In the comments on one of Sunday’s posts, the topic of the elusive “Moderate Muslim” came up again. The discussion began with criticisms of the post (written by our British correspondent JP) by Rob of Joshua Pundit, who was disturbed by JP’s seeming abandonment of Muslims who behave well, accept Western norms, and in no way contribute to the Great Jihad.
These “moderates” are analogous to ordinary people who were forced to live under Communist tyranny behind the Iron Curtain. They did not believe Communist ideology, nor did they accept the legitimacy of the regimes that oppressed them, but the political and social environment in which they lived made it dangerous for them to protest or publicly question the validity of Communist doctrine.
And so it is under Islam. Dissidents or skeptics who live in Muslim-majority countries — or even in predominantly Islamic enclaves within Western countries — take their lives in their hands if they criticize Islam or depart publicly from orthodoxy. Such people deserve our sympathy, and those who actually dare to dissent deserve our respect and admiration.
Nevertheless, I find the distinction between “moderate” and “extremist” Muslims to be useless. It’s not so much that I don’t believe there are “moderates”, but rather that the distinction between “moderates” and “extremists” is meaningless. It is a false dichotomy, and has no significance within Islam itself.
The word “extremist” actually gives the game away. To be an “extremist” implies an adherence to “extreme” doctrines of one sort or another. And what doctrines are those? Why, the core teachings of Islam itself! The “extremist” is one who proclaims the need to return to doctrines as they were originally written in the universally accepted documents that became the canonical teachings of Islam.
Extremists are thus “fundamentalists”. Like Christian fundamentalists, they want to return to the true religion. But Christian fundamentalists are not generally described as “extremists”, because the core scriptures of Christianity — the Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, the Epistles, and the Revelation of Saint John — are not extremist by modern standards. Modernity may regard the New Testament as outmoded superstition, but it does not see it as violent, extremist ideology — because it isn’t.
The Koran, the hadith, and the Sunna are another matter entirely.
Rob’s discussion on JP’s post prompted a response from a commenter name “ManoftheWest”. Evidently a man after my own heart, to bolster his case he cited ’Umdat al-salik wa ’uddat al-nasik, or The reliance of the traveller and tools of the worshipper. It is commonly referred to as Reliance of the Traveller when cited in English.
The Revised Edition (published 1991, revised 1994) is “The Classic Manual of Islamic Sacred Law ’Umdat al-Salik by Ahmad ibn Naqib al-Misri (d. 769/1368) in Arabic with Facing English Text, Commentary, and Appendices”, edited and translated by Nuh Ha Mim Keller.
This book is an authoritative source on Sunni Islamic law, because it is certified as such by Al-Azhar University in Cairo. There is no higher authority on Sunni Islamic doctrine than Al-Azhar; it is the closest equivalent to the Vatican that can be found in Islam.
The rest of this section is adapted from ManoftheWest’s comment. First of all, he noted that the penalty for a Muslim apostate (someone who no longer believes in or no longer follows the tenets of Islam) is death. From Book O, “Justice”:
(O: Leaving Islam is the ugliest form of unbelief (kufr) and the worst. It may come about through sarcasm, as when someone is told, “Trim your nails, it is sunna,” and he replies, “I would not do it even if it were,” as opposed to when some circumstance exists which exonerates him of having committed apostasy, such as when his tongue runs away with him, or when he is quoting someone, or says it out of fear.)
o8.1 When a person who has reached puberty and is sane voluntarily apostatizes from Islam, he deserves to be killed. […] o8.4 There is no indemnity for killing an apostate (O: or any expiation, since it is killing someone who deserves to die).
