Yerushalmi supports the moderate Muslims

(Note: I’ve modified this entry since posting it, smoothing out rough spots.)

In an article at SANE, David Yerushalmi lays out a new approach to the elimination of Islamic extremism in America: application of the 1940 Smith Act which makes advocacy of the violent overthrow of the U.S. government a crime. We may wonder how this could apply to sharia-believing Muslims, since at present not all or even any adherents of sharia in the U.S. actively advocate or seek the violent overthrow of the U.S. government. Yerushalmi sums up his answer as follows:

[G]iven Shari’a as it exists today and as it has existed for over 1000 years, adherents of authoritative Shari’a accept the notion of war to overthrow the US government and other Western nations given the right conditions. [Italics added.]

As I understand his point, Yerushalmi is saying that, since sharia presents a variety of circumstances in which violent jihad to defeat a non-Muslim government is to be waged or is not to be waged, therefore, once a Muslim in the U.S. subscribes to sharia, even in the absence of any current violence or advocacy of violence, he is nevertheless subscribing to the clear possibility of waging violent jihad to overthrow the U.S. government. And therefore both adherence to sharia and advocating adherence to sharia should come under the Smith Act.

Yerushalmi writes:

The Jihadist, following Shari’a, teaches that the purpose of Islam is the submission of the world to Allah’s will as expressed in his perfect law, the Shari’a. Further, anyone who teaches that the Muslim must be faithful and adhere to the traditional and authoritative Shari’a is advocating in effect precisely the same thing. Jihad, which most certainly includes the use and the advocacy of the use of violence in the effort to overthrow the infidel government, is an obligation on the Muslim, either as part of the collective or as an individual. By virtue of the fact that this is a religious instruction and understood to be a call to action—to live by the Shari’a fully and faithfully—and not merely some theoretical theological or political discussion, the call to observe traditional and authoritative Shari’a is the call to arms in a clear and decisive way. It would be hard to understand how this would not be a prima facie violation of the Smith Act.

Use of the Smith Act against sharia-supporting Muslims is certainly a promising approach. It puts clothing on my idea of designating Islam as a political ideology instead of as a religion, so that it would no longer get First Amendment protections. It should be looked into further. However, that is only half of Yerushalmi’s purpose. The other half is to take the side of the moderate Muslims. In the opening section of the article, he explains why he legally represented Frank Gaffney, Alex Alexiev, and Martyn Burke in their efforts to get their spiked-by-PBS movie about Islam released and shown on the Fox News Channel. Yerushalmi is at pains to explain that he supports the moderate Muslims who are extolled in the film and he sees them as the hope for a patriotic, pro-U.S. Islam in America. In his usual overcharged style, he writes: “It is our committed position that all Americans should stand in solidarity with any American Muslim who wishes to embrace Islam as a purely religious faith—practicing the Five Pillars (commitment to monotheism; prayer; charity; fasting; and pilgrimage)—as a committed American and who rejects traditional Shari’a which demands to control and not merely to inform the entire life of the Muslim, including his attitude about and relations toward his country.” All Americans must stand in solidarity with such Muslims? Isn’t that rather extravagantly overstating it? Yerushalmi is no Communist, but to me his writings often have a teeth-jarring, Communist Party-like ring, which seems to stem at least in part from his decision to treat everything he writes at SANE as an official, self-important pronouncement of his organization, the Society of Americans for National Existence. In my opinion he would be a more effective communicator if he dropped the officious mask and the collective voice and wrote as an individual.

