@ Mythical Moderates

The Mythical Moderate Muslim

Faithfreedom.org

Yashiko Sagamori

Primitive tribes offer sacrifices hoping to mollify whatever nonexistent beings they believe in. The New York Times columnist Paul Krugman belongs to a very sophisticated tribe that, according to the recently retired Malaysian Prime Minister, rules the world by proxy.

One would think Mr. Krugman should be above such crude superstitions. Nevertheless, in his column on October 21, he suggests that Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld should fire General Boykin in order to mollify moderate Muslims.

General Boykin, the leading anti-terror expert at the Pentagon and a devout Christian, had openly and publicly, on several occasions, expressed his personal opinion of Islam, which happens to be rather low. Considering where the terror is coming from, this is far less surprising than Mr. Krugman’s eagerness to sacrifice both General Boykin and the First Amendment to mollify moderate Muslims. I’d like to ask Mr. Krugman what gives him a reason to believe that the beings he is trying to mollify actually exist.

The official, politically correct point of view says that Islam is just another monotheistic religion, not that different from Judaism or Christianity. If that is true, then moderate Muslims must exist, just like moderate members of other faiths. However, moderate members of other faiths do not require sacrificial mollification — that’s basically how we tell moderates from extremists.

Therefore, either moderate Muslims are mythical creatures, or we need substantially different criteria to identify them. That dilemma alone should make us suspicious as to whether Islam is “just another religion”. Obviously, it is important that we determine how a moderate Muslim can be distinguished from a Muslim extremist.

Why not ask Muslims themselves? Irshad Manji, a young Canadian author, has published a book titled The Trouble With Islam. Since we don’t hear too many Muslim voices criticizing their religion, her book deserves our attention. This is what the author herself says on her promotional website (http://www.irshadmanji.com/the-book):

 I appreciate that every faith has its share of literalists. Christians have their fundamentalists. Jews have the ultra-Orthodox. For God’s sake, even Buddhists have absolutists.

But what this book hammers home is that only in Islam today is literalism mainstream. Which means that when abuse happens under the banner of Islam, most Muslims have no clue how to dissent, debate, or reform ourselves.

Apparently, the terms literalism and fundamentalism in the quotation above are used interchangeably, as synonyms of religious extremism.

Unfortunately, the author fails to mention the most important difference between “literalists” in Islam and other religions. Evangelical Christians may believe that heaven is reserved for them alone. Ultra-Orthodox Jews may display intimate understanding of the murkiest places in the Talmud. I have no idea what extreme fundamentalist Buddhists do that sets them apart from their moderate coreligionists.

What I do know however is that no religion except Islam pursues the idea of physical extermination of those who believe differently.

The concept of holy war is unique to Islam. Jihad is the absolute monopoly of Muslims. There is no parallel to it in any other religion in the world. (Yes, I have heard about Crusades, but Christianity does not mandate them, and do you know when the last Crusade ended?)So, here we have it in plain English, as simple as A, B, C:

A.	According to the Koran, holy war against the infidels is a sacred duty of every Muslim.
	B.According to Ms. Manji, mainstream Muslims interpret Koran literally.

The conclusion is inevitable:

C.	Mainstream Muslims perceive war against the infidels — meaning you and me — as their sacred duty.

 Once you understand that, you don’t need books to explain to you what exactly the trouble with Islam is. The trouble with Islam derives from the fact that mainstream Islam openly calls for murder of all infidels. That’s why Islam is not “just another religion”. That’s what, in my view, allows to classify all its followers as extremist.

What then, besides our stubborn, groundless faith in the general goodness of our fellow human beings, leads us to believe that moderate Muslims are not just a figment of our imagination? How do they manifest themselves in the real world? It would be utterly useless to look for them in Gaza, Judea, or Samaria.

Unlike Bin Laden, terrorists occupying Israeli lands do not live in caves. They live in small towns, villages and crowded refugee camps where everyone knows everything about everyone else. They couldn’t survive for a day without popular support.

When someone gives them a reason to doubt the sincerity of his support, they label him a collaborator and murder him on the spot. Indeed, the PA-sponsored educational system guarantees that innocent children are indoctrinated in the most murderous variety of Islamic extremism — thereby losing their innocence — at the earliest possible age.

Therefore, in Israel, a moderate Muslim is a dead Muslim, which is bad news for those who want us to believe that there is a peaceful solution to the continuing Arab war against Israel.

Let’s look elsewhere. Afghanistan, liberated by the United States from the medieval tyranny of the Taliban is about to publish the draft of its first constitution. Their new constitution is going to be firmly based on Islamic principles. The country itself is soon to be renamed the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan.

