STANDARD EXAMINER: Islamists are a diverse lot. Some are what diplomats like to call "violent extremists." They want to kill you. Others are less eager to shed blood, more confident that by mastering electoral politics, manipulating international organizations and designing effective public relations campaigns they can achieve their objectives. What are those objectives? Islamism implies a commitment to the imperative of Islamic power. Hassan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood articulated the basic idea succinctly:
It is the nature of Islam to dominate, not to be dominated, to impose its law on all nations and to extend its power to the entire planet.If those championing Islamism were only stateless terrorist groups and tin-pot dictators, their geo-political significance would be minimal. But the regime that rules Iran is dedicated to waging what it calls a global Islamic revolution. And in Saudi Arabia, the state religion is Wahhabism, a strain of Islam that preaches the inferiority of infidels and the rejection of Muslims who do not share Wahhabi ideals.
These regimes float atop an ocean of oil, a commodity that is valuable thanks to those the Islamists despise. It was the Western mind that figured out how to pump oil out of the ground and refine it into fuels, including those used in internal combustion engines, another history-bending Western invention.
If there were even one oil-rich, Muslim-majority nation solidly committed to liberal democratic values, to freedom of religion and speech, to tolerance and minority rights, the challenges of the 21st century would not be so formidable. But there is no such nation. Read on and comment » | Clifford D. May* | Scripps Howard News Service | Thursday, March 08, 2012
* Clifford D. May is president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a policy institute focusing on national security and foreign policy. Email cliff@defenddemocracy.org.