But it gets worse:
Acts That Entail Leaving Islam
o8.7 (O: Among the things that entail apostasy from Islam (may Allah protect us from them) are: […] (7) to deny any verse of the Koran or anything which by scholarly consensus (def: b7) belongs to it, or to add a verse that does not belong to it; (8) to mockingly say, “I don’t know what faith is”; […] (14) to deny the obligatory character of something which by the consensus of Muslims (ijma’, def: b7) is part of Islam, when it is well known as such, like the prayer (salat) or even one rak’a from one of the five obligatory prayers, if there is no excuse (def: u2.4); […] (17) to believe that things in themselves or by their own nature have any causal influence independent of the will of Allah; […] (19) to be sarcastic about any ruling of the Sacred Law; (20) to deny that Allah intended the Prophet’s message (Allah bless him and give him peace) to be the religion followed by the entire world (dis: w4.3-4) (al-Hadiyya al-’Ala’iyya (y4), 423-24).)
There are others, for the subject is nearly limitless. May Allah Most High save us and all Muslims from it.)
#14 and #20 above are doozies when one reads in Reliance of the Traveller that offensive, military jihad against non-Muslims is a communal, religious obligation:
The Obligatory Character of Jihad
o9.1 Jihad is a communal obligation. When enough people perform it to successfully accomplish it, it is no longer obligatory upon others (O: the evidence for which is the Prophet’s saying (Allah bless him and give him peace), “He who provides the equipment for a soldier in jihad has himself performed jihad,” […]
Who is Obliged to Fight in Jihad
o9.4 Those called upon (O: to perform jihad when it is a communal obligation) are every able-bodied man who has reached puberty and is sane.
Rob and ManoftheWest inspired me to respond with this:
I agree that labeling all Muslims as “toxic” is not a good idea. Not only is it counterproductive, it is inaccurate. It is Islam that is completely toxic. Muslims are various; we may take each of them as he or she comes, and see what we think.
If I were robbed by a Hispanic, does that give me the right to label all Hispanics ‘toxic’?
No. But what it does give us is the right — indeed, the obligation — to stop Hispanic immigration into our country. If Hispanics are, say, ten times as likely as Anglos to do bad things, then politicians who allow them to immigrate are violating their oath of office to protect their citizens.
If, on the other hand, they are already native citizens, then they should be treated like all others. If that results in a ten-times disproportionate Hispanic prison population, then so be it; it is not evidence of “profiling” or “discrimination”.
Finally, concerning Muslims who “pick and choose”: the previous commenter was completely correct: they are not “moderate” Muslims; they are apostates. I’m so glad he cited the specifics from Reliance to demonstrate this fact; now I don’t have to go look them up.
Actually, I would insert an additional level of nuance into my taxonomy of Muslims. I see three types:
1. Muslims. These obey the commands of the Koran and the hadith in full, observe the practices of the Sunna, and follow the established tenets of the fiqh. They include Al Qaeda terrorists, Salafists, Wahhabis, the Taliban, Muslim Brotherhood fanatics, and taqiyya artists such as Tariq Ramadan and Imam Rauf. 2. Lapsed Muslims. These are the ones who “pick and choose”, or who have even fallen away entirely. They don’t always wear hijab, and may sometimes drink beer or take out loans with interest. They include apostates, declared “ex-Muslims”. 3. Dormant Muslims. These appear similar to lapsed Muslims. A dormant Muslim may not have a beard or wear a nightgown. But the dictates of the Koran and the Sunna are still working deep in his heart, and someday he will return to them and become part of #1. He will then be a full Muslim.
The problem for us kuffar is that it’s very, very hard to tell the difference between a lapsed Muslim and a dormant Muslim. The latter looks and acts just like the former for years or decades. Then one day he gives up Budweiser, grows a nice long beard, starts praying five times a day, and sports a zebiba on his forehead. The next thing you know, he’s blowing himself up in the food court of his local Mall on a Saturday afternoon.
This is why Islam is toxic: because we cannot functionally distinguish between Muslims who are harmless and Muslims who appear harmless, but will suddenly try to kill us without warning. The only way we can protect ourselves against the latter is to place armed guards in schools, shopping areas, stadiums, train stations, and convention centers; to frisk innocent passers-by and put metal detectors and naked scanners all over the place.
As you may have noticed, the above description applies pretty well to the state of affairs in the USA and Europe ca. 2013. And it is entirely due to Toxic Islam. None of those liberty-destroying measures would have been necessary were it not for all those dormant Muslims among us.
