Of course, US policy has not been consistent in this regard.

Of course, US policy has not been consistent in this regard. As Samuel P. Huntington remarks, the 'paradox of democracy' has weakened the will of the West to promote democracy in the post-Cold War world. By the 'paradox of democracy,' Huntington means that democratically elected governments in non-Western societies may reject Western political domination and refuse to cooperate with Western policy initiatives.

Huntington writes: The West was relieved when the Algerian military intervened in 1992 and canceled the election which the fundamentalist FIS clearly was going to win. Western governments also were reassured when the fundamentalist Welfare Party in Turkey and the nationalist BJP in India were excluded from power after scoring electoral victories in 1995 and 1996.

On the other hand, within the context of its revolution Iran in some respects has one of the more democratic regimes in the Islamic world, and competitive elections in many Arab countries including Saudi Arabia and Egypt would almost surely produce governments far less sympathetic to Western interests than their undemocratic predecessors.[^3] However, despite the inconsistencies in Western policies, it remains the case that Western governments continue to lean heavily on human rights to justify their policies.

The inconsistencies mentioned by Huntington are really a distraction, for they invite an ad hominem response that fails to address the deeper moral issues raised by the challenge of human rights. The moral challenge may be posed by those opposed to Islam as a condemnation of Islam itself: since human rights are trampled by Islamic governments, there is something morally lacking in Islam.

A rather superficial sort of response is to be found in the claim that violations of human rights occur no more frequently in societies with Islamic governments than in societies governed by secularist regimes. This response is superficial because it seems to accept the presumption that respect for human rights may be used as a moral criterion by which to justify the condemnation of a religion.

Another sort of response is also unsatisfying: the concept of human rights is foreign to Islam, so all value judgments made on the basis of human rights are to be rejected as unIslamic. This response is unsatisfying because the consequent does not follow from the antecedent. It is salutary to understand why the entailment does not hold.