The major divide within the Counterjihad movement is between those who believe in the “Moderate Muslim”, and those who don’t.
Nine years ago, in the early days of this blog, whenever the topic of the Moderate Muslim came up I used to say, “The jury is still out on whether he exists or not.” And the jury was out as far as I was concerned — I had only just begun observing the Great Jihad, and was still gathering evidence.
Well, that was 2005, and this is 2014. I’ve collected enough data now. The jury’s in: The Moderate Muslim does not exist.
Mind you, in a strict ontological sense he does exist. You can find a few moderate Muslims here and there. Sincere, well-meaning, decent people who adhere only lightly to the Koranic basis of their religion, and wish to mold it into something humane and modern. Men like Tarek Fatah and Zuhdi Jasser. Women like Irshad Manji. You can’t help but like them (some of them, anyway), and their stance in the face of death threats from their less moderate co-religionists can be admirable.
But they are few in number. None of them leads a large broad-based following. There is no Moderate Muslim with devoted disciples crowding around him trying to touch the hem of his garment. None of them stands on a podium in front of thousands of cheering supporters. They work for (or found) modestly-funded think-tanks and appear from time to time on TV, eloquently presenting their polite, humane point of view.
The rest of the supposed moderates — people like Tariq Ramadan and Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf — are really just skilled taqiyya artists for the Muslim Brotherhood, suave persuasive fellows with golden tongues — sometimes several of them apiece. In truth they are no more moderate than Yusuf al-Qaradawi, but simply adept obfuscators whose job it is to anesthetize the cultural elites in Western countries so that they never feel the Islamic stiletto sliding between their ribs.
The rest of 21st-century Islam — Sunni or Shiite or Sufi, Asian or Middle Eastern or African or European — is a seething mass of superstitious backwardness, trapped in an Evolutionarily Stable Strategy* that requires rapine, slaughter, mass destruction, and world domination.
I bring all of this up because of the question and answer session that followed Geert Wilders’ speech in Denmark yesterday.
Daniel Pipes is perhaps the most prominent proponent of the Moderate Muslim. Or, to be more exact, a Moderate Islam. In his disagreement with Geert Wilders, he asserted that in the last forty years Islam has changed — for the worse, unfortunately — and it’s possible that it may change again. Why, asked Dr. Pipes, should we write off the possibility that Islam may change for the better? That Islamic scholars may reinterpret the core foundational texts of Islam in such a way that their religion could be led into a humane modernity?
Daniel Pipes might thus be styled a Moderate Counterjihadist, while Geert Wilders and Lars Hedegaard — not to mention a large chunk of the Danes in the audience, and myself — are the Hotheads. We find the desperate search for the Moderate Muslim to be a faintly ludicrous enterprise.
Even if the longed-for change were to arrive someday, what purpose does it serve to dwell on that faint possibility? Should we modify our policies towards Islam as it exists and is widely practiced now? Would we be well advised to pause and wait for Moderate Islam to somehow, against all odds, appear and revolutionize the Muslim world?
Dr. Pipes acknowledges that we must fight “Islamism”; in that he completely agrees with Messrs. Hedegaard and Wilders. So what practical change of policy would he propose, given his belief that Islam may someday change for the better?
If Islam were to undergo such a change, it would have to occur entirely within Islam itself, with no input from the infidel world. Any interference by non-Muslims in Islamic theological exegesis could only arouse anger and resistance, and might further harden the traditional ijtihad codified a millennium ago.
Therefore hoping for Moderate Islam can produce no useful, practical results for us. None whatsoever.
And to persist in focusing on the Moderate Muslim might even be dangerous. The vain hope of discovering large numbers of Moderates might well attenuate the grim, determined response which will soon become absolutely necessary — in fact, it is already past due — to deal with the nasty realities of our time.
Fortunately, the wind is blowing in the direction of the Hotheads. Thanks to the antics of ISIS and the “lone wolves” of Western jihad, more and more people are latching onto what Geert Wilders says and nodding their heads in agreement.
And, strangely enough, Geert Wilders found himself in the novel position of being a “moderate” compared to one of the Danes in the audience, who told Mr. Wilders that he didn’t go far enough.
The time of the Hotheads is fast approaching.
| * | Here’s a brief outline of what is meant by an Evolutionarily Stable Strategy (ESS), adapted from something I wrote a number of years ago, using this resource:
Individuals or groups operating under an ESS behave according to strategies which have evolved to successfully resist any change. Islam presents a striking example of an ESS; its encoded rules have successfully resisted any significant change for over a thousand years. Consider the simplicity of these rules:
A system designed so efficiently to prevent change probably cannot be changed. Any effective modification of it must necessarily involve its destruction. |
Islam is stuck in an endless loop. It goes like this.