For the purposes of public safety it is therefore the duty of our elected officials to:
1. Exclude further Muslim immigrants from entering our countries. 2. Remove the status of “religion” from Islam and assign to it the status of a “subversive political ideology”, like Communism or Nazism. 3. Pursuant to #2, monitor all mosques closely and shut down any that preach sedition and treason.
These are the necessary measures. But they will, unfortunately, not be taken in the USA. As our Islamic population increases, we will eventually become like Britain, France, and the Netherlands. Then we will pass that stage and enter a dreadful time, the details of which I prefer not to speculate about.
If you think about it, it should not be our task to figure out whether any given Muslim is a “moderate” or an “extremist”.
We don’t have any need to determine whether a Christian is a fundamentalist, as opposed to a Christian-in-name-only of the weak-dishwater variety found in many Episcopal or Presbyterian churches.
It’s of no great import to us whether a Jew follows Orthodox or Reform doctrines.
We needn’t trouble to determine whether a Buddhist adheres to Theravada or Mahayana practices.
Such doctrinal distinctions are irrelevant to us, because they don’t mean the difference between life and death.
But Islam is different. A failure to accurately determine what kind of Islam a particular Muslim practices may mean the difference between leading a normal daily life and being blown to pieces without warning on a street corner.
If his neighbors, professors, classmates, and acquaintances had been able to determine what kind of Muslim Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was, they might have saved three lives (four if you count Tamerlan’s) and an unimaginable amount of human suffering.
But why should they have to do that?
We don’t have to do it with Jews and Christians. Why must we do it with Muslims?
Islam is different. This is what makes Islam a toxic ideology.
If we have to carefully scrutinize Muslims to determine whether or not they will kill us — and that can be a near-impossible task — then Islam doesn’t belong in our countries.
“moderate” and “extremist” Muslims
Distinction between them useless. Yes. True. Not all Germans were Nazis. Even some of them rose against Hitler and lost their lives and made no difference to the oppressed and victims :Jews, Christians, the sick, and Gypsies.
What is horrible is when Christianity is compared to Islam: “Like Christian fundamentalists, they want to return to the true religion. ” How can you even compare frost to fire. Christianity emphasizes self-discipline, self-control, to love one’s neighbor as oneself, to respect one’s parents and others, not to kill but to sacrifice one’s life for one’s brother. And who is your brother: Anyone who shares humanity with you and goodwill: A disposition to kindness and compassion; Is that difficult to comprehend. Yes. Because the most despised thing in the west is Christianity. Islam: well in spite of what horrible picture Islam displays of itself, western women and blonde-haired men convert to Islam by the thousands because it is fierce. People like something fierce. Women get beaten by their boyfriends all the time because they choose the fierce ones and the jerks. You can’t understand things well until you understand human nature and that is by the time – if at all- you are 60 years old. By then it is too late to benefit anything or anyone. And those are the ironies of life.
Western stupidity has reached a level that you hardly believe it. If you give a student some homework in physics or algebra and deprives him from going to the moral-setter Lindsey Lohan, the teacher is looked upon as oppressor. All work and no play makes johnny a dull boy. All play (parties and horsing around) , make Jack a zombie. He will lose his life, his parties and his country in 50 years if he does not change.
If you talk to a western person in abstract he cannot understand you. Talk to him/her about drugs, sex, parties, booze, and even shit they have a “relevant thing to say.
About the crux of the whole matter, Baron writes:
“The problem for us kuffar is that it’s very, very hard to tell the difference between a lapsed Muslim and a dormant Muslim.”
It’s not “very, very hard”. It is pragmatically impossible. That may seem like a small point, but it could mean the difference between lives massacred, and lives spared.
Hesperado —
Yes, you’re quite right. I suppose I was just being charitable towards those with whom I disagree.
It is impossible to determine whether any given Muslim is a “moderate”. Any current “moderate” can become a mujahid later, without any obvious warning beforehand (except possibly within his immediate family, but maybe not even there).
