Fukuyama on Muslims

I disagree with Francis Fukuyama's "Democracy for All!" approach (and heck, based on this blurb, I'm not even sure he believes in it), but he raises a good point:

Radical Islamism is in no way an assertion of traditional Muslim values or religiosity. ... In a tractional Muslim society, your identity is fixed by the society into which you are born; only when you live in a non-Muslim environment does it occur to you to ask who you are.

The profound alienation that results makes poorly assimilated second- and third-generation Muslims susceptible to a pure, universalistic ideology like that of Osama bin Laden. Mohamed Atta and the other organizers of 9/11, the Madrid and London conspirators, and Mohammed Bouyeri, murderer of the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, all fall into this category.

This means that more democracy and more modernization will not solve our near-term terrorism problem. I believe that both democracy and modernization are good things and should be promoted in the Middle East for their own sake. But we will continue to have a serious problem in democratic Western Europe, regardless of what happens in Egypt or Lebanon."