In any case, given Yerushalmi’s hard-line anti-Muslim position in the past, I am surprised by his embrace of the moderate Muslims. Repeated experience (underscored just the other day by Irshad Manji in the New York Post) shows that the moderates conceal (deliberately or innocently) the truth about Islam, telling non-Muslims that all the bad things that are a part of Islam really aren’t there. Yerushalmi’s apparent answer to that concern is that, once U.S. law is used to root out the sharia-adhering Muslims, the genuinely moderate Muslims who reject sharia and who see Islam as an individual religion not a collective warrior religion will be free for the first time to build a genuinely moderate Islam in the West. I don’t believe it, because the moderates do not exactly reject sharia but rather pretend that sharia does not exist or that it is not binding on Muslims. How can people who imagine—as one of the moderates featured in Gaffney’s film imagines—that Islam can be whatever Muslims want it to be, seriously oppose what Islam actually is? The unstated implication of Yerushalmi’s argument is that, although the moderates do not effectively oppose sharia-based Islam, the U.S. government’s outlawing of sharia-based Islam that he proposes would take care of that lack. If sharia-based Islam were truly banned (by us), then the moderates’ insufficient opposition to it would no longer be a problem, because they would no longer be the ones we were counting on to oppose it. That is my speculation as to Yerushalmi’s real argument.

What then is my position? My position is that we should not be in “solidarity” with any Muslims, period. We should not approve any aspect of the Islamic religion, period. We should have nothing to do with supporting some Muslims against other Muslims, period. We should never involve ourselves in internal Islamic affairs and internal Islamic relations, period. All such endeavors can only lead us into the vain belief that we can manage and engineer a religion which in reality we do not understand. However, to decline to embrace Muslims does not mean that we need to regard all Muslims as our enemies. If orthodox Islam were truly shut down in this country though a combination of the banning of adherence to sharia and the mass voluntary departure of believing Muslims that would occur as a result of that ban, then the rump, non-orthodox Muslim community that would be left behind would probably not be a danger to us and they could be allowed to stay. Such a radically reduced Muslim presence, reduced both in numbers and in commitment to Islam, would no longer present a danger to our society.

I repeat that I am totally opposed to any strategy that involves our approving and embracing any Muslims and any aspect of Islam in any manner whatsoever. My reason for this is that Islam, regardless of its internal divisions that loom so large in our eyes, is a tribe and a nation. If we embrace even a seemingly innocuous part of that nation, we end up embracing Islam itself, thus enabling it to gain power over us.

* * *

Why is it dangerous to make moderate Muslims our allies? Moderate Muslims are like your average, observant, amiable Muslim who doesn’t know much about the religion, doesn’t know about jihad. He’s not dangerous or hostile to non-Muslims, because he doesn’t know what his religion really commands. But as soon as he finds out about the jihad that is at the center of Islam, perhaps at a time of heightened social tension and renewed preaching of jihad, his identity and commitment as a devout Muslim would push him to embrace jihad.

In the same way, your average moderate Muslims (like the Sufi woman who spoke to me at the Gaffney screening) may be entirely sincere in their denial of all the bad things about Islam. But their ignorance is no protection. If we made them our allies, years could pass, generations could pass, and then if jihad were preached, they or their descendants as good Muslims either would follow it or would have nothing to say against it.

The only Muslims who are truly and permanently “safe,” jihadistically speaking, are those who have given up their identity as Muslims.

- end of initial entry -

Jeff in England writes:

Very very good reply and I hope Yerushalmi sees it and replies.

But what about Ali Sina who has completely rejected Islam and is its greatest critic? Or Wofa Sultan, ex-Muslim (I think) who has told Muslims how monstrous their religion is. I think we have to be flexible and support people such as them. Nor should we totally reject the likes of Hirsi Ali (despite her secularism) and Manji (despite her desire to remain Muslim) and others like them….they are very useful in this war for mainstream minds.

In wars, especially wars for minds like this one, one always needs allies even if one disagrees with much of their itinerary. I’m not talking about supporting so called ‘moderate’ Muslims but rather people who are criticising Islam in a powerful way. The mainstream listens to these people who have been inside the beast so to speak.

LA replies:

You’re conflating two different groups. Sina and Sultan are apostates who reject Islam. That is the only real solution.

Manji still considers herself a Muslim who wants to “fix” Islam. That’s an illusion.

Jeff replies:

I still think the so called Reform Muslims are worth “using” to make crucial points to the Mainstream. We need them, they have a lot of effect. That doesn’t mean we have to agree with many of their views. On the point of Moderate Muslims I agree fully.

LA replies:

Agreed. It’s complicated.