1. It trains a small number of devout believers it is OK to kill in the name of Allah.
2. The killers are told to kill anyone who tries to change the system.
3 The killers are told to be self initiating.
4 There are enough devout killers in the general population to reach a critical mass.
5 Bingo – uncounted, unseen killers circulate throughout Islam – creating fear and making change impossible.
You can read my longer article on this “endless loop” hear at GOV at: http://gatesofvienna.blogspot.com/2011/11/islam-is-fear-part-i.html
Islam can never have a reformation from within Islam. Anyone willing to speak up will be literally shot down. There are simply too many willing assassins. To make matters worse, threats to the survival of Islam generate even greater numbers of these assassins.
Reformation must come somehow from outside of Islam.
At the present time I am in the process of formulating ideas on how to force a reformation on Islam.
I have the idea that some sort of internet based crowd source attack on the foundation of Islam could at least start a process.
If anyone has any ideas, send them to me at bob311w9@yahoo.com
Excellent!
“Reformation must come somehow from outside of Islam.”
You’re wasting your time, and it would be a waste of our time to try to reform it. If, as muslims believe, they are the best of peoples and the Infidels the worst, why on earth would they even consider our arguments? They believe that the quran is the word of allah and that mohammed, their god’s messenger and profit, is the perfect man and model for human conduct. There is perfect consistency between the words of the former and the deeds of the latter. So on what basis could you — or we, for that matter — possibly argue that islam could be reformed?
A start must be to stop all immigration by all Muslims from all Muslim countries. Truth in education for the public about the Muslim pure unadulterated hatred for Christians, Jews and everyone else. We may not have the big battalions for too much longer. (Remember those? God marches with them.)
“Reformation must come somehow from outside of Islam.”
Islam was, from its inception, a counter-reformation AGAINST the moderating of Bronze Age values in the Old Testament. Rabbinical judaism and christianity were moderations of these values.
Islam rejected christianity and judaism, and returned to the full-on, literal values found in the Old Testament.
There is no reforming of islam. It will always revert to what it essentially is.
Bob, I wish it were so simple. However I don’t believe Islam is always a “conscious” conspiracy as, say, Communism was (however loosely structured at times). A poster here a few months ago (Takuan?) made an apt comparison with a parasitic wasp, eating out the insides of our civilisation.
Such wasps have millions of years of evolution behind them, Islamists a mere 1,400; both will instinctively try to spread themselves at the expense of other creatures, with the additional threat that if Islamists kill their hosts, they’ll survive, albeit at a stone-age level, but we their victims won’t. There is no central core to attack, and defeat the enemy, as you suggest; aggressive defence seems to me our best option.
Thanks for covering this event, elsewhere ignored.
Absolutely spot on.
>Moderate muslims are particularly muslims<
Bravo – one since many years eagerly awaited statement.
By the way, how to consider all those sympathetic, industrious and good Germans who in the thirties only lightly adhered to the National Socialistic basis of politics. All those who knew nothing (or maybe only surmised but did not care) about any State-led eutanasia programs etc, etc.
If I were to describe a “moderate” Christian it might look like this.
He goes to church once every few months and on Christmas and Easter. He utters short prayers under stress. He owns a bible, it’s dusty and hasn’t been moved from the spot on the bookshelf in years. He thinks some Christians just need to “lighten up” and congratulates himself for not being “a Jesus freak”. If you ask him if he’s a Christian he’ll say “sure” but if you stick a gun in his face and demand he renounce Christ he can’t get the words out of his mouth fast enough. He would never “proselytize” someone else and thinks one religion (or none at all) is just as good as another as long as you’re not a “fanatic”
That’s a moderate Christian. They may even be the majority, but no one (except other moderate Christians) would claim this individual was practicing his religion the right way.
Ditto “moderate Muslims”. They may even make up a majority of the people that identify as Muslim in the world (though I doubt that) but like the moderate Christians they are not the ones that make the mosques run, write books, preach their religion or attempt to convert others. They have no voice and never will because they don’t want one.
Regrettably, I think your analogy is near perfect. And that is from a lapsed Roman Catholic and near five decade long agnostic.
I beg to differ.
There is no such thing as a ‘moderate Christian’. The one described by Kevin Vail is a ‘cultural christian’ (small C).
Jesus’ definition of a true Christian, which is the only definition that counts, is that an individual is either a regenerated follower of Christ, or is not a Christian at all.
