PC aside, of course not. A couple of little-noticed stories out of Iraq this week should drive the point home. One was a report about the de facto return to Iraq of the "jizya," the Islamic tax on non-Islamic (in this case, Christian) worship, last seen in the Fertile Crescent before the Ottoman Empire ended in 1918. The other was about the increasing enthusiasm with which the U.S.-backed Iraqi government is participating in the Arab League boycott of Israel.
According to a U.S. Commerce Department document reported on by the Jerusalem Post, the number of such cases quadrupled, from eight to 31, between 2005 and 2006. Furthermore, U.S. companies doing business in Iraq are actually coming under Iraqi pressure to comply with the boycott.
Such practices constitute religious bigotry -- and, from the Western side of the cultural divide, "illogical" or "irrational" are the most polite words for them. But if such examples are, in fact, logical and rational expressions of Arab-Islamic society, how can American troops organizing soccer leagues compete? Clearly, the American logic of a "hearts and minds" strategy relies on wishful thinking.
The same may be said of the survival strategy Bernard Lewis laid out in the 2007 Irving Kristol Lecture, which he recently delivered at the American Enterprise Institute. Having described the energized process by which sharia-following immigrants are Islamizing Europe, Lewis arrived at his conclusion.
Did he suggest that Islamic immigration be stopped? That sharia practices be outlawed? No. He merely offered a "hearts and minds" strategy to win Islamic converts to Westernism via, simply, "the appeal of freedom." The idea of Western freedom, he explained, "is perhaps in the long run our best hope, perhaps even our only hope, of surviving this developing struggle."
So, like American troops, all Europeans have to do to prevail is be themselves. Maybe they, too, should meet, eat, even live with sharia-following families.
Freedom, soccer leagues -- who could ask for anything more? The logic of it all is self-evident.
And that's precisely why it makes no sense.