Paul Cella writes:

It is certainly possible, in my reading, to use current sedition law (the repeatedly amended—often by the Supreme Court—Smith Act) against agents and sympathizers of the jihad. A healthier republic would recognize the intrinsically seditious nature of Islamic doctrines like jihad and shari’a. What is lacking, of course, is the will to prosecute sedition.

In my view one step we can take to correct this, small though it is, is to advocate a jihad-specific sedition law. We may have even mentioned something like that in our series of statements on jihad and shari’a some months back. But these small steps can have important consequences, as we have seen in the case of immigration. Consider the effect on the mainstream media if a congressman introduced a bill which aims to prohibit by name the promulgation of jihad and shari’a; one that (say in the preamble) makes specific mention of the threat of Islam as such. In short, we ought to work toward the eventual amendment of the Smith Act, such that it takes explicit cognizance of the jihadist threat.

PS—here is a link to the actual content of current sedition law (what’s left of the Smith Act after the Court threw out some portions of it back in the McCarthy days). As you can see, the language is pretty strong already. All that’s needed is specific mention of Islam.

Ken Hechtman writes:

You wrote:

“What then is my position? My position is that we should not be in “solidarity” with any Muslims, period. We should not approve any aspect of the Islamic religion, period. We should have nothing to do with supporting some Muslims against other Muslims, period. We should never involve ourselves in internal Islamic affairs and internal Islamic relations, period. All such endeavors can only lead us into the vain belief that we can manage and socially engineer a religion which in reality we do not understand.”

Well said, sir.

Imagine, just for the sake of this argument, that there were people living in Muslim countries actively trying to turn their societies away from the path of Sharia and Jihad. Now, whether they get to call themselves “moderate Muslims” or “liberal Muslims” or have to live with the term “apostates” is an academic distiction. My opinion on that isn’t the one that counts and quite frankly neither is yours. They’re there and they’re doing righteous work under difficult conditions and we will be better off if they succeed. So what would be the best thing we in the West, with our reputation in that part of the world being what it is (deserved or not), might give them to help them along?

It’s not money, it’s not training, it’s not moral support, it’s not publicity in the Western press. It’s the perception of independence. Whatever you might believe their chances of success are—and yes, Islam is more resistant to change than Christianity or Judaism, it was deliberately designed as the most change-resistant belief system on Earth—those chances vanish to zero once they get tarred as paid agents of their enemies.

The Iranian opposition understands this. A while back, Congress appropriated $70 million to bankroll them. The CIA can’t give it away. This has become an international joke. We’re offering suitcases full of large, circulated, non-sequential bills and no one in Iran will take them.

Time magazine writes:

Several mainstream Iranian reformers tell TIME that from the start they transmitted their opposition to the democracy program indirectly but clearly to American officials via the back-channel talks. Besides warning that it could trigger a crackdown, they argued that Iran’s reform movement had strong popular support and did not want or require foreign help. Outside backing has been an unusually sensitive issue in Iranian politics ever since a CIA-backed coup d’etat in 1953 installed the former Shah. Instead, many of them argue, Iran’s democracy movement would be better served if the U.S. lifted sanctions and improved relations with Tehran, which would enable trade and cultural links to be expanded. “There is no serious individual inside or outside Iran who is going to take this money,” an Iranian reformer told TIME. “Anyone having the slightest knowledge of the domestic political situation in Iran would never have created this program.”

Stewart W. writes:

The use of the Smith Act certainly poses an interesting use of existing legal structure to fight against jihad and sharia, but the money quote exposes a serious double-edge to that sword:

David Yerushalmi wrotes: “[G]iven Shari’a as it exists today and as it has existed for over 1000 years, adherents of authoritative Shari’a accept the notion of war to overthrow the US government and other Western nations given the right conditions.”

The question is, how do we separate the impact of the phrase “given the right conditions” from many of the common legal interpretations of the Second Amendment? Since that amendment is (and historically was) often interpreted to mean that the People have a natural right to keep and bear arms specifically for the purpose of defeating domestic tyranny, given the right conditions, I am wary of using the Smith Act for this purpose. I would much prefer something along the lines of the jihad-specific law that Paul proposes. If we can’t get there as a first step, perhaps we could use the RICO Act for the initial thrust, until such time as the political climate would allow us to formulate a jihad- (or Islam-) specific law.