Since 1997 I have pondered the sincerity of Mr Pipes assertion of the existence of “Moderate Muslims”. He is well-intentioned, highly intelligent, extremely well informed and savvy operator. It is my long considered assessment that Mr Pipes, perhaps the most important early Counterjihadist, just as his father was an important Counter Communist and not overly successful despite being on the solidest of ground, well knows that there is, pace Erdogan, no moderate Islam. It is for him a matter of strategy: publicly designating all practising Muslims as unassimilable threats to Western civilisation is not a step he deems politic. He, like Melanie Phillips, wants to be seen to stay within the polite and civil discourse and pretend there are moderate Muslims. Neither actually believes it. Let them run their game. They are wrong to do so – refusing to grasp the nettle – and in the fullness of time they will realise that their strategy is flawed.
” …but simply adept obfuscators whose job it is to anesthetize the cultural elites in Western countries so that they never feel the Islamic stiletto sliding between their ribs.” Love it!
Doesn’t Mr Erdogan’s opinion count for anything? “There is only islam”
It counts for everything. It’s from the horses mouth that we know the true reality of Islam.
I’ve read Pipe’s works for about two years now and tried to have given him the benefit of the doubt but have come to the conclusion that he is just an extremely polished and quiet taquiyya master, very adept at tampimg down a certain sector of academia and the more learned of politicos while jihad continues unabated.
I no longer read him nor give his pieces any credence whatsoever.
We all know what happened and had to happen before the denazification of my scarred homeland could take place. The same thing will have to be done on the greater scale. At the next 1683, we can’t stop at just defeating them at the gates. Until one generation sacrifices its innocence and totally annihilates this evil spawn from the face of the earth, we burden our successors with its creeping back again and again and again and again.
Exactly.
“Until one generation sacrifices its innocence and totally annihilates this evil spawn from the face of the earth”
This is an immoral, and probably counter-productive strategy.
It is immoral because you advocate a mass slaughter, not for any tactical or strategic reason, but to prevent any further occurrence of problems. As an example of your principle, if you had a war to eliminate Muslims from a country, say France, and you won the war, you would have a choice on what to do with captured Muslims: send them to a Muslim country, or kill them. You would kill them. Spain, after fighting Muslims for hundreds of years, simply expelled the Muslims who were there.
It is counter-productive because it would put energy and focus on a red-herring. Muslims countries are generally not able to compete with non-Muslim countries just because of the intellectual oppression inherent in Islam. The real danger is the Muslim infiltration of free societies. Your strategy would dissipate the focus on lowering Muslim infiltration, in favor of simply slaughtering Muslims.
I do not “advocate” it, that is a misunderstanding. It is gross and unthinkable from our moral standpoint. Whether this standpoint is maintainable in the face of an enemy who is immutably determined to destroy us, that is what I doubt. And as said, the generation that finally loses it is condemned. Yet still, want to choose suicide instead? What I said is not a wish, but a prediction.
Islam will become moderate… Mr. Pipes is just one of many that claim this might happen in the future. I have concluded not in my lifetime and probably not in my children’s lifetime. It is a “how many angels can sit on the head of a pin” type of discussion. Interesting, but of no immediate relevance.
IMO, there are three main factors to why this reformation won’t take place any time soon.
The first is lack of literacy. Do you actually think the majority of rioting Pakis in 1989 could actually read, let alone have read The Satanic Verses? How about the Mo-toon riots? Did someone air drop millions of leaflets with the cartoons into Islamic nations? Did their print media publish the cartoons? Of course not.
The second is the subjugation of women. Islam has done a really good job of making public displays of women/girls that step out of line therefore terrorizing all of them. I have been waiting for western “feminists” to say this is wrong and has to stop, especially the subjugation of Muslim women in western nations… Crickets. They are more interested in debating whether holding a door open for a female is sexist or how a dinner bill should be divided.
The third and probably the most important factor for western society is the collusion of western gov’ts and academies of all sorts in the growth of “immoderate” Islam for MONEY. From favorable energy contracts to multi-million dollar grants to prestigious universities, NGOs, all the way down to Catholic charities. There is big money to be made by just letting these savages have their way. It seems to permeate every aspect of our society and, quite frankly, I don’t see that stopping any time soon. So we will just tweek our society, just a tiny bit to accommodate, and then we will do it again and again and again.
IIMO that there is no reason for Islam to reform until the oil runs out. Why should they?
The ideology and goals of islam are totalitarian and therefore existentially radicalized to the sensibilities of western civilizations. It is only the tactics of a given muslim, in pursuit of the ummah’s totalitarian goal, that might be perceived as being relatively “moderate” compared to that of another muslim.
