Our democratic leaders are failing us!

9/11 was a turning point for the West. The US was attacked, but we have all been affected. This attack changed the nature of our democracies. Ever since, democracy the West over has started to weaken. Not only are our leaders doing nothing to arrest this weakening of democracy at home, but they are, indeed, helping it along, sometimes out of ignorance, sometimes out of denial, but always out of fear!

The odd thing is this: While democracy is weakening at home, the US and the UK have embarked on a foreign policy to try and bring democracy to the Middle East! Make no mistake about it: This policy is destined to fail! Indeed, it is failing before our very eyes. Just take the mayhem in Iraq as a manifestation of this failure. Further, take Iran! There, instead of there being a softening of the régime in that theocratic land, there has been a hardening of their animosity to anything Western, to anything democratic, to anything we consider fair and balanced.

Then we have Syria. What is happening in Syria today is the very opposite of democratic. In that country, people are returning to their Islamic roots, even down to the way that women dress in public. Indeed, many Syrians are touting the idea that their future lies in Shariah law!

The knock-on effect of bringing democracy to Iraq is simply not happening. If anything, it would appear that our attempts to make the Middle East democratic have produced the opposite effect: Attitudes against anything Western, anything democratic, are hardening!

There are a few good reasons why this is so. First and foremost among them is this: Islam and democracy are totally at variance with each other. They are immiscible! Period! Unfortunately, no amount of political spin is going to change this harsh reality.

In Islam, as I have said so many times before, ALL power rests with Allah, and filters down; in a true democracy, ALL power is supposed to rest with the people and filter up. The reality of democracy, of course, is not quite as simple as that for, as we all know, the politicians who lead us so often refuse to listen to the wishes of the electorate after rising to high office. Take the example of Tony Blair taking the British to war against Iraq. Many people were against the idea; but Blair led us to war anyway.

Still, all that having been said, the notion that power in a democracy rests with the electorate still holds true, since even the ‘deafest’ of political leaders has to put himself and his party up for re-election. Pay-back time is never far away!

This is not true for Islam. Islam has never thrown up a true democracy in its almost 1400-year history save, perhaps, for the example of Turkey. But even there ‘democracy’ has had to be held together by the strong arm of the military!

The natural form of government for any country where Islam is the dominant religion is Islamic theocracy, not democracy, since Islam does not, and never will, recognize a separation of the political from the sacred, a separation of mosque and state. Indeed, such a separation is anathema to it! But such a separation is the sine qua non of democracy!

There are many other reasons why the attempt to bring democracy to the Middle East is destined to fail, too. For a democracy to function correctly, the electorate has to be well-educated, and through that sound education, the electorate is supposed to become well-informed in order to make good, solid, sound political judgements. But to be well-informed, it is essential that the electorate be allowed free access to information. Information must not be controlled by government!

The Middle East fails on both these counts. In the Middle East, the level of education is wanting, to say the least. In fact, the rates for illiteracy there are very high indeed. Illiteracy and democracy make very strange bedfellows! How can someone be well-informed if he is illiterate? If a person is not well-informed, then he is not ready to make a well-informed decision at the polls! Moreover, in the Middle East, the people are often denied access to the greatest and most powerful tool for access to information: The Internet.

There are other reasons why it was folly to try and bring democracy to the Middle East; but the reasons already given will suffice for now for the sake of argument.

It is interesting, but very disturbing, to note that whilst the US and the UK have busied themselves trying to bring democracy to the Middle East, they have also been busy trying to curtail our freedoms in our homelands!

Prime Minister Tony Blair, probably more than anyone who held the position in my lifetime, has passed so much legislation banning this, that and the other that he has seriously dented the freedoms of the British. He wants even to curtail freedom of speech and expression to make it a criminal offence to criticize Islam and the prophet of Islam, Muhammad!

Naturally, the reason why he is attempting to pass such a bill is to appease the growing Muslim vote within the UK. In recent years, they have become disaffected because of his insistence on war in Iraq!

It is ironic, isn’t it, that we should be losing our democracy at home at the very time as we are trying to establish their democracy?

