On moderate Muslims and the concept of “religiosity” [Part I]
[NOTE: This is Part I of a two-part series.]
A short while ago I wrote this about the so-called “moderate Muslims”:
Islam may not have moderate branches, but there are moderate Muslims who are good citizens of this country and believe in its ideals.
Do you not know nominal Christians and nominal Jews who don’t follow all the precepts (or even most of the precepts) of their religions? Islam is no different. I know quite a few people born as Muslims who are not religious. Some are even atheists. I know these people quite well. They would be classified by Islam as Muslims, and they would be Muslims by birth, but they are very moderate and no threat at all. They constitute more than 10% but probably less than 50% of the Moslems in this country. Some of them, for example, are expat Iranians who came (or their parents came) to this country after the 1979 revolution. They no more want that sort of life for themselves or for other people than you do, and they are against terrorism. Nor do they want other people to become Muslim.
When I wrote that, I had not yet read this piece by my friend Richard Landes. He makes a somewhat similar argument about “moderate” Muslims—although he makes it far more elegantly and clearly than I ever did, and he then goes on to expand on it greatly. I recommend that you read the whole thing, but here are some excerpts:
…I suggest we look at a matter not so much of theology, or even exegesis, as of “religiosity”””a particular “style” of living one’s religion, the way one’s religious convictions affect the way one treats others, both co-religionists and outsiders. Religiosity goes a long way toward understanding how any given believer reads his or her sacred and legal texts, and to what theological principles they will find themselves drawn.
Not all people who follow a religion follow it in the same way. Typically, the stricter ones consider the others as having left the religion or as practicing a bastardized and/or inauthentic form of the religion, but the rest continue to believe themselves members of that religion in good standing.
Landes goes on:
If “religiosity” designates a religious style, a way of “living” one’s religious beliefs, then “triumphalist religiosity” designates believers who need to assert their own dominance as a visible sign of their superiority, as a proof of God(s) “favor.” Put somewhat differently, “because we rule, our god is the true god.” In monotheism: “We are God’s chosen because we rule.”
So, what are triumphalists out to do?:
Triumphalist religiosity places great importance on a visible deference paid to true believers. It both demands that others pay it respect and, to varying degrees depending on circumstances, disrespects others as a matter of principle. Triumphalists find public criticism unacceptably disrespectful, and interpret blasphemy laws aggressively in order to silence dissent. Intolerance, disdain, violence, repression, intimidation””all of these deeds and attitudes, reflect triumphalist religiosity in its crudest forms. Historically, then, triumphalists exercise power in an authoritarian manner, and, when insecure, tend, domestically, toward inquisitorial persecution of dissent (heretics, apostates) and humiliation of non-believers, and internationally, towards holy wars (Jihads, Crusades) and the massacre of those who resist.
There is a close correlation between triumphalist religiosity and tribal warrior, honor-shame culture: When he found out about the [salvific] crucifixion, the triumphalist tribal war chief, Clovis, exclaimed: “If me and my men had been there, we would have avenged this wrong.” When the Parisian clergy demanded redress for the Chevalier de la Barre’s refusal to doff his cap at their Corpus Christi procession, they were asserting their rights to public deference, and the state made good on their outrage by torturing and beheading the insulter.
Note that the examples from Christianity are ancient. And in America, hundreds of years ago, a further and even more definitive break was made with that tradition by the Constitution:
When the U.S. Constitution separated Church and State, it formally renounced triumphalist religiosity. Every citizen of the democracy, and all the religious groups therein, have full freedom to believe that they are special, the one and only true faith, the exclusively chosen of God””in their own minds and hearts, in their own community of conviction. But they cannot use the state (i.e. coercive power) to impose that perception on others. This involves a collective deed of renunciation so rare, that the U.S. Constitution (1789) represents the first time in the 1750-year history of Christianity that tolerance of dissenting faith became a “winner’s creed.”
Landes is a retired history professor who is an expert on the millennium of 1000, and this background positions him very well to understand the phenomenon:
In Paris in 2015, jihadis began with attacks on blasphemers and Jews and ended with attacks on the nightlife scene. Some puzzled about why. Whence this hostility? It seems less incomprehensible when one realizes that triumphalists find any independent infidel, especially those who are enjoying their (immoral) freedom, intolerable. While different believers have different thresholds at which they will become violent, all triumphalists are susceptible to the Jihadi temptation. When people warn of the negative impact of insults on moderate Muslims’, they refer, often without acknowledging it, to this tipping point at which triumphalists find the behavior of insufficiently deferential infidels unbearable.
