In "The State Dept. Was Right: To deny Tariq Ramadan a visa" in The Weekly Standard, Olivier Guitta explains.
ON SEPTEMBER 20, the State Department denied a visa to Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan on the grounds that he had contributed around 600 euros to a French charity classified as a terrorist organization since 2003 because of its relationship with the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas. This latest exclusion follows on the revocation of Ramadan's visa to live and work in the United States while teaching at Notre Dame in 2004, a step taken at the express request of the Department of Homeland Security. While the American Civil Liberties Union and the leftist literary group PEN, among others, present Ramadan as a moderate and accuse U.S. authorities of intolerance, the background and views of Tariq Ramadan suggest the government's move was entirely justified.For starters, Ramadan is the grandson of Hassan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, the highly influential Islamist organization born in Egypt in 1928. It was the Brotherhood that invented the now-familiar Islamist modus operandi of covert organization, assassination, and extremist theology. Its goal was to overthrow the Egyptian regime, install a fundamentalist Muslim government, and impose sharia (Islamic law) as the new constitution. Tariq's father, Said Ramadan, was a major figure in this organization, expelled from Egypt by Gamal Abdul Nasser for Islamist activity.
Said Ramadan took refuge first in Saudi Arabia, where he was a founder of the World Islamic League, one of the largest Saudi charities and global missionary groups. He then moved to Geneva, where in 1961 he created the Islamic Center, a combination mosque,
think tank, and community center. The philosophy of the Muslim Brotherhood influenced a generation of wealthy Muslim kids, including Osama bin Laden. Interestingly, Said Ramadan also had U.S. connections: He had a close relationship with Malcolm X and was personal mentor to Dawud Salahuddin, a black convert to Islam who murdered an Iranian dissident, Ali Akbar Tabatabai, in Bethesda, Maryland, in 1980. After fleeing the United States, Salahuddin spent a few days in Geneva visiting Said Ramadan before taking refuge in Iran. Profiled in the New Yorker in 2002, Salahuddin confirmed that Ramadan remained his adviser and spiritual guide until Ramadan's death in 1995.Said Ramadan was one of the most important Islamist thinkers of the 20th century. He is probably the author of "The Project," a 14-page document dated 1982 found by the Swiss secret service in 2001. "The Project" is a roadmap for installing Islamic regimes in the West by propaganda, preaching, and if necessary war. (It can be read here.)
Tariq Ramadan was born in 1962 in Switzerland. After toying with a career as a professional soccer player, he settled into the family business as an Islamic scholar. He became a teacher of philosophy and theology in Swiss universities. Most European secret service agencies are convinced that, at the end of the 1980s, the Muslim Brotherhood chose Tariq Ramadan to be their European representative. In 1991, he went to Cairo to study with Islamist professors. Upon his return to Switzerland, he founded the Movement of Swiss Muslims. His objective was to reach Muslim youth by Islamizing modernity rather than modernizing Islam.
Read it all.
Only Reza Aslan is greasier.
Reza Aslan is not a menace, merely silly and worthless as a guide to Islam. A one-trick pony, the "young American Muslim" who pockets his $400,000 advance for a book that tells the non-Muslim reader nothing of value about Islam. It was not a book but rather that different thing, an "event." In the first excitable wave of books about Islam commissioned by excitable publishers who were easily conned by plausible agents, the come-on must have sounded something like this: "Hey, he's a young Muslim. American as apple pie. Went to a great school. Really a great kid. Wants to bridge the gap. Wants to explain what Islam is all about. Unusual perspective -- Muslim kid, raised in America. Articulate, winning. He'll be great on Charlie Rose. He really knows his stuff about Islam -- I mean, he's a real Muslim so he must, right? Who better to explain Islam but a young dynamic go-getting American who just happens to be a Muslim like Raza Aslan? You've got to sign this book. He's what we've all been waiting for." And Random House shelled out the $400,000. And Reza Aslan couldn't believe his dumb -- very dumb -- luck.
Tariq Ramadan, on the other hand, is dangerous.
Three comments on Reza Aslan posted at JW on March 19, 2005:
#1.