We wouldn’t call a Jew or a Christian who wanted his religion to become the basis of his country’s constitution a moderate, would we?

Here, in the United States, we value the separation of church from state so much that we launch court battles to remove the Ten Commandments and every reference to God from everything that is even remotely related to the government.

If Islam is “just another religion”, shouldn’t the same criteria apply to Muslim countries? And if the same criteria do apply, we have to conclude that President Karzai installed in Afghanistan by the American military and unable to survive now or in the foreseeable future without the American military presence, is not a moderate Muslim, but an outright religious extremist. His “Very correct” remark to Mahadir’s call for the extermination of Jews shows that he is a political extremist as well.

Therefore, the only practical question regarding Afghanistan is why did the United States have to waste lives of its soldiers and tens of billions of dollars in order to replace one bunch of Muslim extremists with another?

It might have been worthwhile had it improved our security at home, but, as we know, that didn’t happen. Therefore, we have to conclude that the United States has once again won a battle but lost the war. Next, the same will inevitably happen in Iraq.

Desperate search for moderate Muslims goes all around the world. It is especially urgent in Europe whose face is being irreversibly altered by mass immigration from Islamic countries.

Recently, the British government appealed to the growing British Muslim community to isolate extremists in their midst. It’s not hard to predict the response. Actually, there will be no response, because everyone in any Muslim community is an extremist. Such is the nature of Islam, and the only thing that I find hard to comprehend is the self-imposed blindness of the British government. Apparently, such is the price of liberalism and political correctness.

Bye-bye, Europe. We are next.

I don’t think World War II could be won if the Allies, instead of eradicating Nazism, attempted to replace Nazi extremists with moderate Nazis.

Actually, nobody was looking for moderate Nazis during World War II. But those were simpler, purer times. Today, the mythical moderate Muslim remains the focal point of the US foreign policy in the Middle East. The blind faith in his existence has already led the United States to many monumental failures, and many more are to be expected in the future. Meanwhile, the moderate Muslim, along with the Big Foot, the unicorn, the Loch Ness monster, remains more elusive than a cure for cancer: there is at least a theoretical possibility that a cure for cancer can be found one day, unless of course Islam takes over and drags us all down into its own endless Dark Ages. source: www.faithfreedom.org/2009/01/30/the-mythical-moderate-muslim/

RELATED STORIES:

Chasing a Mirage  @ http://ultracurrents.blogspot.com/2009_01_01_archive.html

A German’s View @ http://worldmonitor.wordpress.com/2008/08/15/a-germans-view/ 

Ayaan Hirsi Ali & Islam @ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6Wrhivp7eQ&mode=related&search=

 

For Moderate Muslims @ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avYtAyCxUbA&eurl=http://ibloga.blogspot.com/

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@ Nurturing terror w/$

Nurturing terror with US dollars

Daily Pioneer : Jan. 18, 2009

Kanchan Gupta

Commenting on America’s response to the multiple terrorist strikes of 9/11, the most spectacular of which was Mohammed Atta and his fellow jihadis flying two passenger jets into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York and reducing the glittering chrome-and-glass symbol of American power to twisted steel and rubble, Gen Pervez Musharraf writes in his memoir, In the Line of Fire, “I was chairing an important meeting… when my military secretary told me that the US Secretary of State, Gen Colin Powell, was on the phone. I said I would call back later, but he insisted that I come out of the meeting and take the call. Powell was quite candid: ‘You are either with us or against us.’ I took this as a blatant ultimatum… I told him we were with the United States against terrorism, having suffered from it for years, and would fight along with his country against it.”

Gen Powell’s pronounced pro-Pakistan bias was no secret in the first Bush Administration. It is possible that his colleagues were not too sure whether he had been blunt enough while delivering what Gen Musharraf was to later correctly describe as a “blatant ultimatum” to Pakistan. So a follow-up message was sent, this time through a person who had little time and lesser patience for niceties. “When I was back in Islamabad the next day, our director-general of Inter-Services Intelligence, who happened to be in Washington, told me on the phone about his meeting with the US Deputy Secretary of State, Richard Armitage.

In what was to be the most undiplomatic statement ever made, Armitage added to what Colin Powell had said to me and told the director-general not only that we had to decide whether we were with America or with the terrorists, but that if we chose the terrorists, then we would be bombed back to the Stone Age.”

It is anybody’s guess as to whether the Americans would have carried out their threat had Gen Musharraf cast Pakistan’s lot with the Taliban and Al Qaeda. But being the crafty man that he is, Gen Musharraf decided to play along with the Bush Administration by pretending to be a ‘staunch’ and ‘steadfast’ ally in the war on terror, and thus get the West to acknowledge Pakistan as the ‘frontline state’ deserving of military and civilian aid, which has since run into billions of dollars, most of it contributed by the US.

