Greek Weakness Provokes Macedonian Aggression

The Peloponnesian War lasted from 431 B.C. to 404 B.C., and left Greece depleted in multiple ways. Neither before, during, nor after the war was the area of Greece a united nation-state. Instead, it was a collection of competing and squabbling city-states.

The war was instigated by the greed of the Athenian-led Delian league. The Spartans, along with several other city-states in the region, organized the Peloponnesian League and resisted the various taxes, tariffs, levies, and tributes which Athens demanded from cities.

Athens had a powerful navy with which to reinforce its dictates. The Peloponnesian War was a long series of confrontations between the Athenian navy and the Spartan army, with their respective allies.

When the war was over, Greece was weakened: Politically weakened, because leaders and governments had lost credibility and moral authority, and because the people were psychologically too exhausted from the war to generate enthusiastic support; Economically weakened, because wars are expensive and not very productive; Socially weakened, because the casualties from the war, along with its attendant plagues and famines, not only reduced the population, but eroded social structures and the willingness of people to rely on those structures; Militarily weakened, because the war consumed men and material, leaving less for the military, and because men were less inclined to engage in warfare, having seen enough of it.

On paper, the Spartans won, and the Athenians lost, the war. On a macro-level, all the Greek cities lost. Many historians regard the war as the beginning of the end of the Classical “Golden Age” of Greece.

In the wake of the war, the weakened Greeks seemed less likely to generate those works of art, poetry, and philosophy which had marked the apogee of the Classical Age.

The implications of Greece’s post-war condition were not lost on their neighbors to the north, the Macedonians. One axiom of history is that “weakness is provocative.”

Beginning first under King Philip II, the Macedonians proceeded with the military and political conquest of the Greek city-states, one by one. Some negotiated to be annexed into Philip’s empire diplomatically; others were defeated in battle.

After Philip II’s death in 336 B.C., his son Alexander the Great took over and accelerated Philip’s conquests.

Greece lost most of its geopolitical significance, being first a province within the Macedonian Empire, then a province within the Roman Empire, later a province within the Byzantine Empire, and finally a beleaguered independent nation-state, clinging to survival against repeated attacks by Islamic Caliphates.

Although the Macedonians conquered the Greeks, it might be equally true to say that the Greeks did themselves in. Through internal bickering, they created the perceptions in the minds of the Macedonians that they were weak and therefore an easy target.

Any country which is perceived as weak will, of necessity, eventually be attacked - if not by another country, then by some type of organization or alliance. Weakness is provocative.

Buddhism and Text

Studying about Buddhism can be a bewildering experience, and for understandable reasons. The student is confronted with divergent forms of Buddhism: Chinese Buddhism contains considerable infusions of Confucianism; Japanese Buddhism includes a large dose of Shintoism.

Beyond that, motto has been widely circulated that “Buddhism is more of a philosophy than a religion,” leaving the student first with the question of what exactly this proposition means, and second with the question of whether or not this proposition is true.

Proceeding along normal academic lines, a diligent scholar will seek to resolve some of these questions about Buddhism by turning to texts - primary texts, sacred texts, canonical texts, the defining or confessional texts of Buddhism. Indeed, some scholars assert that this is the proper way to investigate and define any religion.

In the absence of close reading of specific texts, it can be argued, little significant study or understanding of any religion is possible. Interviewing adherents of Buddhism will result in a confusing kaleidoscope of subjective impressions, from which no meaningful conclusions can be drawn. Texts are publicly accessible - the letters on the page do not change, even though the readers do - and provide permanency, consistency, and objectivity.

Despite the plausibility and persuasiveness of such a textual approach to religion in general, and to Buddhism in particular, this approach came under fire in the twentieth century, when it was derisively labeled a “protestant bias.”

To confuse matters further, different critics use the phrase “protestant bias” in different ways. Some use it, e.g., to refer to an inordinate emphasis on morality as a part of religion. We will here, however, use it to refer to the question of whether, and to which extent, texts are foundational in a religion.