"Whoever was the editor at Random House who thought this book would be just the ticket -- the thrusting young academic, a "good Muslim" eager for Reform, and fitting right in with the dreamy belief of some that
1) "democracy is on the march" in the Middle East
and
2) "democracy will necessarily bring with it all sorts of wonderful things so Infidels can sit back, relax, and not worry about the islamization of Europe and silly things like that [was someone who knew nothing about Islam].
There is no end to this.
Posted by: Hugh at March 19, 2005 03:05 PM
#2.
"It is pluralism, not secularism, that defines democracy. A democratic state can be established upon any normative moral framework as long as pluralism remains the source of its legitimacy."
Really? Is that what defines the liberal democracies in the modern world -- "pluralism" and not, rather, extreme solicitousness for the autonomy of the individual, the kind of solicitousness which can be found in the Bill of Rights.
One wonders if Reza Aslan has permitted himself to read another, more sober and piercing Reza, that is Reza Afshari, who has written intelligently on the incompatiblity of the Sharia with modern ideas of human rights, as expressed, for example, in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. One wonders if he has given thought to "freedom of conscience" and why, when non-Muslims under Muslim rule, were permitted to stay alive and even to practice their religion, their numbers inevitably dwindled as individuals could no longer endure the various disablities, beginning with the jizyah but hardly ending there, that constituted that system of deliberate humiliation and degradation that we now know call, from the word "dhimmi" -- dhimmitude.
"Pluralism" is not enough because were the population to be parcelled out among various "beliefs" (and what happens to those who are resolutely without belief -- are they tolerated, or accepted as full equals, as well?), this would still not necessarily imply freedom of conscience. In other religions, apostasy is not now punished. In Islam, it can lead to a death sentence. And even the most seemingly up-to-date, tolerant, relaxed Muslims get extremely defensive when one raises this issue, as I discovered years ago when, among a group of advanced Kuwaitis, the kind who send their children to the American school and spend much of the year outside of Kuwait, a real chill and then a series of amazing lies, when I raised the issue of Mr. Qambar, the Kuwaiti apostate (he may have been forced to return to Islam), about whom a great deal was written 6 or 7 years ago.
Judging by this excerpt, the book is essentially transparently inane. This has not kept "Advance Praise From" (as the PR publishing machine puts it), inter alia, John Esposito, about whom the less said in polite company the better (except by James Schall or Habib Malik), by Noah Feldman (whose claim to temporary fame -- and lasting tenure -- is that of being the Yeshiva-Bokher-who-Practically-Wrote-the-Constitution-Of-the-New-Iraq), and by Tom Reiss, whose spent five years tracking down the identity of Kurban Said, or Lev Nissenbaum, the author of the well-known "Ali and Nino," which takes place in old Baku, with starcrossed Muslim boy and Christian girl, and his research may have given him a William-Dalrymplish delight in the mysteries of the Muslim-East-and-its-encounters-with-the-West that is not the same thing as taking the trouble, through late lucubrations, of being versed in the theory and practice of Islam. NOte that not a single serious scholar of Islam has praised the book -- nor will one.
[Posted by: Hugh at March 19, 2005 09:03 PM]
#3.
"..there are few scriptures in the great religions of the world that can match the reverence with which the Quran speaks of other religious traditions.'" [from Reza Aslan on Islam]
There are several things about this statement that are worth noting. The first is that there is no reverence -- none -- in the Qur'an about how other "religious traditions" -- whatever that may mean -- are spoken about. None. Not a single passage. And then, of course, there are the Hadith and the Sira -- one hopes that in his longer work (of which this is, I assume, an excerpt) Reza Aslan, born in Iran, raised in easygoing America far from the Islamic Republic of Iran (had he had the misfortune to have been raised in the Islamic Republic of Iran, one suspets he would not be writing the nonsense he has written). For the Qur'an, the only "religious tradition" is that of Islam; Judaism and Christianity are not part of another "religious tradition" but are simply wrongly-received (by their benighted followers) versions of the one and only true belief -- Islam itself. Judaism and Christianity are not even permitted to be rendered with any accuracy: the Muslim Jesus is far from the Christan Jesus, and Judaism is also a parody of itself in the incondite hodge-podge of the Qur'an.
