Something is bothering me about our exchanges today.

What is the logic that would give the Muslim world and its leaders a pass by saying, essentially, that you can’t expect them to evolve beyond rampant, irrational anti-Semitism but which nevertheless holds that we should bet the ranch on their evolution to something we would recognize as a democratic culture (e.g., freedom to choose any religion or none, freedom to convert away from Islam, equality between men/women and Muslims/non-Muslims, right of free people to make laws that diverge from Islamic law/doctrine, separation of church/mosque and state, etc.)?

Mind you, I don’t think anyone’s come close to establishing that democracy actually reduces the incidence of terrorism. But even if we accept that proposition for argument’s sake, what is the process of mind that would make one open to one kind of cultural change and not the other? Or, turned the other way round, if they can’t get beyond the hatred, why do we assume they get to functioning democracy?