Waffle by any other name
When will people start to realize that Islam and democracy are totally incompatible? It's that simple! Clear thinking is what is needed, not all this academic hooey.

America's misreading of the Arab world—and our current misadventure in Iraq—may have really begun in 1950. That was the year a young University of London historian named Bernard Lewis visited Turkey for the first time. Lewis, who is today an imposing, white-haired sage known as the “doyen of Middle Eastern studies” in America (as a New York Times reviewer once called him), was then on a sabbatical. Granted access to the Imperial Ottoman archives—the first Westerner allowed in—Lewis recalled that he felt “rather like a child turned loose in a toy shop, or like an intruder in Ali Baba's cave.” But what Lewis saw happening outside his study window was just as exciting, he later wrote. There in Istanbul, in the heart of what once was a Muslim empire, a Western-style democracy was being born. Bernard Lewis Revisited: What if Islam isn't an obstacle to democracy in the Middle East but the secret to achieving it? by Michael Hirsh (Senior Editor of Newsweek)

Mark Alexander