America Houses of Modernity

The Weekly Standard's contributing editor Reuel Marc Gerecht wrote an editorial "for the editors" in the August 20/August 27 issue about Barack Obama's comments on Pakistan and foreign policy initiatives to engage Islamic radicalism. My comments have little if anything to do with Obama, so I have nothing "political" in mind here at all. What jumped out at me were two sentences in the final paragraph that I found stunningly blunt.

But first, the set up. What leads into Gerecht's editorial ending are his comments about Obama's plan, in Obama's words, to "open 'America Houses' in cities across the Islamic world, with Internet, libraries, English lessons, stories of America's Muslims, and the strength they add to our country." Gerecht's reply:

Senator, go visit the many Internet houses of Peshawar in Pakistan's Northwest Frontier Province, and you will find young men everywhere surfing porn. They are free to view other glories of Western civilization, but they choose to focus on young women. . . . Open "America Houses" and we will surely increase the knowledge of such Hollywood entertainment more than we will of the Founding Fathers or the lifestyle of Muslim Americans. The "American Dream" is alive and well in the Middle East, but it is vastly more complicated than Obama seems to realize.

Then, more bluntness:

What [Obama] does not seem to grasp--and the Bush administration is no better--is that America is the cutting edge of a modernity that has convulsed Islam as a faith and a civilization. This collision will likely become more violent, not less, as Muslims more completely enter the ethical free fall that comes as modernity crushes the world of our ancestors.

He says "our" ancestors, not just Muslims. To tell the truth, I feel the world of my near ancestors--meaning my mother and my father and their generation and their parents'--is being crushed. I can only imagine what "modernity" looks like to Muslims. Aspects of it are slightly disgusting and something from which any decent parent would want to protect children. Instead, we've got influential people openly talking about protecting children from religious indoctrination, for example, as in "first communion" for Catholic children.