The allegation was that nineteenth century scholarship had overstated the role of text in defining and determining a religion. The twentieth-century riposte was to deny such a central role to text, and look instead to other ways of defining or describing a religion.

To be sure, it is possible to overemphasize the role of text; a religion also has a founder, a historical setting for its origin, a range or spectrum of varying forms, a community, a way of life, and other factors which must be included. But it is equally possible to understate the centrality of text. To be investigated, then, is the assertion that text is necessarily a part of any religion - that text, perhaps along with other variables, is foundational to any religion.

Potential counterexamples come quickly to mind: illiterate, or preliterate, societies would certainly have no texts to found their religions. There are at least two responses to these would-be counterexamples: first, the definition of “text” can be broadened to include fixed narratives transmitted without being fully written, and to include as “text” paintings and sculptures and Zen rock gardens; second, some such societies may not have a religion proper, but fit rather into a pre-religious phase dominated by magic and myth.

A pre-religious belief system is built around attempts to manipulate (magic) nature and around attempts to explain (myth) nature. A religion proper is built around a relationship with the deity.

Having offered a characteristic which might be part of a potential definition of ‘religion,’ the discussion returns to Buddhism, a belief system which may or may not be a religion.

Seeking to find the foundation of Buddhism, one looks historically for its original form, before the Chinese amalgamated it with Confucianism, and before the Japanese blended it with Shintoism. Buddhism arose in India, and there archeologists have found some of its earliest texts.

More so than some other belief systems, it is controversial to discuss the possibility that Buddhism has a textual basis or canon. Aware of, and sensitive to, such controversy, Richard Salomon explores what the earliest codified forms of Buddhism may have been:

Most Buddhist traditions seem to have developed, at some point in their history, at least a “notional” canon that was conceived as comprising the totality of the “scriptures,” that is to say, the words of the Buddha (buddha-vacana), however conceived. Such comprehensive canons are actually manifested, for example, in the Pali Tipitaka and the Tibetan Kanjur. If we accept as historical the accounts of the communal recitations (sangiti) of the Buddha’s words at the earliest Buddhist councils, this sense of a need to collect the Buddha’s teachings in a complete and standardized corpus would go back to the very roots of the tradition, and hence be fundamental to it. But it must also be kept in mind that the historicity of these traditions is not beyond doubt, and the concept of a comprehensive collection of the teachings is not conclusively proven to be original to Buddhism.

Not long after the time of the historical Siddhartha, groups of his followers probably attempted to distill the essence of his thinking. Direct data about Siddhartha is scant. Precise dates, or even precise approximations, of his birth date, lifespan, and death date are difficult to come by. In the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, L.C. Cousins writes:

From the point of view of reasonable probability the evidence seems to favour some kind of median chronology and we should no doubt speak of a date for the Buddha's Mahaparinibbana of c.400 B.C - I choose the round number deliberately to indicate that the margins are rather loose.

Scholars usually identify this “pre-sectarian” phase of Buddhism as ending around 250 B.C., the time of the third Buddhist council. This pre-sectarian period would be the original Buddhism of the historical Siddhartha.

What defines this original Buddhism? A set of doctrines contained in a set of fixed texts. We will not attempt here to specify exactly which doctrines and which texts constituted this historical Buddhism. Many scholars have done work on this topic, and the reader may consult the work of Donald W. Mitchell, Tadeusz Skorupski, and Gregory Schopen.

While the concept of a textual canon does not necessary play a foundational role in all forms of contemporary Buddhism, this does not entail that the canon was not a central part of early Buddhism. Richard Salomon writes:

The complete canon, if present at all, tends to be more an abstract entity, or at best a set of books that sit, mostly unread, on a shelf, rather than the central focus of the monks’ and lay followers’ daily study and worship. In practice, the number of texts actually read, chanted, and studied in a given tradition is generally quite limited.

