Another Muslim “moderate” hits the fan

Even I, normally a firm doubter of the whole “moderate” Muslim mythology, fell for it. I described Tarek Fatah as a moderate, since death threats from other Muslims over his criticisms of anti-Western Muslim extremism forced him to step down from the Canadian Muslim Congress. But, as pointed out by reader Rachael S., Fatah’s article that I linked ends on this strange note:

It is ironic that Muslim extremists are portraying themselves as anti-imperialist when, in fact, Al Qaeda and the Taliban are nothing more than a creation of the CIA. Muslims need to recognize that the agenda of these extremists is a cult of hate and fascism, not one of advocacy for their community.

Fatah seems to be saying that while Muslim extremists claim that they are not imperialist, they really are imperialist, because they are the creation of the CIA which is really imperialist. So this so-called moderate Muslim denies that imperialism and violence are inherent components of Islam. Instead, according to him, some parts of Islam only became imperialist and violent because the nasty CIA funded Muslim groups to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. The truth, as Rachael points out, is that “even if the U.S. gave funds to these groups in their infancy, we didn’t give them the foundation for their abiding hatred. The Koran did.” Indeed, Fatah is not so much a Muslim moderate as a typical secular anti-American leftist. And leftists, like Muslims, see America as the root of all evil. (As one who is both a leftist and a Muslim, Fatah would appear to have two counts against him from our point of view.)

In any event, even if he were not anti-American, a moderate Muslim who denies that the source of Islamic extremism resides in Islam will never be able effectively to oppose that extremism. How can he, since he thinks that Islam itself is moderate, and that it is only some extraneous force—modernity, the Palestine problem, the CIA, you name it—that has artificially injected extremism into Islam? Such a moderate, just like the extremists, is still living in a fantasy world in which Islam is and must be totally innocent.

And yet the moderate Fatah, inadequate and even undesirable though he may be from our point of view, is still so out of step with his true-believing co-religionists that they threatened to kill him and drove him out of their organization. By welcoming Muslims into the West, we have brought Islamic tyranny into the West, where it now silences the moderate Muslims upon whom we fondly imagine that the reform of Islam—and our own safety—depends!

Islam cannot be reformed, and the Islam problem cannot be solved, short of Islam going out of existence, which can only happen if the Muslims abandon it en masse and cease to follow it. And that is not something that we non-Muslims can make them do. We can only solve the Islam problem for ourselves, by excluding Muslims from our society.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 04, 2006 01:55 PM | Send