al-Democrazy

The underlying premise of the democracy project is the former sense of “civilization.” As I argued at the time, the real world is the latter. And now, five years removed from the Abdul Rahman case, five more years of intensive, costly American entanglement with Afghanistan, Paul Marshall gives us the harrowing plight of Said Musa. When he told the Afghan court he was a Christian man, no Afghan defense lawyer would have anything to do with him — except the one who spat on him. He was thrown in jail as an apostate among 400 Afghan Muslims, and he has since been beaten, mocked, deprived of sleep, derisively referred to as “Jesus Christ,” and sexually abused. And just as no Afghan lawyer was willing to aid an apostate, the Afghan sharia state declined to aid him — refusing him access to foreign counsel. We think of this as an affront to civilization. They, on the other hand, think they have their own civilization, and that our civilization and Said Musa are affronts to it.

The affront here is our own betrayal of our own principles. The Islamic democracy project is not democratizing the Muslim world. It is degrading individual liberty by masquerading sharia, in its most draconian form, as democracy. The only worthy reason for dispatching our young men and women in uniform to Islamic countries is to destroy America’s enemies. Our armed forces are not agents of Islamic social justice, and stabilizing a sharia state so its children can learn to hate the West as much as their parents do is not a mission the American people would ever have endorsed. It is past time to end this failed experiment.