Nicely illuminated Baron.
I have a tanget comment regarding this…
“If, on the other hand, they are already native citizens, then they should be treated like all others. If that results in a ten-times disproportionate Hispanic prison population, then so be it; it is not evidence of “profiling” or “discrimination”.”
This is seen as racism/supremacism. The cultural norms based upon the norms of behavior of certain European Christian ethnicities. If you based society upon other groups norms, you would accept more violence and crime as a matter of normalcy, instead of incarcerating a huge percentage of the population. To disabuse ourselves of our racism is to accept more violence and crime societally, normalizing our system upon the more violent and criminal minority groups cultural norms. Thus we get Western women need to adjust their behavior to the norms of the MENA and South Asian immigrant cultural norms. Instead of enforcing our norms upon them.
Multiculturalism, means regression of societal norms to serve the behaviors of the lowest most barbaric among us.
It isn’t impossible, it isn’t even difficult. All you need to do is verify that a person accepts the historical evidence that the Koran is a perversion and violation of Mohammad’s teachings rather than an authoritative source.
Given that I have mentioned this, repeatedly and consistently, I can only assume that some so desperately want making a distinction between Koranic Islam and Reform Islam to be impossible that they reject the historical evidence about the origins of the Koran with the same fervor that Koranic Islam rejects it.
I can easily see the difference between those willing to accept the historical evidence about the real origins of the Koran and those determined to reject that evidence. But I have to admit that I’m starting to have difficulty seeing the difference between one group that dogmatically rejects that evidence and another group that dogmatically rejects it.
Chiu, the relevant issue isn’t what I understand and accept as true.
What’s relevant is what people who call themselves “Muslims” — and follow what they call “Islam” — accept as true.
Of the 1.5 billion or 1.6 billion (or 77.8 quintillion, or however many there are alleged to be now) Muslims in the world, the vast majority believe that the Koran and the Sunna are the foundational texts of their faith.
Your assertion may well be true, and I wish you the best of luck in convincing the world’s Muslims that you are right, and that all 85.4 octillion of them are wrong. One cannot help but hope that you will succeed.
However, I’m not waiting around for all of them to change their minds. For the foreseeable future, the definition of “Islam” must remain “the Koran-based ideology practiced by people who call themselves Muslims”.
Common sense and practicality demand that I consider Islam to be exactly what the vast bulk of its practitioners say it is. I would be a fool to do anything else.
Sun-Tzu said “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself,
you will succumb in every battle”
Koranic Islam does not know itself. It refuses to know itself, because to know the truth about the Koran is to know that it is not Islam. That is the great advantage of the West. But as long as you refuse to accept that advantage, you will suffer a defeat for every victory.
The expert in war never accepts that it is impossible to know the enemy better than he knows himself, because to do that is to concede at least the validity of his cause, and probably of his strategy, it may even concede the success of his tactics. If you would wage war effectively, then you must seek to know the enemy better than he knows himself.
This is the second time Chin has demonstrated a complete lack of comprehension of the phenomenon, the problem, and the danger of Taqiyya.
This is the second time Chin has demonstrated an apparent incomprehension of the phenomenon, the problem, and the danger of Taqiyya. The equivalent would be during the Cold War being oblivious to the efforts by the Communists to subvert through deceptive infiltration. I.e., the equivalent would be to wage the Cold War while being oblivious to the danger of espionage.
“Any current “moderate” can become a mujahid later, without any obvious warning beforehand…”
Or was a mujahid all along but was successfully dissembling to all too gullible Kuffar (and that as you know is not merely hypothetical, but has occurred many times).
And also, there are many ways a Muslim can be deadly to us without being strictly speaking a mujahid (for example, hiding a backpack of a mujahid).
An extremist Muslim wants to kill you. A moderate Muslim wants an extremist Muslim to kill you.
Exactly! I was going to say the extremist declares his hatreds, while the moderate keeps them to himself.
