Hard-hitting Gaffney documentary on Islam to be shown

Part II of the Frank Gaffney documentary, “Islam versus Islamists: Voices from the Muslim Center,” which was spiked from the PBS series about Islam in early May, will by shown on Fox News on Saturday, June 23 at 6 p.m. I wasn’t aware that the film had two parts. I saw what I thought was the entire film at a screening in a theater in New York City on May 2, and wrote about it in my article, “Frank Gaffney’s total disconnect on Islam,” which I highly recommend to anyone who hasn’t read it.

The total disconnect refers to the fact that Gaffney’s movie portrays confident Islamic extremist leaders gaining power in the West, and a handful of besieged, powerless moderate Muslims opposing them. The message of the movie is plain: Islam represents an increasing threat, and we must protect ourselves from it. But in the discussions following the movie at the May 2 screening, Gaffney and his colleagues had a different message totally contradicting their own movie: The message of the movie is plain: Islam represents an increasing threat, and we must protect ourselves from it. But in the discussions following the movie at the May 2 screening, Gaffney and his colleagues had a different message totally contradicting their own movie: that the Islamists are not real Muslims, the Islam can be whatever Muslims want it to be, namely secular and modern, and that all we need to do is side with the moderates against the extremists. The movie itself showed the utter unreality and futility of this approach. Simply “siding with moderates” while the actual sharia-believing Muslims continue to gain in power and numbers is a formula for the Islamic conquest of the West.

A friend tells me that it is hard for my message to get across because people see someone like Gaffney being censored by the Left, then they see me saying that Gaffney himself is too liberal, and it’s hard for them to make sense of this.

This difficulty is related to the most basic fact of the modern political landscape. We have two “parties” in America: the center-right, and the liberal-left. These two parties hate each other, but in reality, the center-right, which thinks of itself as conservative, is also liberal. The conservatives’ basic identity is tied up with the belief that they are conservatives, so they don’t realize how liberal they are really are; while the left also needs to believe that the conservatives are conservative, otherwise the left would not have a “fascist” enemy to oppose. Once you understand that we have two liberal parties in America, the right-liberals (a.k.a. conservatives), and the left-liberals (a.k.a. liberals), all kinds of things that currently make no sense start to make sense, such as why conservatives keep moving to the left, such as why conservatives complain endlessly about the Islamic threat but refuse to support the only things that can actually protect us from it. The only way America can survive is by acquiring a genuine conservative party.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 22, 2007 01:47 PM | Send