Nidra Poller has sent me this superb “Reaction to ‘Islam-Haters: An Enemy Within‘ by Ralph Peters”:
A strange reversal operates from beginning to end of Ralph Peters” diatribe against an anonymous horde of “Islam-haters” who, because they are not named, cannot defend themselves. They are faceless and speechless: their statements are not quoted, their books are not cited, no one knows where they come from, where they can be seen and heard. Are their arguments really as crude as Peters makes them out to be? Are their intentions correctly described, or grossly misrepresented? How can we know, since these evil people do not really exist except in their own right, but only as targets of a vehement refutation?
Following the trail of accusations thrown at the “Islam-haters,” we get the dizzying impression that Peters went into an adjectival free fall:
“¦a rotten core of American extremists
The most repugnant trend in the American shouting match that passes for a debate on the struggle with Islamist terrorism”¦
“¦when you read between the lines, that all Muslims are evil and subhuman”¦
The message between the lines: Muslims are Untermenschen”¦
I’ll never sign up for your “Protocols of the Elders of Mecca.” You’re just the Ku Klux Klan with higher-thread-count sheets.
But those who warn of Muslims in general are heirs of the creeps who once told us Jews can never be real Americans and JFK will serve the Vatican.
Sorry, all you bigots: You’ll never get the Wannsee Conference, Part II, at Lake Tahoe.
“¦our inveterate haters, those whose personal disappointments have left them with a need to blame others (sounds like al Qaeda to me . . . ),
Some of the bigots out there might like to try to kill a billion Muslims, but I’m not signing up for their genocidal daydreams.
And yet the op-ed begins with this telling statement:
ISLAMIST fanatics attacked us and yearn to destroy us. The Muslim civilization of the Middle East has failed comprehensively and will continue to generate violence. The only way to deal with faith-poisoned terrorists is to kill them.
What, then, separates Ralph Peters from the “enemy within”? Nothing more than a categorical belief that Middle East Muslims have hijacked a religion that is practiced with exquisite finesse in reasonably civilized places like Dakar or Dearborn. Peters can call for killing “faith poisoned terrorists,” but anyone who would dare to suggest that jihad is a central tenet of Islam no matter where it is practiced is a genocidal Nazi- KKK – al-Qaeda murderer. According to Ralph Peters” logic, if a Muslim in Dearborn should suddenly go on a rampage and behead a Christian neighbor, it would be a sort of geographical error, totally unrelated to the teachings of Islam.
There is a word for this kind of reversal: it’s called perversity. If we take “Islam-haters” at their word, then we must do the same for Islam’s words, which do in fact raise legitimate questions, all the more pressing since 9/11 when airplanes, not a religion, were hijacked and used as weapons of mass destruction. A new generation of scholars and critics is judging Islam by its words and deeds. The insights of these thinkers are not only valuable, they may be life-saving. None of them call for genocide of Muslims, not between the lines, not in the lines.
If a tiny minority of the world’s billion and a half Muslims actually sets out to exterminate millions of infidels and impose the religion of Allah on the rare survivors, it is more than enough to imperil civilization. Furthermore, as Peters readily admits, they have already made a good start on such a project.
Where did Peters find the Islam-haters who want to do a final solution on the Muslims? Are they an infinitesimal minority of non-Muslims, located in e-mails or on websites? Are they a few threads of nondescript unknowns? Peters doesn’t name names. But precisely by leaving the Islam-haters nameless he allows his readers to imagine they might be X or Y or Z or any one of the reputable scholars accused of Islamophobia by CAIR or some such American Muslim association or, as recently occurred, invited by bin Laden and his American sidekick to convert to Islam”¦
“¦or die. Yes, convert or die. That is the full invitation.
Now, tell me, does that invitation come from plain ordinary Islam, or from hijacked Islam, or from Middle Eastern Islam?
And what is the appropriate response?