Even if the official canon has been replaced, in some practices, by an abridged or variant unofficial canon, canon is still central. Some might argue that merely because a set of texts is regularly “read, chanted, and studied” does not mean that they have dogmatic authority; but their ubiquity within the canon would give them a de facto authority and enormous influence. Even if there were a sect which tried self-consciously to avoid having a canon, the assertion that “we have no canon” would become a canon.

For religion in general, and for Buddhism in particular, canon is essential, even if its necessity is doubted. Salomon seems to agree:

We have, then, evidence of various types of “canons” embodied in the scriptures of various Buddhist traditions. At one extreme is the comprehensive, voluminous, and even (at least in the Theravada case; see Collins 1990: 91ff.) exclusive canon; and at the other, the “canon” is reduced in effect to a single text that is endlessly chanted, copied, and explicated to the effective exclusion of the others. Between these extremes, there is a wide range of intermediate “canons,” including, perhaps most importantly, what Collins calls the “ritual canon,” which “contains the texts, canonical or otherwise, which are in actual use in ritual life in the area concerned” (p. 104).

While text-critical and historical-critical studies will long ponder which exact words, or even which general concepts, may with certainty be attributed to the historical Siddhartha, Buddhists themselves, as an article of faith, do make such attributions. Clarence Herbert Hamilton writes:

According to the oldest Buddhist literature (preserved in the Pali language), Gautama Buddha began his teaching career at Benares with a sermon traditionally accepted as the first exposition of his basic doctrine. It is known as Turning the Wheel of Doctrine (or “of Righteousness”; Dhammacakkappavattana) and has remained authoritative for all Buddhists.

In any case, to answer the question about what, exactly, Buddhism is, and about whether or not it is a religion, one can and will consult that which is, in some form, a textual canon.

Freedom of Speech - Not Only for the United States

Students in History classes are familiar with discussions of “freedom of speech” and “freedom of the press” in relation to the First Amendment. That amendment was ratified in 1791 along with the other nine amendments contained in the Bill of Rights.

But what about these freedoms in other nations? The freedoms of speech and of the press are human questions, concerning people in every nation.

Compared to other countries, the citizens in the United States enjoyed more freedom of expression, and at earlier dates. Already in the late 1700s, political discourse was essentially unrestrained and unregulated. In spoken and written form, citizens were free to criticize George Washington and even the Constitution - and many did so, including prominent Founding Fathers, like Samuel Adams, Patrick Henry, and James Monroe.

Elsewhere, such freedoms had not yet emerged: In Germany, newspapers were subject to political censorship in the early 1800s. In France, the revolution which was allegedly undertaken to increase freedom quickly suppressed it. In Russia, czarist censorship morphed into Soviet censorship.

England enjoyed more freedom than some other nations, but even there, the freedoms were not codified as statutes or in constitutional language, but were rather preserved as a tradition within common law.

Thus it was, in 2011, that the Canadian government prosecuted a newspaper reporter, Mark Steyn, because of statements he had made in printed articles. What might be his punishment? He writes that

the statutory penalty under the British Columbia "Human Rights" Code was that Maclean's, Canada's biggest-selling news weekly, and by extension any other publication, would be forbidden henceforth to publish anything by me about Islam, Europe, terrorism, demography, welfare, multiculturalism, and various related subjects. And that this prohibition would last forever, and was deemed to have the force of a supreme-court decision. I would in effect be rendered unpublishable in the land of my birth.

Writers in Canada are both punished for what they’ve written - if their opinions are not the same as the government’s - and they’re also forbidden from publishing again.

Naturally, if a writer happens to have the same political views as the government, she or he is free to write, and no legal action will be taken against her or him.

Any action by a government to reduce freedom of expression is a net reduction in freedom for all its citizens. Convoluted reasoning, which attempts to justify limits on free speech by asserting that such regulation somehow protects other rights, is specious. A government which violates the freedom of speech is obtaining power for itself, and history offers examples which teach us that such a government will soon violate other rights as well.

