Question

Submitted by David Farer (Israel), Mar 4, 2015 at 01:57

Ah, but Holy Brother, what IS moderate Islam? Do you want Muslims to deemphasize, postpone, or recreate Jihad as a kind of eschaton, thus enabling everybody to live together, BUT!!! that they simultaneously keep the Sharia notions that a woman has no rights, that a kafir is evil, that her clitoris and his head must be chopped off, and a thousand other examples of legalized viciousness? Jihad is not the only problem I observe in those societies. Surely Saudia is better than Iran, but it is not what John Locke had in mind. A rigorously enforced set of legal rights for everybody is the solution, and it is what we should mean by secularism - and these rights take precedence over any religious practice or law.

Back to the basics of classical liberal thinking! Dust off your Locke, your J. S. Mill, and your Isaiah Berlin books, read them from cover to cover, and let them suffuse your thinking and your writing.

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