Internet Clarity Doesn't Always Solve World Problems

I'd like to teach the world to sing
in perfect harmony.
I'd like to hold it in my arms,
and keep it company

I'd like to see the world for once
all standing hand in hand.
And hear them echo through the hills
for peace throughout the land.

- Heard all too often since the 1960s

One of the articles of faith of the world's peaceniks is that, underneath all the various artificial conflicts of our greedy and selfish ruling elites, normal people are pretty much the same; so, if only our leaders would get out of the way, we'd all get along fine.  Wars are not caused by substantive conflicts between entire peoples; they are evilly created so that giant corporations can fleece the taxpayer, arms merchants can get rich, and demagogues can increase their power, or so it is said.

It follows, therefore, that modern communication and transportation technology is often viewed not just as a generally useful tool for commerce but as the means to World Peace!  Where once England's Neville Chamberlain could say that the buildup to World War II involved "a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing," now large chunks of the British electorate routinely fly off to Czechoslovakia or Poland for a weekend's carousing.

There aren't too many parts of the world that are really, really far away anymore, and even the most economically and politically insignificant countries such as Haiti can instantly command global attention if something bad enough happens there.

However, all these hopes for grass-roots friendliness rest on one less-than-solid assumption: that people really are mostly the same, value similar things, and think more or less the same way.

Wired magazine brings us news of a new venture that if it works will finally and conclusively test this thesis, quite possibly to destruction.

A new site hopes the seemingly simple idea of eliminating the language barrier, letting you write in English and be read in Arabic - and vice versa - will cultivate citizen diplomacy between the Middle East and the West. It aims to reduce tensions at the grassroots level between two cultures that increasingly co-exist but seem a world apart.

Meedan, which officially launches Monday, lets users post stories and comments in English and have them automatically translated into Arabic, or the opposite. People who don't share a common language can have an online discussion in near real time.  [emphasis added]

The article goes on to cite, by way of example, the issue of child marriages.  In the West this practice is condemned as self-evidently bad, but in the Arabic world it is the subject of some debate.  Presumably, being able to view the internal discussion and to dispassionately evaluate the argumentation of those gentlemen whose taste runs to twelve-year-olds will bring mutual respect and avoid the Clash of Cultures we see on the news every night.

The Truth Can Set You Free - But Really Hurts Sometimes

Meedan's backers certainly seem to mean well, but they haven't thought this through.  The only reason Westerners tolerate Muslims even to the extent that they do is because the mainstream media has blatantly lied about the dictates of that particular religion and the opinions of its practitioners.

You may have heard that Moroccans, for instance, "overwhelmingly disapprove of suicide bombings against civilians."  Great - common ground!  You may not have heard that those same Moroccans

...are the most likely to see it as a justifiable tactic against Americans and other westerners in Iraq.

Perhaps you've heard that support of the Muslim man-on-the-street for terrorism in general is diminishing?  Indeed it is: from two-thirds down to somewhere around half.  Fantastic - now only half a billion people want to blow us all up instead of two-thirds of a billion.

Scragged is not yet as internationally respected and widely read as its editors would like to think it deserves to be.  Still, its reach is wider than you might suppose.  Several of our recent articles on the subject of Islam attracted a Muslim commenter by the name of "A.L.PURI," who described himself as

...a 69 years old Hydro Power Engineer who is working as a freelance consultant in private Sector. I very humbly and honestly confess that I am neither a religious scholar nor a very good practicing Muslim.

In other words, a Muslim Everyman, just the sort of person with whom Meedan's founders would expect Americans to be able to find common ground.  Mr. Puri and other Scragged commenters and authors debated Islamic doctrine through the comment-pages of Scragged for quite some time.

We are indeed privileged to have enjoyed the insights into everyday Muslim thought provided by Mr. Puri.  It's one thing to hear something said by a Western analyst; it's quite another to hear it from the horse's mouth, or even from the horse's other end.

In a long apologetic as to why Muslims are justified in performing acts of terror in the various countries that they do, Mr. Puri offered up the following explanations in their defense:

Muslim terrorists have murdered innocents in...
The Netherlands (For showing disrespect to Muslim's Prophet)
France (For showing disrespect to Muslim's feelings)
Germany (For showing disrespect to Muslim's feelings)

There you have it, folks: thanks to a free and open dialogue with an ordinary person on the other side of the world, we ignorant Americans have reached a deeper understanding of their point of view, which quite simply is that Muslims reserve the right to gruesomely murder anyone who shows any disrespect towards either their feelings or their murderous, drug-addled, piratical pedophile of a prophet.

And our media thought the "War on Terror" was all a figment of the imagination of Dick Cheney and Mark Steyn!

Let's hope Meedan is successful in bringing truth and clarity to intercultural understanding.  We'll know its operators have reached understanding of reality - when they shut the website down.  Being rich liberals, wider knowledge of reality would have consequences they won't like: for most ordinary, patriotic Americans, to know Islam is to loathe it.