But the second thing to note is the absurdity of his claim that "few scriptures in the great religions of the world that can match the reverence with which the Qur'an speaks of other religions traditions." Well, how could Judaism speak of "other religious traditions"? Its sacred books certainly could not contain any commentary on Christiantiy or Islam -- can Reza Aslan guess why? And Christianity could not show "reverence for other religous traditions" except Judaism, and there, like IBM wishing to seize market share from Apple, of course some of the early Christians (who were all Jews) had to say something not quite nice about Judaism or those who followed it -- after all, would IBM go around and say how wonderful Apple was, in order to take away its customers? Yet, is it not true that there has always been a recognition of a connection between Old and New Testaments, between Judaism and Christianity, even if some Christians have not exactly demonstrated in their behavior an awareness of this, or have allowed that quest-for-market-share that helps explain some parts of the Gospel of John, or the use to which the description of Christ's death was allowed to meteastatize first from anti-Judaism into antisemitism, and then from antisemitism into the fullblown pathological mass-murder within living memory, which should have, but did not, have made the slightest exhibition of antisemitism into something that would be met with the fiercest condemnation, ostracism, and punishment.
And how, conceivably, could the sacred texts of such ancient religions as Buddhism and Hinduism, long predating any of the monotheistic ones, and conceived in distant India, conceivably have made any mention at all, much less shown that "reverse" for other "religious traditions" that Rexa Aslan blandly claims as characteristic of Islam.
He really has to think a little bit more about how when B comes after A, we should not fault A for failing to mention B. It is called chronology. Learned historians know all about it. And so do schoolchildren.
But not Reza Aslan.
[Posted by: Hugh at March 19, 2005 10:37 PM]
Oh please Hugh ,everyone knows the Quran was written by the pen before time and rests on pillars in heaven, unchanged confirming what came before it.
Yes, I know. But I am a twisted soul, and my mind just can't quite get the hang of all that.
Hugh, do you read alll the time?
I don't think you're twisted,
perhaps a bit eccentric.
No muslims ever.
We don't need any of them.
We have already had lessons in what they believe.
I learned all I need to know about islam on 9-11.
http://www.solcomhouse.com/wtc11.jpg
Muslim scholar earns hatred over Islamic reform
Saturday, October 7, 2006
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LONDON (AP) - Tariq Ramadan's call for modernizing Islam has earned him the hatred of Muslim traditionalists. The Bush administration sees him as a threat and has banned him from the United States.
But underscoring the conflicting reactions provoked by this soft-spoken Muslim from Switzerland, British Prime Minister Tony Blair sees Ramadan as one of the best hopes for bridging the divide between the West and Islam, and has put him on a task force to tackle extremism.
France banned him from the country in 1995, linking him to Algerian terrorists, but leftist organizations successfully campaigned to overturn the measure and he is now welcome there.
To his admirers, the 44-year-old Oxford University scholar is the conscience of Western Europe's Muslims _ the man who can articulate what it means to play an active part in secular society while remaining true to the Quran.
"I'm Swiss by nationality, I'm a Muslim by religion, I'm an Egyptian by memory and I'm a European by culture," Ramadan told The Associated Press in an interview at the suburban London home he shares with his wife and four children.
His campaign to modernize Islam has drawn comparisons to Martin Luther, the 16th century father of the Protestant reformation. It involves a "shift in the center of gravity" away from the monopoly of theologians and closer toward experts in fields like science, economics and the arts.
He believes Islamic thought can only move forward if Muslims become more self-critical, and harbor less of a victim mentality. He says Islam can be adapted to 21st century life and its scriptures are flexible enough to provide guidance without losing key tenets of the faith.
Many Muslims say that because democracy is not in the Quran it isn't Islamic, but Ramadan believes such literal pronouncements are dangerous.
He most recently made waves by criticizing the violent Islamic reaction to Pope Benedict XVI's comments in which he quoted a Byzantine emperor's remarks tying the Prophet Muhammad to violence.
The appropriate response, Ramadan says, should have been dialogue, not an explosion of outrage.
Ramadan said Muslim extremists were using Benedict's remark to stoke dangerous reactions for their own aims. He accused some Muslim regimes of manipulating the violent demonstrations to distract attention from their own repressive policies, and conservatives on both sides of fomenting a clash of civilizations.
Muslims should heed the pope's words carefully, he told the AP. "We have to listen to the deep message he was saying and come back with very deep articulated arguments here."
But Ramadan also said Benedict misrepresented history by placing European culture strictly within Christian and Greek traditions and ignoring the great Muslim contribution to Western civilization.
