CAIR keeps repeating the same quotes from me — consult the original for the parts that CAIR carefully left out — from Jihad Watch, but what exactly do they expect people to find so self-evidently deplorable about them?
Here’s what they quote from me (mind those gaps):
Hugh Fitzgerald wrote on that hate [sic] site: “Only one group, only one belief-system, distinguishes itself by appearing incapable of fitting in. And that is Muslims, and Islam…if one really knew what Islam contained…then how could any decent person remain a Muslim?”
He also recommended that western nations be “Islam-proofed the way a house is child-proofed,” compared Muslims to Nazis and urged that they be boycotted: “[I]t should not be hard to find ways to limit the spread or practice of Islam. And if in addition to whatever local, state and federal government officials do, private parties simply conduct their own boycott of goods and services offered by Muslims, in the same way that they would have refused to buy, in 1938, a German Voigtlander camera…”
(The original is here.)
Well, how exactly does Islam fit in? If it teaches — and it does teach — its adherents that Islam is the Truth (so far not unusual), and that, furthermore, Muslims have a duty, not tangential but central, to push back the boundaries of Dar al-Islam, through the “struggle” or Jihad that is to be waged against all non-Muslims who do not accept the dominance of Islam and rule by Muslims (whatever their numbers), then how can Islam, how can Muslims, fit into the pluralist societies of the advanced world?
They can take advantage of such pluralism, but they do not for one minute advocate genuine pluralism anywhere that Islam has already triumphed, already dominates. And if they did not have, for now, to bide their time, and to assume whatever protective coloration they need to avoid inquiry, especially inquiry by the well-prepared, into the texts and tenets of Islam and the attitudes and atmospherics that naturally result from those texts and tenets, they would certainly behave in this country as they do wherever they rule: never permitting legal equality to non-Muslims, and subjecting them to harassment, humiliation, persecution, and even, at times, mass murder.
Look at the Copts, whose only protection comes from the powers the Muslims think of still as “Christian.” Look at the Assyrians and Chaldeans, now without their (self-interested) Iraqi protector, Saddam Hussein. Look at the Jews, or at least look at how they were treated all over the Muslim world, save when the odd secularizing ruler came to power, as with Shah Reza Pahlevi. Look at the treatment of the Hindus under Muslim rule in India before the British arrived, or at present, in Pakistan and Bangladesh. Look at the treatment of Christians in Pakistan and Indonesia, or in southern Sudan, or southern Nigeria when the northern, Muslim Nigerians were conducting their “Jihad” (the word chosen by the leader of Christian Biafra, Colonel Ojukwu, in his 1969 Ohiara Declaration).
As for the other quotes, I see no reason to disavow them. Why should anyone who continues to identify himself as a Muslim and does not choose to distance himself from the ideology, the texts of Islam, by calling himself (sheepishly, embarrassedly, apologetically) a “cultural Muslim only,” not be held to such things as 9.29 and 9.5 in the Qur’an? And if one believes that 9.29 and 9.5, or for that matter all of Sura 9, or for that matter another 100-odd Jihad verses in the Qur’an, are the immutable word of God, it would be senseless for those non-Muslims of this world not to wish to minimize in their countries the presence of believers in such tenets. It would be senseless for them not to wish to render their societies less susceptible and sturdier against undermining from Jihad, conducted by non-violent and sometimes non-obvious means, from within.
And why should someone who thinks it was a duty not to buy German goods in 1938 (that Voigtlander camera), or for that matter Soviet goods in 1953, if that someone is well-informed about what is in the Qur’an, the Hadith, and the Sira, not wish to withhold his custom from Muslims? What should one be embarrassed about? Shall I, shall you, shall any of us, help support those who say and do nothing to distance themselves from the deep believers in 9.29 and 9.5? Shall we help support those who appear to believe that a man who regarded the decapitation of the 600-900 bound prisoners of the Banu Qurayza with satisfaction, and staged an attack, in order to acquire loot and women, on the inoffensive farmers of the Khaybar Oasis, and who took satisfaction in the murders of Asma bint Marwan and Abu Afak, and the marriage, the consummated marriage, to Aisha when she was nine, is the Model of Conduct (uswa hasana), the Perfect Man (al-insan al-kamil)?
Are we not entitled to take note of all this, and to draw some conclusions from the texts and tenets of Islam about the character of those who have not taken the step taken by the morally advanced Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Ibn Warraq and Wafa Sultan and Ali Sina and thousands or possibly even hundreds of thousands more of those who, having been born into Islam, have examined what Islam inculcates and chosen, for moral and intellectual reasons, to leave Islam? And since freedom of conscience is unknown to Islam, they are threatened with severe punishment, even death, for daring to be defectors from the Army of Islam.