Diogenes, Tom Friedman has a job for you

Diogenes (d. 320 bce) is famous for searching for one honest Athenian. And failing. He would be just the fellah to search for the "Muslim moderates" Mr. Friedman writes of in today's New York Times op-ed piece. And just as liable to fail in this task.

Oh, I suspect that one may find Muslims who call themselves moderate, and certainly many, many who are good and kind to their fellow Muslims. But here's the catch -- history, and current events, conspire to deny that a Muslim society can ever be "moderate" in the tolerant, liberal sense as we in the West understand the term. Muslims do not have, and have never had, separation of mosque and state. To be sure, there are Muslims who live under secular governments, but, let us be crystal clear, not in states identifiably Muslim in character.

It is a basic tenet of Islam ("submission") that all others must submit to the rule of Muslims under the Koran. Such submission may be benign and even promote the flourishing of literature and science, as in pre-1200 Moorish Spain when there was a notional "Golden Age" for Jews and Christians living under the caliphate. But the rule, even then, was that those in dhimmi status, i.e. non-Muslims, were second class citizens even by the extremely limited notion of what a citizen's rights were at that time.

Today's world brings daily demonstrations of what evils await those who allow themselves to be placed under the Islamist yoke. It is only by throwing off this burden that people may at least start to journey on the road to freedom. The Turks are worrisome, insofar as they may be backsliding towards a caliphate once again. But they are our only solid example of a modern state that has (so far) successfully thrown off the Islamic shakles that bound it to a world that ended almost 1000 years ago.