Polygamy in Modern Africa

The spread of Islam through many parts of Africa established a societal pattern of polygamy which has lasted for several centuries. In 2014 in Kenya, a country in which Muslims are less than 50% of the population, the government passed laws declaring polygamy legal. The Muslim minority had persuaded a few non-Muslim legislators to vote for the bill, which then passed.

The traditional versions of Sharia law which shape Islam in Africa allow a man to have more than one wife, but a woman, according to this law, may have only one husband. Kenyan journalist Moses Wasamu writes:

Kenyans have many approaches to marriage, and in March their government consolidated types under one law that went into effect this week. One change has drawn the lion's share of attention: legalizing polygamy for men — even if the first wife protests.

Africa has a so-called "polygamy belt" that stretches from Senegal to Tanzania. A 2009 government survey indicated that 13 percent of Kenyan women were in polygamous relationships.

The passage of the law has caused concerns among non-Muslims in Kenya. Wasamu reports that non-Muslims predict that

the law will erode recent gains against HIV, and lead to more divorces and court fights over inheritances.

While the Muslims are a minority in Kenya, they hold significant political power there. In some other African nation-states, Muslims are in the majority, and encounter little significant resistance to polygamy laws. While Kenyan Muslims celebrate the polygamy law as a victory for Islam, others still see hope for Kenya:

James Fenske, an Oxford economist who studies African polygamy, thinks church leaders needn't worry. The law will have little effect since polygamy has been declining in Kenya for decades, he said. "I see no reason to expect this trend to reverse."

Barack Obama, Sr. spent most of his life in Kenya, with only a brief stay in the United States. It was during that stay that he married Ann Dunham and became the father of Barack Obama, Jr. - who would later be President of the United States.

When he married Ann Dunham, he was already married to a woman in Kenya. Before his death, he would marry several more women. Barack Obama, Sr., was a practicing polygamist, being married to more than one woman at the same time.

His son, Barack Obama, Jr., the President of the United States, is, however, a monogamist.

A Brief Moment of Hope: the Arab Spring

The Arab Spring has a clear beginning point in time: 17 December 2010. An unemployed Tunisian committed suicide by setting himself on fire, an apparent protest against the bureaucratic regulations which prevented him from trying to earn a living by selling fruit at a roadside stand. Brian Short writes:

The Arab Spring — which began in December 2010 and included Arab, African, and Iranian populations — started in Tunisia. The month before, a street vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi had doused himself with gasoline and set himself on fire to protest police abuse. Bouazizi had been bullied and beaten by Tunisian police for years. They harassed him constantly about not having a vendor’s permit and demanded bribes to let him continue his daily work.

The wide-scale movement triggered by his death, however, was not about the need for fewer regulations or the benefits which a free-market economy would bring to the residents of the Middle East. The Arab Spring would be a broader response to tyranny.

In quick succession, tyrants in Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt resigned or were removed from office.

Although its starting point is precise, there is no precise point at which the Arab Spring turned into the Arab Winter - the point at which the hope for freedom was dashed and at which one set of tyrants simply replaced another set. Like the Prague Spring of 1968 and the Spring Revolutions of 1848, the Arab Spring was crushed.

The details of the uprisings during the Arab Spring varied slightly from country to country - Libya, Egypt, Turkey, Syria - depending on the grievances of the residents: Brian Short reports that in Turkey, protests addressed a spectrum of topics, "censorship, police abuse,"

an unpopular ban on alcohol sales and consumption, and what many protestors saw as the creeping de-secularization of Turkish society.

The Justice and Development Party's influence on Turkey seemed to be in opposition to the modernizations introduced by Mustafa Kemal, known popularly as "Ataturk" and the leader who brought Turkey into contemporary world. The Turks of the Arab Spring were protesting an Islamist political trend that seems to be dragging them several centuries backward.

Present at the start of the Arab Spring was at least one of the causes of its failure: lack of a cohesive vision for what might replace the toppled dictators. An unharmonized mixture of views held by the protestors was

one of the problems that has kept many people's hopes for the Arab Spring from being realized: protestors' inability to cooperate with each once the revolution is over.

Sadly, the Arab Winter slowly emerged as the reality that would replace the Arab Spring. The Muslim Brotherhood replaced several fallen dictators, imposing versions of Sharia law as harsh, or harsher, than the regimes which it replaced.

The new autocrats, some of whom grabbed power via seemingly democratic elections held in an atmosphere of post-revolutionary chaos, and the Muslim Brotherhood as their political organization, have quickly sapped hope from many who had taken to the streets during the Arab Spring.

The attempted revolutions lacked not only a unified political vision for what would be instituted after the overthrow, but lacked also an attempt to address the cultural and societal deficits which have prevented the Middle East from establishing civil liberties. The traditions of this civilization are not a welcoming environment for the establishment of a republic with freely elected representatives.

