Israel, the hope of the Muslim world

I can't imaging most Muslims would agree, but an article in Asia Times Online posits a very interesting thought: The state of Israel embodies the last, best chance for the Islamic world to come to terms with the modern world. Received wisdom in the foreign ministries of the West holds that relations with Muslims would be ever so much easier without the annoying presence of the Jewish state, which humiliates the Muslim world. Just the opposite is true. The Israeli presence in the territory of the ancient Jewish commonwealth, on land that once belonged to the Dar al’Islam, offers the single, slender hope for the future of the Muslim world, precisely because it constitutes a humiliation.

The premise of Western policy is to tread lightly upon Muslim sensibilities. That is an error of first magnitude, for Muslim sensibilities are what prevents the Islamic world from creating modern states.

Do they want modern states? Or do they want to revert to the eight century?

Islam cannot produce the preconditions for democracy in the Western sense out of its own resources.