I really have quite an exhaustive internal debate about posting anything of a political nature on this blog, mainly because my experience with politics is that getting anything constructive done usually involves a lot of gnashing of teeth and rending of garments.
Leah and I caught the tail end of an interview last night in which some pundit was talking about the current Muslim uproar over the depictions of Mohammed published in the Danish press. CNN or MSNBC or wherever it was had a split screen in which one side was occupied by the guest and the other side displayed taped footage of a furious mob setting fire to the Danish embassy in Damascus.
The interviewee mentioned a point that has been brought up numerous times and is a central tenet of the debate over the nature of and provenence of radical Islam, which is, Islam has never had its reformation. Which is not to say, of course, that tyranny doesn’t still exist under the names of the world’s reformed religions. The issue on everyone’s mind is whether Islam’s clerics can lead their followers — moderates and radicals alike — to a place where suicide bombing, kidnapping, and terror are no longer acceptable ways to exert influence.
I’m just trying to figure out how to explain all of this to Ava. I suppose I’d begin by trying to make her understand how lucky she is to live in a place where she has so many freedoms, and how those freedoms weren’t always there for everyone in our country. That’ll be the easy part. From there it’s on to a description of the religious, ethnic, and sexual intolerance that pockmark the United States’ development. If she can grasp what a terrible, difficult history her own country has endured, maybe she can begin to see what a monumental task the Muslim world has ahead of it and why it’s so important that they succeed.