Same planet, different worlds

I disagree with the ambassador if he meant that he has a lot of respect for Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia's human rights record is among the worst in the world. Women have few rights. Christians, Hindus, Buddists, Atheists and even Shia Muslims are repressed in terms of how they are allowed to express their views of God.

The political leadership is unaccountable to periodic competitive elections. In other words, Saudi Arabia is a dictatorship. To be blunt, Saudi Arabia is a human rights hell hole that a compassionate person wouldn't wish his worst enemy to live in.

I hope that this ambassador was simply expressing "respect" for individual, progressive, human rights supporting Saudis, not the repressive and repulsive totalitarian mentalies of the Saudi state.

As to the issue of "how fundamentally different the Islamic mind is from the Western mind," think of how remarkably the "Western mind" has changed in the past centuries.

Several generations ago, "the Western mind" existed along side the world's largest slaveholding nation: The United States in 1860.

One century ago, "the Western mind" didn't give Women the right to vote and African-Americans couldn't exercise their right to vote in many parts of the country without risking death at the hands of white supremacists. This didn't really change until around the time I was born, in the mid-1960s.

In the early 1970s, intellectuals looked at the dictatorships of Portugal and Spain as a reflection of the Southern European mentality. But then in the mid to late 1970s, both nations transitioned to democracy.

In the mid-1980s intellectuals looked at the military dictatorship in South Korea and said, "It's the Korean culture that is so different from the Western culture that precludes South Korea from becoming a democracy." By 1990 South Korea was a democracy.

And we can also talk about how Imperial Japan, Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy didn't seem like fertile ground for democracy until it seemed like obvious ground for democracy by the 1960s.

I'd say that anyone who takes a "the way things are now are the way things have always been and will always be" probably shouldn't be conducting US foreign policy.

SteveM,

I think Turkey respresents better possibilities for a society that is 95 to 99 percent Muslim. That's not to say that Turkey is as free a society as is, say, Ireland or Belgium or the United States. But certainly if a westerner like myself were forced to choose between living in Saudi Arabia or Turkey, Turkey would be the obvious choice.

And I believe it is possible that Turkey's political/social culture can evolve to become better over time (it can also evolve to become worse).

Perhaps the reason why Turkey is a better nation, in human rights terms, than Saudi Arabia is that the Muslims of Turkey have been bathed in decades of Kemalist secularism. Or maybe its because Turkey hold periodic competitive elections. Or maybe it's because Turkey is historically and geographically closer to Europe. Or because it is non-Arab and Arab culture is a bigger factor than Islamic theology.

I'm just tossing out some guesses.

But the bottom line is that I don't want my criticisms of Saudi Arabia and the "stoning infidels is part of their culture and we must respect all cultures" multiculturalist bunk to make it sound like I don't think Islam can co-exist with freedom and democracy.

In my opinion, some kinds of Islam can co-exist with freedom and democracy while other kinds of Islam can not. One might respond, "Islam is a single religion, not a dozen religions." To that I would disagree in the sense that Islam is practiced differently by Irshad Manji (a Canadian Lesbian Muslim reformer) than is practiced by my Aunt's in-laws (who live in the Istanbul, Turkey community) than is practiced by the Suicide bomber in the Gaza strip.

The role of the West is to keep the option of killing the Muslims that fall into the latter camp while encouraging the Muslims that fall into the first two camps, letting them know that they won't have to face the extremists without our assistance (unless they want to go it alone.)

How numerous are the Islamic extremists compare to the "Practical Muslims" (as I would call them)? I don't know.

Which form of Islam gets more support from the Koran? Probably the extremist vintage.

Still, I don't think the West should take a deterministic view of the world's Muslims.

Amir Taheri, in the column below, states more clearly what I was trying to communicate.

France’s pro-U.S. turn on Iraq
by Amir Teheri

One key promise that Nicolas Sarkozy had made during his presidential election campaign last spring was to "correct foreign-policy mistakes" made by his predecessor Jacques Chirac.

Chief among these was Chirac's desperate efforts to prevent Iraq's liberation from Saddam Hussein's regime of terror. Chirac failed to save his friend's regime but managed to sour relations with the United States, Great Britain and more than 40 other democracies that joined the Coalition of the Willing to liberate Iraq in 2003.

We can count on the Ambassador to go on to take a huge check from the Saudis to defend their "hard to understand" Islamic worldview. It's not so hard to understand at all. These people are crazy, and this man and his boss are enablers for the sake of their oil interests.

I'll be interested to hear what the Ambassador had to say, Rod. I think that we need to understand Islamic nations better since we've chosen a foreign policy path that links us so closely to these nations. It's, especially, important as we take on the role of striking unfriendly governments followed by nation building to form democracies that are friendly to us and our interests.

Anybody check out Spengler's take on Lilla's article?

I, too, look forward to your Rod's take once he can freely comment "On the Record" on his session with the former Saudi Ambassador.

Rock's comments at the top were good. Saudi Arabia claims to be our ally and friend, while being single-handedly responsible for more evangelizing for radical Islam than any other entity.

Arguably, Saudi Arabia has bankrolled or given birth to more terrorist cells than any other nation on Earth, to say nothing of the hate literature they have been distributing in the U.S. and Canada in the guise of "educational literature."

I'm sure there are enlightened Saudis, even in the Royal Family. We need them to do a lot more to destroy the cognitive dissonance between their claims to be our friend and ally and their destructive and deceitful actions.