Culturally, triumphalism is at the intersection of two powerful social forces: a tribal warrior ethos that appeals especially to the youth, and an imperial, millennial ethos that mobilizes the drive for world conquest. Together they constitute a powerful recruiting device urging hormone-riddled young people to join the apocalyptic global battle to implement Allah’s plan for a global Caliphate. And as victorious warriors, to them go the spoils of holy war.
So there are two dimensions about religion that matter in this discussion. One is whether a religion is “truimphalist” or not. If it is not, then it doesn’t much matter how deeply religious a person is; he or she will very much tend to be a live-and-let-live type. It the religion is triumphalist, then “religiosity” is a dimension that matters very much.
Islam is a religion that in its classic form is triumphalist (there are heterodox forms that are not, but they are minority sects of the religion). There are many Muslims in this country who display no more “religiosity” than the secular Jew or the reform Jew who doesn’t keep kosher and hasn’t read the Tanakh, or those nominal Christians who don’t go to church regularly and even have some trouble with the doctrine of Christ’s divinity. Many of those Muslims are citizens who are as dedicated to the principles of the Constitution as the average Christian or Jew. Those who suggest that all Muslims must be deported need to take them into account without just stating that all Muslims are secret jihadis or that these “moderate” people aren’t really Muslims.
They exist. They are Muslims of one kind or other. They are citizens. You may think they are the eggs that must be broken to make some palatable omelets, but I don’t.
[Part II, to come tomorrow, will deal with some suggestions of mine on what should be done.]
[ADDENDUM: Part II can be found here.]
Neo,
I consume a lot of blog writing and general commentary on the web on a daily basis. What I find here is consistently the most reasonable, balanced, and thoughtful stuff in my circle of reading. Keep up the good work.
Theodore Dalrymple recently wrote about having a Muslim North African cab driver who insisted that the terrorists are simply criminals who have found a new ego-feeding and resource-claiming gig. They get radicalised in prison, he claimed. I don’t doubt that this is partly true. However, mild disapproval without institutional support isn’t going to bring us to peace, except perhaps in the very long run with lots of innocents killed along the way.
How would we have been able to determine the “religiosity” of the Muslim couple that perpetrated the slaughter in San Bernardino? More to the point: How would we make that determination without violating their right to privacy?
Islam is not compatible with our Constitution. Muslims do not believe in separation of church and state, the very basis of our republic.
That’s all well and good, Neo, but hardly helps in solving the problem. Jihadis are butchering people worldwide, and the fact is they hide in the Molenbeeks of the world, sheltered among the “moderate” Muslims.
Maybe you’ll propose your solutions in part II. In the meantime, as eve just noted above, Islam cannot ever be compatible with the Constitution.
It is illegal to advocate the violent overthrow of the US government. Is Islam pacifist? I think not. Accordingly, is there a place for Islam in the USA?
It’s a pro-choice, pro-choice, pro-choice, pro-choice world. Which implies that principles cannot be considered meaningful predictors of behavior since they are negotiable or variable. Only a consensus of force or negligence can be considered reliable determinants. It’s a religion of special and peculiar interests complemented by prevailing winds as Humpty Dumpty rocks to and fro on the wall.
Echoing Eve, I have heard there are reputable polls showing 46% of U.S. Muslims believe sharia law should be the law of the land. If true, can these people, although non-violent Muslims, still be considered “moderate” Muslims? Do they not threaten to undermine Western civilization and the freedoms we collectively fought for and cherish? Shouldn’t the sharia believers be deported along with the obvious jihadists? Many more questions, so little time…
Presume we have a scale of religiosity. At what point, running down from full triumphalism, do we find moderate Muslims for whom Islamic solidarity does not supercede legal and moral issues which would call for them to, for example, drop the dime on a potential terrorist.
Fiftieth percentile? Eightieth? Twentieth?
Just a reminder: If it’s the fiftieth percentile, that means half the Muslims in the country are with the program in one way or another.
Suppose we have three or four young Muslim guys prosecuted for harassing women at the shopping mall and there are two Muslims on the jury who vote to acquit. Solidarity or problems with the prosecution’s case? And what are the rest of us likely to think? Presume, for grins, that one of the Muslim jurors says he would never vote a Muslim defendant guilty. Then what?
Even moderately religious parents normally attempt to pass on their religion and cultural heritage to their children. Muslim children exposed to the Koran and Islamic teachers thereby become at least aware of what is required to be observant.
The writings of authors such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Robert Spencer reveal not only what is in the Koranic blueprint most of those children are taught, but how Muslim society nudges them to be observant.