As I see it, the story of Western politics ever since 9/11 is a story of failure! Even in the recent response to the fiasco caused by the publication of the cartoons of the prophet, there are signs aplenty that Westerners are losing one of their cherished freedoms: Freedom of expression. Why? Because our Western ‘leaders’ – American, British, European, Australasian - have failed to stand together against the tyranny of Islam. They have failed to re-affirm their commitment to liberty, failed to re-affirm their commitment to freedom of expression, failed to re-affirm the West’s commitment to the very values which underpin our civilization. Dear readers, make no mistake about this: Our leaders have failed us!

But there is one failure which endangers our democracy and our liberty even more. It is should be plain to see. Indeed, it should be as plain as the noses on our faces. Our politicians, with but few exceptions, have failed to see this too, however. …

9/11 was an attack not just on the Americans, but it was an attack on the West in its entirety. President George W Bush’s response to this attack was pathetically weak and appeasing. The day after 9/11, he appeared on TV to make an announcement to the Americans and the world. In front of him was a copy of the Qur’an – a book which had hitherto made no significant contribution either to the US in particular nor to the West in general - along with the Torah and the Bible. He stated that America was not at war with Islam or Muslims, insisting that Muslims were the friends of Americans!

It was at this point that the Neo-Conservative idea of bringing democracy to the Middle East was truly conceived. The great pity is that it didn’t produce a still birth!

The President’s response to 9/11 was weak and appeasing and flawed and destined to fail! Why? The main reason is that he failed to define the enemy. The enemy, of course, is Islam itself. The President tried to say that Al-Qaïda had taken a perfectly good religion – indeed, he called it a ‘religion of love and peace’! – and had twisted it, and had warped it into a religion of hatred.

His whole performance was so flawed, so very flawed. To start with, he showed that he had absolutely no understanding of Islam, no understanding of what motivates Muslims, and no knowledge of what the Qur’an says very clearly about us infidels. No, Mr President! No! Muslims are not our friends! They say so! Indeed, it says so in the Qur’an itself, the book that Muslims hold so dear! And NO again, Mr President! Al-Qaïda has not bastardized the message of Islam. On the contrary, Al-Qaïda takes the message of the Prophet Muhammad and the message of the Qur’an very seriously indeed. Al-Qaïda’s message is the true message of Islam. You had better believe it, Mr President! You, too, Mr Bair! Islam must be recognized for what it is: It is a competing civilization to Western civilization, competing in all respects!

What the President should have said that day is this: We were at war neither with Islam nor with Muslims. That would have been true. But he should have gone on to say that it is abundantly clear the Islam and Muslims are at war with America, and by extension the West. That would also have been true. If he had done this, he would surely have been able to galvanize the West in its entirety, for it was plain to see that 9/11 was not just an attack on America, but an attack on liberal democracy. If he had done this, he would have unified the West at a stroke! Furthermore, he would have displayed true leadership.

All further policies should have stemmed from the simple fact that Islam was at war with the West.

Very unfortunately, this was not done; so the ridiculous concept of ‘Islamism’ was born – an idea conceived to let Muslims off the hook, and to let our leaders off the hook, too. This way, they could start to wage their ‘War on Terror’. This war is one which is destined to go on and on and on. The terror they refer to is actually the Jihad in action. The jihad, or holy war, is the tool used by Muslims worldwide to bring Islam to the rest of what Muslims consider the ‘chaotic, jahiliyyic, un-Islamized regions of the world. We should note, and with urgency, that the jihad in history has been employed with great success wherever it has been waged.

Our leaders steadfastly refuse to accept this simple fact. Mssrs Bush and Blair, please start listening to the people, and please, please, please grow a spine! Accept the inevitable, accept what will sometime have to be accepted if the West is to survive, namely that the Islamic world is at war with the West and all its values. You cannot, you simply cannot, duck out of this one, for to do so is a dereliction of your duties. Your first duty is to protect the very system that brought you into office – democracy; and in doing so, protect the people who entrusted you with the power you have over them. Till now, you have failed your electorates! Till now, you have failed to identify the enemy! Till now, you have therefore failed to do anything meaningful to stop the jihad, to stop the Islamization of the West!

You are failing to protect democracy! You are therefore failing the people!

©Mark Alexander