Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald once again assesses the vexed question of Muslim moderates:
Islamic moderates remain elusive. Despite protestations and ostentatious displays, there is still no large-scale effort on the part of such people to distinguish themselves from “Islamist extremists.” Meanwhile the moderates cause a great deal of confusion. Look at My Weekly Standard, with its stout support for the “moderate Muslim” (at least one of whom appears in its pages), especially the wonderful Shi’a of wonderful Iraq, and the inability of many on that magazine to grasp what is wrong with the whole Iraq tarbaby. That failure comes from an uncritical cheering of the Administration, and a refusal by its writers to study Islam or to consult with “moderates” who are occasional contributors, but the defectors from Islam.
There is no clearly identifiable group of moderates for all sorts of reasons. There have been many documented instances (most famously Mike Hawash) of people who feign “moderate” attitudes, or for that matter may even, for a time, hold certain “moderate” attitudes. But then, in response to any one or more of a whole panoply of provocations large and small (including emotional desarroi, perceived loss in status, any number of things), the feigning stops, or those who had perhaps thought of themselves as one kind of Muslim, the “moderate” kind, found that their true beliefs were now, or perhaps always had been, more deep, and thus more “extreme” and less “moderate” than even they had once understood.
The very notion of a “moderate Muslim” must be examined carefully, and always one objective criterion kept in mind: does this person, in his (or her) being, contribute to a truthful understanding of what the tenets of Islam teach, and what the vast majority of Believers believe, about jihad and the ultimate necessity to establish the supremacy of Islam and the Shari”a? Or does this person lead the unwary astray, whether out of embarrassment at what Islam really teaches, or filial piety (perhaps toward pious ancestors, or simply toward one’s own cultural heritage, at times leading some to become Defenders of a Faith they do not really support or accept, but cannot bear to allow it to be criticized). The bar should not be set too low.
There is altogether too much solicitousness about those “moderate” Muslims and what they may or may not feel, or how they will react to various anti-terror measures. The Shari’a initiative almost succeeded in Canada, and that whole story does not lead one to draw the comforting moral that, in the end, those “moderate Muslims” will come to aid of the Infidel society in which they live. Sometimes they will, sometimes they won’t. In this case, since the imposition of the Shari’a was to immediately affect the well-being of Muslim women, some Muslim women — of the refugee from Islamic Republic of Iran variety — entered the fray. But what if the measure in question were, say, a law to monitor all the sermons — khutbas — in the mosques of Canada? This could possibly be done by employing government agents to tape-record, or otherwise, openly or surreptitiously, insure that what goes on in mosques has nothing which might tend to inflame people to hostility toward Infidels, their laws, customs, manners, and understandings. What, then, would be the attitude of those “moderate” Muslims? And what would be their attitude if Infidels began to discuss or suggest that perhaps they had no duty to permanently welcome into their midst those who chose to call themselves the adherents of a belief-system that, right down the line, in every jot and tittle, divides the world between Believer and Infidel, and encourages the former to spread his belief-system at the expense of the latter, because “Islam is to dominate and not to be dominated”?
There is much more one could say, but all over the Western world there has been entirely too much holding-back in order to win the favor and support of so-called moderate Muslims. I see no great effort to resist the global jihad by those largely-imaginary, or quite ineffective and inarticulate, “moderate” Muslims. No mass marches, no rallies, no expression of horror at much of what is contained in Qur’an, Hadith, and Sira. Instead, there is a continuing effort to distract or soothe Infidels, and to prevent them from learning about what is contained in those immutable texts, and making sense of them, and understanding what they mean.
That kind of thing has gone on too long. Infidels are losing patience pari passu with the level of their knowledge, and their comprehension, of Islam. And since more and more are learning about it, and trying to improve their understanding every day — not in the way, I’m afraid, that CAIR and other Muslim groups had in mind when they began their own propagandistic outreach efforts — the more Infidels will not be willing to tolerate those who do not speak truthfully about Islam, its tenets, its attitudes, its atmospherics. Infidels are learning about the history of Muslim conquest of Infidel lands, and the subjugation of non-Muslim peoples.
That particular cat, despite the best efforts of Muslim “moderates,” can’t be kept from getting out of its bag.