Progressing from total delusion to half-delusion

How often have we witnessed the infuriating and ridiculous spectacle of some Western liberal leader—especially President Bush, who knows as much about Islam as I do about string theory—authoritatively declaring that Islam is a religion of peace and tolerance, even as Muslims all over the world are proving the very opposite through their words and actions?

Finally a Western liberal leader is himself admitting the irony. As Daniel Pipes reports, at a memorial for Israel’s fallen soldiers, Israeli President Moshe Katsav spoke to the Muslim religious and political leaders in attendance and asked them:

Are you really sanctifying the spilling of blood as a religious value, as a value with which you want to shape the future generation? Can it be that one of you will rise and say – this is not the way, not through the path of the spilling of blood? Could it be that we, the Jewish people, will be the only one who say that terror is not the path of Islam, that it stands in contradiction to the tenets of the Koran, and not one of you speaks up?

Pipes adds that Katsav made a similar point in an interview with the Jerusalem Post:

How absurd. I as a Jew come and say that Islam and the Koran oppose bloodshed and terrorism. They, in the name of Islam, say, “No, Islam does support acts of terror,” like the one in the old bus station in Tel Aviv, against women, old people, young people, hurt in the name of religion. I am certain that there cannot be a religion that supports bloodshed. It cannot be that the Koran and Islam support this. But I don’t hear Muslim religious leaders speaking out against this.

Pipes then comments:

These are most daring statements for a politician. Will other Israeli and Western leaders follow suit?

I agree with Pipes that the statements are daring by contemporary standards. However, let’s say that other leaders follow suit, as Pipes hopes. What then? In fact, they will merely be in the place where Pipes himself is (that is, where he is on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays , since on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays he takes the opposite position), admitting that moderate Islam does not exist and that Islam is now and has always been a terrorist jihadist religion, but at the same time insisting that Islam can and must be changed into a moderate religion of peace, because, as Pipes has put it, Islam is whatever Muslims say it is.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 08, 2006 05:06 PM | Send