It behooves us to be aware of what is meant by the Mecca (peaceful, tolerant) vs Medina (violent, intolerant) parts of the Koran, and the abrogation surah* that resolves that conflict in favor of the newer Medina passages.
The combined influences on Muslim children add up to a very bad outcome for a civilization that closes its eyes and pretends that Islam is a religion of peace.
*Surah 2:106:
None of Our revelations do We abrogate or cause to be forgotten, but We substitute something better or similar: Knowest thou not that Allah Hath power over all things?
If I become Dutch Prime Minister next year I’ll crush Islamic terrorism, close our national borders and De-Islamize The Netherlands. – Geert Wilders
It is the only way. Moderate, quiet, unassuming Moslems are, by Islam’s tenets, not real Moslems, but apostates or heretics. Sectarian Islam swamps everything in its wake, including “moderates”. No other religion perpetrates such destruction on the less than convicted. Having been a Catholic of some ill repute for various periods or offenses, I have yet to be visited by an albino Jesuit ninja or a Swiss Guardsman in Mufti to set me straight or deliver a Papal Bull.
As long as Islam proper exists, moderate or middling Moslems are inconsequential. And certainly can never ever be counted on to stand up to immoderate extreme Islam. If any would reform Islam they must first reform the Prophet and the Prophet PBUH would have to be presumed to have been imperfect for fourteen hundred years. And Allah would have to be presumed an idiot god for having revealed to the Prophet utter nonsense.
All that can be done with Islam is to relegate it to its natural habitat with geopolitical apartheid and have as little do with it as possible — which is a good deal less than the Bush clan had managed.
I suspect that all religions are triumphalist (in the sense that the word is used here), given half a chance. A thousand plus years of minority status vastly weakened Jewish triumphalism, but there are stories (and supporting videos) of ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods, certainly in Israel and to a lesser extent in New York, where those who perpetrate “abominations” (like skirts above the knee or driving on the Sabbath) are spat upon or have stones thrown at them.
Incidentally, “triumphalist” Muslims are not seeking to force conversions, only what they consider proper behavior. The Constitution by no means prohibits that sort of religious enforcement. For example, a Muslim political majority would certainly have the Constitutional power to prohibit alcohol or pork, just as the current American government has prohibited alcohol, and currently prohibits horsemeat.
https://www.lawfareblog.com/syria-obamas-fault
There is no known way of parsing the devout Muslim from those trying to LEAVE Islam.
You are projecting Western norms of inner logic onto souls whose outlook is 12,000 years back in the Neolithic.
Islamic practice is to murder anyone leaving the collective, the act usually performed by a close relative.
Grasshoppers morph into locusts when conditions are ripe. The transformation is so remarkable that for centuries no-one made the connection. ( It occurs while the critter is in the soil. )
Muslims morph from common behavior to suicide-jihad — and that transformation is hidden from view, also.
Most of the Parisian jihadis didn’t fit the jihadi profile AT ALL.
They were practicing ‘moderate’ Islam — actually they were lapsed Muslims — never having entered a Mosque. (!)
In sum, Muslim immigration has to be stopped — entirely.
There is no other solution this side of a full on police state.
I don’t care to live in Nazi America.
It will never be possible to suppress True Believers from expressing their true jihad.
Did you see the newsagent in Glasgow who posted “Happy Easter to my Christian Friends” on his Facebook page. A more devout Muslim traveled 200 miles in 4 hours to murder him by stabbing him over 30 times. Yes those moderates are out there, and they have learned to keep their mouths shut.
Surveys show that the happiest Mohammedans are those living in inverted societies. The fewer Muslims present, the happier the Muslims there. As the percentage of Muslims in a population goes up the happiness of those Muslims goes down. Bummer man.
“Do you not know nominal Christians and nominal Jews who don’t follow all the precepts (or even most of the precepts) of their religions? Islam is no different.”
There certainly are ‘cafeteria’ Christians, Jews and Muslims. As well, no doubt in all religions.
Islam is profoundly different however, in that triumphalism is not supported by either Moses or Jesus. Whereas Muhammad is entirely triumphalist.
And that factor is evident in how many American Muslims would prefer to be ruled by Shariah Law. That the FBI has revealed that they get little to no collaboration from the ‘moderate’ Muslim community. That 51% of American mosques contain written materials that call for violence and that 100% of mosques preach from the Qur’an, which unequivocally commands violence against the infidel. Nor is it America alone but rather in every Western society. It is not accidental that young British Muslims are much more radical than their parents. And, that the very same dynamic applies among young American Muslims. Nor is it happenstance that 84% of Egyptians support the death penalty for Sharia.
