Steyn says there is no such thing as moderate Muslims

Mark Steyn writes:

I’ve met plenty of “moderate Muslims” in Jordan and Iraq and the Gulf states. But, as a reader wrote to me a year or two back, in Europe and North America they aren’t so much “moderate Muslims” as quiescent Muslims. The few who do speak out wind up living in hiding or under 24-hour armed guard, like Dutch MP Ayaab Hirsi Ali.

So when the EU and the BBC and the New York Times say that we too need to be more “sensitive” to those fellows with “Behead the enemies of Islam” banners, they should look in the mirror: They’re turning into “moderate Muslims,” and likely to wind up as cowed and silenced and invisible.

What Steyn is saying is that the Islamic community consists of two types of Muslims: active Muslims, who threaten death to all who stand in their way, and quiet Muslims, who are mortally afraid of the active Muslims.

Steyn is of course a staunch supporter of President Bush’s policy of spreading democracy in the Muslim world in order to render it peaceful and non-threatening. But if Steyn’s view about real nature of the “moderate” Muslims is correct, as it certainly is, how can the Bush doctrine possibly succeed, short of the military defeat and permanent suppression by the U.S. of all active Muslims on earth? In order to liberate the quiescent Muslims from their paralyzing fear of the active Muslims, we would have to do in every Muslim country the same thing we are doing in Iraq, that is, occupy the country and wage an interminable and unwinnable counter-insurgency campaign against jihadist forces, so that, under the umbrella of security provided by us, the normally intimidated and quiescent Muslims would feel safe to show their moderation and practice their belief in democracy. Since these moderate Muslims have no will, no power, and no strength to manifest their moderateness in the absence of U.S. military protection from the active Muslims, the moment the U.S. withdraws its forces, the moderate Muslims would return to their default, quiescent state.

To repeat, if it is true that the moderate Muslims are withholding their support for moderation out of fear of non-moderate Muslims, then the reform and moderation of the Muslim world would require the permanent U.S. occupation of the Muslim world.

This is not the first time that a neocon supporter of the Bush democratization doctrine has acknowledged that moderate Islam is a fiction. Here is a VFR discussion from May 2004 concerning a similar concession by David (“The End of Evil”) Frum, though his analysis is somewhat different from Steyn’s. Frum says that the so-called moderates are simply decent people who would not do terrorist acts themselves, but who are nevertheless unable to find in Islam any firm basis to oppose the terrorists.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 12, 2006 02:54 PM | Send