MG writes:

You wrote: “the rump, non-orthodox Muslim community that would be left behind would probably not be a danger to us and they could be allowed to stay. Such a radically reduced Muslim presence, reduced both in numbers and in commitment to Islam, would no longer present a danger to our society.”

I don’t know how safe this will be. Sudden Jihad Syndrome (SJS), described at JihadWatch and littlegreenfootballs, is always a problem. SJS is a case of a previously perfectly “moderate” ordinary Muslim, very often young, suddenly discovering his true religion and acting accordingly.

After event, Jihadi parents, neighbors, coworkers, etc., most of whom are “moderate” Muslims, express total surprise.

There is certainly lack of a tool that can reliably predict how offspring of “moderate” Muslims will act.

Very different behaviour of previous generation of Muslim immigrants in Britain and France as compared to their children is evidence of unacceptably high probability of SJS.

Only Muslims In Name Only should be allowed to remain in this country. All believing Muslims, no matter how small in number, are time bombs.

If only we can reliably separate Muslims In Name Only from the rest. I suppose spiky-haired Lesbian liberal writers would qualify.

LA replies:

“Only Muslims In Name Only should be allowed to remain in this country.”

That’s basically what I meant. But as I’ve said many times, what we need to do is start this process of reverse immigration, not with a definite end in mind, but with a definite direction in mind, meaning that the Muslims grow steadily less powerful in this country, and we become steadily more powerful, moving progressively stage by stage and seeing where we stand at each point. So, try to picture what the Muslim situation in America would be after (1) all new Muslim immigration is stopped; (2) Muslim illegals are removed, (3) Muslim non-citizens with jihad and sharia connections are removed; (4) naturalized citizens with jihad and sharia connections are removed, and after (5) we designate Islam as a political ideology and place the practice of the Muslim religion under severe restrictions, causing many Muslims to return to their native countries voluntarily. Where would we stand at that point? How many Muslims would be left in America? What kinds of Muslims would be left in America? How much of a problem would we still have with them at that point? What further steps might be needed? We wouldn’t know the answer to these question until we had carried out the above steps. Yet to have carried out those steps would have radically reduced the Muslim numbers, elan, and power in America and transformed our own posture in relation to Islam, from dhimmi wannabees to a self-respecting country assuring its own survival.

Mark J. writes:

You wrote, “The only Muslims who are truly and permanently ‘safe,’ jihadistically speaking, are those who have given up their identity as Muslims.” I agree.

So since the only Muslims who are safe are those who have given up their identity as Muslims—i.e., they are not Muslim—then can’t we set as our goal simply banning Islam from our nation(s)? It must be my engineer’s dislike of muddled solutions, but why leave this ambiguous door open for a “rump, non-orthodox Muslim community” to remain here? Then we have to get into a whole debate about who exactly is a “Muslim in name only” for purposes of allowing them to stay here. I can’t imagine what that legislation would look like, or how we could know how serious they really are or aren’t about Islam.

If the members of this rump Muslim community truly have given up any serious commitment to Islam then they should be willing to wash their hands of it altogether.

It seems to me that Muslims present a virtually unprecedented challenge to our political philosophy of liberty. We fought a desperate war against Nazis and yet we didn’t ban Nazism in our country. Orthodox Muslims present the same sort of challenge as devoted Nazis.

I wonder what the Founding Fathers would have advocated as a solution to this? I don’t think there’s any question that they wouldn’t have wanted to let Muslims into the country at all given the same set of facts we face. But how would they have squared it with their commitment to individual liberty and freedom of conscience?

I suspect that the traditional solution all the way up through the 1920s would have been for men in the community to organize some kind of vigilantism that would drive the intruders out.

