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“Moderate Islam is the solution“ is not just untrue, it is logically absurd
Though I have followed and participated in the “moderate Islam” debate for years (see for example my November 2000 article on the myth of moderate Islam), a friend recently made an obvious and definitive point on the subject that had never occurred to me before. The word “moderate,” she points out, means in-between, not taking a strong or unyielding position. Moderates by definition avoid fights, especially fights to the finish. How then can moderate Muslims, even if there were a significant number of them, ever effectively challenge the pure-believing, Allah-devoted, Koran-drenched, death-threatening and death-dealing hard-line Muslims? The very notion of conflict-averse moderates vanquishing holy-war radicals is an absurdity. Beyond the logical impossibility of a moderate Muslim ascendancy, Daniel Pipes, the leading promoter of moderate Islam as the solution to radical Islam, has explicitly or tacitly admitted on numerous occasions that the moderates are virtually non-existent, and that, to the extent that they do exist, they are to the radicals as the tiny rodent-like mammals of the Cretaceous period were to the dinosaurs.
If some wag comes along and tells me that the moderate Muslims could replace the radical Muslims the way the mammals replaced the dinosaurs, I would remind him that the Cretaceous period lasted 70 million years. Email entry |