Spoonfeeding liberals the truth

A reader recommended a Mark Steyn article about Britain’s Muslim problem in the Telegraph that he felt represented progress on Steyn’s part. In reply to my sceptical comments about the article and Steyn, he spoke of his attempt to get some liberals thinking rationally about Islam:

I got into a discussion on an email list about “moderate Muslims” and baited my trap with your articles over at Front Page on whether moderate Muslims exist. The debate was polite, if lively, and focused on people who knew Muslims personally, and “they weren’t like that.” One guy offered up a friend with whom he discussed Sharia while the guy was preparing for the hajj; his friend in the end admitted that he could not go along with some of the punishments in the Koran, because he’s a human being…and the question was asked, what did I think about that?

Happily the answer was easy: his friend was a bad Muslim by definition, because he substituted his own mercy in the place of Allah’s law. I then pointed out that to the degree a Muslim becomes humane, he becomes less of a Muslim, whereas to the degree he adheres to Islam, he becomes inhumane.

This got some of the secular humanitarians thinking, yessir it did. I do not expect they have given up that liberal conceit you have described, of believing that “everyone is like me,” not entirely, but it got them thinking.

I don’t know if you’ve ever had to feed a child, but if you put too much food on a plate and place it in front of, say, a four year old, nothing will be eaten. The child rejects the plate and everything on it, claiming “I’m full,” “I’m not hungry,” “that’s yucky,” and so forth. But if you put just a few bites of this and that on the same plate, and replenish it as the child eats, then the same amount of food is consumed.

So it is with many people; they cannot step from their vague, fuzzy, “Abrahamic faiths” notions of Islam to the reality in one go. They must be shown certain facts one at a time, in order that the whole ugly picture builds up slowly. This I have seen in the e-list above. I hope that Steyn is getting it, because he writes well and thus has influence.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 03, 2005 09:23 AM | Send