But your points are well argued and you could be right. Ban the Niqab - and create the wedge to out the fervent radicals. I agree this would be at least a step in the right direction.
The victories against “social” Islam will be fought by Muslim feminists. There is a real bias in Islam toward the latest and most violently aggressive Hadiths. Much of the Koran is subject to feminist and “liberal” critique. A lot of it is mistranslated, so they say, to the benefit of misogynists. Go get em girls!
While it is true that the Koran has its violence and aggression it is open to interpretation. That interpretation is the wedge between the radicals and the other 99% of Muslims who simply follow the religion of their parents, grandparents and culture.
My feeling is that the upheaval in the Islamic world is a blessing. Certainly revolutions don’t end very well, but unless you get serious despotism like in Syria, the rebels don’t go away. They haven’t in Iran.
Here’s a good article on it by Thomas Friedman: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/11062/1129231-109.stm
What’s happening is the West is engaging Islam and Islam is moving out of the 14th century. Is there a real danger? Yes, but it comes from a small group of dedicated radicals who are essentially serial murderers awaiting the “nirvana” of the Caliphate. Like the Baader-Meinhof gang they are vicious and dangerous and they also share the same or similar ideologies and funding sources.
You’ll have trouble dismantling their funding sources. There will always be millions in illicit funds floating around and the Islamists, for all their pious talk, are willing to deal with anyone for a buck - sex slavers, drug dealers, etc.
You can kill them and our current policy of chopping off the head is very effective, but it doesn’t stop the movement or the “infection” so to speak. What does is intellectual defeat. Bush got it and potentially the Obama administration may as well, at least the US military does.
If you can get some semblance of republicanism in the Muslim world - Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Iran and Iraq have high chances, the others that are very serious dictatorships have the lowest because there is an enormous power vacuum and no intellectual history of liberty through Islam - you kill the radicals. You’ve just proved the Islamists wrong - you don’t need a caliphate to be a good Muslim and once you get some liberty and money in your pocket it takes a real calamity to put you back on the “plantation”.
The nation-building method is expensive, long and bloody. So what is the alternative?
Kill them in the West by banning the burka (niqab really, the burka is just a very modest dress). If France bans the niqab you free their women. The radicals either surrender on this fundamentalist issue or they leave. It is a win-win despite the risk of taqiyya or kitman. It’s really hard to live a double life with a wife and family that is rapidly being westernized. Can you imagine what an Islamist faces with a teen daughter in the west?
In the US we can make it a civil rights issue or a security issue or both and essentially ban the niqab in public. The key is you ruin the radicals locus of control - the woman and by default the family. You’ll never relieve the world of Islamic radicals, but you can alienate them from normal Muslims...plus ruin their day. ;-]