In my eyes, the “moderate muslims” topic has been treated best by Bosch Fawstin in
http://frontpagemag.com/2011/bosch-fawstin/non-muslim-muslims-and-the-jihad-against-the-west/
“Non-observant Muslims are not our problem, but neither are they the solution to our problem. Our problem is Islam and its most consistent practitioners.”
Ah, thanks for reminding me about the term “non-observant Muslims”. I’m collecting a taxonomy of Muslims for an essay on my blog about how people have over the past decade generated several subspecies of the Moderate Muslim in order to
a) pretend to abjure the term “Moderate Muslim” so they can look tough and no-nonsense about the problem of Islam
while
b) keeping a functional equivalent of that very same term, as a rose by another name.
Things aren’t whatever we want them to be.
This may seem like an odd or trite statement but it is absolutely crucial to understanding relativism and that, as I said in my response to Rob’s initial post, is what’s behind all of our problems today, especially vis-à-vis Islam.
The Baron is clear and correct (as usual) when he says:
“It is Islam that is completely toxic. Muslims are various; we may take each of them as he or she comes, and see what we think.”
And yet people still come out with illogical, incoherent nonsense like this:
“But we are NOT Muslims, and that has nothing to do with how WE act. The Muslims I’m talking about still pray and observe many tenets of Islam but have gone past the misogyny, the violence for Allah, the hatred of Jews and other non-believers and pose no danger to anyone. Should we therefore forget our own principles and start labeling people as toxic because they’re Muslim apostates? Do we want to cede that ground to the jihadis?” Rob Miller
Today is the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, when mainstream, observant, theologically justified (in Islamic terms) Muslims murdered nearly three thousand innocent people because their ideology told them to.
So, in the spirit of charity, I am going to try one more time:
There is an ideology, let’s call it “Ideology A”
“Ideology A” is definite and specific.
“Ideology A” has copious, authoritative documentation detailing EXACTLY what it is and what being an “Ideology A-ist” consists of.
In order to BE an “Ideology A-ist” one MUST follow the definite and specific tenets and instructions that “Ideology A” uses to define itself.
The very definition of being an “Ideology A-ist” IS following those detailed, definite and specific instructions.
If anyone decides they quite like certain aspects of “Ideology A”, but not other aspects of “Ideology A”, they are NOT “Ideology A-ists”, they are something else.
Anyone who calls themselves an “Ideology A-ist” but picks and chooses which bits of “Ideology A” they accept and reject, is either ignorant of what “Ideology A” actually is, or is simply being dishonest.
Now Jihadis, i.e. fully observant Muslims, are quite clear about all this. However, an obviously superior Islamic theologian comes up with this:
“The middle ground is Muslims who do not accept the authority of the Koran. You agree with the Koranic Jihadists that those who do not accept the Koran as authoritative are apostates. Think about that for a moment.” Chiu Chunling
I’m struggling to be civil here, I really am. But it’s hard.
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen and heard this particular relativist trope and the most teeth-grindingly annoying thing about it is the pompous call to reflection at the end, as though, if I could just transcend my narrow, parochial little worldview, I would suddenly slap my forehead and exclaim, “Good grief! What an unsophisticated fool I’ve been all these years, actually taking the foundational texts of Islam and those who follow them to the letter at their word! Why, Islam can have any number of meanings! In fact, it can mean anything anybody says it means!”
Today, of all days, my thoughts and prayers are for those who have and still are suffering under this brutish and regressive ideology and for the families and friends of the victims of 9/11 who will forever bear holes in their hearts that should have been filled with love.
I am sorry that the suggestion that you think causes you such pain. If I could make thinking a painless activity for you, I would. But since I have no idea why the suggestion of thinking about something is so painful for you, I really am at a loss as to what can be done.
Because you must think.
The historical record clearly shows that the Koran was an imposition which was directly contrary to Islam as it existed before the creation of the Koran. Thus the Koran cannot really be a definitive source of Islam, it is simply incorrect to assert that acceptance of the Koran as a perfect transmission of Mohammad’s teaching is necessary for Muslims. And the effect of learning and accepting the true place of the Koran in the history of Islam is demonstrable, those who understand the Koran to be a fraud may be willing to lie and claim it is, but they are not willing to put their own lives on the line to act according to the dictates of the Koran.
