Simple Utah Mormon Politics

With the fall of Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak, many Americans bemoaned the imminent takeover of Egyptian public life by the Muslim Brotherhood.  Clearly the MB dominates the legislature, because they were more organized than other parties in the first ever free elections, but events that have unfolded in the past few days indicate that it will not be nearly so easy to dominate the rest of Egyptian life.  Freedom of speech and association are alive and fairly healthy in Egypt today.

What's it really like to live in Gaza? It really sucks. Even Israeli Arab citizens don't have all of the freedoms that Israeli Jewish citizens do.  And it is much worse in the West Bank and Gaza.

The primary problem in the Gaza is Hamas.  Hamas is rightly designated by most of the world as a terrorist organization, and it is rightly hated by Israelis, because Hamas regularly commits terrorist acts against Israel.  Ironically, though, Hamas is revered by most Palestinians, because most of what Hamas does in the Gaza is provide humanitarian services to destitute Palestinians. Israel will never beat Hamas in the game of war, which is guaranteed to only create more Palestinian enemies for Israel.  The only way Israel can decimate Hamas is to do a better job of doing what Hamas does best--providing the services that Palestinians need.

I'm sure there are worse places to live than Iran, but there can't be too many. It is a living hell for many. Its government has usurped religion to wreak on its people things that religion was never meant for. Below I describe a small part of the desecrations that are going on in that country.  The Iranian people deserve much better.

Islam IS compatible with democracy.  Islam IS compatible with the free market.  Islam is the only religion that I know that was founded by a businessman! How did we Americans get so many misconceptions about Islam? The answer lies in falsely thinking we can explain modern Islamic violence by ancient Islamic history. The answer lies in the fact that we DON'T UNDERSTAND much more recent history--that of the last 100 years.

Here are some things that, in retrospect, I wish I had known when I was a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ or Latter-day Saints.  Since my son is leaving for his mission in the next few days, I thought I'd share those ideas with him, so that he can be more successful than I was.

"Seek first to understand," goes the wise saying. Westerners, and particularly Americans, and more particularly American evangelical Christians, have done a very poor job of seeking to understand what Islam really is.  Like anything else, Islam cannot be captured in a sound bite or even a series of sound bites.  Islam is much more variegated than the average Westerner currently comprehends, and an understanding of Islam requires dozens of hours of study, along with opening one's self up to the possibility that a lot of the sound bites informing what we think we know about Islam just might be wrong. Here is a list of books that one would do better to read to get a much broader and more accurate view of the religion of Islam.