What is a Moderate Muslim?

Submitted by St.George (United States), Sep 10, 2010 at 18:43

Many of the respondents to Pipes article seem like Demosthenes looking for an honest man with a candle. He didn't find one either. Whenever a "moderate" Muslim is queried about 9/11, the invariable response is something like "well, you have to understand, but ..." or "we have to look at it in an historical perspective" and more and other equivocations. America, at times, seems like a Cristo art event in which everything is wrapped in a thick blanket and we can only make out vague shapes. PC notions of "inclusion," "diversity," "multi-culturalism," what Richard Bernstein called the "tyranny of good intentions," muffle real debate ("bigots") and blind us to the reality that is happening around us.

Yes, there are good Muslims just as there were good Germans. They are also in denial. In America we have never come to terms with what 9/11 means. We never asked the question "does this mean that there are a lot people who hate us and want us dead?" Instead we dodged the question. We noted, in passing, that whole Islamic nations danced in the streets but banished the thought as unworthy of our lofty PC preconceptions. Historically, Islam was good only when it in totalitarian ascendancy or when it was caged. Uncaged, it rampaged through the world with the ferocity and virulence of a violent disease: convert or die. It is no doubt in an historical ascendant moment again and Islam is currently high on its success. When Communism was ascendant, it embraced the useful concept of "fellow travelers." Moderate Muslims are correspondent "fellow travelers." Islamist ideology hasn't changed, the means varies, that's all.

In America we are also strangled by guilt. After WWII American emerged not only victorious but somehow omnipotent. As a consequence the world, and we, believe that everything, everywhere, is our fault. If it isn't, then we are not omnipotent. We are powerful, but we are also good. Communism also emerged from WWII omnipotent. We were worthy adversaries. But Communism collapsed, succumbing to its myriad contradictions. But many who wanted "the revolution," were frustrated and took up Anti-Americanism as a revolutionary placeholder until the "real revolution" could be made to happen. Anti-Americanism is a potent tool for our enemies and is still being exploited, now, most especially by the Islamists. The Left took up the Anti-American banner in its quest to "change" America into a Socialist state. Islamism and Leftism, adopting the motto that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, became the accepted credo. We are very confused by these ripping crosscurrents and their incessant clamor. We have begun, like the truly brainwashed, to believe it.

So, like Mayor Bloomberg (a very rich man but not the brightest bulb; intelligence and wealth not necessarily compatible, in fact, H.L. Hunt, the richest man of his time when asked if he regretted not going beyond the fourth grade replied "an education would have been an absolute barrier getting this rich.") we refuse the obey the evidence of our senses and are, annoyingly, desperate to be loved. We want the people who want to destroy us to love us too. We extend our hand and they spit on us. They announce their intention to destroy not only us and erect an Islamic state as outlined in the Koran and the Hadith (yes, Mein Kampf) and they cry "Allah Akbar" as they plow into the Twin Towers and murder three thousand people, brutally and without mercy and without provocation (by our terms anyway; to them our very existence is a provocation) and we say "what have we done to deserve this?" And since we believe, in the West, that there is a strict separation between church and state and that we guarantee religious freedom there cannot, categorically, be a connection between a religion, Islam, "just another religion," the Koran, "just like the Bible, right?" (who among these Bloomberg naifs has actually read the Koran) and the horror they have inflicted. And they keep telling us over and over what they want and we just refuse to listen. We just won't take them at their word.

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