Tuesday, September 16, 2014




The Mysterious Moderate Muslim

By Carol Brown

AMERICAN THINKER

September 16, 2014

What, and who, is a moderate Muslim?
Islamic values are codified in the Koran. The idea that some Muslims might interpret those values in a moderate way is like saying there’s such a thing as jihad lite. There’s no getting around the fact that a central tenet of the Koran is mass murder – whether through the directive to kill infidels (non-believers), apostates (those who leave Islam), or hypocrites (Muslims who don’t practice their religion appropriately). In other words, most of civilization is fair game for slaughter. What, pray tell, would be a moderate version of that? 
And if people try to suggest there are many peaceful verses in the Koran, they are either uninformed or practicing taqiyya, because older, more peaceful teachings are abrogated by more recent violent teachings, as written in Sura 2, Verse 106. Jihad Watch reports:
Those Westerners who manage to pick up a translation of the Quran are often left bewildered as to its meaning thanks to ignorance of a critically important principle of Quranic interpretation known as “abrogation.” The principle of abrogation — al-naskh wa al-mansukh (the abrogating and the abrogated) — directs that verses revealed later in Muhammad’s career “abrogate” — i.e., cancel and replace — earlier ones whose instructions they may contradict. Thus, passages revealed later in Muhammad’s career, in Medina, overrule passages revealed earlier, in Mecca. The Quran itself lays out the principle of abrogation:
Whatever a Verse (revelation) do We {Allah} abrogate or cause to be forgotten, We bring a better one or similar to it. Know you not that Allah is able to do all things? (snip)
…Meccan suras, revealed at a time when the Muslims were vulnerable, are generally benign; the later Medinan suras, revealed after Muhammad had made himself the head of an army, are bellicose.
David Wood, from Acts17Apologetics, has created a short video of essential verses from the Koran that highlight the pervasive call to violence. Would that such violence were only written in some ancient document that no one cared about. Unfortunately, we see Muslims the world over following these violent teachings as they commit mass murder, engage in honor killings, as well as rape, stoning, floggings, acid attacks, beheadings, and on and on and on.
The Muslim community appears to have no desire to expunge these violent teachings from the Koran, and so Islam remains a totalitarian ideology that puts it in a class all its own among other religions. Yet most in the West refuse to accept this fact. Instead, they want to believe a sweet story about Islam that exists only in their minds. Case in point: Just a few days ago after ISIS beheaded a British aid worker, Prime Minister David Cameron publically stated the all-too-familiar refrain that “Islam is a religion of peace.”
This gaping hole between the reality of what the Koran teaches and the fantasy so many want to embrace was highlighted when Bill Maher was interviewed by Charlie Rose recently. The interview included a discussion about Islam, Muslims, and ISIS. Maher, who has been outspoken about Islam in the past, was forthright on Rose’s show. (It’s the only positive thing I can say about him.) He spoke the truth about Islam and – miracle of miracles – even defended Christians.  Rose, smirking and laughing, resisted being educated at all cost. But more importantly and emblematic of so many progressives on this topic, he was left with only one card to play as he said another familiar leftist refrain: “But I don’t believe….” Real Clear Politics reports:
MAHER: But most Muslim people in the world do condone violence just for what you think.

ROSE: How do you know that?

MAHER: They do. First of all they say it. They shout it.

ROSE: Vast majorities of Muslims say that?

MAHER: Absolutely. There was a Pew poll in Egypt done a few years ago -- 82% said, I think, stoning is the appropriate punishment for adultery. Over 80% thought death was the appropriate punishment for leaving the Muslim religion. I'm sure you know these things.