LA replies:

The reason I am not saying what you want me to say is that I do not believe, and am not prepared to say at this point, that all U.S.-born children of Muslim immigrants regardless of their beliefs must leave the U.S. That is a very extreme position, and I’m already taking some extreme positions. Rather, as in my 2004 article, “How to Defeat Jihad in America,” I lead up to that ultimate measure through a graded series of steps, leaving it as a possibility, not as a certainty. The whole point of the gradual, progressive process I propose is that U.S. Muslim population will have been so weakened and attenuated by the more preliminary measures, particularly the restrictions on or even the outright banning of the Islamic religion, that we will not need to state as an explicit principle that all native born Muslims must lose their citizenship and leave. I do not want to say that. If it becomes necessary I would say it. But it’s not necessary to say it now. Less extreme measures may accomplish the same ends.

Mark J. replies:

I’m not saying “all U.S.-born children of Muslim immigrants regardless of their beliefs must leave the U.S.” I said we should ban Islam, period. We should say that if they want to practice Islam, they can’t do it here. That is not the same as saying that they must leave regardless of their beliefs. They can give up Islam and remain. But then they won’t be a rump, non-orthodox Muslim community. They won’t be any kind of Muslim community.

For me, this whole situation casts a new light on the decision of various historic regimes around the world to ban certain religions or cultures from their nations. I always felt that that was a primitive and barbaric way to respond to an ideological threat. But we in the modern West never had to deal with something like Islam before, and now I can understand how a leader would conclude that the only realistic answer is to ban the belief system that threatens his people’s existence.

Maybe our American faith in freedom of speech and religion is founded on a faulty understanding of the nature of the human personality and human society?

LA replies:

That’s my position. But then we need to work out: what exactly would be banned? Certain types of Islam? Or all Islam? Would it mean only closing down mosques, or would it mean getting into homes and communities and banning all Islamic practices whatsoever? The problem has been formulated in different ways. But leaving aside those question, if the U.S. in some manner declared that the Islamic religion has no place in America and shut down all mosques, I think a majority of the Muslims (and the great majority of Muslims living here now are immigrants) would leave. My gosh, Muhammad and his followers left their native city because they couldn’t freely practice their religion there. How much more likely are Muslim immigrants to leave a foreign country where they cannot practice their religion.

Steven Warshawsky writes:

Mr. Yerushalmi’s proposal to use the Smith Act against sharia-believing Muslims is creative and demonstrates his legal acumen. But I don’t think it gets at the heart of the political/cultural problem we face.

To begin with, we must acknowledge that the Smith Act, primarily intended to root out domestic communism, has been a failure. Communist ideology—by which I mean a belief in international socialism (i.e., political and economic collectivism and the elimination of national borders)—has thoroughly infiltrated our government, our schools, our media, our entertainment, and our culture.

In the 20th Century, starting with the New Deal era and intensifying greatly during the 1960s, this country’s political and economic systems were largely redefined by the forces of domestic communism (although the 1960s communists called themselves the “New Left” to differentiate themselves from the communists of the 1920s and 1930s who openly sided with Stalin—yes, Americans who sided with Stalin! and who were not jailed or thrown out of the country!). Traditional American values of limited government, individual freedom, self-reliance, patriotism, and so on, have taken a brutal, perhaps fatal, beating in the past 70 years or so. Why? Because the majority of Americans who believe in these traditional values were (and are) too decent, and too complacent, to confront the communists head-on. In contrast, the communists were (and are) a very determined lot. Just look around to see how much they have accomplished.

As Whittaker Chambers explained in Witness, to seriously confront the threat of domestic communism (which includes dealing with fellow-traveling liberals who unthinkingly accept socialist dogma) would require destroying the lives of seemingly “respectable” people, like Alger Hiss. Chambers agonized over his decision to become an informer against the communist movement in this country, and agonized even longer about revealing evidence that Hiss had engaged in espionage. While Chambers was more conflicted about these issues than I suspect most people in his situation would have been, his reluctance to call out the communists and to do all in his power to bring them down is illustrative, I think, of the inherent weakness of a democratic society to protect itself from internal subversion.

Which brings me to today’s problem of militant Islam. The vast majority of people in this country will not act forcefully against Muslims under laws like the Smith Act or any others, because to do so would require openly taking the position that a certain group of people—indeed, a group defined by religion, after race the most hallowed of our society’s “protected characteristcs”—simply do not belong in our country. And then working, in effect, to destroy these peoples’ lives by expelling them from the country or imposing various restrictions on their freedoms. If the American people were unwilling to take such a stand against communists, why would they do so against Muslims?

