Islamists or Muslims

Submitted by Patrick Moore (United States), Sep 19, 2012 at 16:18

From my reading of Islamic history, religion and politics, I can't see how the crowd in Sydney (and crowds demonstrating elsewhere, should not be considered simply "Muslims." There are peaceful Muslims but their irenicism stems more from being peaceful people than it does from being Islamic.

The term Islamist is a trope, a stalking horse for the fact that Islam requires things like death to apostates, animal sacrifice, violent defense of the Prophet and the interests of Islam, that it is a matter of Islamic law that they seek to subjugate all non-muslim populations to the political control of Muslims (because, as Bernard Lewis, I believe, pointed out, a Muslim cannot "freely" exercise his religion unless he is in command ("Command the good; forbid what is evil"), and that Sharia requires everything from (as Adda Bozeman said) "low-intensity warfare" to open military confrontation. Jihad deals with the "oppression" of a Muslim minority in a non-muslim country as a classic "casus belli", and we will soon have to comply with Muslim demands of censorship and the like until we recognize that there are non-militant Muslims who simply want to live as neighbors and militant Muslims who want to enforce the full panoply of the Muslim religion's demands on non-Muslims including the stigma of Dhimmitude (being forced to bow to Islamic religious and political demands or else).

Until we face these facts (i.e. that there is only one Islam but two kinds of Muslims: those who want to impose everything Islam requires and those willing to let the more repugnant things to the West slide in the interests of civil tranquility), things will only get worse.

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