It IS the Religion, Stupid!!

Found this at AOSHQ, quoting Bernard Lewis from a 1976(!!!) essay:

...This recurring unwillingness to recognize the nature of Islam or even the fact of Islam as an independent, different, and autonomous religious phenomenon persists and recurs from medieval to modern times..Modern Western man, being unable for the most part to assign a dominant and central place to religion in his own affairs, found himself unable to conceive that any other peoples in any other place could have done so, and was therefore impelled to devise other explanations of what seemed to him only superficially religious phenomena.. 

To the modern Western mind, it is not conceivable that men would fight and die in such numbers over mere differences of religion; there have to be some other "genuine" reasons underneath the religious veil..This is reflected in the present inability, political, journalistic, and scholarly alike, to recognize the importance of the factor of religion in the current affairs of the Muslim world and in the consequent recourse to the language of left-wing and right-wing, progressive and conservative, and the rest of the Western terminology....

That tells us two things:  1)  The West has become far too secularized--particularly its "leaders", including GWBush, Merkel, and whoever's running England these days; and 2)  Mohammedanism has not changed since its founding.

It is true that some Mohammedans are also secularized.  But betting on "how many" and "how much" is a fool's game, as the Austrians, Swedes, Germans, and Brits have found.