Until foundational understandings - the value of each human life, personal freedom and individual liberty, the protection of the dignity of each man and woman - are introduced and take root, it will be difficult to establish the types of government the protestors desired. The governments are the symptoms; the deeper cultural values are the causes.

Is Democracy the Answer?

Well-known is Woodrow Wilson's slogan that America's entry into WWI would make the world "safe for democracy." While effective at rousing the emotions, President Wilson's slogan raises more questions than it answers. In hindsight, the USA's involvement in WWI was perhaps more about creating opportunities for Wilson to implement his domestic policies; the war gave him the excuse to operate in a heavy-handed manner as he intervened into the private matters of citizens.

Among the questions raised by Wilson's slogan are these: if making the world safe for democracy is a good thing, what are the anticipated benefits of this democracy? will democracy alone generate these benefits, or are other factors necessary? if so, what are those factors? if not, should we anticipate these benefits in any and every instance of democracy?

Historian and economist Hans-Hermann Hoppe argues that democracy can be, and has been, overrated. Expectations that democracy, by itself, will produce a wide variety of benefits are expectations likely to be disappointed. Concrete evidence is as recent as the Middle East in the early twenty-first century, but Hoppe points to the First World War:

World War I marks one of the great watersheds of modern history. With its end the transformation of the entire Western world from monarchical rule and sovereign kings to democratic-republican rule and sovereign people that began with the French Revolution was completed. Until 1914, only three republics had existed in Europe - France, Switzerland and after 1911, Portugal; and of all major European monarchies only the United Kingdom could be classified as a parliamentary system, i. e., one in which supreme power was vested in an elected parliament. Only four years later, after the United States had entered the European war and decisively determined its outcome, monarchies all but disappeared, and Europe along with the entire world entered the age of democratic republicanism.

So it would seem that Woodrow Wilson's plan to make the world safe for democracy yielded fruit. But which type of fruit was it? Readers educated in the western world are trained to answer that this was progress, that democracy was spread, and that dignity was granted to millions. Many readers will take it as axiomatic that democracy is good, and if a nation embraces, or is embraced by, a democratic system, then this is an improvement.

There are some facts which might cause us to pause and consider more carefully these assumptions about democracy.

In the specific case of WWI, America's entry into the war may have prolonged it and increased the death count. Naturally, dealing with counterfactual hypotheses, e.g. what would have happened if the United States hadn't entered the war, is imprecise speculation and not rigorous history. But there is plausible and persuasive evidence to suggest that the stalemate situation of mid-1917 would have led to ceasefires and negotiations, if the USA had convincingly declared itself neutral and had refused to engage in the war effort, and that such ceasefires could have occurred well before November 1918.

Democracy, then, might be responsible for millions of battlefield deaths.

Some might argue that the regrettable loss of life was, however, in the service of attaining more democracy in the world. The net increase in democracy, as a blessing to the human race, might ensure that those deaths were not in vain.

Yet that assertion is far from self-evident, viewing the course of events after 1918.

If we look at the United States, which Wilson alleged to be the font of such blessings, we see that the century after WWI has yielded persistent economic problems: periods of stagnant or falling wages, massive public-sector debt, problematic private-sector debt, unpaid and unpayable future obligations in the forms of entitlements, and others. Also present are non-economic problems: high or rising rates of divorce, illegitimacy, and a strangling bureaucratic regulatory culture. Tensions exist along racial, ethnic, cultural, linguistic, and religious lines.

Those nations which followed the path of American democracy have experienced similar outcomes - in some cases milder, in other cases worse. Ethnic disintegration struck Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. Economic decay hobbled Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Ireland.

Western democracy cannot be defended by comparing it to the USSR, as Hoppe notes:

Further, the collapse of the Soviet Empire represented not so much a triumph of democracy as the bankruptcy of the idea of socialism, and it also contained an indictment against the American (Western) system of democratic - rather than dictatorial - socialism.

None of this, let us be clear, is meant to say that democracy is evil. There are real benefits which are made possible by democracy. Let us entertain this thesis: democracy by itself is insufficient.

The mere fact that one has instituted, within the territorial borders of some given nation-state, a republic with freely elected representatives, does not guarantee civil bliss and political justice and economic prosperity. On the contrary, democracy unaccompanied by other factors may merely place into the hands of people the ability to dismantle the beneficial aspects of their civilization.

The question which remains, then, is this: if democracy by itself is not sufficient to guarantee those anticipated benefits, what is necessary in addition to democracy?

Islam in History

In April 2014, Tony Blair gave a major policy speech titled “Why the Middle East Matters” in which he analyzed the major problems in that part of the world, and why the rest of the world cannot afford to ignore the trouble brewing there. As former British Prime Minister, Blair offers a perspective from outside the United States.

Social media and modern telecommunications have changed the dynamics, both within the Middle East, and between the Middle East and the rest of the world. Technological proliferation has enabled those extremist aspects within Islam to influence a much wider audience than ever before. These radical aspects of Islam have existed, in many cases, for centuries, but were confined to narrow alleys in the less cosmopolitan neighborhoods in the cities in the Middle East. Now those same radical elements use technology to reach millions.

