Hizzoner emphasizes religious confession--Jewish, Christian, and Muslim--to the exclusion of real world considerations of national and strategic interest or even the reasonably compelling factor of shared values, practices, and orientations. He seems to be of the view that religion trumps all other inputs to the evaluation of alliances, the definition of hostile powers, or the coinciding nature of national and strategic interests between nation-states.
None of this denies the importance of religion, particularly majority religion, in establishing the context surrounding any nation-state's definition of self, or the nature of its national and strategic interests. There is, for example, utterly no way of separating Israel, the state, from Israel, the national homeland for Jews, wherever they may reside. Israel is the ultimate refuge, the final bastion for Jews everywhere. It is the state which serves as a guarantee for the safety of Jews under threat anywhere in the world.
That is the greatest, longest lasting, and most important "lesson learned" from the Nazi regime's Slaughter of the Innocents between 1933 and 1945. The extreme reluctance exhibited by supposedly civilized, progressive, secular, and liberal states to offer safe haven to the Jews of Germany, Austria, and other countries shows for once and for all that only a Jewish nation-state can be trusted to welcome Jews in danger.
Nor can the centrality of Islam in the making and executing of policy in nation-states be ignored or underestimated. There is and can be no separation of polity and community of faith in Islam. Unlike either Christianity or Judaism which admit of a separation between the state and the institutions of faith, Islam prohibits even the slightest hint of daylight between the two.
However context alone does not determine foreign policy, define alliances, or identify enemies. The determinants, the definers, the identifiers are found in the ways in which factors of context merge with other, more discrete factors.
For example, Israel is not only Jewish, it is also a liberal democracy with institutions not at all dissimilar from those in Western Europe, the US, Japan, and other such nation-states. Israel, like other civilized states, has a free press, a high degree of governmental transparency, a strong commitment to the rule of law, a heavy focus upon equality of opportunity. Israel, again like the overwhelming majority of civilized states, has a regulated free market economy. And, perhaps most fundamental of all, it places the highest value on the dignity and autonomy of the individual citizen.
All of these non religious factors provide a firm basis for the establishment and development of a web of coinciding national interests. There are as many bases for an array of coinciding national interests between the US and Israel as exist for our bilateral relations with any and all European nation-states or Canada, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and a few other countries. In short, religious terminology is irrelevant.
The overwhelming majority of Muslim majority countries do not share any basic values, imperatives, or goals with the US. It is difficult to the point of impossibility to point out a Muslim majority polity which has produced a government with a dedication to pluralism, transparency, democracy, or the dignity of the individual citizen.
The record of the membership of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) in the observance of human rights is somewhere between appalling and nauseating. The same harsh judgement is appropriate when considering the primacy of the rule of law.
Freedom of expression is a null referent in the Muslim majority states. Thought crime is not only a reality in the Muslim states, it is a reality where the death penalty is applied. Only in the Muslim view of law are "crimes" such as apostasy and blasphemy punishable by death.
The bitter ground truth is that whether religious terms are employed or not, the nation-states dominated by Muslim ideology are guided, motivated, informed by an ideological agenda which is antithetical to the cultural matrix and the institutions arising from this matrix throughout the civilized world. There is no need to mention the religious strictures which have produced the antipathy between Muslim dominated polities and those of the civilized states, it is enough to reference the results: the pronouncements, the demands, the intransigence, the flat-out, full bore hostility.
It is needful to oppose Muslim states not because they are Muslim but rather because they stand in automatic opposition to most if not all of what the US and other civilized nation-states stand for. This is not unlike the need to oppose the old Soviet Union not because of Communism or Marxism-Leninism per se but rather because the Soviet Union sought to make a world order which was utterly unacceptable to the US and other countries.
Muslim states, particularly those in which the more ambitious advocates of political Islam hold forth, seek a new world order. It may be that these seekers after a new caliphate are self-delusional but that does not make them any less of a real world threat. Whether Iran or Turkey, Pakistan or Saudi Arabia, the designers of the new global political alignment are positing and pursuing a goal which is inherently inimical to the US and other civilized countries.
No less than a world dominated by National Socialism or Fascism or Marxism-Leninism, a globe in which Islamism rides high would be a place most unfriendly to the US. As a Great Power, the US has an obligation to pursue a global political, economic, and social order in which it can flourish, (to steal from an old US Army ad campaign) "be all it can be." As a Great Power, the US has the duty to block the efforts of hostile camps to succeed in achieving their goals.
To this end it is necessary that the US do now what it has done repeatedly over the past seven decades--identify countries with which we have the greatest and strongest coinciding national interests and work together to defeat threats. It is evident that the US has a wide number of strong coinciding national interests with Israel.
None of these, pace, Mr Koch, have anything directly to do with religion. All have much to do in a manner quite direct with the calculus of national and strategic interests.
When considering Iran, or Pakistan, or Syria or any of the other Muslim majority polities, it is possible to parse the opposing national and strategic interests without reference to sacred writings, theological prestidigitation, fatwas or mosques and minarets. As one could find good and sufficient reasons to oppose Nazi Germany without having studied Mein Kampf, or the Soviet Union without having pondered Das Kapital, it is both easy and proper to stand against the intents of political Islam without having gone to the neighborhood madras to meditate upon the Koran or the life of the Prophet.
Since Americans tend to give ill-deserved deference to matters of religion, it would be in our best interests to take the religion out of discussing foreign relations. After all, the great game of nations is all about power in this life and gives no thought to whatever reward may await one in the next.
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