Everybody into the pool! This is getting to be more and more fun! Dinesh’s latest, “The Silence of the Traditional Muslims,” says this:
There is also a second reason. Prominent Americans–many of them on the right–have devoted acres of commentary to attacking the Muslim religion, complete with exposes of the Prophet Muhammad and attacks on the Koran as a gospel of terrorism. Then these same characters plaintively wonder why Muslims are reluctant to join their anti-Muslim crusade. All they are asking, to quote Victor Davis Hanson, is for Muslims to get busy “emancipating women…outlawing polygamy…insisting on secular education…and ending tribalism.” Wow, Hanson, and can you also recommend a new holy book?
Robert Spencer can: It’s called the Torah.
Now this one really stopped me short! And not only because I had to blink twice or three times at D’Souza’s scolding Hanson for opposing polygamy, ending tribalism, and emancipating women. I guess the last sentence means that D’Souza assumes that I am Jewish. This, of course, shows that he doesn’t have the first foggiest idea of who I am and what I am really saying, as I have noted before. It may also mean that he believes that I want to convert Muslims to Judaism. Perhaps I would do this in imitation of Moses — for D’Souza informs us elsewhere that “if Moses could he would have imposed the laws of Yahweh on the whole world…”
This bizarre claim shows that he knows at least as little about Moses as he does about me, but never mind. This thing about my positing the Torah as an alternative holy book for Muslims also suggests that he, like many jihadists and Islamic apologists, cannot fathom the idea that anyone but a Jew would have any grievance against Muslims — a peculiar pathology I have written about before. And others, for darker reasons, can’t fathom the possibility that anyone but a Jew would support Israel.
Anyway, although I am not Jewish, I am proud to stand with Jews and call for the defense of Israel as the front line of the global jihad — a jihad which threatens us all, as the EU and UN will soon enough discover if they succeed in trying to appease the jihadist wolves by throwing Israel to them.
But I digress. Back to Dinesh, way down in the deep end of the pool:
Spencer wants the Muslims to just stop following the Koran and repudiate the teachings of Muhammad and the main schools of Islamic thought. In short, here are a bunch of Americans advising Muslims to stop being Muslims. (Spencer’s euphemistic term for this is “cultural Muslims.”) Great advice, right? Should anyone be surprised that the traditional Muslims are not signing up in droves? If you were a traditional Muslim, would you join a bunch of Islamophobes who are always denouncing your religion, its founder, its sacred text and its basic values?
Of course, I have never, ever said, anywhere in any way, that Muslims need to “just stop following the Koran and repudiate the teachings of Muhammad and the main schools of Islamic thought.” If D’Souza ever bothered to read anything I have written, including the reams of material I have now written about him and to him, he would know why this is a false statement. Flatly false.
What I have actually called for, and will keep calling for, is for Muslims to confront the fact that bin Laden and Zawahri and the late Zarqawi and Mukhlas Imron and so many other jihadists are justifying their violence by reference to passages of the Qur’an and the words and deeds of Muhammad. If they don’t confront this and formulate new and non-literalist ways of understanding this material, it will continue to be used to incite violence. In other words, the use that jihadists make of elements of the Qur’an and Muhammad’s teaching makes it incumbent upon peaceful Muslims to perform a searching reevaluation of how they understand those elements, so as to neutralize their capacity to set Muslims against non-Muslims.
And I will not, now or ever, apologize for calling for that.