So, Daniel Pipes still believes in the moderate Muslim theory, eh ? You have to give him the benefit of tenacity.
TThThe problem with this “Moderate Islam” stuff is that even if it happens it will be a lie and all lies will one day be exposed and a backlash will be imminent. Islam did become more “moderate” at the turn of the century and as a result of forced secularisation and the abject defeat of the Ottoman Empire A.K.A. The Caliphate a lot of its more militant aspects were swept under the rug for many decades. But if that was the solution then why are we here now having to deal with Al Qaeda and IS?? The reason is that “moderate Islam” is a lie! The only person who has the right to define Islam and say what it is and it is not is the founder of the religion i.e. Muhammed. Islam is what HE says it is and not what various Muslims at various times might what to practice. So even if some groups of Muslims at various times of history had decided to be hypocritical and make it up as they went and sweep those parts of the religion which they find hard or distasteful under the rug there has also always been and will always be those who would be sincere and honest and actually want to follow their prophet and they will always go back to his true example as recorder to Islamic scriptures. One can bring new interpretation of matters that the founder of the religion didn’t make very clear and left ambiguous. But the matters that he made very clear by word and dead cannot be up for re-interpretation!! You cannot make Islam teach everything the opposite way of what Muhammed taught and still claim that it is the same religion and revers the character of Muhammed as its founder and considers him the prophet of Allah. And that is why Jihad and murder and honour-killing and beheadings and Jizyah, etc… shall always be with us till the end of times. The example and teachings, and worldview of the founder of a religion MATTER!!! Who he was and what was his character like MATTER! And what ever solution we want to find to this “Islam problem” dishonesty and fakery and falsifying of history should NOT be a part of it! “Moderate Islam” is nothing but falsified history!
Moderate Muslims, reformation and enlightenment are not synonymous with the ideology of Islam, a supremacist, political and pseudo – religion that has more in common with a collective cult or a severe sect within the most encompassing totalitarian system ever devised by man.
There may be Muslims who would like nothing better to escape from the madness that is Islam, but they risk their lives in doing so as no other ‘religion’ issues death fatwas to apostates. No doubt if Islam was the kind of religious system the West is generally familiar with there would no longer be the many problems around the world now connected to Islam as Islam would cease to exist.
It must never come down to us infidels to worry about, let alone interfere in the workings of Islam. Us infidels need only to observe the dysfunction within Islam to realize that Islam will eventually destroy itself if left alone and to its own devices. What we need to do is to confront, publicly expose and then to deal decisively with Islam as the Muslim only knows two positions in life, as this quote from Winston Churchill notes; “……they are either at your feet or at your throat.”
The West and Islam are completely incompatible. That is a fact that has been deliberately ignored by the West for far too long by those who at some point in time must be called out for what they are now slowly being recognized as, Traitors! And it is the West that has been yielding ground in this clash of civilizations that has now turned into the Fourth Great Jihad that the West largely ignores in recognizing.
At some point in the near future Islam will have to be confronted otherwise the world as we know it and wish to grant to our children will end, and end abruptly the many benefits to humanity that the West has brought to the world.
I would add my voice to those who think the “moderates” of Islam are irrelevant because they simply have no theological leg to stand on and they know it. The Verse of the Sword chopped off that leg. Thus, as long as anyone self-identifies as Muslim, they, by virtue of Islam’s doctrine of deception, must, in any sane calibration, remain suspect.
As a free man, I reserve the right to be suspicious of anyone, no matter how mellow their behaviour, who adheres in any way to a belief system that denies life, liberty and the pursuit of one’s interests, even happiness.
Imagine how violent Islam would be if it wasn’t the Religion of Peace.
Imagine how violent Islam would be if it wasn’t the Religion of Peace.
That is a keeper! LOL!
In the 1930s, The Times of London referred to “moderate Nazis”.
Moderate Nazis, like moderate Muslims, still lead to the genocide of other peoples.