The attack in Pakistan against public Christian celebration of Easter is entirely in keeping with the Qur’an’s tenets. The Crucifixion of a priest on Good Friday is entirely in keeping with Muhammad’s M.O.
Nor from the standpoint of American security is it possible to reliably determine the true moderate from the Muslim practicing Taqiyya or Muruna.
I must also take issue with the good professor’s assertion that the Crusades are an example of Christian ‘triumphalism’.
That is patently untrue. For a history professor who specializes in that subject to not know this is either an appallingly inexcusable degree of ignorance or, much more likely, willful deceit.
The Crusades were both a military reaction to Islam’s repeated depredations against the Christian world and a religious reaction to Islam’s refusal to allow Christian pilgrimage to the Holy Lands. That is properly characterized as self-defense, not triumphalism.
Where is the anonymous outcry on the internet from Muslim moderates against ISIS for the Crucifixion of a priest? Outrage against the slaughter of children in Pakistan?
Muslim leaders condemning it, does not outweigh the utter silence from the 3.3 million Muslims living in America.
A google search reveals official condemnation but Muslims on the internet have nothing to say…
Where are the moderate Muslims, staying safely anonymous, who believe in our Constitution’s precepts? Even on the internet I can’t find them, can anyone?
Some cancer cells are benign, sitting right beside the malignant ones. Better to surgically remove all. If they will eat a BLT and renounce Islam, they get to stay. Otherwise deport them to Saudi Arabia. The jihhadists expect no less of their “converts”.
Taqiyya, the right of Muslims to lie to and deceive unbelievers while remaining true to their “faith”. Almost a duty.
Certain American Indian tribes had the same (ahem) ethos, particularly the Comanche. There was no way to make peace with them. They entered into treaties and promptly ignored them. They had no concept of “my word is my bond” in dealings with the white man. Which led to the creation of Texas Rangers. After a Comanche attack, the regional ranger’s duty was to create a posse and hunt and kill the offenders, regardless of time and distance.
Which led to the saying, “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.”
There were 147 Islamic terror attacks in January 2016 alone. About 20,000 killed in 2015, in many countries, all continents.
See religionofpeace.com which tallies the murders.
It is not about ISIS.
It is about Islam.
And the only good Muslim is….?
How does one take seriously attempts to modulating Islam when Islam promotes taqiyya?
The video supports one of two premises:
All Moslems are spiritually equipped to lie. Khurram Dara is a Moslem. Khurram Dara is lying.
or
Khurram Dara has just stuck a “kick me” sign on his back.
Islam cannot be reformed. The reformation of Islam is the end of Islam. Islam is not THAT fatalistic.
The problem is that Islam is alien to Western Civilization, and has been antagonistic to the West throughout its history. Raising the question of deportation just confuses things. All you have to do is not let any more in. Just have a moratorium on immigration. That’s long overdue, and a good place to start.
Richard Landes is an excellent historian, and his father was a great one. When Richard Landes reminds us of the importance of triumphalist religiosity, we’d do well to listen. But Landes’s examples of triumphalist religiosity are all tribal, and that’s no accident.
A famous Arab proverb has been translated as “I, against my brothers. I and my brothers against my cousins. I and my brothers and my cousins against the world.” This proverb is quintessential tribalism, and Islam is the quintessential tribal religion. This is why even a small minority of Muslims inevitably causes violent problems in a society.
It’s true that a Muslim with intense religiosity may become a violent terrorist, and it’s also true that many other Muslims of low religiosity will not. Unfortunately, those of low religiosity will protect their violent “brothers” against the infidels. This isn’t just an ancient feud. It’s happening right now — of course, in the Middle East, but also in places as different as Thailand and Minneapolis.
Many polls have been taken to measure ordinary Muslims’ sympathy for terrorism. These polls have been done in the US, Europe, North Africa and the Mideast. Off the top of my head, I can’t remember the exact numbers, but roughly 25% of American Muslims sympathize with terrorists, while roughly 90% of Egyptian Muslims do. Other Muslims fall somewhere in between. The 25% figure is usually reported as evidence of the restraint and moderation common to American Muslims. In fact, the numbers reflect tribal math. In places that are dense with Muslims — e.g. some neighborhoods in Minneapolis — support for terrorism is high. In areas where Muslims are sparse, tribal sentiments are weaker, and support for terrorism is lower. This is what has driven many people to call for Muslim deportations. In many areas, the concentration of Muslims has become too high. Violence becomes inevitable, and the violent will be protected by their coreligionists — even if they’re nominal Muslims who seem to be your friends.
