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“Moderate” Muslim MP exposed as phony
A remarkable and valuable exchange occurred Friday night on one of the try-out broadcasts of the post Ted (“I am God”) Koppel incarnation of Nightline. Substitute anchorman Jake Tapper, whom I’ve never seen before, but who is young, quick witted, direct, and not preoccupied with his own empyrean self, was interviewing the only British-born Muslim Member of Parliament (hereinafter known as the OBBMMP), who is in the news because he has been been saying that the British Muslim community must not just condemn terrorism, but confront it. Yippee—a poster child for the moderate-Islam-that-someday-somehow-is-going-to-be-the-solution-to-radical-Islam. However, after the OBBMMP told Tapper that the British Muslim community must not just condemn Islam, but confront it, a very interesting thing occurred. The OBBMMP began saying that he has many constituents who belong to the right-wing British National Party, and that these young white men are “alienated” just like the young British Muslim jihadists. Therefore, he continued, Britain needs to “engage” both of these groups in order to overcome their alienation. Anchorman Tapper quickly riposted that non-Muslim groups in Britain are not setting off terrorist bombs, that it’s exclusively Muslims who are doing that. The comment must have hit home, because the OBBMMP suddenly veered off in a different direction. In a complete non-sequitur, he denounced Britain’s “Islamophobia,” and began cataloguing the many grievances that Muslims have with non-Muslims around the world, ranging from American-British anti-terror and pro-democracy policies of the last few years to Chechnya and Bosnia. He said that Britain and America must re-examine their actions. In other words, the much admired Muslim member, who a moment before had been expatiating on the need for Muslims to confront radical Islam, had, in response to the simple, obvious statement that Muslims, not white Britons, are the source of terrorism, slipped back into the typical Muslim defensive reaction of describing Muslim terrorism as an understandable response to Western prejudice and oppression. From his reasoning it follows that the only way for the West to end Muslim terrorism is to do what all those aggrieved and angry Muslims say it must—withdraw from Iraq, leave Israel to the wolves (which Bush and Rice seem to be already doing), stop putting Al Qaeda people in prison where their Korans might occasionally get roughly handled, and so on. But if these are the OBBMMP’s thoughts, how serious can he be about getting the “moderate” Muslims to “confront radical Islam”? Never before on Nightline has a left-wing or minority phony been so quickly and totally unmasked. Thank you, Jake Tapper. There’s one more point to make about this. President Bush tells us incessantly that the policies we’ve been pursuing for the last few years, namely defeating extremist regimes and building Muslim democracies, will soften the Muslims’ anti-Western passions, their “ideology of hate,” and rid the world of terrorism. But if the above interview is any indication of Muslim attitudes, it is clear that our well-meant effort to democratize Muslim countries is having just the opposite effect from what Bush says it will have, even in the case of a supposedly very moderate Muslim MP. Instead of supporting Bush’s effort to democratize and reform the Islamic world, the moderate MP sees that effort as an anti-Islamic act that understandably makes young British Muslims want to mass murder Westerners.
This being the case, isn’t it finally time for Bush and those who support his democratization strategy to have some Second Thoughts? Email entry |