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Steyn inching toward the truth about Islam
Now that President Bush has finally acknowledged that our enemy is not terror but Islamic radicalism, Mark Steyn seems to be on the verge of realizing that our enemy is not Islamic radicalism but Islam. That is the plain meaning of his long quote of Bassam Tibi in the second to last paragraph of his article in the Australian, in which Tibi points out that Islam’s goal of “peace” means nothing less than the Islamization of the whole world. But then in the last paragraph, speaking in his own voice again, Steyn cowardly returns to the phrase “Islamism” rather than Islam. That’s why I say he’s on the verge of acknowledging the truth rather than that he’s acknowledged it: The reality is that there are more Muslim states than a half-century ago, many more Muslims within non-Muslim states, and many more of those Muslims are radicalised and fundamentalist. It’s not hard to understand. All you have to do is take them at their word. As Bassam Tibi, a Muslim professor at Gottingen University in Germany, said in an interesting speech a few months after September 11, “Both sides should acknowledge candidly that although they might use identical terms, these mean different things to each of them. The word peace, for example, implies to a Muslim the extension of the Dar al-Islam—or House of Islam—to the entire world. This is completely different from the Enlightenment concept of eternal peace that dominates Western thought. Only when the entire world is a Dar al-Islam will it be a Dar a-Salam, or House of Peace.”However, to say that Steyn is on the verge of stating the truth about Islam is probably giving him too much credit, because it implies that at some point soon he will state the truth. I think we can safely predict that Steyn will always throw in evasive language, such as “Islamism,” to avoid condemning Islam per se. Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 10, 2005 08:14 AM | Send Email entry |