True, the American people will continue to react (relatively) strongly to express acts of Islamic violence (although we sure seem eager to deny that Muslim violence in this country has anything to do with Islam), and we will continue to use our criminal laws to deal with terrorists—so much for a new post-9/11 strategy. But to declare that a certain ideology, however hateful, that is shared by millions of people in this country, and hundreds of millions across the world, is subversive and anti-American? Ain’t gonna happen. At least not anytime soon.

Heck, we can’t even rally sufficient support in this country to expel illegal aliens. Yes, we were able to prevent the amnesty bill from passing—but don’t hold your breath in hopes that the border will be enforced effectively anytime soon, let alone that the illegals already here will be required to leave. Ever. When push comes to shove, most Americans simply do not have the stomach for such a policy. Our inherent goodness as a people prevents us from doing what is necessary to protect our country.

This is not about laws. This is about the prevailing culture in our country, and about the character of the American people. Until those things change, or an entirely new group of elites takes over leadership of our nation, we will not take decisive action to protect ourselves from the Muslim threat.

LA replies:

I must say I feel a bit discouraged at Mr. Warshawsky’s comment. I think I must be a poor communicator, because no matter how often I respond (I think adequately) to certain negative and discouraging statements that readers have, other readers keep coming back at me with the same gloomy statements.

It is the central theme of this website that the ruling belief system of the modern Western world is leading it to its destruction, and that only a radical renunciation of that belief system can save the West. I say this over and over, in many different ways, so that there can be no mistaking my meaning: As we are we now, we are doomed, but if we change our beliefs we have a chance of saving ourselves.

Yet regularly readers like Mr. Warshawky send me a conclusory comment stating that America is finished, because, in order to save itself, it would have to change its beliefs!

So the difference between Mr. W. and myself is that he thinks it out of the question for the West to abandon its ruling liberalism, and I think it’s entirely possible.

The ruling liberalism seems like some unassailable monster. And from one point of view it is. But it is also the case that this entire belief system is irrational, out of touch with reality, and unsustainable. What seems mighty and immovable is really a shallow, insubstantial thing that can come to an end in a second. Recently we’ve seen people changing their life-long positions on immigration, seemingly in the blink of an eye. People simply stop believing what they have believed up to this moment.

That’s the paradox of our situation. Liberalism from one angle seems unchallengeably fixed and powerful, but from another angle it is revealed as an airy nothing, an illusory thought.

American Cassandra writes:

Whatever your flaws are, not being able to express yourself certainly isn’t one of them. Your message that we need to change ourselves on a profound level to save our civilization, but that it is not hopeless, because it is in our control, and we can change ourselves, comes across loud and clear. I don’t know if I mentioned it before, but the fact that you don’t give in to despair is one of my favorite things about your blog. This is such an important message. Not everyone who fights will prevail, but nobody who gives up will. We have to take this one day at a time. There are reasons for hope all around us. I bet even your readers who send you doom and gloom aren’t always like that. We all have gloomy moments sometimes, but they don’t define us.

MG writes:

Steven Warshawsky comment is pretty gloomy.

However, those of you who are old enough to remember 1980 clearly surely would agree that it looked much gloomier than.

Embarrassing weakling was the President. 18% mortgages. Iran is lost and there is a daily remainder of US impotence by egregious Ted Koppel in his America Held Hostage program.

Soviets are in Afghanistan and on the move everywhere it seems.

And yet. In a few months Iranian Mullahs would release hostages, they afraid of a new President. And only in 9 years Berlin wall would fall and shortly thereafter Soviet Union is no more.

Mortgages are at 6% and Japanese are not 10 feet tall anymore.

If there was anyone who could think in 1980 that by 1990 all of that would happen, I have never heard about him.

At a critical point, United States can change relatively quickly and cause the World and The History to change with it.

Do not despair. History teaches that we, eventually, will raise to occasion. Muslim history teaches that they will overplay their hand and, ironically, will facilitate our awakening.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 10, 2007 07:30 AM | Send