VK3AUU,

"We are only playing into the hands of their leaders who find ready listeners to their distortions of the Koran"

I agree that the recent Western interventions in Islamic countries are war crimes, however we shouldn't forget the central ideology of Islam.

The Koran is a sacred text and there are many interpretations, so believers can extract any meaning that suits their purposes, Islam has always been violent and expansionist- that's its nature. Moslems in the West would still attempt to Islamise their host country and destroy liberal democracy, either through violence or propaganda, even if America and its allies had never "intervened". Even that exemplar of multi-culti tolerance, neutral Sweden has failed to accommodate its Moslem minority, the result-- a week of riots.

That process has continued for 1400 years, Moslems are at perpetual war with infidels.

Cohenite. No I am not an Islamist, but I am getting weary of the holier than thou attitude of those, generally Christians, who are anti Islam. The West has no business interfering in the governance of those who they purport to convert to western democratic style government under the guise of helping them. Most of the aid which the unwashed multitude think is going to help the poor and needy in those countries, finishes in the hands of those in the corrupt governments who are seeking to make themselves rich. In return, the West gets concessions to oil and other valuable mineral resources.

America did great things after the second world war with such things as the Marshall Plan, but after that they got greedy. Now they are going through a new McCarthy type era which will be shown to be their undoing, both politically and economically. We are backing the wrong horse if we keep following them down this path of destruction.

David

"The West has no business interfering in the governance of those who they purport to convert to western democratic style government under the guise of helping them"

This is the problem. You do not 'convert' people to be free.

The Western model of individual rights based democracy cannot be 'forced'; it is a contradiction in terms.

What Western intervention has [sometimes, I agree there were ocassionally more problematic motives] basically tried to do is either get rid of social structures and ideology which constrained individual rights or prevent them from occurring as per the Domino principle to justify intervention in Vietnam.

Intervention in islamic countries is a completely different situation. It is different because islam is incompatible with Western democracy.

Which is why the West is currently fighting in islamic nations.

But the policy behind these interventions will remain shizophrenic as long as this basic fact is not faced; which is islam is incompatible with Western values.

Outside of islam why would you think anyone does not want to be free?

For those of you who wish to slam the West for allegedly running the affairs of Muslim countries, and for those who say majority Muslim populated countries cannot be “moderate” we need only to look at what’s unfolding in Turkey. On the world stage we’re seeing protestors in a country with a majority Muslim population rallying against the government in an attempt to stop the imposition of an Islamic lifestyle by the PM.

When I refer to Turks, read: “moderate Muslims” (for the most part) who are not interested in having an Islamic Republic, nor do they want any part of Sharia based law (remember, Turkey is a secular country).

In addition to religion, the other factor driving this PM and his now daily deranged public threats is the excessively greedy demands of his Islamic mates who have become extra-ordinarily rich from being awarded lucrative government contracts. Greed is not the preserve of the West or the US, it is just as much alive and well elsewhere.

As for the inaccurate claims that Muslims are killed as a result of Western influence there are many examples right now throughout the world of Muslims killing other Muslims without any assistance from the big bad West, Syria stands out as such an example, notably foreign intervention from the east (Lebanese Hezbollah) in support of the Syrian regime. Take note.

Back to Turkey, where PM Tayyip Erdgoan (or “Gazdogan” as he’s now known) has called on his Islamic rooted AKP supporters to “strangle those who are protesting against my government”.

Tayyip is indeed putting his foot in his mouth more and more with each passing day as he plunges the country towards a civil war.

And finally I say to those who do not like the ways of the West that if you are indeed unhappy then you can either fit in, or shove off. After all, most of you live in the West by choice, not by compulsion. In a (Western) democracy, the choice is always entirely yours.

Politico,

"On the world stage we’re seeing protestors in a country with a majority Muslim population rallying against the government in an attempt to stop the imposition of an Islamic lifestyle by the PM."

Protests have occurred all over the Islamic world, in Iran, Tunisia, Egypt and many other nations with little affect in regard to reducing the continual Islamisation of those countries. Turkey might be "moderate" relative to other majority Moslem nations but its human rights record is appalling, particularly in the treatment of religious and ethnic minorities.

"Moderate" Moslems are usually not liberal democrats--refer to the Pew surveys on Islamic attitudes to "democracy".

Most "Muslims" don't even read the Koran, the majority of them either can't read Arabic, can't read at all or can't read well enough to interpret the writings on their own. Islam is a way of life which allows inferior people, dumb people to feel superior in the same way that the underclas of dumb western people have a self righteous "holier than thou" attitude. The smart Muslims are most likely to become the dangerous "Radicals" because they are able to read the Koran and follow it's battle plan. Islam is only peaceful when it's contained within borders and where there are no external challenges to it's authority and no competing systems, like provincial Indonesia and Malaysia for example. Islam is a good system for a country like Somalia where the median IQ is about 70, it calms low IQ people down, gives their lives a structure and provides a basic set of amenities to make life tolerable.
The problem is you can't take low IQ African Muslims from the structured Islamic society, who via their religion assume themselves to be "ubermensch" and parachute them into Liberal Democracy where they will have to fend for themselves, the results are always predictable, the riots and murders of late were totally avoidable.
The Toxic ideology at play in this issue isn't Islam, it's the brutal system of egalitarian multiculturalism.