Why They Hate and Fear Us

Because the gulf between American Christians and even moderate Middle Eastern Muslims is sufficiently wide to prove fallacious the direct comparison that some insist on making nonetheless, this is the sort of thing that one does well to back into. In exploring the incompatibility of Western and Muslim culture, Rev. Donald Sensing offers an opening:

There are many points of contention and conflict between Arab Islam and the West, but the chief religious contention is not really between Islamic Arabs and Christian or Jewish Westerners, but between Islamic Arabs and scientific-materialist Westerners.

Because of the supremacy of the sciences in western thought, western culture has become caught in a cycle of ever-increasing changes. Western societies contend with an exponentially increasing pace of cultural changes. However, the pace and kinds of changes that we adapt to (with greater or lesser difficulty, to be sure) are exactly the changes that fundamentalist Arab Muslims correctly believe would destroy basic structures of their society which they believe are the divinely-commanded.

Sensing veers toward the faults of Muslim culture, citing the Allah-ordained treatment of women. But it seems plausible to me that the extremes of decadence in our modern culture exacerbate the differences to such a degree as to hinder progression toward equality and democracy in the Middle East. With Western pop culture achieving levels of effrontery that go far beyond what even mildly traditional religious Americans will accept, it is all too easy for Muslims who might otherwise constitute a basis for democratic reforms to turn away out of a sense of fatalism.

I'll admit that, in all the recent argumentation about pornography, I came close to suggesting that, to some degree, cracking down on smut would assist the War on Terror. This suggestion might draw the response that placing any sorts of limits on obscene "speech" in the context of that war would be giving in to the terrorists. But that's surely the opposite of the truth. The terrorists and the tyrants want nothing more than for the United States and Europe to remain frightening lands of debauchery from which even the most quiescent Muslim would recoil.

I daresay that our own ancestors mightn't have taken some of the eminently just steps toward equality and freedom had there been as dramatic an example of where that path could lead as we now represent.