Two years ago, and days before he was to arrive in the U.S. to become a professor of religion at the University of Notre Dame, the United States canceled his visa. The State Department said that he was barred for actions "which constituted providing material support to a terrorist organization"_ a claim Ramadan says stems from his donation, then worth about $750, to a Palestinian charity.
U.S. authorities have furnished no further explanation, and some of his supporters claim Ramadan was shut out because his arguments, made on American soil, would have been hard for the Bush administration to dispute. "He would be a poster boy for a very appealing brand of Islam ... He is a charismatic, well-spoken, articulate defender of something that can be loosely described as liberal Islam," said John Sidel, Professor of International and Comparative Politics at the London School of Economics.
Ramadan's message resonates among Europe's Muslim youths because he relates to their difficulty in straddling cultures. His grandfather was Hassan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt's most powerful opposition group, and his father was forced to seek asylum in Switzerland, where Tariq was born. The pedigree gives him credibility among many Muslims.
Among his Western critics is French journalist Caroline Fourest. Her book, "Brother Tariq," portrays Ramadan as a polished media performer who promotes religious tolerance while disseminating a more fundamentalist message on the ground.
She told the AP she believed the Bush administration acted appropriately, saying: "He's more likely to radicalize western Muslims than make Middle Eastern Muslims more liberal."
"I'm sure he would be a fantastic prime minister of somewhere like Iran," she said, but "in Europe he cannot be considered a liberal."
Ramadan rejects such claims, saying his goal is an Islam fit for the modern world.
Slenderly built with a neatly trimmed beard, Ramadan chooses his words carefully in English inflected with a gentle Swiss-French accent.
He accuses regimes in countries such as Saudi Arabia, which also bans him, of hijacking Islam to protect their dictatorships.
"By criticizing Saudi Arabia I make the United States not happy at all because I'm putting my finger on something which is hypocrisy," he said. "You are speaking about spreading democracy around the Islamic world and at the same time you are with the least progressive Muslims as long as it protects your interest."
http://www.cantonrep.com/index.php?ID=312032&Category=24
Good-who needs this loser pontificating about the evils of America inside America? We've had enough foreign riffraff coming here and venting their spleens as so-called guests and diplomats. And I'm not even mentioning all those "immigrants" and their fellow travellers who parrot them. Keep them all out.
Tariq Ramadan's Achilles heel is when one talks about Mulims living in Europe converting to Christianity (following the old adage of doing in Rome as the Romans do).
One can see then that he loses his cool and becomes irritable.
It is soo clear that this guy has an agenda.
Which agenda?
"...Muslims to get together and organize themselves into viable Muslim communities. They should set up mosques, community centres and Islamic schools. At all costs they must avoid being assimilated by the majority, and to resist assimilation must group themselves geographically, forming areas of high Muslim concentration..."
(from Fjordman's the Eurabia Code)
"Ramadan rejects such claims, saying his goal is an Islam fit for the modern world."
-- quoted in a posting above
Tariq Ramadan has never, and will never, rejected a single passage in the Qur'an or a single one of the most "authentic" Hadith. He accepts Muhammad's words and deeds as those of a man who was the Perfect Man, uswa hasana, al-insan al-kamil. He rejects nothing of Islam at its most permanently menacing. He has never taken the slightest issue with, much less denounced the Muslim worldview that divides the universe uncompromisingly between Believer and Infidel. Like Edward Said, he has a certain oleagineous charm that works, apparently, on a few of the unwary (such as Timothy Garton Ash, whose knowledge of Islam is insufficient to allow him to remain uncharmed by his St. Antony's colleague, Tariq Ramadan). His words are sly, but his goal is clear. He wishes to ensure that Infidels in Europe are not unduly alarmed, for now, by the growing Muslim presence, and counsels Muslims that, for now, in the most trivial but obvious of ways, they should "fit in" but not change Islam -- he prates on about a "European Islam" but never suggests that this "European Islam" will be any different, in its essential doctrine or practice, from the Islam that is to be found everywhere else -- for how could he? how could he suggest a different Qur'an, or a different version of the Hadith, or a new life of Muhammad? He can't. He reads the same Qur'an, and the same Hadith, as his grandfather Al-Banna, or Sheik al-Qaradawi, or Al-Zawahiri, or Nasrallah, or any Muslim Believer anywhere. There are diffrences among Muslims -- of dress and food, of rituals (how the Shi'a hold their hands at prayer differs from what the Sunnis do), of jurisprudence (four Muslim schools), and so on. But none of those differences are different over what concerns us, the Infidels -- that is, there are no differences when it comes to the Muslim view of Infidels, and how they are to be regarded, and how they are to be treated.
