Freedom and Virtue - Islam and The West

From SF Gate

Behind the physical attacks on the West and its allies is an intellectual attack -- an assault not just on what America does but also on what America is.

So far, the U.S. government's military response in Afghanistan, in Iraq and elsewhere has been reasonably effective against terrorism and its sponsors. But our intellectual response has been weak.

This matters because ultimately it is not enough to shut down the al Qaeda training camps. We must also stop the "jihad factories," the mosques and educational institutions that are turning out tens of thousands of aspiring terrorists and suicide bombers. We cannot kill all these people. We have to change their minds.

Yet America is making few converts in the Muslim world.

The problem is that we have not effectively answered the strongest version of the Islamic critique of the United States. Usually Americans seek to defend their society by appealing to its shared principles. Thus our leaders remind us that America is a free society, or a prosperous society, or a diverse and pluralistic culture, or a nation that gives women the same rights as men. The most intelligent Islamic critics acknowledge all this, but they dismiss it as worthless triviality.

As they say, read the whole thing. Great article.

He ends with this:

Moreover, it is not the case that Islamic fundamentalists care about virtue while we in the West care only about freedom. We, too, care about virtue. Like them, we seek the good society; but we disagree with the Islamic fundamentalists about the best means to achieve this goal.

In the Western view, freedom is the necessary precondition for virtue. Without freedom, there is no virtue.
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