A recent Hamas television broadcast to Palestinian children encouraged them to envision themselves “killing Jews” when they grew up and became adults. Blair addresses this militancy:

The threat of this radical Islam is not abating. It is growing. It is spreading across the world. It is destabilizing communities and even nations. It is undermining the possibility of peaceful co-existence in an era of globalization. And in the face of this threat we seem curiously reluctant to acknowledge it and powerless to counter it effectively.

This technological proliferation also blurs international borders. An imam named Abu Ammaar Yasir Qadhi made a series of statements in 2013 and 2014, encouraging Muslims to engage in a type of jihad in which “the life and property” of a non-Muslim were to be taken without hesitation. This imam studied in Saudi Arabia. Where did he make these statements? In Egypt? In Libya? In Syria? No, in Memphis, Tennessee.

For the most part, a very common sentiment is that the region may be important but it is ungovernable and therefore impossible and therefore we should let it look after itself.

Blair points out that it is tempting to abandon the Middle East as hopeless. Whether a mideast country suffers under a hardline Islamic government, or whether it suffers under a more secular dictatorship, it seems that this region of the world is doomed by its cultural and social structures to be dominated by tyrants. But, Blair warns, if we abandon the Middle East, it will continue to be an incubator for radical Islamic terrorism, which it will export to the rest of the world.

History offers reasons for hoping that a less violent and less tyrannical form of government can be found for at least some of the countries in the Middle East. The British Protectorate in Egypt, the British Mandate for Mesopotamia (Iraq), and the French Mandate for Syria and Lebanon are examples of a better pattern for governing in the region.

But governing the Middle East is only part of the puzzle. Solving the problem of Islam's influence on geopolitics is another part. As long as the establishment of a caliphate remains a concrete goal, and as long as jihad remains a specified means to achieve that goal, the Middle East will continue to export violence. Blair says:

It is in the Middle East that the future of Islam will be decided. By this I mean the future of its relationship with politics. This is controversial because the world of politics is uncomfortable talking about religion; because some will say that really the problems are not religious but political; and even because – it is true – that the largest Muslim populations are to be found outside the region not inside it.

The vocabulary of mideast demography demands nuanced attention. There is a significant difference between Islamic and Islamist. The former is a general adjective, the latter is a violent political ideology. Islamofascism and Islamism are roughly synonymous. People, places, things, ideas, and events properly labeled Islamic can be, and often are, moderate and peaceful. Those which are Islamist are militant and aggressive. Blair explains:

one of the frustrating things about this debate is the inadequacy of the terminology and the tendency for any short hand to be capable of misinterpretation, so that you can appear to elide those who support the Islamist ideology with all Muslims.

While some of the largest concentrations of Muslims are located outside the Middle East - in places like India and Indonesia and Dearborn, Michigan - the ideological center of Islam remains in the Middle East. Physically, Muslims still face Mecca from any point on the globe when they pray. For this reason, Blair says, the Middle East is the key to solving the Muslim problem, even if huge numbers of Muslims live elsewhere.

The reason this matters so much is that this ideology is exported around the world. The Middle East is still the epicenter of thought and theology in Islam.

Those outside the Middle East have long spoken of, and hoped for, significant evidence of moderate Islam. To be clear: moderate Muslims exist. In the Middle East, they are scattered from the highest levels of Saudi royalty to the most humble of the poor, with a few intellectuals in between. But in the Middle East, their numbers are not enough to influence the general direction of Islam, and they do not occupy sufficient positions of influence: even Saudi royals must acknowledge the influence of radical Islamic clerics.

Outside of the Middle East, elsewhere in the world, there are pockets of moderate Muslims. In North America, they are largely middle-class, middle-age, college-educated professionals living in suburbs in the Midwest. Again, however, they do not control the overall direction taken by formally organized Islam, or by informally shaped Islamic culture. As Blair notes, many Muslims

who are probably perfectly content to live and let live, in the same way that nowadays most Catholics and Protestants do, are caught in a vicious and often literal crossfire between competing exclusivist views of the ‘true’ Islam. Where the two views align, whatever their mutual antagonism, is in the belief that those who think differently are the ‘enemy’ either within or without.

Jihadist Muslims whose clear goal is the establishment of a caliphate have several powerful instruments at hand: funding, technological proliferation, their sheet numbers, and their ability to intimidate others into silence. In January 2014, in England, an Islamist named Abu Waleed gave a speech in which he suggested the organized segregation of, and discrimination against, “infidels” in his hoped-for caliphate. He would require non-Muslims to wear marked and demeaning clothing and shave their heads.

