Oh pweeze, oh pwetty pweeze

From the BBC News

Reid call over Muslim extremism
Home Secretary John Reid is to call on British Muslims to do more to help root out potential extremists.

I said it all in “The Search for Moderate Islam”:

We would be making our safety contingent on whether the moderate Muslims can be what we want them to be. We would keep gazing expectantly at each Muslim as a potential moderate, and averting our eyes when he turned out not to be one …. We would have to keep refusing to acknowledge failure, because that would wreck our fantasy of an ecumenic and peaceful world. Regardless of all disappointments, we will still keep telling ourselves that some wonderful “moderates” are just around the corner and that we have to reach out to them.

In the end, our refusal to face the truth about Muslims, our flattery of non-moderate Moslems as “moderates,” will convince them that we are saps lacking the wit and will to defend ourselves, which will increase their aggression against us….

If we pursue the course of ecumenism, we will embark on a decades-long attempt to turn Muslims into moderate Muslims. The endeavor would become the central political project and moral commitment of our society, an obsessive, irrational quest that—like the Oslo “peace” process—we could never permit ourselves to abandon, no matter how many times it had failed. In the process we would empower Islam and lose ourselves.

If we pursue the course of civilizational defense, we will unstring Islam as a global force by decreasing Muslims’ presence in the West and containing them within their historic lands. Once the two civilizations are no longer in each other’s faces, our freedom and safety will no longer depend on our begging, cajoling, and bribing them to give up their deepest convictions.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 20, 2006 02:05 AM | Send