Germany enjoyed several decades of civil liberty before Hitler took power in 1933. The Weimar government, a coalition-based structure which ruled from 1919 until 1933, is still seen by many as a noble attempt to create a republic with freely-elected representatives. In many ways, the Weimar Republic succeeded. But it succumbed to one of its flaws - limiting political speech. The Nazis would use, among other tactics, that flaw to bring an end to representative government, and to initiate their own horrific totalitarianism.

With doubtless the noblest of motives, the Weimar Republic implemented regulations against “hate speech.” The reasoning was that, by limiting freedom of speech, the other freedoms could be protected: an admirable goal, but flawed logic.

This faulty reasoning - that one could protect the freedoms of some people by limiting the freedoms of others - led to the destruction of almost everyone’s freedoms. Trying to protect the Jews, the Weimar Republic enacted laws against anti-Jewish rhetoric; these laws would be exploited by the Nazis both to topple the republic and to impose their dictatorship on the populace.

The Weimar Republic, with good intentions, limited freedom of speech. When the Nazis appeared on the German political landscape - remember that “Nazi” means “National Socialist” - the citizens had grown accustomed to having their speech restricted, and thus were prone to simply accept edicts from the Nazi government limiting their political expression.

The Weimar Republic’s laws against “hate speech” set the dangerous precedent that the government has the right to restrict individual expression. With that restriction in place, Hitler’s National Socialists had merely to adjust the details of which types of speech were forbidden. Mark Steyn recounts the details:

In the 15 years before the Nazis came to power, there were over 200 prosecutions for "anti-Semitic speech" in Germany — and a fat lot of good it did. But more important than the practical uselessness of such laws is the assumption you're making: You're accepting that the state, in ruling one opinion out of bounds, will be content to stop there.

The temptation to limit personal freedom arises, in some cases, when it seems that by curtailing individual liberty, the government can better serve or protect some alleged victim class. In the case of the Weimar Republic, the effort to shield a group led to the group’s destruction. All citizens, regardless of their demographic or other grouping, are best served by a principled protection of every citizen’s civil freedoms.

The saying, “justice is blind,” refers to, among many other things, the idea that the law should treat citizens equally. The laws must ignore groupings and classes - even the claim that one group is a set of “victims.” When all citizens stand equally before the law, with no special treatments or protections for one class over another, then all citizens have the best chance to exercise their freedoms.

Mark Steyn sees this principle enshrined in the long series of precedents which have informed legal culture in England and North America - the legal culture which gave birth to an unprecedented degree of personal freedom, and codified it in the Magna Carta of 1215, in the English Bill of Rights of 1689, and in America’s Declaration of Independence, Bill of Rights, and Constitution:

One of the great strengths of common law has been its general antipathy toward group rights — because the ultimate minority is the individual. The minute you have collective rights, you require dramatically enhanced state power to me­diate the hierarchy of different victim groups.

The freedom of expression is seminal because it can be used to promulgate other freedoms. Given freedom of speech and freedom of the press, thinkers who favor liberty can speak on behalf of freedom of religion or other freedoms.

But when free expression is squelched, other freedoms disappear because no defense of them can be verbalized.

As John Milton wrote in his Areopagitica of 1644, "Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties."

Or as an ordinary Canadian citizen said to me, after I testified in defense of free speech to the Ontario parliament at Queen's Park, "Give me the right to free speech, and I will use it to claim all my other rights."

Conversely, if you let them take your right to free speech, how are you going to stop them from taking all the others?

The freedom of expression is a vital part of any civilization, and cannot be compromised merely because some group claims to “feel offended.” If the freedom of speech disappears because some particular opinion is labeled as “hate speech,” other freedoms will soon disappear along with it.

The Jewish Germans during the Weimar Republic would probably have chosen to endure occasional offensive language and live long lives over having the republic’s misguided efforts at protecting them give way to their annihilation.

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.