Yes, there are muslims who do not want to slice off the clitoris of my granddaughters, stone their own daughters for unfortunately being raped, or toss homosexuals off tall buildings, or fly airliners in the WTC, behead or set on fire infidels, ect. So what? There were Germans who were not Nazi. There were Japanese who were not gung ho for the emperor. So what? Unconditional war, no mercy, no hand ringing over collateral damage.
I don’t want to intern domestic muslims, many are not loyal to sharia, yet we see few willing to rat out the fanatics in their local mosque. Soon they will have to choose. Only so many more deaths of the infidels will be tolerated. It will not end well for islam, the religion of death.
That Moslem man who was massacred because he wished his Christian neighbors a Happy Easter was an Ahmadi Moslem. I had heard of them, knew little about them. I only know slightly more now. But it seems that it is somewhat of “Reform Islam” that has a certain amount of potential for being less… uh, problematic. (Of course, many other Moslem thins they are heretical.)
It used to be that the Alawites were a little more, uh, moderate, but under Bashar Al-Assad, they have been cleaving more to Shiite Islam — kind of trying to prove their NOT “heretical.”
The organized terrs have long known to conceal their religiousity – shaving beards, drinking alchohol and visiting strip clubs are all sanctioned by their leaders as helpful for the mission. So nothing can be concluded from public “display”.
Likewise saying many of the outwardly lapsed Muslims are as dedicated to our western principle is meaningless. I’m sure there are some, but there is no way of determining whether even Neo’s minimum of more than 10 % percent is at all accurate. Saying there are “many” without provable evidence is just wishful thinking – projecting the values of lapsed Christians and Jews onto members of a culture as alien to to those values as any on earth.
I have a great deal of sympathy for the non-jihadist Muslims, who are generally being caught in the cross-fire generated by their fanatic co-religionists, and who will be most at risk in the conflagration that is shaping up in the world.
However, I will only worry about triumphalist Lutherans and Baptists when they start cutting off the heads of those who convert to other denominations, or forcibly preventing police from entering the Bible Belt.
If they begin to do so, then the Law will be brought to bear against them, and most of Society will decry them — and they will be acting against the fundamental principles of their Religious doctrines as currently promulgated.
Only Muslims believe they have the right to kill heretics and blasphemers, and no due process is involved at all.
That reduces the ranks of moderates very rapidly.
(Incidentally (but perhaps not just coincidentally), most of the Triumphalism in the West is being practiced by the Left, including President “I Won”.)
****
http://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2016/03/28/nina-shea-how-hillary-clinton-assisted-the-mainstreaming-of-taliban-ideology-in-pakistan/
(emphasis added)
Shea noted that even rumors of blasphemy have led to mob violence and suicide bombings.
“This is a huge problem, and it’s more than a human rights problem, because Pakistan is the second-largest Muslim country in the world, after Indonesia,” she said. “It has 190 million people, and it has the nuclear bomb. So we are seeing an Islamization of this country, and it’s in large part due to this culture of blasphemy, where blasphemy is punished by vigilantes as well as the State, carries the death penalty, and there’s absolutely no due process. You don’t need evidence. To repeat the evidence in court, in fact, is to repeat the blasphemy, so there is no evidence.”
There also aren’t many acquittals, as Shea noted judges who acquit on blasphemy charges have been driven into hiding with death threats. She noted Pakistan’s blasphemy laws have been used to attack moderate Muslims, Hindus, journalists, and educators, as well as Christians. In essence, every moderating force in society has been crushed, allowing “extremist radical Islamists to control the discourse and learning within this country.”
Carthage has been rebuilt, and there is a peace pact between Carthage and Rome, more’s the pity!
The non-jihadi Muslims are not fixed in their “moderation.” They talk the talk but walk not the walk. They finance, they shelter, they admire the jihadis. They promote CAIR and the various other “friendly” and “educational” front groups, the Muslim (Wahhabi) chaplains in all prisons, all, converting the black felons. Their “assimilated”‘ children become American jihadis.
Our local rug dealer, an unctuous and obseqiuous man who flogged poor quality machine-made Indian oriental rugs at high prices, placed his son in our best private Episcopal middle school, which was naturally thrilled to have this addition for cultural diversity. Until he started bead-mouthing Jews at class breaks and was expelled. Wonder who he learned that from? Dear old assimilated Dad? Or at our one mosque, surrounded by 8 ft iron fence?
Maybe Neo will give us a really neat algorithm with which to separate the honest moderate Muzzies from the secretive taqiyya Muzzies. Maybe with centrifuges.