The fact that this Muslim voiced such ideas is, by itself, not cause for concern. There will always be someone somewhere voicing odd ideas - that is freedom of speech. But there is cause for concern in the fact that his speaking is funded, and proliferates with technology. He no longer represents only himself as a odd individual with bizarre ideas. He is the voice of a movement - and merely one of many such voices. Militant Islam's voice is loud. Moderate Islam is numerically small, and does not command funding and electronic media. Blair argues that militant Islam is more than merely bigoted or chauvinistic - it is dangerous:

For the last 40/50 years, there has been a steady stream of funding, proselytizing, organizing and promulgating coming out of the Middle East, pushing views of religion that are narrow minded and dangerous. Unfortunately we seem blind to the enormous global impact such teaching has had and is having.

Ibrahim Hooper is a public spokesman for CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Hooper has endorsed and promoted books written by Muhammad Asad, books which state that it is the right of a married Muslim husband to beat his wife. Hooper has likewise publicized a book by Jamal Badawi which endorses domestic violence against women, and a book by Paul Findley which explains polygamy as within the rights of a Muslim man.

Given the nature of such Islamist thought, and famous examples like the “Girl in the Blue Bra” who was publicly beaten in Cairo in December 2011, Muslims in the Middle East may attempt to throw off secular tyrants only to find themselves oppressed by Islamist tyrants - this phenomenon was expressed as the 'Arab Spring' turning into the Arab Winter. Blair phrases it thus:

Within the Middle East itself, the result has been horrible, with people often facing a choice between authoritarian Government that is at least religiously tolerant; and the risk that in throwing off the Government they don't like, they end up with a religiously intolerant quasi-theocracy.

In concrete and specific terms, when a shipment of arms, originally bound for the forces of Moammar Gadhafi in Libya, were diverted to anti-Gadhafi groups including al-Qaida elements, the U.S. Department of State allowed the diversion, hoping to topple the secular dictator. Gadhafi was indeed toppled, but into the ensuing power vacuum stepped the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaida, who used those arms to attack and kill U.S. diplomats in Benghazi in September 2012.

Take a step back and analyse the world today: with the possible exception of Latin America (leaving aside Hezbollah in the tri-border area in South America), there is not a region of the world not adversely affected by Islamism and the ideology is growing. The problems of the Mid East and North Africa are obvious. But look at the terror being inflicted in countries – Nigeria, Mali, Central African Republic, Chad and many others – across Sub Saharan Africa.

The Middle East is hamstrung by its extremists. While Islamists leverage technological proliferation, they do not encourage invention or entrepreneurship. The Middle East lags behind other areas of the world in terms of number of technological patents filed and new technology developed and brought to market. They lag in terms of technical education. Those who do receive a technological education often emigrate, if they can, causing a "brain-drain" as talent leaves that part of the world.

Extremism is possibly the single biggest threat to their ability to overcome the massive challenges of development today.

It would be a mistake to take a strictly Euro-American view of concerns about the Middle East. A more global perspective reveals the pattern. Islamist terrorists killed over 350 people, mostly children, at the Russian school in Beslan in 2004. Bali experienced terrorist bombings in 2002 and 2005; Islamist groups claimed responsibility. China has experienced violence at the hands of radical Muslims. Dozens and scores of further examples can be easily found.

In Central Asia, terrorist attacks are regular occurrences in Russia, whose Muslim population is now over 15%, and radical influences are stretching across the whole of the central part of Northern Asia, reaching even the Western province of Xinjiang in China.

To repeat the obvious truisms, not all Muslims are Arabs, and not all Arabs are Muslims. Yet CAIR persists in acting and speaking as if 'Muslim' and 'Arab' are synonyms. In the Middle East, there are large non-Muslim populations of Palestinians, Syrians, Iranians, Iraqis, Egyptians, and others. In North America, where Michigan has the highest concentration of Arab Americans in any U.S. state according to the Arab American Institute, more than half of the state's Arabs identify as non-Muslim.

While some non-Muslims have risen to prominence in the Middle East, Islam is still a decisive factor in the region's culture, society, and geo-politics.

Islamic unrest had overshadowed both Europe and the British Isles since 2000. The Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh was murdered by Mohammed Bouyeri in 2004; the murder was indisputably motivated by Islamofascist ideology, and Bouyeri was indisputably identified as a member of an Islamist terror cell. The publication of a few cartoons was taken as a pretext for rioting and violence; the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten was the victim of an exaggerated and disproportionate response. Germany, France, and England have similarly seen Islamic elements which use any occasion as a pretext for outbursts, and which finally begin instigating violence without even bothering to find any alleged instigating event as a flimsy excuse for their rioting.

The Muslim population in Europe is now over 40m and growing. The Muslim Brotherhood and other organizations are increasingly active and they operate without much investigation or constraint. Recent controversy over schools in Birmingham (and similar allegations in France) show heightened levels of concern about Islamist penetration of our own societies.

The irony, of course, is that Europe, and especially Britain, fostered the notions of freedom, the very notions which these Islamic elements are exploiting in their quest to end such freedom. In short, the Islamofascists are using the dynamics of free societies to bring an end to free societies.

