rab and Muslin oil producing countries proved incapable to use oil as aa weapon to put pressure on the international community in order to stop the brutal Israeli invasion in the Palestinian territories). The Western domination is exercised at the expense of the population governed by dictatorial regimes that impose anti-democratic practises to societies that are moreover submitted to the enormous socio-economic pressure of economic liberal reform and its structural adjustments.
What is truly appalling in this situation is that our societies are so obsessed by the "cultural clash between Islam and the West ", so convinced that there is no democracy in the Muslim world because of Islam, that the inequality between men and women comes from inmutable constraints in the Muslim universe, that violence stems from an innate islamic cultural-religious fanaticism, that they are unable to see what are the deeply political causes for this lack of democracy, this inequality and this violence. And what is even worse no one asks the question of what the West does to feed such inadequacies and violence. It is true that there is no democracy, but that is not because they are Muslims, but because an alliance has been struck between the local despotic governing elites and the Western powers. It is true that there is no processs of social modernization, but that is not imposed by Islam, but comes about rather because of the complicity between dictatorial regimes and ultra-conservative religious circles that preserve the patriarchal and puritan social models (just as it occured in other dictatorships in Southern Europe or Latin America). The only way to open up the doors of social evolution would be to promote democratization and the Rule of Law. It is true that there is violence, but not because "they are Muslims" but because the State exerts its violence continuously and the feelings of humiliation, despair and neglect that prevail in these societies constitute a culture medium favorable to a social explosion and to extremism.
This is how we come to this paradox that caracterizes the approach of Western societies toward the Muslim world. The cultural perspective is supposedly used to fight fundamentalist islamic attitudes, but at political level, we support those who defend and impose obsolete interpretations of Islam and suppress the modernists. We proclaim ourselves to be the representatives of civilization and of the model to be followed by all the others, while our political action promotes at the same time depotism and assents to the violation of human rights. This political stand of ours favours in the Muslim world the players that give the most negative image of Islam in the West and who even tend to a monopoly of this image, used as an overall discrimination tool against a vast social majority that does not identify with them. Because if such an unfai r contradiction, feelings of bitterness and anti-western resentment keep growi...
