February 23, 2005

Douglas Feith visits a Muslim democracy

Maybe Muslim Democracy Isn't Such a Hot Idea After All: After endlessly pushing former Israeli Housing (i.e., West Bank Settlement) Minister Natan Sharansky's book about how democracy will save the Muslim world, the Wall Street Journal Editorial Page gets around to sending one of their senior writers, Robert L. Pollock, to visit an actual working Muslim democracy, Turkey, and is aghast: "The Sick Man of Europe--Again: Islamism and leftism add up to anti-American madness in Turkey:"

"On a brief visit to Ankara earlier this month with Undersecretary of Defense Doug Feith, I found a poisonous atmosphere--one in which just about every politician and media outlet (secular and religious) preaches an extreme combination of America- and Jew-hatred that (like the Turkish artists) voluntarily goes far further than anything found in most of the Arab world's state-controlled press. If I hesitate to call it Nazi-like, that's only because Goebbels would probably have rejected much of it as too crude."

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