The long list of incidents, of which only a few are mentioned here as examples - Nidal Malik Hasan killing unarmed victims in Fort Hood; Lee Boyd Malvo and John Allen Muhammad killing civilians in the Washington area; Hesham Mohamed Hadayet killing people in the Los Angeles airport in 2002; the Boston Marathon bombings of 2013 - are linked by Islamist ideology. Islam is the lens through which one sees and understands the unifying thread behind these killings. Yet, as Tony Blair points out, there exists

the absolutely rooted desire on the part of Western commentators to analyze these issues as disparate rather than united by common elements. They go to extraordinary lengths to say why, in every individual case, there are multiple reasons for understanding that this is not really about Islam, it is not really about religion; there are local or historic reasons which explain what is happening. There is a wish to eliminate the obvious common factor in a way that is almost willful. Now of course as I have said, there is always a context that is unique to each situation. There will naturally be a host of local factors that play a part in creating the issue. But it is bizarre to ignore the fact the principal actors in all situations, express themselves through the medium of religious identity or that in ideological terms, there is a powerful unifying factor based on a particular world view of religion and its place in politics and society.

Among the many factors which complicate any attempt to understand the role of Islam in the Middle East are the question of nomenclature and the question of categories.

Tony Blair already alluded, above, to the complexities of defining the words we use to discuss this region and its belief systems. Consider this bewildering set of words: Islam, Islamic, Islamist, Islamofascist. Try as we might to define them carefully and precisely, different people will still understand them in different ways. The same is true for the word 'Muslim' and its plural form.

One way to attempt more nuance is to avoid these words altogether, or to use these words with refining adjectives. This requires the use of cumbersome circumlocutions, but may achieve a bit more clarity.

One might, perhaps, therefore speak on the one hand of 'moderate, peaceful, nominal, cultural' Muslims - i.e., those whose connection with Islam consists largely of some external observances, holidays, foods, occasional or ceremonial participations and attendance, framed and conditioned by the culture of a time and of a place.

On the other hand, one could speak of 'orthodox, literal' Muslims, who adhere to the deeper conceptual structure of Islam itself, of the prophet Muhammad, and of the texts - Qur'an, Hadith, Sunnah, Sira, etc. To those, individual subdivisions within Islam would add their own texts, peculiar to Wahabi, Sufi, Sunni, Shiite, etc.

By clarifying vocabulary, we can clarify thought. While sorting through the complex social and political dynamics of the Middle East, Tony Blair notes, we cannot artificially isolate one phenomenon from another; many of them are closely connected:

There is a deep desire to separate the political ideology represented by groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood from the actions of extremists including acts of terrorism. This stems from a completely laudable sense that we must always distinguish between those who violate the law and those we simply disagree with.

But laudable though the motives are, which lead us to this distinction, if we're not careful, they also blind us to the fact that the ideology itself is nonetheless dangerous and corrosive; and cannot and should not be treated as a conventional political debate between two opposing views of how society should be governed.

We cannot simply dismiss the violent elements and hope to conduct constructive dialogue with the less radical elements. The former is an organic outgrowth of the latter. Blair is telling us that this is a different type of discussion. A conversation about culture and politics in the Middle East is not like a conversation about tariff rates between Canada and Brazil, or a conversation about setting bus fares on a city-owned transit system.

The central issues of the Middle East are not "mere" politics to be settled by negotiation or compromise, nor are they dispassionate discussions about one's worldview and one's conception of human nature. What an outsider may fail to perceive about the Middle East is that factions not engaged in violence are still nonetheless Islamist in the sense that they have as a concrete goal the establishment of a caliphate. That goal, held in common with other groups which are violent, blurs the lines which the outsider may wish to draw between peaceful and jihadist elements. Blair put it this way:

But their overall ideology is one which inevitably creates the soil in which such extremism can take root. In many cases, it is clear that they regard themselves as part of a spectrum, with a difference of view as to how to achieve the goals of Islamism, not a difference as to what those goals are; and in certain cases, they will support the use of violence.

Terminology is one obstacle to understanding Islam in the Middle East; as mentioned above, another obstacle is what a philosopher might call a "category mistake" - as embodied in the organization called the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).

First, a linguistic examination of the name of this group reveals a confusion of national and religious issues. The term "American-Islamic Relations" is odd, in this way: normally, such a phrase would include nationalities - "American-French Relations" or "Canadian-Brazilian Relations" or "Sino-Soviet Relations" or "Swedish-Vietnamese Relations" etc.

Or, possibly, such a phrase would name two religions: "Hindu-Christian Relations" or "Jewish-Buddhist Relations" or "Sikh-Mormon Relations" etc.

But CAIR has, in the words of the old proverb, mixed apples and oranges. Parallel coinages revealed the oddity: imagine a "Council on Swedish-Hindu Relations" or a "Council on Brazilian-Sikh Relations" or a "Council on Mexican-Buddhist Relations" etc.

