The sheer insanity of thinking that Muslims are like us

President Bush, Condoleezza Rice, most of the Republican party, most of the “conservative” commentariat including all the neoconservatives and most plain vanilla conservatives, along with various “moderate” liberals such as Thomas Friedman and various “rational leftists” such as Tony Blair and Christopher Hitchens, believe that the Islamic world can be “moderated,” modernized and democratized, and thus become part of a liberal world civilization based on individual freedom, tolerance, and commerce. These people seem to have no idea of the depth of primitiveness that controls the Muslim mind.

Consider the following statement, quoted at the MEMRI website. It is by Egyptian professor Abd Al-Sabour Shahin, the head of the Shari’a faculty at the famous Al-Ahzar University in Cairo, the Harvard of Sunni Islam, speaking on Saudi television on August 8. Remember—this man represents the cream of Muslim intellectual culture:

Our enemies weave many lies about us, which we are not necessarily aware of. For example: One day, we awoke to the crime of 9/11, which hit the tallest buildings in New York, the Empire State Building [sic]. There is no doubt that not a single Arab or Muslim had anything to do with these events. The incident was fabricated as a pretext to attack Islam and Muslims. The plan was to take over the world’s energy sources, and to achieve this control by force and not by agreement or negotiations, by interests, free trade, or anything like that. This is what they wanted.

So this incident was fabricated—and Allah knows that the Arabs and Muslims are innocent of it—in order to serve as a pretext to attack Islam and the Muslims.

All of a sudden, after we had been accustomed to considering America a rational and balanced country… All of a sudden, it violates international conventions, cancels treaties, ignores the U.N., acts on its own accord, attacks nations, kills innocent people, and claims it has the right to do so—and all this is based on lies.

These were lies from beginning to end, and we were not used to lying—not in policy, not in our discourse, and not in the media. Imagine what crisis the Arab and Islam nation finds itself in, in the midst of these peculiar events, which we cannot explain or believe.

All of a sudden, we were framed for an international crime, on the basis of lies.

I believe a dirty Zionist hand carried out this act. Zionism has taken the opportunity to escalate the war in Palestine, killing hundreds of thousands so far, while we watch from the sidelines in astonishment and ask: What’s going on?

And Bush, Rice, the Republicans, the neocons, the cons, the moderate libs, and the rational leftists all think that a culture where the top intellects talk like this is capable of getting along on a civilized basis with the rest of us? What planet are these Bushites living on? The only thing a rational person would want to do with Muslims is to have as little to do with them as possible.

And I ask of my fellow critics of Islam: when putting down Islam, please don’t do it by equating Islam with the European Middle Ages. Let’s have no more of these easy clichés such as that today’s Islam is “500 years behind Europe,” or that Muslim extremists exhibit a “medieval” mindset. To speak that way is to trash our own civilizational past and turn ourselves into rootless beings. In the year 1500, or 1300, or 1100, the top intellects of the West were not spouting paranoid gibberish. They were building Christian Europe, and, among other things, defending it from Islam.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 10, 2005 12:54 AM | Send