Jihad continues - with rockets and mass communication

From GLORIA, by Barry Rubin, August 5, 2008:

...There was a time when Europe often behaved in ways parallel to that of Muslim-majority countries today. ...it's true there are parallels between Western and Middle Eastern societies. But even leaving aside quite important doctrinal religious issues the difference is that things far in the past in Western ones still exist in Muslim-majority counterparts. Crusades ended eight centuries ago; Jihad continues.

...progressive opinion, intellectuals, governments, even much of the Christian churches themselves, fought for progress in the West. They didn't say, "These are our sacred practices, our lifestyle and thus must remain forever unchanged." They didn't let fear of being labeled "Christianophobic" paralyze them.

...four centuries of rethinking, struggle, and debate were needed to create contemporary Western democratic society. Such processes have, at best, barely begun in the contemporary Middle East.

... secularism is almost a hanging offense in the Middle East and democracy, as it is understood in the West, is deemed inappropriate. Much of Europe's cultural production of Europe in the sixteenth through eighteenth century could not be produced and widely accepted in the Arabic-speaking world today.

...[a] struggle between the old and new societies characterized much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, yet the trend was steady. Perhaps fascism (arguably Communism) and World War Two were, respectively, the final reactionary movements and last struggle. Yet victory required 500 years of rethinking and education.

There's no such history in the Middle East and several additional problems block change toward moderation and democracy here. ... the big problem is that [Islamic doctrine] remains so powerful and hegemonic. Arab nationalism is anti-democratic, repressive, and statist. Islamists seek a somewhat revised version of the eighth century, albeit with rockets and mass communication.

It is also worse because Middle East regimes and revolutionaries know Western history. ...They know what happened to Soviet bloc dictatorships ... they have weapons, technology, new means of organization and communication to block change through persuasion and threat. This point applies as much to Iran's Islamist rulers as to Syria's pretend-pious ones or Saudi Arabia's Wahhabi monarchs.

... there's a powerful, growing movement--radical Islamism--posing an alternative to modernism. The question is not merely of tiny, marginalized al-Qaida but also the governments of Iran, Syria, and Sudan; the Saudi regime; powerful mainstream societal influences, Hamas and Hizballah; the Muslim Brotherhoods, and many others.

In comparison, while there are courageous individual liberals, there's no real liberal party anywhere in the Middle East, no liberal-controlled media or liberal proselytizing university. In Egypt the liberal organization has been taken over by the Muslim Brotherhood...

...Anyone who doesn't understand history is doomed to be battered by it.