“bad” not “bead”
I respect neo’s desire to shield non-complicit Muslims from the inevitable Western backlash against Muslim terrorism, but I think this PowerLine post is relevant to the discussion, as is the one from Heather MacDonald.
(emphasis added)
***
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2016/03/easter-greetings-from-the-taliban.php
…
President Obama, meanwhile, warns us against “stigmatizing” Muslims. (To be fair, his precise reference was to Muslim-Americans, although the context was the Brussels bombings.) Actually, you and I have no ability to stigmatize Muslims. The problem is that a great many Muslims are stigmatizing themselves, by committing terrorist acts, by applauding terrorist acts and supporting terrorists, and by failing to take action against terrorists and terrorist groups. President Obama demands that we maintain the absurd fiction that Islamic terrorism has nothing to do with Islam, on the theory that pretending will make it so. Unfortunately, it won’t.
***
http://city-journal.org/html/sometimes-jihad-just-jihad-14313.html
..
So let’s get this straight. ISIS has no respect for civil liberties. Its advocates preach an autocratic, theocratic, tribal society that beheads innocents without the slightest due process of the law. Its power is total and brutal. It seeks to dominate as much of the West as it can by acts of violence that violate every Western norm of combat.
Yet, when it comes to Muslims living in the West, ISIS suddenly becomes a zealous advocate for the same civil liberties that are unknown in its own territory. It allegedly expects Muslims in the West to be protected by an ACLU-certified panoply of rights that it automatically denies residents of its imaginary caliphate. Furthermore, according to this counterintuitive narrative, though ISIS detests the West and would never allow Jews or Christians to colonize ISIS territories, it allegedly gets really hot under the collar at the prospect of any diminishment of open Muslim migration into the hated dens of Western decadence. And ISIS is killing people not because it wants to kill the infidels, but for a far more complicated, two-step reason: to induce Western security measures that only a radical civil libertarian would object to, but that will allegedly arouse Muslim residents of the West into deadly rebellion.
Reality check: ISIS isn’t “seeking to manipulate European fears of terrorism;” it is creating those fears by its own actions. Those fears wouldn’t exist but for Islamic terrorism. Any heightened security and immigration measures that Europe may belatedly implement are not the product of some irrational paranoia; they are the product of the demonstrated failure of existing policies to protect innocent lives. ISIS engages in the same brutal tactics in countries with civil liberties and in countries without civil liberties. Those tactics are not designed to trigger a lessening of civil liberties, but to kill as many people as possible.
It is perfectly appropriate and legitimate for the West to institute whatever immigration measures it believes will best protect it from terrorism.
..
The liberal intelligentsia’s reflexive blaming of Western society for anti-Western barbarity is the ultimate act of narcissism. That intelligentsia believes that everything that happens is about us. In fact, it’s not. The remaining pockets of savagery in the world exist independently of the West. According to the liberal elites, however, the West has no right to take common-sense security measures to defend itself against that savagery.
An article by Andrew McCarthy that sheds some light on the issue.
http://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/islam-facts-or-dreams/
The key is that the Islamic scholars and imams who preach Salafi/Wahhabi doctrine are calling the tune. Most Muslims do not feel qualified to interpret the Quran. They look to the imams and scholars. There are other schools of Islamic jurisprudence that don’t teach Salafi Islam. It has been rapidly spreading since the days when the Saudis acquired vast riches and have used those riches to spread that form of Islam. Want an example of Muslims who reject Salafism? The Kurds are a prime example of Muslims who adhere to a more moderate form of the religion.
IMO, the key is to follow the lead of Egypt’s President el Sisi in challenging the doctrine of Salafi Islam. It is a doctrine that preaches the extermination/conversion of the 7.4 billion non Muslims in the world. Is it not possible to point out forcefully how insane this doctrine is and how it commits the Muslim world to war it can’t win? That is, if the non Muslim world ever stand up for itself.
It would be remiss to pass over Mr. Steyn’s remarks on the question, as expressed in this recent post (which echoes — literally — most of his writing on the subject)
somewhere about mid-way:
***
http://www.steynonline.com/7499/it-was-were-you
(preface)
I’m not sure I’d be entirely comfortable writing in today’s Britain. In response to the Brussels bloodbath, Matthew Doyle, who runs a talent agency, Tweeted:
I confronted a Muslim woman yesterday in Croydon. I asked her to explain Brussels. She said ‘Nothing to do with me’. A mealy mouthed reply.