I also have doubts about the existence of moderate Muslims, but there has been, in recent times, an example of rebellion against Islam, which may still have some spirit left to it. During the first World War, when Turkey was ally of the Germans, a young Turkish officer named Mustapha Kemal had extensive contact with the German officer corps. He began to wonder why the Germans, the British and the French armies had a large array of modern weapons that seemed almost miraculous, such as airplanes, machine guns, tanks and battleships…but none of the Europeans seemed any more intelligent than he was…and most of them were not his equal. Before long he arrived at a conclusion that still holds water today. He realized that the cause of the inferiority of the Muslim world was…Islam. In the early 1920s he persuaded a group of his fellow junior officers(known today as the “Young Turks”) to overthrow the senior officer corps. And then he abolished the Caliphate, (which would be, perhaps, the equivalent of Mussolini abolishing the Papacy.) And the final stroke of his good judgement was to decline Hitler’s invitation to have another go at the British and the French. He was no dummy. None of this qualified him to be called a “moderate”. I think this is a good example of the “Great Man” theory of history. And it remains to be seen if ANY Great Man has the ability to remove a Satanic ideology from the earth. One of the results of ending the caliphate was the formation of the Muslim Brotherhood in the late twenties. And you know the rest.
It could be that the only way we can be rid of this Satanic Cult may be the same remedy we used against Imperial Japan.
Tough Love.
The so-called “moderate Muslim” is no less fond of his supremacist cult than the jihadist, he’s just too chicken to cut throats personally. But the mass of them will always lend support to those they regard as “heroes”, no matter the lip service to the contrary.
“It could be that the only way we can be rid of this Satanic Cult may be the same remedy we used against Imperial Japan.
Tough Love.”
What I said above. Leave something for the archaeologists to dig through–Sam Cohen is the name of the inventor of just the right tool. But don’t think you’ll come out unscathed from that. The generation who rids the world of this menace will be condemned for the rest of human history.
I forgot to add. The Japanese are rational people after all, and it took two strikes to end the madness then. Islam is not rational. It will never end until it is exterminated entirely.
The muslim masses continue to strut along our streets in the believef they have the upper hand with their strategy of lies and disturb – then kill the kafir. They even have one of their own in the White House with God knows how many of the Muslim Brotherhood coming and going through the windows and doors. Imagine WWII wondering which side our leaders are on? No country grows and progresses by injecting itself with muslims and their vile repulsive backward Loveless theology of darkness and death. Close the mosques. Ban the Koran. Protect our children. Are we really responsible men and women?
In arguing “Judaism reformed, Christianity reformed, so can Islam,” Pipes glides over the question of what lies at the very heart of each creed.
Judaism may have lost much of its legalism, but those laws never had much if any effect on anyone outside Judaism; there was never an imperative to force the whole world to live under them. For many centuries, Jews accepted the idea of living under governments run by Gentiles (if the Gentiles would allow them). And the original ethical force of Judaism remains active today.
Christianity began by individual, free-will conversion and it developed a structure of religious authority quite separate from the powers of the state, before emperors and then chieftains and kings converted and sought to enforce some measure of religious conformity in their realms. When people eventually rebelled, the original model of accepting the faith only by free choice was there to be revived, along with the self-sacrificing redeemer (there all along).
What is at the heart of Islam? There are lots of rules that might be scrapped (as some were in some Islamic countries in the 20th century), but not much in the way of ethics. At the heart of Islam is the mandate to compel the whole world to submit, by bloody conquest among other means, as well as the death penalty for choosing to leave the cult. A core doctrine of Islam is that every part of the world not under Islamic control is by definition at war with Islam and therefore invites attack by Muslims until it submits. Islam was about violent conquest and plunder from the beginning.
What is bad about Islam is the heart and soul of Islam. How can there be Islam if the heart and soul are rejected, and if its “Prophet” (so sacrosanct that he may not even be depicted, let alone “insulted”) is acknowledged to have been a thoroughly vile creature who should in no way be emulated?
ISIS is not being suicide bombed by moderates. If “radical” or “fundamental” Islam was truly a hijacking of Islam, there would be declarations that they are heretics and blasphemers, and they would be isolated, embargoed, etc. Clerics aren’t telling Muslims to go kill the heretic fundies, the fundies are telling Muslims to go kill the heretic moderates and infidels.
Understanding Daniel Pipes’ Pseudo-Scholastic Drivel on Islamic Jew-Hatred and His (Understandable) Unwillingness to Defend It!
http://www.andrewbostom.org/blog/2013/07/10/educating-daniel-pipes-on-islamic-antisemitism/
Educating Daniel Pipes On Islamic Antisemitism
Andrew Bostom July 10th, 2013
“On May 20, 2013, Daniel Pipes declined to accept Rabbi Jon Hausman’s gracious offer to host a debate between Pipes and myself (at the Rabbi’s Temple Ahavath Torah, Stoughton, MA) about the nature—doctrinal and historical—of Islamic Antisemitism. Previously, I had accepted Rabbi Hausman’s proposal. Having now examined Pipes’ flimsy, pseudo-academic charlatanism on the subject matter of the proposed debate, I can fully understand his decision.”