ROSE: Well I do. But I don't believe --
“I don’t believe” are critical words for progressives.
The left wants to live in a fantasy world. Part of that world includes the idea that most Muslims are not violent nor do they support violence. Many on the right are fond of making this proclamation, as well. But how do they know what “most Muslims” truly think or want?
As noted in the excerpted transcript above, a Pew Research poll from 2013 showed that a large percentage of Muslims around the world support Sharia law, with varying interpretations of what the law should dictate.
In addition, two years ago a poll was conducted on behalf of World Net Daily that revealed the following:
Nearly half of 600 Muslim-American citizens polled…believe parodies of Muhammad should be prosecuted criminally in the U.S. (snip)
“Almost half of those Muslims surveyed – an astonishing 46 percent – said they believe those Americans who offer criticism or parodies of Islam should face criminal charges,” said pollster Fritz Wenzel in an analysis of the survey’s results.
“Even more shocking: One in eight respondents said they think those Americans who criticize or parody Islam should face the death penalty, while another nine percent said they were unsure on the question,” he said. (snip)
Four in 10 said Muslims in America should not be judged by U.S. law and the Constitution, but by Islamic Shariah law.
“A much smaller percentage said they think the U.S. should establish an entirely separate court system to adjudicate matters involving Muslims,” Wenzel said.
While the respondents overwhelmingly lean toward the Democratic Party…they also have a fundamental conflict with American life, expressing objections to the freedom of speech and religion guaranteed in the Constitution.
American Muslims, Wenzel said, “show signs of ambivalence toward the U.S. Constitution generally and the First Amendment specifically.” (snip)
When you read polls like these. When you consider the tens of thousands of Muslims around the world who poured into city streets this summer to chant “death to Jews,” yet who are silent in the face of atrocities committed by Muslims in the name of Islam; when you watch the Muslim Day parade in New York city and witness their embrace of hate and faux victimization; when you see the violence that is unfolding in Europe as a direct result of Muslim immigration; when you realize there are increasing numbers of Muslims who seem like regular folks who then turn around and become jihadists, one realizes there is no way to know just which Muslims are “moderate.” See here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here among a litany of examples.
As Daniel Greenfield recently wrote in FrontPage Magazine:
Every week another lad or lass from St. Louis, Toronto or Sydney makes the trip through Turkey to the Islamic State. A reporter dispatched by a local paper to talk to the neighbors scribbles down the same recollections about how nice and normal Jihad Joe or Jihad Jane was.
Classmates remember a loud partier or a shy student. Neighbors mention that everything seemed normal until those last few years when he began wearing a robe and she began wearing a burka.
The Somali and Algerian immigrants, the German and American converts, the black burkas and dyed beards, headed into the dying summer to kill Christians and Kurds, Turkmen and Shiites, to behead babies and crucify critics, don’t seem like monsters.
They loved their parents. They posed for jokey snapshots on Facebook. They had dreams of becoming biologists or boxers. Until they began killing people, they seemed just like the rest of us.
And with one difference, they were.
The forensic examinations of their lives rarely reveal anything of significance. The extensive digging into the lives of the Boston bombers told us nothing about why they would plant a bomb near a little boy.
The answer lay in the topic that the media carefully avoided. As with the other Muslim terrorists, the meaning of their motives was in the little black book of their religion which commanded them to kill.
Then there are those Muslims who are not outwardly violent (yet), but who support those who are and/or who participate in creeping Sharia. Throw taqiyya into the mix and it becomes extremely difficult to know or trust who is the ever-elusive moderate Muslim.
Sorry to be so blunt, but there it is.


20 comments:

  1. There are some beliefs, the most fundamental ones, which are from the very outset "decentered," beliefs of the Other; the phenomenon of the "subject supposed to believe," is thus universal and structurally necessary. From the very outset, the speaking subject displaces his belief onto the big Other qua the order of pure semblance, so that the subject never "really believed in it"; from the very beginning, the subject refers to some decentered other to whom he imputes this belief. All concrete versions of this "subject supposed to believe" (from small children for whose sake parents pretend to believe in Santa Claus, to the "ordinary working people" for whose sake Communist intellectuals pretend to believe in Socialism) are stand-ins for the big Other. So, what one should answer to the conservative platitude according to which every honest man has a profound need to believe in something, is that every honest man has a profound need to find another subject who would believe in his place…

    -Slavoj Zizek, "The Interpassive Subject"

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  2. Religious ideologists usually claim that, true or not, religion makes some otherwise bad people to do some good things. From today’s experience, however, one should rather stick to Steven Weinberg’s claim: while, without religion, good people would have been doing good things and bad people bad things, only religion can make good people do bad things.

    -Slavoj Zizek, "Against Aristocratic Pride - Shakespeare and Radical Politics"

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  3. So Free, let's accept your premise as valid...

    What solutions do you propose given that our Constitution will not permit the types of ideas I've heard from many conservatives?

    Some, like Lisa, have advocated banning their religion. How does that get accomplished under our Constitution?