The name of CAIR, is, then, a malformed formula. Subsequently, its activities are an attempt to effectuate an oxymoron. By way of analogy, image a "Council on Square Circles" or a "Council on Four-Sided Triangles."

In addition to this category mistake, which renders the name of CAIR to be senseless or nonsense, there is a second set of categories involved: sincere and insincere.

Taking CAIR's published statements prima facie, one might deduce from them a certain set of goals or values; looking, however, at the organization's funding patterns and ties to other organizations, a different set of goals or values would be revealed. What are those goals? Tony Blair explains:

The ultimate goal is not a society which someone else can change after winning an election. It is a society of a fixed polity, governed by religious doctrines that are not changeable but which are, of their essence, unchangeable.

Because the West is so completely unfamiliar with such an ideology – though actually the experience of revolutionary communism or fascism should resonate with older generations – we can't really see the danger properly. We feel almost that if we identify it in these terms, we're being anti-Muslim, a sentiment on which the Islamists cleverly play.

Certainly, the fair-mindedness of Western Civilization demands that we respect the belief systems of other cultures. The spiritual tradition of European culture demands that we place "the best possible construction" on the actions of others. But this desire to honor other societies can be exploited by those cynical enough to take advantage of it.

Right now in the Middle East, this is the battle being waged. Of course in each country, it arises in a different form. But in each case, take out the extremist views around religion, and each conflict or challenge becomes infinitely more manageable. This is where, even though at one level the ideology coming out of Shia Iran and that of the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood may seem to be different, in reality they amount to the same thing with the same effect – the holding back of the proper political, social and economic advance of the country.

What is the rest of the world to do? From China to Brazil, from Canada to Zimbabwe, almost every nation on earth will be impacted, for good or for ill, by the direction which the Middle East takes. Tony Blair explains what it means for the collected countries of the world to make a meaningful contribution to the future of the Middle East:

It means supporting the principles of religious freedom and open, rule-based economies. It means helping those countries whose people wish to embrace those principles to achieve them. Where there has been revolution, we should be on the side of those who support those principles and opposed to those who would thwart them.

A contradiction lies beneath the surface of the world's policies toward the Middle East: on the one hand, we work to defend ourselves from the military and terrorist threats emerging from that part of the world; on the other hand, we seek to be friendly and supportive to the governments and societies there. Yet those governments and societies are part of a larger system which supports the violent jihad from which we work to protect ourselves.

All over the world the challenge of defeating this ideology requires active and sustained engagement. Consider this absurdity: that we spend billions of $ on security arrangements and on defense to protect ourselves against the consequences of an ideology that is being advocated in the formal and informal school systems and in civic institutions of the very countries with whom we have intimate security and defense relationships. Some of those countries of course wish to escape from the grip of this ideology. But often it is hard for them to do so within their own political constraints. They need to have this issue out in the open where it then becomes harder for the promotion of this ideology to happen underneath the radar. In other words they need us to make this a core part of the international dialogue in order to force the necessary change within their own societies.

The human cost of Islamofascism is staggering: people are dying in large numbers; others are wounded or maimed, physically or psychologically; women live in a humiliating subjugation because of Islamist ideology; property is destroyed or confiscated; economic burdens ripple around the globe; millions live with peril of Islamic terrorism hovering overhead. A large amount of painful detail is available for those who care to inform themselves - especially about dehumanizing treatment inflicted upon women.

Add up the deaths around the world now – and even leave out the theatre of the Middle East – and the toll on human life is deplorable. In Nigeria recently and Pakistan alone thousands are now dying in religiously inspired conflict. And quite apart from the actual loss of life, there is the loss of life opportunities for parts of the population mired in backward thinking and reactionary attitudes especially towards girls.

Freedom by itself is not the answer to the problems of the Middle East. It is part of the answer, but merely instituting a voting process will not remove the dangers to the rest of the world, or provide dignity to the residents of the region. Freedom must be combined with understanding - a worldview which allows for civil debate, a worldview which values human life, a worldview which promotes personal liberty and political freedom, not for themselves, but because they emerge organically from a concept of the vocation of the humanity.

Freedom by itself is not the answer. The answer includes freedom seen as the innate property of humans, because every human life should be honored and seen as valuable, and freedom seen as the instrument by which humans can fulfill, not their own desires, but rather their function to honor and help each other.

Raoul Wallenberg - His Mind

In the 1940s, Raoul Wallenberg was one of the people inside Europe who worked to save Jews from the Nazis. Many courageous Germans risked their lives to help Jews to safety. But Wallenberg was different: he wasn't a German.

The Germans who formed an underground resistance movement to stop Hitler's genocide had obvious motives: they lived inside Germany and had direct access to information about secret plans for the Holocaust, and had direct opportunities to do something to stop it. Thousands of Jewish Germans and Jewish Poles were saved by men like Oskar Schindler, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Max Kolbe.