Seven years after Gen Powell asked Gen Musharraf to choose between America and the terrorists, and Mr Armitage made sure Pakistan chose to support the US, there is little or nothing to show for the military and non-military aid. Oversight audits have revealed that much of the money meant to modernise the Pakistani Army to fight terrorism in that country’s badlands has been pocketed by its top brass through the rampant use of bogus vouchers and fake bills.

As for non-military aid, it is obvious that generous cash transfers from Western capitals to Islamabad have not helped prevent Pakistani society’s descent into Islamic fanaticism and jihadi bloodletting. Gen Musharraf had promised to reform the education system by cleansing school curriculum of the regressive elements introduced during the Islamisation drive of Gen Zia-ul-Haq, shutting down non-registered madarsas run by rabid mullahs, and modernising those seminaries which are recognised by the Government.

For all his talk about “enlightened moderation”, Gen Musharraf did nothing on this front; by the time he ordered his troops to storm Lal Masjid and its two madarsas, including Jamia Hafza, in the heart of Islamabad on July 8, 2007, thousands of clones of this Deoband-inspired seminary of hate had sprung up across Pakistan. Many more have mushroomed in the last two years and each one of them preaches a simple, one-sentence message: “Jihad is your salvation.”

Distinguished Pakistani scholar and columnist Pervez Hoodbhoy, in an article, “The Saudi-isation of Pakistan”, published in the latest issue of Newsline, laments how radical Islamism and mullah-driven Arabisation are furiously gnawing at the innards of a tottering Pakistani state. He says although the Government admits to the existence of only 13,000 madarsas with 1.5 million taliban, the real number is likely between 18,000 and 22,000.

That would mean millions of taliban being indoctrinated by hate-mongers for whom Islam means being in a state of constant war with those who refuse to submit to oppressive Islamism that militates against human liberty, equality and dignity.

The preaching of hate and the teaching of ‘virtues’ of jihad are not limited to Deobandi madarsas alone. Such has been the all-pervasive influence of state-sponsored Islamisation since the days of Gen Zia’s dictatorship — contrary to popular belief Benazir Bhutto did nothing to reverse the trend after the dictator met a justly deserved fiery death (those with an evil mind insist the CIA did him in), nor did Mr Nawaz Sharif bother to halt the onward march of radical Islam while Gen Musharraf tricked the Americans into believing he was working on education reforms but it would require a few more million dollars, please — that private schools have now begun adopting offensive textbooks.

Rezaul Laskar of PTI has filed a report from Islamabad which is worth quoting verbatim: “Thousands of Pakistani schoolgoing children are growing up learning that the Urdu equivalent of the letter ‘A’ stands for Allah, ‘B’ for bandook (gun) and ‘J’ for jihad. Though not officially prescribed for pre-schoolers, books printed by Iqra Publishers are being used in several regular schools and madarsas across Pakistan.

The three examples of Allah, bandook and jihad are not the only ones which sound like a ‘blueprint for a religious fascist state’. The Urdu letter for the ‘T’ stands for takrao (collision), ‘K’ for khanjar (dagger), H for hijab (veil) and ‘Z’ for zunoob (sins) which include watching television, playing musical instruments and flying kites.

Which takes us back to Peerbhoy’s lament: “Left unchallenged, this education will produce a generation incapable of co-existing with anyone except strictly their own kind.

The mindset it creates may eventually lead to Pakistan’s demise as a nation state.” Not given to grand pronouncements, Peerbhoy has been cautious with his words. For, Pakistan has not only set itself on a self-destructive course, it is also headed for a catastrophe whose victims shall not be Pakistanis alone.

Tragically, the Americans refuse to read the writing on the wall. If the Bush Administration erred in trusting Pakistan, the incoming Obama Administration has compounded that error by promising to treble aid to a criminal state whose ruling elite, both military and civilian, is a complicit partner in promoting a particularly virulent form of radical Islamism. Little does the Pakistani elite realise that it too shall be devoured by the beast it is nurturing with American dollars.      — kanchangupta@rocketmail.com

1) India & Obama @  http://www.southasiaanalysis.org/papers31/paper3013.html

2) Aiding Terror @ http://www.organiser.org/dynamic/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=277&page=10

3) Act Tough, India! @ http://newstodaynet.com/newsindex.php?id=14033%20&%20section=13

http://www.dailypioneer.com/150623/Nurturing-terror-with-US-dollars.html

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