lack of definitions from moderate Muslims belie any "Moderate Islam"

Submitted by Charles Stevens (United States), Sep 8, 2010 at 22:44

... the so-called moderates give the rest of us little to work with other than their various subjective wish-lists of how they think Islam should be, not of how it actually is. There is no religion called "Moderate Islam". There is only Islam, that has theologically never in 1400 years renounced its aggressive barbaric components. So-called moderate Muslims want to have their cake and eat it too. They provide the rest of us with no theologically distinct lines of demarcation between themselves and the radicals. All moderate Muslims should be forced to ask themselves one essential question: Theologically, what gives them the right to pick and choose what they profess from the Koran, Hadiths, and Sharia?

Muslim theologists have been consistent over the centuries in determining that true Islam consists of abrogation by the hard-line jihadist Medina suras over those of the live-and-let-live Mecca sections. Likewise with Sharia, all of the barbaric 7th-century Arabist cultural tenets are supposed to be fulfilled by every good Muslim without exception. Whenever moderate Muslims are confronted with such issues, they inevitably fall back on what each of them personally believes Islam should be, not about what Islam truly is. It is no surprise that every Islamic crime committed in this country has been perpetrated by those who are always described as former moderates. The problem is that such moderates, when finally forced to assess their faith with respect to true Islam, inevitably realize their apostasy and revert to aggression and killing.

Liberals prattle on about some type of reformed Islam, but refuse to describe what "reformation" really means with respect to Islam. Moderate Muslims and their apologists fail to understand that in order for there to be a reformed Islam, there must instead be a new religion, one that completely deletes forever from its theology all of the dangerous, barbaric aspects that now comprise true Islam, including the reverence for some deeply flawed individual named Mohammed. In other words, the only way to reform Islam is to reject most of its bases completely. Moderate Muslims may want to reform Islam, but they don't have the intellectual honesty to admit that the religion they want instead can no longer be Islam, because Islam's fundamentals are far too hard-line and incompatible with any modern, enlightened society.

Then to make a bad situaation worse, progressives with their not-so-hidden agenda of cultural Marxism have completely prevented any useful dialogue about Islam. Western society is now in a position of being absolutely unable to make clear, rational distinctions about any differences (assuming they really exist) between radical Islam versus any other kind. This includes the continuing lack of useful, widely agreed-upon defintions, and more importantly, a complete lack of codified laws based on such definitions. At best, we simply have some type of vague acknowledgement that there are "moderate Muslims" out there somewhere, but no legally accepted means by which to prove it one way or the other.

Conservatives are now in the absurd position of hoping that arguments based on "insensitivity", or "reciprocity", or being "uncaring" or "offensive" will carry the day. This is naive and ultimately feckless, since the only default legailty leads us directly back to the First Amendment which will trump you every time. We are thus left in the dark about the relationship of our Constitution to a real but amorphously defined enemy. This is what progressives do best... refuse to make useful distinctions, and then violently squelch any attempt by others to do so in their stead.

"The Constitution is not a suicide pact." However, the lack of any codified, logical, rational analysis is allowing us to blanket our enemies with Constitutional protections to which they were never originally entitled. Each of us should familiarize ourselves with the concept of the demopath. We see the rise and success of demopaths throughout our society. It is they whom we have allowed to control the debate, control the laws, and ultimately undercut the foundations of our society.

Note: Opinions expressed in comments are those of the authors alone and not necessarily those of Daniel Pipes. Original writing only, please. Comments are screened and in some cases edited before posting. Reasoned disagreement is welcome but not comments that are scurrilous, off-topic, commercial, disparaging religions, or otherwise inappropriate. For complete regulations, see the "Guidelines for Reader Comments".