But in the end, nobody will be willing to blow themselves up to kill people who have left them alone.
I do not share your faith - because people have very very different notions of what "being left alone" means. As it happens, we cannot "leave Muslims alone", no matter what policies we now pursue, because their idea of being left alone would require a complete revolution in current geo-political realities.
What realities? For example:
Globalization is happening. Nobody can stop it.
Globalization pushes our success into their face, pointing out the dire contradition between historical and Islam-promised Muslim success and current Muslim failure along so many lines.
Israel exists. Unless we agree to destroy it for them, they will not consider themselves "left alone".
The question of whether a Palestinian state comes into being in what borders is a huge red herring, because the Muslim world doesn't give a tinker's dam for the welfare of the Palestinians. In fact, if you listen to the Arabs, you will notice that a Palestinian state is always spoken of among them not a desirable goal to be pursued, but an immense concession to Israel to be granted reluctantly, or better yet, refused indignantly.
Russia controls Chechnya, India controls half of Kashmir, the US controls Afghanistan, and now the US occupies Iraq too. Again, they are not being "left alone" due to their geopolitical weakness and utter dysfunction. A huge grievance with all Arabs - except most Iraqis, who are quite bitter about how the Arab world sided with Saddam and didn't care how many Iraqis he killed.
The US is not likely to change any of these ways "we're not leaving them alone;" and we couldn't change most of them if we tried. Therefore the Muslim world is going to feel more and more "not left alone" - until they have a change of attitude and stop looking for someone else to blame all their problems on. |
