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Calling their bluff
Hugh Fitzgerald asks an obvious question of the Islam defenders that no one has ever thought to ask before, and that exposes the absolute emptiness and fraudulence of their position: If it is true that a tiny minority of “extremist” Muslims have distorted the “true” Islamic teachings into something “extreme,” what are these “true” Islamic teachings that have been distorted, and how have they been distorted? If conservatives would adopt Fitzgerald’s approach in debate (and, of course, if real debate on these questions were ever allowed in our society), the effect on the Islam apologists would be quick and conclusive. All we would have to do is take some statement by a prominent Muslim jihadist in which he calls for jihad, or for the execution of Muslim apostates, or for the beheading of innocents, or for the submission of non-Muslims under Islamic law, and pose the following question to the apologists: “If this statement is, as you insist, an extremist distortion of true Islam, show me the true and authoritative Islamic text that it is distorting.” The apologists would have nothing to say, since there is no such text. And if, in a rare instance, they were able to point to some Islamic text that contradicted our quote of the prominent jihadist, we would then (and this is something we would have been holding in reserve) continue our quote of the jihadist, to the point where the jihadist (as jihadists habitually do) references, as the basis for his own statement, an authoritative passage from the Koran or the Traditions or the schools of jurisprudence. For example, if you had a chance to address President Bush or some other Islam apologist, you could say, “Mr. President, you have said that radical Muslims have hijacked and perverted a great faith. So please tell me this. When Osama bin Laden issued his fatwa calling on Muslims to kill Jews and Americans wherever they find them, what was the Islamic teaching that bin Laden was perverting? In fact, Bin Laden was simply paraphrasing the Koran, in which, at Sura 9, verse 5, Allah commands Muslims to ‘slay the idolaters wherever you find them.’ So how was bin Laden perverting Islam?” The debate would be over. The fact that Islam is a single continuum stretching from Muhammad to the latest terrorist killer could no longer be denied. This would be easy for us to do. We simply need to find and commit to memory a contemporary jihadist’s statement along with the Koranic passage that the jihadist uses to support it, and the next time we hear someone say that Radical Muslims Have Hijacked A Great Faith, we hit them with the quote and ask them to show how this is not the true Islam.
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