Raoul Wallenberg, however, wasn't a German, and didn't live in Germany. His decision to rescue Jews, a decision which cost him his life, is therefore significant. His "special mission" to Budapest saved thousands of Jewish Hungarians. The President of the United States remarked about Wallenberg:

He came from a prominent family, but he chose to help the most vulnerable. He was a Lutheran, and yet he risked his life to save Jews. “I will never be able to go back to Stockholm,” he said, “without knowing inside myself I’d done all a man could do to save as many Jews as possible.”

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said that

It is important to recall not just the Holocaust's horrors, but also its heroes: bearers of witness like Jan Karski; rescuers like Wallenberg and Schindler; writers like Anne Frank and Elie Wiesel; and resistors like the Danes and the righteous of many nations who hid and saved many thousands of their Jewish neighbors.

Who was this Swedish Lutheran, who studied in United States, and wound up in Hungary? His development included spending time at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He traveled extensively in Africa. He also traveled in Israel, and after a stay near the Sea of Galilee, he described his experiences in a letter:

The next morning we went swimming in the lake, which is situated a couple of hundred feet below sea level and is the one on which Jesus walked.

Elsewhere in Israel, he wrote about how he spent his reflective time:

Sundays, I usually take a walk up Mount Carmel (where the Carmelite fathers originated) and admire the view.

These travel experiences gave him a global perspective, and his later activities in saving the lives of others takes on a special significance in light of his time spent in Israel.

The details of Wallenberg's efforts, which saved thousands of Jews, have been recorded in detail; great mystery, however, surrounds his final disappearance and death, presumably at the hands of Soviet intelligence officers. What is clear, however, is that his character was a spiritual and powerful one, motivating and enabling him to undertake his special mission to Budapest.

Hitler's Economics

To understand the economic program of the Nazi Party, one must remember the meaning of the word "Nazi" - it was an abbreviation for the long official name of the party, the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, translated as the National-Socialist German Workers Party, and also abbreviated NSDAP. The words "socialist" and "worker" in the party's name give hints as to its economic policies.

The Nazi Party generally embraced the notions of regulation, taxation, and income redistribution. Further, it "nationalized" various businesses, meaning that it made some companies the property of the government, allowing ordinary people no influence over such businesses. Thus Nazi economic policy intersected with its mission to have total control over society.

Historian Marshall Dill notes that the Nazis proceeded in two ways. Indirectly, by ensuring that government officials and party leaders were appointed to the boards of directors of major companies, they took control of companies. Directly, the Nazis instructed the government to confiscate and simply assume ownership of some businesses. Marshall Dill writes:

It is instructive to note the infiltration of boards of directors by deserving Nazis: government officials, Gauleiter, etc. The network of interlocking directorates was impressive. On the other hand, the government by no means refused to establish direct ownership and control of industry.

The Nazis, then, were socialists in the sense that they believed that the government should intervene in the marketplace and should own the means of production. The Nazis were clearly opposed to a free market. Marshall Dill continues:

The principle example of direct government participation in industry was the huge Hermann Goering combine, which by the end of its career managed operations ranging from steel mills to the control of canal-boat shipping.

Not only in terms of industrial production, but also in terms of employment, the Nazis wanted the government, and not the decisions of free individuals, to control the economy. Historian William Duiker writes:

Most dramatic were the mass demonstrations and spectacles employed to integrate the German nation into a collective fellowship and to mobilize it as an instrument for Hitler's policies. In the economic sphere, the Nazis pursued the use of public works projects and "pump-priming" grants.

Thus an ever-increasing percentage of Germans became employees of the state, thereby reducing the ability of the free individual to impact the economy. Looking at the rise of Hitler's government and how it took power, and looking at that process from an economic perspective, Friedrich Hayek writes:

The support which brought these ideas to power came precisely from the socialist camp. It was certainly not through the bourgeoisie, but rather through the absence of a strong bourgeoisie, that they were helped to power.

Although the Nazis came to power in 1933, the social and economic forces which gave them control over the Germans began much earlier. Hayek writes that

The doctrines which had guided the ruling elements in Germany for the past generation were not opposed to the socialism in Marxism.

The Nazis opposed Marxism because of "its internationalism" which, the Nazis saw, proved an obstacle to the concrete implementation of certain aspects of socialism. Internationalism reduced the ability of the Nazi government to regulate, to tax, and to eventually own businesses - all of which reduced the power of any free individual to act independently in the economy. The Nazis rejected these elements of Marxism: its internationalism and its democracy. The Nazis saw that these elements were inconsistent with socialism. In this way, the Nazis were developing a form of socialism which was more consistent than Marxism, as Hayek writes, "and as it became increasingly clear that it was just these elements which formed obstacles to the realization of socialism, the socialists" became willing to abandon the program of democracy and internationalism. "It was the union of anticapitalist forces," the socialists and others who opposed free markets and who opposed democracy, "which drove out from Germany everything that was" oriented toward liberty.

