Sunday, March 14, 2010

Who goes there? Friend or foe and how do we know?



There is an issue that we, as a society, are currently unwilling to step up and address. That issue is simply this.

How can any member of our society find any common ground with Islam?

The expression, "moderate Muslims" is often used but fails to recognize that the goal of Islam is the Islamization of the world and the development of "radical Muslims" represents the extreme side of that. Yet the goals of both are the same. And given that, how far can we ever believe that "moderates" will do anything beyond giving lip service condemnation?

The question is becoming further complicated by the 10 DOJ attorney's, including Obama's AG, that we now have in justice. And while it can be argued that everyone deserves representation in criminal matters, if these lawyers volunteered they must have a vision that is much different than the ordinary American.

All of this is better said here:

Now, to the more important question posed in the last paragraph of Jonah's post. Let's put DOJ's ten (and counting) Gitmo lawyers to the side and just talk about the volunteer Gitmo bar in general. I believe many of the attorneys who volunteered their services to al Qaeda were, in fact, pro-Qaeda or, at the very least, pro-Islamist. Not all of them, but many of them. The assistance many of them provided went disturbingly beyond any conventional notion of "legal representation." (And let's not forget that what Lynne Stewart called her "legal representation" of the Blind Sheikh was later found by a jury to be material support to terrorism.) I expect we'll be hearing much more about this in the coming days.

Islamism is a much broader and more mainstream (in Islam) ideology than suggested by the surprisingly ill-informed comments Charles Krauthammer made about a week ago (see Dr. K's commentary here; Mark Steyn's reaction, with which I agree, is here.) Jihadist terrorists are a subset of the Islamists, but many Islamists disagree with the terrorists' means — they are mostly on the same page as far as ends are concerned.

Personally, I don't think there is much difference, if any, between Islam and Islamism. In that assessment, I'm not much different from Turkey's Islamist prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who claims it is "very ugly" for Westerners to draw these distinctions between Muslims as "moderate" or "Islamist" — “It is offensive and an insult to our religion," he says, because "there is no moderate or immoderate Islam. Islam is Islam, and that’s it."

Islamists are Muslims who would like to see sharia (Islamic law) installed. That is the necessary precondition to Islamicizing a society. It is the purpose of jihad. The terrorists are willing to force sharia's installation by violent jihad; other Islamists have varying views about the usefulness of violence, but they also want sharia, and their jihadist methods include tactics other than violence. I reluctantly use the term "Islamist" rather than "Islam" because I believe there are hundreds of millions of Muslims (somewhere between a third to a half of the world's 1.4 billion Muslims) who do not want to live under sharia, and who want religion to be a private matter, separated from public life. It is baffling to me why these people are Muslims since, as I understand Islam, (a) sharia is a basic element, and (b) Islam rejects the separation of mosque and state. But I'm not a Muslim, so that is not for me to say. I think we have to encourage the non-sharia Muslims and give them space to try to reform their religion, so I believe it's worth labeling the sharia seekers "Islamists" in order to sort them out. But I admit being very conflicted about it because I also concede that the Islamists have the more coherent (and scary) construction of Islam. We wouldn't be encouraging reform if we really thought Islam was fine as is.


Use the link and read the complete National Review article.

submit to reddit

On Twitter I am Lesabre1

No comments:

Post a Comment