if citizens can address legitimate grievances through the democratic process and express themselves through strong civil societies. 

Those efforts must be matched by economic, educational and entrepreneurial development so people have hope for a life of dignity.

Really?

More attempts to export democracy and a new wave of nation building, though our American interventions up to now have nearly always led to chaos?

Phooey.

Believers in the West since the Enlightenment have less and less wanted to trust religious authorities with political power or to allow the law to enforce either the faith or the morals of their various religions.

The rejection has become all the more thorough and uncompromising since the mid-20th Century.

It has been facilitated by NT and history-based Christian acceptance of the separation of Church and State and in some degree legitimated by persistent strands of Christian thought that have all along rejected reliance on the state for enforcement of Christianity.

Too, it helps that the Bible is a huge book not much read even by literate and educated believers, and anyway little (but not nothing) is in the NT to encourage Christian use of the state to enforce or spread Christian belief or Christian morals.

But Islam has no such traditions, just as it has had no Reformation and remains untouched by the European Enlightenment.

And the Koran is quite short, widely read by literate Muslims, and every bit as blood-curdling as it is made out to be.

Some people think the only solution to the problem of savage Muslim religious violence from domestic issues like honor killings, beheadings of apostates, or the flogging of rape victims to Jihader terrorism and conquest is for Islam to disappear.

Failing that the problem cannot be solved, but only combated, hedged in, and lived with as people used to live with malaria.

Flare-ups needn't be fatal but are all too frequent, and there will always be another.

That is where we are.