In a perused weekly, a picture depicting a posing bin Laden has caught your correspondent’s attention. The man is shown with his crutch, which is a Kalashnikov. Properly so. Without the philosophical and theological arguments that the gun supports, the ideas of the movement would not score on the free market place of ideas. The struggle to implement heaven on earth according to the taste of the Prophet, would be unlikely to succeed if its best supporting claim would be discarded. At this juncture, through an association, another “impossible” comes to mind. A system with bin Laden’s preferences as its basic guideline would have never developed his essential Kalashnikov. Swords are slightly out of date since the time of last-ditch banzai attacks on tropical islands. Therefore, that assault rifle is the precondition of the global attention the Prophet’s warrior now commands. Oddly, to have it he had to import it. That from a culture whose most outstanding fundamental spiritual products, which are its driving force, he consciously condemns and rejects.

Where a Moslem majority controls the government, that institution is likely to be used to enforce a religion-derived agenda. When this is the case, the practice is not an aberration of the faith or of the local idea of good government. The fusion of church and state is a central element of the Islamic concept of governance. For this reason, the laicism of politics is much harder to achieve than in societies with another tradition. This includes the Christian one. Regardless of subsequent and ultimately failed attempts to merge state and church, already Christ is on record of advocating the need to separate the affairs of man from the realm of God.

In fact, in the context of Mohammedanism, a separation is only achievable if the church’ rights and role are curtailed. In practice, the maintenance of the division requires the suppression of the organization of the faithful –as the past practice of Ataturk’s Turkey shows. Accordingly, the massive physical stress put upon religious minorities and the killing of Christians is, without massive outside pressure, unlikely to treated as a matter for government intervention. Naturally, the same crimes against Muslims, not to mention lesser matters that they classify as offenses, would cause an international outcry. Here one may wonder why democracies, and especially why Christian-influenced democracies, do not protest vigorously. Responding to a given action according to the “culture” of its source implies a judgment. It is that the political culture of Muslims is of a special kind. Therefore, from their societies one cannot expect behavior that meets advanced democratic standards. If you think that, you should have the courage to call the phenomena by its name. Tolerance for a reprehensible act in one instance, and proscribing it in another because of the background of the perpetrator, applies different, higher or lower standards and these reflect the quality of the deed’s originator. In this case, such a procedure implies that one of the parties to the comparison not only differs from the other but is, to that same extent, also inferior to the other party.