    Others have posited the idea that we should just invade their countries and/or bomb them back to the stone age.

    I am not unsympathetic to what I see as the potential for some real problems here, but how do we reconcile redressing the fears many have, with a set of laws that permits many of the very actions that cause those fears?

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  4. It's already against the law and Constitution to advocate/incite violence and/or deny other people the practice of their Constitutional rights. It's already against the law to harm "protected" groups (Jews/women/minorities)

    So enforce these law inside the USA! And ignore the idiots outside the USA.

    So if an Imam in Chicago advocates for jihad or the rape of infidel women who blaspheme the Koran, arrest him! Don't ignore him and pretend he's just preaching another "religion" that is protected speech under the Constitution. It's NOT!

    Religious freedom ends once VIOLENCE is advocated.

    Enforce the law.

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  5. John Kerry, like most progressives, is living in Fantasyland. The "real" Islam is biting his *ss every day, only he's too stupid to see it.

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  6. Good answer, Thersites, and I would repeat once again for the umpteenth time:

    "The U.S. Constitution Is Not a Suicide Pact."

    Besides, and Im sure Dave knows this as well as anyone, starting with Saint Abraham Lincoln, and then with TR and the Marixan-Fabian-Socialist-Statist-Interventionist, Progressives, strict adherence to the Constitution has never daunted ANY of those leaders from doing what THEY wanted to do, and what THeY thought was "right."

    As George Will said in the first segment of Ken Burns' fawning new hagiography, "The Roosevelts," The Progressives, who regarded the Constitution as an outmoded nuisance, reversed its accepted interpretation, and replaced it with the assertion they could anything they wanted to do not specifically FORBIDDEN by the document."

    As much as I despise Ken Burns' unmistakable tone of open, unabashed ADORATION, I must give him credit for airing Wills' astute observation.

    Burns did that, of course, to spike the guns of Conservative critics who might seek to attack the series as biased hogwash.

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  7. Dave:

    Good questions.

    My answer has always been to not let in people from cultures incompatible with ours. Notice I make no moral judgements using words like better or worse. Just different.

    Our government has proven itself woefully incapable of sorting out the good ones from the bad ones, and that same government treats assimilation as if it were a dirty word, so, quite simply, we should not be handing out any kind of visa to muslims, because once they are here, as you observe, they have the same rights as everyone else.

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  8. Silver, and maybe that is the answer. Before the 1965 immigration act that was pushed by Ted Kennedy and many liberal union favoring politicians, particularly in automobile manufacturing areas, we limited immigration on the very premise you mentioned.

    We accepted veery few Asians because they were seen as incompatible with our culture, and we were very open to immigration, with practically open borders, to our neighbors to the south.

    Why? Culture.

    Maybe we should go back to that, although I do not see how we could possibly get that kind of push through either party.

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  9. "What, and who, is a moderate Muslim?"

    Well, in my personal experience, pretty much every Muslim I've ever met, and I've met a lot.

    I love how Christians use less than 5% of the Muslim population to somehow draw wild conclusions about over 1 billion people on the planet.

    What really bothers me is how no matter how many times I point out that the Bible is just as violent as the Quran, Christians just sort of ignore all of that.

    Didn't Jesus talk about bringing a sword? Didn't God command Joshua and his Hebrew horde to slaughter women and children whilst conquering the Promised Land?

    When Christians were wholesale slaughtering the natives of the New World in the name of Christ, do we look back on that and say "well, there's something wrong with Christianity"? No, I know you don't. Because in your mind, Christianity is perfect and it's the only way.

    From now on, I should start lumping all Christians in with the Westboro Baptist assholes.

    And this question never gets answered: if so many Muslims are so violent and awful, then why is the UAE safe? Why have Malaysia and Indonesia largely avoided all the violence? The answer is simple for anyone who even has a cursory understanding of cultural evolution, but it would seem that Christians often lack that level of insight.

    Whatever, I guess. This topic is about as pointless as trying to convince a DC fanboy that Marvel is better. It never ceases to amaze me how men and women who claim to think logically and reasonably abandon both logic and reason when discussing religion.

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  10. Jack, the problem with your reasoning is that 5% of Christians aren't going around killing infidels, blasphemers, and apostates. The Westboro Baptist "Assholes" as you put it aren't 5% or even .00000000005% of Christianity.

