Recently I was taken to task for suggesting that Moderate Islam may either not exist in any meaningful use of the term, or that the Moderates have so little influence as to be ineffectual. This should not be confused with suggesting there are no Moderate Muslims. Obviously, many, perhaps even most, of the Muslims in the world just want to live their lives and have the time and space to raise a family. However, the self-appointed spokesmen for the Muslim world (there are almost no Spokeswomen in the Muslim world) have created conditions that make it extremely difficult for moderates to have a voice. In the autocracies of the Middle East, Islamists have been nurtured by vile governments to use as weapons against their enemies, only too late finding out in Egypt and Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, that their pet pit bulls are not terribly discriminate in which enemies they attack. Victor Davis Hanson describes the reaction then (immediately post-9/11) and now, of Mohammed Atta's father:
Remember how shortly after September 11 Mohammed Atta’s lawyer father sounded worried in his cozy apartment? He stammered that his son did not help engineer the deaths of 3,000 Americans. According to him, the videos of the falling towers were doctored. Or maybe the wily Jews did it. Why, in fact, he had only talked to dear Mohammed Junior that very day, September 11. Surely someone other than his son was the killer taped boarding his death plane.
Apparently Mohammed el-Amir was worried of American retaliation — as if a cruise missile might shatter the very window of his upper-middle class Giza apartment on the premise that the father’s hatred had been passed on to the son.
He sings a rather different tune now. Mohammed el-Amir recently boasts that he would like to see more attacks like the July 7 bombings of the London subway.
Indeed, he promised to use any future fees from his interviews to fund more of such terrorist killings of the type that his now admittedly deceased son mastered. Apparently in the years since 9/11, el-Amir has lost his worry about an angry America taking out its wrath on the former Muslim Brotherhood member who member who sired such a monster like Atta.
VDH goes on to describe, in no uncertain terms, the tendency of the Arab world to trade in one pathological ideology for another:
In the 1940s the raging -ism in the Middle East was anti-Semitic secular fascism, copycatting Hitler and Mussolini — who seemed by 1942 ascendant and victorious.
Between the 1950s and 1970s Soviet-style atheistic Baathism and tribal Pan-Arabism were deemed the waves of the future and unstoppable.
By the 1980s Islamism was the new antidote for the old bacillus of failure and inadequacy.
Just as in the case of Nazism, there can be no compromise with the haters. We could have happily ignored the Arab world and allowed them to live in their own mess as long as they left us alone and sold us their oil at inflated prices, and in fact managed to ignore them for years while they attacked us with increasingly aggressive acts of terror. We could ignore the USS Cole, the Khobar Towers, Beirut, but we could no longer ignore them after 9/11, not when they proclaimed their greatest dreams were to destroy our cities and kill our people with nuclear weapons, poison gas and biological weapons. Hanson concludes:
The Middle East does not need a reformation in Islam as much as a war to eradicate a minority of religious fanatics who are empowered through their blackmail of dictatorships — and to do so in a way that leads to constitutional government rather than buttressing a police state. So far governments have chosen appeasement and bribery — if at times some torture when demands for investigations rise — and so time is running out for the entire region.
The committed religious fanatic, just as the committed political fanatic (and political Islam conflates the two), strongly resembles the paranoid in that their belief system is not only impossible to confirm or refute, but they are unable psychologically to incorporate new data into their world view. If the religious fundamentalist believes that I, as a non-believer, will suffer in the next life for my beliefs, but is willing to tolerate my different beliefs in this life, I have no problem co-existing with them. We will find out who is right eventually and can get along with each other in the here and now. The fanatic who believes my life is an affront to his version of the Deity and wants to kill me and mine is not amenable to discussion and has no interest in co-existence.
The definition of delusion is of a "fixed, false belief". While it is impossible to falsify a religious or ideological belief, the fixed nature of the belief in the face of confounding data suggests it shares attributes with paranoia. If people who believe we are infidels who must be killed or subjugated cannot be made to re-evaluate their philosophy, our responses will be guided by events. Any other choice is suicidal and most Americans are not suicidal.
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