In response, the bozos of Her Majesty’s Constabulary arrested Mr Doyle, locked him up and charged him with an offence under Section 19 of the Public Order Act, which carries a gaol term of up to seven years. If anyone in the chain of command and broader bureaucracy at the Metropolitan Police thought there was something thuggish and totalitarian and, indeed, unEnglish about criminalizing an unexceptional Tweet, I’ve yet to hear about it….
But on Friday night the Met police said the charge had been dropped after it emerged the police officer in question had jumped the gun and charged Mr Doyle when in fact he needed CPS approval to do so.
This seems like a fairly elementary mistake to make, and I would be interested to know the identity of the copper who made it. …
But we got to lock him up and make an example of him, didn’t we? And we’ll do the same to you, got it? Because in a tolerant, multicultural society, everybody has to fall in line and think the same way. Or else.
As my friend John O’Sullivan said a few years back, the British police are now the paramilitary wing of The Guardian. Whatever your opinion of Mr Doyle’s opinion, the state’s cure is worse than the disease.
(main thesis)
Ten years ago, on page 85 of my bestseller America Alone I wrote:
One is tempted to update the old joke: A ten-dollar bill is in the center of the crossroads. To the north, there’s Santa Claus. To the west, the Tooth Fairy. To the east, a radical Muslim. To the south, a moderate Muslim. Who reaches the ten-dollar bill first?
Answer: The radical Muslim. All the others are mythical creatures.
The “moderate Muslim” is not entirely fictional. But it would be more accurate to call them quiescent Muslims.
…
What I wrote over Easter was that “not all Muslims are like these savages” – which is not the same thing at all (as “most Muslims abhor terrorism”), and happens to be true: not all Muslims are like the savages who murdered Mr Shah by stamping his head into the pavement. If a billion-and-a-half Muslims worldwide were willing to stamp you to death, it’d already be over. Because there are approximately a billion of us in the developed world – and, on the evidence of the reaction to Paris, Brussels et al, the proportion of the west willing to resist Islamic supremacism barely makes it into double digits.
For those who would prefer to deny that there is “moderation” in Islam, here is something to support the contention that there are certain “moderating”—or at least “progressive”—influences at work:
http://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/2016/03/islamic-state-condemns-other-terrorists-for-focusing-on-israel/
The german people who stayed home, worked, bought bonds and donated to the cause, are the moderate nazis..
This ‘Moderate Moooslimes’ post, like the 12/19/15 infamous goody two-shoes post about the
‘human tragedy’ of German Socialist concentration camps Kapos, referencing one particularly nasty effer who almost got away with it, leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
Moronic fellow-feelings for Kapos would have gotten you nastily killed in my parents living room.
Those, non-Jewish, survivors were pissed off.
This type of mushy middle-of-the-road, syrupy, pseudo-emphatic, pseudo-psychotherapeutic thinking will get us all killed.
Adam Smith made it clear: reason not fellow-feelings.
If ‘moderate’ Moooslimes don’t make a stand they will have to go … on.a.grand.scale. Think Sudeten Germans or Algerian Pied-Noirs or …Armenians.
At large, moderates or mushy-middle independents do not matter. It’s the Fanatics, Who Rule.
There is … the mushy stance of Western women is this sorry state of affairs. We know all too well that Feminist Vagina Organizations get easily inflamed but in the case of invasive Moooslime gross misogyny … crickets.
Then, there is the twisted matter of Moooslime women.
They.raise.the.boys.
Somewhere in the Jungian penumbra, this is lurking.
Pretentiously call this comment a rant one time to many and you get … Trump.
People have been dying in a nasty manner … nothing moderate about that.
Finally, from the penumbra, emerges a silly elderly twit crisscrossing the nation aggressively displaying a Communist clenched fist salute.
Stereotypic.
Another fine exposition, Ms. Neo. But, here is the $64,000 Question: how can our government – famously incompetent in terms of hiring genuinely patriotic “experts” in foreign languages and culture – discern the “irreligious” Muslims who live in America from the “triumphantly religious” Muslims? Bear in mind that the success rate of such a program needs to be fairly high in order to protect us from a domestic support base for Islamic terrorists’ attacks. I’m not being rhetorical nor critical. I hope your Part II includes your prescription for such a program.
Ike.
We have a problem: Whenever–in Europe at least–there is a certain number of Muslims we get; jew-bashing, gay-bashing, rape, petty crime, assault on women. That’s the good stuff. Then we get radicalization and terror.
I understand that describing a problem which is, under most circumstances, not manageable brings accusations of recommending the Very Serious Solution.
Not my idea. The problem was not my idea.