    If you think Indonesia and Malaysia don't have an Islamic terrorism problem, try Google. You're either disingenuous or willfully blind.

    Why doesn't the UAE have a significant terrorism problem? Quite simply, they execute them. They've made the majority of terrorism related offenses capital crimes. To include " infringement of diplomatic or consular premises"

    http://gulfnews.com/news/gulf/uae/government/uae-anti-terror-law-is-toughest-in-40-years-1.1374314

    5% of 1 billion is 50000000; there is no corollary problem in Christendom today. To put that number in perspective, the Nazis peaked at about 18 million in WWII and look what they accomplished.

    Yes the Bible contains violence, like the Quran it also preaches for the stoning of adulterers... when is the last time you heard that preached from the pulpit? How many priests or Christian ministers do you think are preaching that worldwide compared to the number of Imams doing so?

    You're an apologist, and a bad one at that.

    As to what was done in the name of Christianity in the past, well we've learned from that, I can't say the same for Islam worldwide.

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  11. Jack, I saw an opinion piece the other day bringing up your exact point about Muslims from Asia being essentially different from the Arab Muslims.

    We all know the country with the largest Muslim population is Indonesia, so logic would ask why do they not have huge terrorist issues within the indigenous population.

    Your questions are fair, and deserve some fair consideration. As for Christianity, most, if not all, of the violent passages that are similar to the Koran, are Old Testament references. Jesus was a man of peace, as was his theology, in spite of how many conservatives portray him.

    Sadly, our American Jesus, as we understand him, is quite far from the sacrificial lamb that went to the cross...

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  12. Because blowing up churches and beheading Christian schoolgirls isn't terrorism?

    Your ignorance regarding Indonesia and Jemaah Islamiyah is astounding.

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  13. Candida St. Albans said

    "Muslims from Asia [are] essentially different from the Arab Muslims."

    The problem then is obviously one of race not religion, isn't it?

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  14. Thanks for your help, Finntann. I was feeling a bit "beleaguered" till you arrived.

    --------------

    Thanks too, AOW, for the Dana Loesch video. His manner is a bit too much like that of a standup comic for my taste, -- rather clownish like Glenn Beck as a mater of fact -- but also like Beck his reasoning is sound, his information good.

    ---------------

    Jack, I suspect you have been taken in by TAQIYYA. These crafty devils depend on the innocence, inherent good will and gullibility of nice, well-meanng Westerners who do not want to believe there could be such evil in the world.

    We Americans too often discount the effects of septic cultural conditioning, and make the grievous error of imagining that "everybody is really just like us" at heart -- "once you get to know them."

    I suggest developing a better acquaintance with certain poems of Kipling, Yeats and Auden -- and maybe T.S. Eliot as well. THEY understood how deceitful and 'desperately wicked' the human heart could be.

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  15. So after years of war in Iraq only to have the government on the verge of failing and nation building in Afghanistan where the government's days are numbered again, I have a few questions:

    1) What ever changes in the middle east? Different day, same problem.

    2) Why are we propping up despotic governments?

    3) Why is that shit hole called the Middle East our problem? - Europe and Japan get most of the middle east oil and we are having an energy boom here. Let's mind our own business and develop our own energy.

    4) How are Democrats different than Republicans again? - After all the flying fur, they are behind an invasion yet again just like Kosovo, Bosnia, Libya and their support of Republicans in Somalia, Kuwait, Iraq. I hear a lot of cackling about staying out of other people's business. I see no egg. Just like when Republicans talk about spending cuts. Republicans and Democrats are like male and female stink bugs. You may be able to tell each other apart, but you look the same to everyone else.

    Einstein: Insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result. I have a different idea for the middle east. Let's stay out of it.
    But I guess that if we had some SANE leadership and not the inept, idiot that we have calling himself “Our President”, we would stop his constant FAILED policiesand do something that really is meaningful.
    But then again, I must be dreaming, because that will never happen, with Obammy and his flagrant liberal hypocrisy in charge.

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  16. Sure sure sure, but what WOULD you do, Kaz?

    WHAT would you do?

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  17. Come on Candida isn't it obvious, the difference between Asian Muslims and Arab Muslims is they blow stuff up in different places.

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  18. I think Candida may have have assumed Jack knew what he was talking about, since he sounds so positive with his assertions, and was responding to him with that in mind.

    Just a guess ...

    Helen Highwater

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