Of course they do. And if they love freedom they may just have to stay here, because back at their Islamic home state freedom is the opposite of Islam. Now I'm all for freedom and democracy spreading, don't get me wrong. It's just that Islam stomps out freedom and democracy wherever it flares up. The will of the people is not allowed. If it were just a tyrannical government, it would be easier for the people to overturn the status quo but it is a theocracy, and to promote freedom there is asking for the death penalty. From God, so they think. It's a formidable impediment to the spread of freedom.
Islam has had periods of relative freedom and enlightenment and other periods of repression. So has Christianity.
It's just that Islam stomps out freedom and democracy wherever it flares up. The will of the people is not allowed.
Bring Them Freedom, Or They Destroy Us
Real Clear Politics ^ | September 20, 2006 | Bernard Lewis
(snip)
General Bonaparte--he wasn't yet Emperor--proclaimed to the Egyptians that he had come to them on behalf of a French Republic built on the principles of liberty and equality. We know something about the reactions to this proclamation from the extensive literature of the Middle Eastern Arab world. The idea of equality posed no great problem. Equality is very basic in Islamic belief: All true believers are equal. Of course, that still leaves three "inferior" categories of people--slaves, unbelievers and women. But in general, the concept of equality was understood. Islam never developed anything like the caste system of India to the east or the privileged aristocracies of Christian Europe to the west. Equality was something they knew, respected, and in large measure practiced. But liberty was something else.
As used in Arabic at that time, liberty was not a political but a legal term: You were free if you were not a slave. The word liberty was not used as we use it in the Western world, as a metaphor for good government. So the idea of a republic founded on principles of freedom caused some puzzlement. Some years later an Egyptian sheikh--Sheikh Rifa'a Rafi' al-Tahtawi, who went to Paris as chaplain to the first group of Egyptian students sent to Europe--wrote a book about his adventures and explained his discovery of the meaning of freedom. He wrote that when the French talk about freedom they mean what Muslims mean when they talk about justice. By equating freedom with justice, he opened a whole new phase in the political and public discourse of the Arab world, and then, more broadly, the Islamic world......
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