Moderate Mohammedans aren’t going to kill me because I’m Christian. Or because I’m hoping to grow in devoutness as a Christian. The more intently a Mohammedan follows the directions of the Prophet Mohammed, the more likely they are to feel the need to kill me, because that’s how they roll. They also kill “moderate Muslims” for being too moderate. This is why the moderates won’t try to reign in the radicals. Call out one radical and his brother will kill you. The fellow who killed the newsagent waited for the police to show up and surrendered peacefully. (None of this ‘hands up, don’t shoot’ shit.)
The difference between a religious fanatic and me is a religious fanatic believes in God more than I do.
Remember a few years back, when a French Rabbi and his two sons were killed by a Mohammedan? The killer also killed two moderate Muslims because there weren’t being Muslim enough.
A Christian that follows historic Christianity in our present time (and for some time) is no threat to the general populace. The command is to “love your neighbor”, “offer your other cheek”, “walk the extra mile” and “forgive your enemies”. The ascendancy of the western culture that is predicated on the 10 commandments is replete with vanquishing those that wouldn’t abide those commandments; that is true. Since then wars have been fought in coming to the aide of our allies and opposing evil. Historic Islam is a threat to western culture. That is the distinction for me. We are recipients of a world that has been greatly sacrificed for, by our predecessors. We will have to resolve to fight this foe in defending our legacy or be overcome. I am in agreement with those that call for an end to Muslim immigration at this present time (and should have been already our protocol since 9/11). Yes, innocent Muslims will suffer while they sort it out. That is the unfortunate reality. Until the moderate Muslim is made to suffer and deal with that family member that is making life miserable for the majority, nothing will be resolved. Are there ever any simple or easy solutions?
Artfldgr:
Incorrect analogy.
Those were “moderate Nazis.”
The proper analogy is “moderate Germans”—who were anti-Nazi but not activist. The activists were the underground or other anti-Nazi activists, some of whom got killed. There were many anti-Nazi Germans who laid low. They were intimidated into silence, and afraid, and hoped to merely survive, but they hated the Nazis. There were plenty of people like that, and many of them died because they were residing in Germany and/or even fought in the war because they were drafted. I have said that in wartime that is what happens.
You may recall that the Nazis only ever got about a third of German votes in a fair election.
That renunciation only works in a relatively libertarian society wherein the vast majority have the same secular life-ways and values and wherein the idiots can be kept at social arm’s length and made to eat the stews they cook up, themselves.
They start sleeping on your front lawn and and presenting themselves as social peers deserving of tax funded solidarity, and all bets are off.
Modern Liberalism, kills itself. Unfortunately it kills anyone else that comes into unwilling contact with it as well.
Richard Aubrey.
I’m not certain that I understand your comment, sir. Frankly, I am unable to propose even as a thought experiment in my own head any approach to this national security problem that would not be considered – by most if not all including myself – a Very Serious Solution. Assuming that are in fact such people as might be labeled “moderate Muslims” and further assuming that they would not assist in the supply and conduct of any attack here in the US, we still have the problem is distinguishing the moderates from the radicals, so that any policy might likewise distinguish between them in the way in which we treat them, while still providing protection of our non-Muslim population from attacks.
neo: With all due respect, I doubt the existence of any significant number of “moderate Germans” during the Nazi era, who were not laying so low that they could not be discerned. As a practical matter, there isn’t much difference between such a group and those who were indifferent. The White Rose was a tiny fraction of the German nation. The Soviet spy apparat in Nazi Germany was larger than the entirety of the actual civilian opposition to the Nazi regime, until of course the war ended and the Allies occupied Germany. Then, all the “moderate Germans” protested to our occupying forces that they were cowed by the Nazi terror into submission. Entirely too convenient to be believed, but irrelevant because one who doesn’t actively resist is genuinely in opposition.
Two corrections: In the first part, it should read, “…the problem of…” not “…is…”. In the second, it should read, “…is not genuinely in opposition”. My apologies.
Winston Churchill put it succinctly, and perhaps best, in The River War, Volume 2, pp 248-250 (1899):
“How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries, improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live.
A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement, the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property, either as a child, a wife, or a concubine, must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men.
Individual Muslims may show splendid qualities, but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it.
No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilization of ancient Rome .”
Ike. A moderate Muslim is one who, in large and concentrated numbers, does not generate radicalized Muslims. Does not shelter them when they show up. Does not decline to call the cops.
It’s for this reason that the solution could be Very Serious.
Is there anything the Europeans have tried that worked? The best they’ve got going for them is imploring Islam to reform itself. Meantime….
But I didn’t design the problem.