In the fall out of the Newsweek "Flushing Koran" story, a lot of people have begun to take more notice of the primitive and viscious response of the Muslim world to any real and/or perceived insults. Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe, wondered Why Islam is disrespected and concluded:
...what disgraces Islam above all is the vast majority of the planet's Muslims saying nothing and doing nothing about the jihadist cancer eating away at their religion. It is Free Muslims Against Terrorism, a pro-democracy organization, calling on Muslims and Middle Easterners to ''converge on our nation's capital for a rally against terrorism" -- and having only 50 people show up.
Yes, Islam is disrespected. That will only change when throngs of passionate Muslims show up for rallies against terrorism, and when rabble-rousers trying to gin up a riot over a defiled Koran can't get the time of day.
Yesterday, Bloggledygook wrote an impassioned piece, Taking Islam Seriously.
We may be winning or losing this war; it's getting harder each day to tell. But if we lose, it will not be because the enemy is superior in strength, morality or guile. It will be because we have failed to take the threat with the seriousness and dead calm that an existential crisis demands. We have failed to identify the enemy and in doing so have turned the fight in on ourselves. The current spat between the government and the media would make for lively entertainment in another time. As we grow towards what is likely to be a showdown with thousands, maybe millions, of radicalized religious fanatics it might be a good idea for us to come to some agreement on whom we fight before it is too late.
The majority of tolerant, moderate Muslims must do the same. It is incumbent on both the media and government that they explain that the enemy we face is their enemy also. And it is of the greatest import that Muslims finally decide that they will indeed take their religion, and the internal threat to its very survival, seriously. An army of free Muslims mobilized alongside that of the West would be an overwhelming force in the fight against Islamofascism. It has yet to be enlisted or even contemplated. We must demonstrate to our Muslim allies that we take the threat to their religion and culture as serious as we take the same threat to ours, and that we expect them to do the same. Until Muslims show respect for their own ways, the West will be impotent to force a surrender."
Many, many others are awake to the dangers of radical Islam and the, to them, curious silence by the vast, moderate majority of Islam. I wish the situation were as simple as mobilizing the moderates to repudiate the radicals.
I liken the Islamic world to the state of the German nation in the 1930's. The Nazis were a minority party with a small following at first, in the early years of the decade. The percentage of people willing and eager to join in the party's thuggery was quite small. A far larger number sympathized with the Nazi program of externalizing all blame for Germany's straits with special emphasis on anti-Semitism, an even larger number were quietly alarmed or indifferent but the number willing to stand against the Nazis was minuscule, and hampered by the fact that they were typically not thugs themselves. By the late thirties, Hitler had been legally elected by a minority of voters and once in power he unleashed a growing band of bullies and thugs who were the spiritual ancestors to Zarqawi and his ilk. By the time the danger of Nazism was noticed by the population, opposition became deadly dangerous. It is one thing to risk your life to protect yourself and your family, it is something else altogether to risk your life to defend an outsider, like the Jew. As it was by the late 1930's and increasingly into the 1940's, to be an anti-Nazi German was to risk a horrible, lonely death; today, in "1930's Islam", to be a moderate Muslim is to risk death.
We cannot expect any help from Moderate Muslims in saving their own hides. Their governments cynically use the radical Islamists to keep pressure on their enemies and to keep their own populations under control. There will be minimal help from that direction. Further, every poll taken of an Islamic country shows a sizable population supporting the most rigorous and most intolerant, often Wahhabi or Wahhabi influenced (thanks to Saudi oil money), brands of Islam. These populations are still minorities in many places, but they are sizable, passionate, and ruthless. In general, the more provincial and unsophisticated a society, the more conservative they tend to be. While we can't expect much help from Saudi Arabia, still playing their double game, protected by their oil for the time being, it should surprise no one that Egypt, Pakistan, the Sudan, parts of Indonesia, and other areas, are extremely fundamentalist, extremely anti-American, and extremely unlikely to ever utter a word of complaint about the desecration and persecution of Christians, Jews and others unfortunate enough to live within their midst.
It is also worth wondering if there even exists a sizable population of moderate Muslims. The MSM, our government, most civilized people seem to believe that if they insist there exists a moderate Islam, then it must be so. While I have no doubt there are moderate Muslims, their lack of visibility is troubling. When even in this country, where dissenters are safer than most anywhere else, a rally for Muslims against terror draws minimal numbers, it is troubling. Whenever there is an article written, or a public stance taken, opposing the Islamic fascists, the brave individual Muslim puts their life at risk, receives condemnation from official organs of Islam, and often receives death threat fatwas. They receive nothing but calumny from the governments which are supposed to be our allies in this war. The official Egyptian press and the state sponsored Imams in state supported mosques, regularly spew out the worst hatred of infidels (that is Americans and Israelis, especially, but with special vitriol for those Europeans who have the temerity to object to their increasing dhimmitude) and apostates. Most Islamic states have death penalties for apostasy, for desecration of the Koran, and for any of a number of offenses against Islam; at the same time, Shariah law openly, arrogantly, discriminates against those who are not sufficiently Islamic, and grants almost no rights to non Muslims.
Thus, sadly, we can expect minimal help from any Moderate Muslims who might exist, and only the minimal levels of assistance that they can get away with from the so-called Moderate Islamic states in the world. If our MSM and their allies in the Academic, Left wing, and European elites, succeed at disarming us, and the Islamofascists husband their resources, the fight in which we are in the early stages may yet feature all of Islam against the civilized world. The fall out (literal and figurative) will touch everyone on the planet before it is over.
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