Sidelining the loud-mouthed cultural warriors

He concludes that the rhetoric of cultural (and, indeed, military) jihad on both sides deploys:

... spurious historical and cultural references to justify what are fundamentally prejudiced and ignorant views, and all twist actuality to fit their ideas.

As time goes by, the loudest voices from both camps are the most extreme. Caught in the middle are the vast majority of people, who just want to get on with their lives and who are quite happy to live with people who don't share their culture or religion.

Still, the neocons did get one thing right: the Western policy of sponsoring allegedly moderate despots to rule Muslim-majority states will backfire as it has in the past. What they got wrong was the idea that the only way to convince Muslims to adopt Western-style liberal democracy was to bomb them into the Stone Age.

When one looks at the Muslim regimes and leaders deemed acceptable to Western interests, one can immediately recognise why so many in the Muslim world are resentful. The tsunami of often absurd eulogies that followed the assassination of former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto is a case in point.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Bernard Henri-Levy speaks of:

... a beautiful woman. A visible, indeed a conspicuously, spectacularly visible woman ... with her face uncovered, unveiled.

Is Levy for real? Does he seriously believe that the most suitable woman to rule a Muslim- majority state is one who makes his imagination run wild? Would he write such words about a female Western leader, say Margaret Thatcher?

And now the largest political party in Pakistan is led by a 19-year-old who doesn't speak a single Pakistani dialect and who seems to be more popular among female Facebook fans than Pakistani voters.

During a recent visit to France to sign a nuclear energy agreement, recently rehabilitated Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi was quoted as making this request of his hosts:

I want my tent to be erected near Elysee Palace. I want to meet 200 attractive French women there.

If this is the calibre of secular leadership the West expects the citizens of Muslim-majority states to put up with, is it any wonder so many are prepared to do the unthinkable and give religious parties a try?

If the West can do anything constructive, it is to encourage those Muslim communities tempted to flirt with Islamist politics to choose the kind of Islamists chosen by Turkish voters. They aren't really Islamists at all, but rather cultural conservatives who want their nation to return to its Muslim heritage in the same manner that Western conservatives speak of their own societies' Judeo-Christian heritage.

And what sensible people from all sides can do is marginalise the loud- mouthed cultural warriors whose conspiratorial world view is conspiring to destroy us all.