Tariq Ramadan's goal is to see Islam dominate in Western Europe. That is what his advice to Muslims in Europe is all about. That is what his entire effort is directed towards. It is not directed at all towards actually changing Islam. He is a permanent menace to Infidels, to their freedoms, their art, their skeptical inquiry, their ability even to challenge or question Islam. He is a menace, and the French, including Caroline Fourest, Alain Finkielkraut, and even Nicolas Sarkozy, have found him out. That is why he is now, most temporarily, called "a scholar now at Oxford" (i.e., at St. Antony's MIddle Eastern wing, which is not exactly the same thing as being "an Oxford scholar" as most people understand it -- his books are not scholarship as that is understood in the Western world, but rather propagandistic vaporings, whose equivalent in Christian vulgarisation (not "haute vulgarisation" but merely "vulgarisation") would be Norman Vincent Peale or, still more aptly, the LIttle Flower of Detroit, the late Father Coughlin of infamous memory). That's Tariq Ramadan, not with the goal "an Islam fit for the modern world" but with the goal of a modern world made "fit for Islam" which will require, for now, and for a decade or so, a certain amount, as he sees it, of obfuscation, taqiyya, and lying-low, while the numbers of Muslims steadily increases and their presence in the Western world becomes impossible, as he sees it -- and even as some Infidels apparently and quite unnecessarily see it -- to dislodge.
Look what I found:
A real Da'awa clinic smack in the middle of LA, catering to the psychologically marginal, mostly poor blacks and hispanics, in order to spread the cult of subversion and sedition!
Putting lipstick on a pig is one thing, but one wonders why they don't establish such benevolent and generous clinics in Africa? Could it be political?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLiagBbSryY
"psychologically marginal..."
-- from a posting above
"Psychologically" -- or in this case, would it not be more accurate to describe the targets of this campaign of aid-based Da'wa as, rather, economically marginal?
Mr. Fitzgerald:
How dare you apply logic and chronology to the great religion of Islam?
Don't you know that Islam is far above any human concept of comprehension? You don't even speak Arabic, let alone read the Koran in the language it was meant to be studied!
How dare you wear the shoes of Allah, the all merciful and compassionate?
Are you sure I don't speak Arabic?
Here is a very interesting article on "the master of Double Speak" and his ties to not only the muslim brotherhood but the swiss nazis ahmad Huber and francois genoud and the altaqwa bank of Lugano (the Bank of Alqaeda).
http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/2441
It is difficult to understand that with this information and the books written by John loftus and the mass of available information which needs to be exposed even more, such a man could be welcomed by Tony Blair and elevated to high scholorship by Oxford University.
When a committee of experts at Fribourg University rejected his doctoral dissertation in 1998, Ramadan claimed that he had been a victim of Islamophobia.(11) Following his 2003 television debate with French Interior Minister Sarkozy, when a Swiss MP asked whether a figure as controversial as Ramadan should be lecturing at Fribourg University, Ramadan again raised the issue of Islamophobia and urged students to sign a petition supporting him. Thus, "throughout the years Ramadan has managed to evade any criticism by presenting himself as a victim."
Yes Mr. Fitzgerald:
I am absolutely certain that you don't speak
-that kind of Arabic-
that a proper Mohammed-worshipper would find acceptable....
Hugh:
"economically marginal" is correct, of course!
What do you make of this 'clinic for the poor?'
Hugh:
You’re wrong about the Hebrew Bible. It may not refer to Islam and Christianity but it does refer to the religions of the Philistines and of the followers of Baal, Marduk and others. It condemns them and their practices, like child sacrifice, consistently and unequivocally. It states that, beside YHVH, these other gods are not really gods at all.
