Half-way There

Submitted by Ron Thompson (United States), Jan 20, 2015 at 13:24

I applaud and watch with real interest the rise of the insurgent and so-called "far" right parties in Europe. And I agree with Daniel Pipes that only one or two of them (in Hungary and Greece) may deserve the epithet of 'fascist'.

One thing surprises me - that these vigorous insurgencies still think in terms of "radical" or "fundamentalist" Islam, as if there's some other type of Islam that is a counterweight of the slightest significance to the supremacist core of Islamic teachings. Give Erdogan of Turkey credit: he tells it like it is when he says, "there's only one Islam."

What IS it that compels so many, equally on the blindly multicultural Left and the seemingly ferocious Right, to both agree that whatever problems there are with Islam, thay extend only to "radical" Islam.

Would they be saying the same if there were 1.6 million Muslims in the world instead of 1.6 billion?

Does it have something to do with a vague, subconscious Fear that if it is openly said that one of the 'world's great religions', or one the 'three Abahamic faiths' is actually, and always has been a monstrous intellectual fraud and a threat to the peace and order of the World (and not least to the physical and moral well-being of its own adherents) that somehow the other mass relgions which believe in one God would be undermined or threatened?

I don't get this dangerous reticence to look at what we are facing straight on, and ask and debate, if not immediately proclaim, is it the religion itself?

Failing to do this leaves our hands tied in several ways, the most important of which is that we forbid ourselves from calling for the Freedom of Muslims from the Tyranny of Islam. Besides the virtue of that call in its own right, it would put us, for the first time, on the ideological offensive, an offensive we explicitly declined after the seminal event of 9/11.

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