Even outside the relatively tiny numbers of Reformist Muslims, the “Islam is whatever we want it to be” interpretation isn’t uncommon. But it is usually not backed by a firm understanding that the Koran has no authority and is in fact contrary to Islam. The main authorities in Islam devote a substantial effort to upholding the authority of the Koran and prohibiting any questioning of its validity, because the lie that the Koran is authoritative is the foundation of their own authority in Islam.
I really don’t know why you are so determined to uphold that authority. Perhaps you could explain it to me.
It is not the thinking… it is the condescension packed into “Think about that for a moment” that is hard to deal with.
Look at the statement – which I’m assuming is yours and accurate: “The middle ground is Muslims who do not accept the authority of the Koran.” Muslims who do not accept the authority of the Koran are Islamic freaks – not the middle ground of anything. From your comment above I think you see the rarity of your position. The vast majority of non-jihadist muslims are non-jihadist because they don’t care, not because they are reformist. In my opinion, being an Islamic outlier is a step up from being Islamic, but that doesn’t make it middle ground. The difficulty is while I can appreciate your position, and think it might have interesting aspects, I don’t see how it will be relevant in the next few decades while it is so rare.
It is rare in Islam, because those who base their authority on the Koran are in power and will brook no challenge to the source of their authority.
It does not have to be rare in the Counter Jihad, if we are willing to exploit this fundamental weakness in the authority claims of Koranic Islam. I know that you don’t care personally about whether or not the Koran is really an accurate representation of Mohammad’s teachings. I don’t personally care either, except in a merely intellectual sense as a historical curiosity. But Muslims do care, and they care intensely.
If you would defeat the Koran, break the power it has over the imagination of Muslims, then you need to care that Muslims care about the authority of the Koran. And exposing the lie which authorizes a totalitarian ideology is the key to defeating every totalitarianism. It always has been. For some ideologies, simple military defeat is enough to prove them wrong. This is manifestly untrue of Islam, and even if it weren’t military action is always worse than other means of destroying a totalitarian lie.
We must secure the borders of Western nations against all mass immigration (not just Muslim immigration, as I’ve pointed out before the point of taqiya is that you don’t know who is a Muslim and who is not once you start trying to distinguish them) and implement strict immigration controls commensurate with wartime. But to defeat Koranic Islam we must attack its weak point, even if it seems like a small vulnerability.
I work for a couple of days a week in a charity shop (“goodwill”, I believe, in the US) in London. At the end of Ramadan a few weeks ago, one of our female regulars (I think Turkish; headscarf, no burka) brought in some cakes she’d made for Eid; my (also female) manager exchanged kisses with her in thanks.
The cakes were rather scented for my taste, but I find it hard to believe this woman was practising any kind of taquiya; she gained nothing by the gesture.
If there has to be a violent showdown to preserve our civilisation, I’d hate for people like her to be victims. Don’t know the solution, just wanted to say it.
Ah, sweet smelling cakes, a moderate and probably colorful scarf, kisses and friendliness. You find it hard to believe such a nice person would be part of the stealth jihad of the Hijra. That’s precisely how effective it is.
Sincerely starry-eyed Westerners have a tendency to look at everything from a microcosmic, personal perspective, and to block out the collective effects of a mass immigration and insinuation into our societies — not only as assistant clerks or tellers in a store, not only as taxi drivers, but also in nearly every institution of the West — academe, public schools, government, infrastructure, arts and entertainment, news media, law enforcement, the courts, hospitals, clinics, etc. A Muslim doesn’t have to be wielding a sword or lighting a fuse of a bomb to be enabling the overall jihad. Future terrorists who will be (or who already are right now) plotting horrific attacks using WMDs of every flavor they can get their hands on — attacks that will make 911 seem like firecrackers at a picnic — will need the kind of infiltration provided by all these Ordinary Muslims. And they will need for our guard to be let down, as the appeal of the nice friendly Muslim bringing honeyed Eid cakes will tug at our heart strings and will tend to make us less likely to do what we have to do to prevent such future terror.