Incidentally, the Hebrew scriptures (or Tanach) are not the Old Testament: the Tanach (Torah, Prophets, Writings) is a book of history, not prophecy. The first book is Genesis and the last is Chronicles. The Old Testament, by contrast, is a Christian reconstruction of the Hebrew Bible, its books having been rearranged to make it look like a work of prophecy: Chronicles, Ruth, the Psalms, Job and many more are moved up so that Malachi leads straight into Matthew. To Christians the Old Testament doesn't exist without the New and, in fact, the term "The Old Testament" implies the supercession of the Old by the New. This ought not to surprise us. There is no doubt that all religions fight to possess the holy sites of their predecessors to either destroy them or imbue them with new meaning: a new feeling about life. Islam is no different. Even in its destruction of the holy sites of others, like the Buddhas in Afghanistan, it is not alone: think of the iconoclastic Protestant reformers, for example.
Bohemond_1069: Who's "he?"
muftis make lousy footbalers.. just look at the SAWdis.. Germany whooped them 8-zip in 2002 Workd Cup. This time around in 2006 they were placed in a conference round with lesser teams so as to spare them the humiliation. It was disgusting to see SOWdi players kissing our GERMAN grass with their asses in the air after they'd managed to score against - gasp - Algeria! What a disgusting display!
I even saw a mooftee pull out his prayer rug and start his thing rigght in the middle of rush hour on a crowded sidewalk in midtown New York. I was so enraged I wanted to kick his prominently displayed rear. Like a football on the penalty spot.
What right do these fools have to obstruct our traffic with this garbage I ask? They are forcing their cult down our throats and I AM TIRED OF IT!!!
I say anytime a mooftee displays himself in such manner he shall be fair game for any gay man who'd like to have a go at him.. though I doubt there'd be many takers.. gay men have their standards. LOL
Bullshit. Nuke Mecca and Medina during the Hajj. Hopefully he'll be there and you'll get Tariq Ramadan too.
Posted by: Bohemond_1069
I second that emotion!
True European Heroes they don't teach in our schools:
Sobieski, Martell, Pelayo and so many more! Only after much time online after 9/11 have I re-discovered our European roots Heroes! Now I KNOW the Crusades were not some evil colonialist enterprise, but rather an act of necessary self-defence.
HOW can our teachers so willfully neglect to school us properly??!! No wonder that most of Western People are completely ignorant and so naive when it comes to our most mortal enemy!!
WHO writes our History Books???!!! I wonder if it's the SOWdi Ministry of Wahhabism... Hmmmm, Mr Bush.. care to read us a few lines from "Billy the moslem goat"?
Well, I'm wondering who you mean by "he." Since it follows my post, I gotta tell you I ain't a Muslim. I'm a member of the Conservative Party of Canada. I support the foreign policy of the Harper government and I support your President, John Howard and Tony Blair. I was and still am in favour of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. I hope they are there to dismantle Iran's nuclear facility too, and soon.
The thing that's wrong with this otherwise worthwhile site is too many cheerleaders getting off bathing in their emotions.
By the way, I favoured your M & M plans on September 12th and it may have to end that way. Cf. the Jewish War on Rome and destruction of the second Temple.
But if it does end that way, the Hebrew Bible will still have condemned the religions of its day, it will still be of a different structure than the Old Testament and succeeding cultures will still attempt to possess the holy sites of their predecessors in order to change their meaning or destroy them. These things are facts and they were the entire content of my post.
If you meant me, you misread my post. Try using reason. It's a very useful tool, and one that we will need to prevent Islamofascism from taking over the West.
By the way, we aren't responsible for the conflict between McMuslims and their more conservative counterparts any more than they are wholly responsible for our problems with them: Feminism and Gay activism have destroyed the birthrates of Western nations and the exploding birthrates of the Muslim world have made them very dangerous competitors. Though blue states are losing population and influence and reds are gaining, that doesn't mean it's gonna be enough and on time. The liberal victories from the 60s 'til today will, one day, be seen as pyrrhic. The only question is whether conservative westerners or easterners will roll back their achievements.
If you used reason instead of emotion, you'd be able to convince Democrats of the errors of their ways. The survival of the West may depend on your ability to reason with those people and change their minds so a united front can emerge. If you want to go into emotional tantrums instead, you are only preaching to the converted. That takes you out of the real game, cheerleader, and a neutral liberal, an inactive moderate Muslim and a right wing cheerleader will all have the exact same effect: to strengthen the threat and weaken the West. Think about it.