John Burgess of Crossroads Arabia has given me the heads-up on a bit of good news. It’s being reported that the ban in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia on women’s driving is to be lifted:
Britain’s The Daily Telegraph reports that the Saudi government has at last showered its blessings upon women and granted them permission to drive. The government had, in recent years, been saying that it wasn’t a legal or religious mandate that kept women from driving, but that society and custom weren’t quite ready for the change. Some women called them on it by trying to obtain drivers licenses from government offices; other got behind the wheel and just drove. All were frustrated because lower level authorities were under the impression that, in fact, it was illegal.
If it turns out to be true, although it may seem like a small step I’m sure it will look huge to the Saudis and, particularly, to Saudi women.
Saudi society is a conservative one that has travelled an enormous distance in just a couple of generations. Needless to say they still have a long way to go but this little sign of progress would be welcome.
I’ve heard that a group of American women volunteers will be flying over to instruct them in the additional skills of driving while applying make-up and talking on the cell phone.
True story. I once saw a woman in Chicago rush hour traffic simultaneously driving, putting on makeup, talking on a cell phone, reading the newspaper, drinking a cup of coffee, and disciplining two kids in the back seat.
Progress for the rest of us will have been made when no Saudi can drive; because nobody there has a car. And when Saudi doesn’t have any schools, hospitals, power stations, shops, reservoirs or any other manifestation of anything later than the 8th century where they would prefer to live. And where they would prefer everyone else to live.
While one stone stands atop another in Saudi Arabia, they will not let the decent people of the world have peace. The same applies, in lesser degree, to the rest of the Dar al-Islam.
Fletcher:
I think that’s a remarkably stupid thing to say. Whatever your opinion of Saudi Arabia, or Islam in general, you cannot know that progress there is impossible, and you cannot morally or rationally generalize to an entire population, some of whom at least are risking life and limb to bring about the liberalization that all decent people hope to see.
Mr. Reynolds, perhaps you can tell me why you think that a religion that has made no progress in over twelve hundred years towards tolerance (in fact it is less tolerant now than in the Middle Ages) is going, all of a sudden and of its own accord, to start doing so?
Islam has been at war with the rest of the world since its founding. This war is a commandment in its most unholy book, as is lying about the fact (or any other) to infidels to gain advantage. It is time, and way past time, that the West carried on with what Charles Martel started and John of Austria continued – and ended the menace of Islam. Permanently. In a similar way to the methods of Rome when in conflict with Carthage. The difference is that now we can do it better.
I think they can evolve because we’ve seen the same thing in Christianity. The Bible is every bit as loopy as the Koran. The difference is that Christians have found ways to studiously ignore the crazier bits and focus on the more useful stuff. Muslims in Turkey and Indonesia, to take the two easiest examples, seem able to do the same with the Koran. Turkish Muslims fought with us in Korea. They stood with us against the USSR. Turks have actively helped Israel.
If Turkish Muslims can find a way to square the Koran with NATO membership and representative democracy I’m at a loss to understand your conclusion that the entire religion needs to be exterminated.
Mr. Reynolds, in Turkey the Islamists aren’t in charge. It’s really that simple. For some reason I don’t pretend to understand, the Turkish military appear to have decided that fundamentalist lunacy is not going to prevail. They have fundie nutcases; they just don’t get to make any decisions. I don’t know for sure; but Turkey appears to be the only place in the world where the military, rather than forming a dictatorship, prevent it.
In virtually the entire Middle East, the lunatics are in charge of the asylum. In Pakistan, they may well soon be – and Pakistan has WMD.
“Moderate Islam” is semantically equivalent to “Islam that hasn’t won yet”. And in Europe, including my country the UK, they may well win – by outbreeding the native population if in no other way. In the UK, because the Moslems are concentrated in small areas they have political influence out of all proportion to their numbers – try getting to become an MP in Bradford without courting the Moslem vote, for example.
An example of the sort of thing that this leads to is that it looks as if in a town in Britain (I forget where) the local mosques are going to get planning permission to install loudspeakers for the “call to the faithful” five times per day starting at 5:30 AM. This in the same town where, on grounds of environmental nuisance, the ringing of church bells is banned.
Little by little…
. . . in Turkey the Islamists aren’t in charge
Exactly. Which rather proves the pojnt that they don’t always win. That other options are possible. That, in short, your reaction to Islam is hysterical.
Mr. Reynolds, the problem is essentially one of time. Turkey is a secular state, and has been for over a hundred years, and has a powerful force dedicated to making sure it stays that way. Incidentally; Iraq, although very ugly and unpleasant if you were a dissident, was also secular – now, it looks very much as if it’s going to turn into yet another Moslem theocracy if it doesn’t stay an anarchic hellhole.
It has been said, by greater minds than mine, that greater and greater power is being concentrated in the hands of smaller and smaller numbers of individuals – which logically ends in the power to destroy civilisation, or all life on Earth, being in the hands of one individual. There are several ways this could happen; and all of them appear to have a possible time of emergence of around 2030-2040. It may well not be my problem by then – but is it acceptable to have even the smallest chance of any one of several million death-worshipping chiliasts having that sort of power in his hands? The question answers itself.
To put this in more concrete terms; Islam has a subcult of death-worshippers who wouldn’t mind at all taking the rest of humanity with them. This part of their so-called religion has to be extirpated, completely, or humanity won’t survive this century. There are only two ways of arranging this; one is for Islam to do five hundred years or so of growing up in twenty. Fat chance. The other way is, bluntly, to kill them all – or at the very least, to give that religion a shock from which it won’t recover. We just don’t have time for Islam to grow up in the way Christianity did.
Otherwise, the suicide cultist of 2040 won’t have a Semtex jacket; he will have a vial of replicating nanoassemblers. And how many of those does it take to destroy not only the human race, but all its works and in fact all life on Earth?
One.