Point out Islamic hypocrisy with respect.

Submitted by Pradeep Mohanty (United States), Apr 5, 2009 at 16:03

Dear Dr Pipes: Let not fundamentalists usurp the world 'respect'. In my son's kindergarten class, 'respect' is preached as a fundamental value throughout the day. So if President Obama talks of respect for the Muslim world, he may not necessarily be doing anything wrong.

If you read the news stories around the world, there is a common theme -- non-Muslim governments are bending over backwards to appease Muslims. All of us find something wrong in this scenario. On a per capita basis the contribution of present-day Islamic countries to science, art, literature, and peace to the world is indeed very low. This is notwithstanding the enormous oil wealth that many of these countries possess. I shudder to think what the state of education/art/culture/science had been in the countries of western Europe, USA, or non-Islamic Asia (such as India) if these societies had the amount of oil money that Islamic countries have.

But there is no option but to treat Islamic societies with respect. Treating them with disrespect is no solution. Starting wars with them is no a solution even less. When Obama makes a positive gesture to Iran and Iran promptly rejects it, we win a point. The rest of the world has to break the Jihadic thought process -- one thought at a time, one highschooler at a time, one woman at a time, and one person at a time. It is a race of non-violence against violence, of peace against war, of symmetry (golden rule) against non-symmetry, universal-catholicism against sectoral-selfishness, and of democracies against theocracies. The hypocrisy of Islamic leaders should be highlighted every single moment of every single day. But with respect.

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