Anyone who thinks I’m being alarmist or paranoid just hasn’t been reading carefully the mountain of data about Muslims worldwide and in the West that has been building, and continues to build.
Is there any religion in the world saying that converters from the religion should be killed?
This is one – and a sufficent – argument for not accepting islam as a religion.
The more that a person studies and internalizes the Bible, the more he learns and accepts that he must live at peace with others if at all possible. The more a person studies and internalizes the Quran and other texts what happens? The Muslim Brotherhood’s teachings are to chastise moderate Muslims to live up to the full weight of Islam’s teachings.
Many people who grew up as Muslims just cannot bring themselves to be as violent as their texts demand. But sometimes sects like the Muslim Brotherhood or charismatic imams convince them to fully accept Islam and to act on what they believe. That is exactly what happened to Major Nadal Hassan.
I don’t hate Muslims. But Islam, in its totality of beliefs and practices, is so hostile to my values that living at peace with me is not a natural act for them. It is clear that once the proportions of Muslims in any enclave of western society rises above a minority percent, they demand to impose Muslim culture and society on me, no matter how that denies the secular legal structure they seemed to agree with in order to live there originally.
Western society is an unnatural environment for Muslims by their own choice and expressions. Multi-culturalism is the foolish and dangerous idea of idealistic leftists (er, “progressives”) who think society will be better off with “diversity”. No secular power can offer anything to a Muslim that trumps their promised afterlife. This is religious war that can only be fought on religious terms. That is why Muslims organizations like CAIR and IANA play progressives like a fiddle.
We can and should detest the Koran for what it teaches. We should also encourage Muslims to detest the Koran for what it teaches. But we can start by proving that, as Muslims, they should reject the Koran because it is an affront against Islam. The historical context of the Koran proves that it is not a valid source of the teachings of Mohammad, the compilation and codification of the Koran directly contradict what Mohammad taught about how the teachings of Islam were to be propagated.
Shoulding Muslims is so 2003. To the extent it’s thought to be potentially effective in this monstrously massive global problem of Islamic fanaticism, it’s predicated upon the notion that Muslims will listen to Infidels lecture them about their own religion (which is more than a religion, it’s an all-embracing totalitarian Way of Life and the Meaning of Life). Such a notion is not only naive in the extreme, it would be reckless and would cost lives if put into policy.
In fact, in another permutation, it already is guiding our disastrous policy of trying to bring out the Inner Western Democrat in Muslims in, for example, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Egypt, and now Syria.
We don’t need to lecture them about their own religion. We just need to insist that they comply with ordinary anti-fraud laws against knowingly promulgating provable falsehoods. The idea that the Koran is a legitimate authority on the teachings of Mohammad is provable false, based on the history of Islam itself. Not only did Mohammad teach that his revelations should not be published in written form, but the reciter he recommended as the preferred teacher, Abdullah bin Mas’ud, is on record as having objected to the codification of the Koran after Mohammad’s death.
Thus teaching that the Koran represents a definitive reference on the teachings of Mohammad is equivalent to, say…selling copies of Lord of the Rings as history texts. We don’t need to engage with the literary or artistic value that motivate fans to enjoy them, we just need to establish that Tolkien was writing fiction rather than recording historical facts.
That would be like insisting that Nazis stop purveying historical falsehoods about the Aryan race, meanwhile they continue to bomb London and blitzkrieg their way througn Europe, one Lebensraum after another. Not only will they not listen to you and rather laugh at you, they will continue their Krieg und Kampf unfazed — unless we physically stop them.
Bikers … I salute you. Keep the faith. Demonstrate peacefully. Let our goal be justice and safety of America. We have to be discerning and discover who wants us good and who wishes us harm. I am really encouraged to see the patriotic bikers responding to reality in a dignified American way. Wake up America we have no time to be asleep and in a trance.