In short, the Nazis discovered that a free market and the right to own private property were analogues to political freedom and to free speech. In order to completely control society, which was Naziism's goal as a totalitarian movement, the government had to intervene in the economy, limit the individual's decision-making ability, tax, regulate, and otherwise reduce the freedom and influence of the individual, culminating in government-owned or government-operated industries. Hayek continues:

The connection between socialism and nationalism in Germany was close from the beginning. It is significant that the most important ancestors of National Socialism - Fichte, Rodbertus, and Lasalle - are at the same time acknowledged fathers of socialism.

While the Marxist version of socialism was theoretically internationalist, in the concrete development of socialism, especially after 1914, nationalism was wedded to socialism. In this way, Hitler and the Nazis understood how to make a more effect form of socialism, which would allow them to control spheres of public and private life, and enslave the Germans.

Hitler's economic policies were part of his larger plan to bind millions of Germans who, having lost their freedom to the Nazi government, would be forced to carry out his visions of war, conquest, and genocide.

Ancient Weather, Modern Concerns

The earth's climate is always changing. A few decades with warmer-than-normal temperatures follow a few decades with cooler-than-normal temperatures. Indeed, the change is so constant that it becomes a statistical challenge to determine what ‘normal’ might mean in this context.

Should we take the average temperature of the last 500 years as normal? Or of the 500 years prior to that? How does the 500 years between 1450 and 1950 compare to the 500 years between 1200 and 1700? And which of them might be “normal”? The lack of direct temperature measurements complicates the question further. Prior to a century or two ago, few direct observations of climate were recorded. Even in the last century, large parts of the earth's surface were unmeasured in terms of daily temperatures.

This is true of rainfall as well: it is constantly changing on a micro and a macro scale, over decades and centuries, and observational data are scarce for most regions prior to the last few years.

A wealth of questions and dearth of data: one political question looms over all - could any of this climate change be caused by human activity? There are indeed quite a few policymakers who believe that climatic instability is anthropogenic. How can this claim be verified?

Those who assert that the planet's climate is being disrupted usually assert that this is the result of industrialization. Large-scale use of fossil fuels, and the production of other alleged agents of climate change, began around 1750. The earliest working steam engines date to the late 1600's, and people had burned wood, coal, peat, and charcoal for centuries before that. But the mid-1700's saw an acceleration of industrialization, and if human activity can influence the climate, then this would be the starting date.

One may formulate the question this way: do we see changes in the earth's climate after 1750 which are unlike changes and patterns which occurred prior to that date? If so, then it is at least possible that some climate change is anthropogenic. Jack Goldstone, commenting on research published by Geoffrey Parker, notes that scholarship uses

the geological, biological, and recorded data on regional and global temperatures to show that the “Little Ice Age” of the 17th century was not a mere figure of speech or anachronistic exaggeration; it was in fact an age of dramatically lower temperatures and the advance of ice and glaciers across the world: at one point even the Bosporus froze solid, creating a land bridge from Europe to the Middle East that had not existed for millennia.

Thus documented is a temperature swing, in this case a cooling, greater in magnitude and duration than anything observed after 1750. The early 1600's were the center of this "Little Ice Age," which spanned, according to scholar J.R. McNeill, the years from 1250 to 1850. Nobody is likely to assert that a climate change starting in 1250 was caused by human activity.

The causes and variables in the climate are so many, and their interrelationships so complex, that mathematical and computerized models are still insufficient to reflect them. Current computational models, as complex as they may be, are still oversimplified relative to the actual climate, and do not produce accurate results.

Of the many factors in this complicated climate, Goldstone mentions solar and volcanic activity. He writes that Parker's scholarship

attributes the climate change to both a decline in solar radiation (indicated by a sustained period of low or absent sunspot activity known as the “Maunder minimum” from 1645 to 1710) and to clusters of major volcanic eruptions (in 1600-1609, 1641-1647, 1676-1679, and 1709-1710) whose sulfur and ash further reduced the solar radiation reaching the lower atmosphere. This combination triggered several series of exceptionally cold years in succession, in 1600-1609, 1620-1627, 1641-1647, 1666-1680, and 1695-1699, as measured by severe low summer temperatures in the northern hemisphere.

The example above cites a significant and enduring cold period. Much of the current concerns about climate contemplate, however, the hypothesis of a warming trend. Immediately prior to the “Little Ice Age” was a period of several centuries of atypically warm weather. Here is an instance of “global warming” which occurred at a time which prevents it from being labeled as anthropogenic in any sense. Under the wordy title Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC writes:

Continental-scale surface temperature reconstructions show, with high confidence, multi-decadal periods during the Medieval Climate Anomaly (year 950 to 1250) that were in some regions as warm as in the late 20th century.

Dramatic changes in temperature and rainfall are documented, then, at points in time prior to any possible effects of large-scale industrialization. If current climate trends have yet to reach either the magnitude or the duration of these previous naturally-occurring climate disruptions, then there is little reason to hypothesize that such trends are anthropogenic.