Another brilliant Islam critic who undercuts his own argument against Islam

Alan Roebuck writes:

At FrontPage Magazine, there is an interview with Tom Trento, Director of the Florida Security Council, which has a billboard up saying simply “Sharia Law Threatens America.” Their spokesman says they have not yet received flack from Moslem organizations; he attributes it to their wish not to publicize the true nature of sharia:

The “official” Muslim response has been non-existent, which is very strange for the loud-mouthed “protectors” of Islam.

I don’t think the Islamist organizations (CAIR, MPAC, ICNA, etc) want to touch this because it’s an absolutely toxic public relations issue. From the Islamist perspective, Sharia must be injected into the veins of dumbed-down Americas in a surreptitious, stealthy manner. Once we put a gigantic sign up in the air for the public to see and shine a light on the insidious nature of Sharia…the bad guys go limp. Conversely, the response from middle America has been extremely supportive and encouraging. Our Sharia project has initiated creative thinking in many organizations to do similar advertising in their areas.

He also says:

Sharia in Europe is like cancer in your stomach. As much as those of us on this side of the pond enjoy practicing the high art of ridicule directed at our western brothers and sisters, the global fact remains that Europe is a fundamental and absolutely necessary part of the American “body.”

Unfortunately, the article also includes the standard distinction between the moderate Moslems, potential allies of ours, and the bad Moslems, who have intimidated them:

I make a serious distinction between the Muslims of America and American Muslims. The former desire the implementation of political Islam in America through Sharia and jihad (if necessary) whereas the latter simply desire to worship Allah, while pledging allegiance to America and all for which she stands. Herein lays the secret that Muslims do not want revealed. American Muslims are being intimidated by the (phony) Muslims of America through the tightly controlled Islamic communities and Mosques and forced to remain silent about any views that counter or challenge the clerics, imams or anything related to the Muslim Brotherhood….

The bottom line of this complicated issue is that there really are good Muslims who love America, reject political Islam and just want the First Amendment right to worship freely, as every other American enjoys. On both Constitutional and moral principle, we cannot abandon these folks at their greatest time of need.
[end of quote]

The right hand giveth and the left hand taketh away.

LA replies:

Pathetic. Trento has the wit and brashness to put up a terrific billboard like that warning against Islamic law, then he turns into a ridiculous liberal denier of reality by calling Muslims who believe in Islamic law “phony Muslims”!

It’s like putting up a billboard saying, “I have no brain.”

And notice how, once he makes the distinction between moderate and “phony” Muslims, the protection of the moderate Muslims becomes a top priority, even a moral calling: “On both Constitutional and moral principle, we cannot abandon these folks at their greatest time of need.”

I delineated this atttitude and its inevitable consequences in my January 2005 article at FrontPage Magazine, “The Search for Moderate Islam”:

Similarly, if we embrace the idea that moderate Islam is the cure for extremist Islam, we will have to carry out a cultural peace process, in which we strive to build up the “moderate” Muslims (whether in our own country or in the Mideast) and turn them into leaders of the Islamic community. The path is filled with punji traps. In light of [Daniel] Pipes’s desolating observation that we often cannot even tell a moderate from a radical, our efforts to raise the influence of “moderate” Muslims—many of whom will turn out not to be moderate—will simply mean giving Muslims qua Muslims more caché and power in our society, with their demands and perhaps their threats ever increasing, while we get more and more entangled in the process of instructing, exhorting, bribing, and (maybe) changing them, even as we keep desperately assuring ourselves that moderate Muslim solution will work in the long run.

Because the search for moderate Muslims requires us not to see the other side as it really is, we must replace truthful speech with politically correct slogans that demoralize us and encourage our enemies. For example, almost every time Pipes criticizes radical Muslims, he must—in order to prove that he’s not a bigot and that he still believes in an ecumenic resolution—assure his audience that “moderate Islam is the answer.” Varieties of this double message, repeated constantly by the government and the intelligentsia, create deep confusion and ambivalence in the public mind. On one hand we’re being told that radical Muslims are a remorseless wicked enemy; on the other hand, we’re being told that almost all Muslims are moderate and harmless, and that we are bigoted if we think otherwise. The net effect of these two contradictory statements is to establish the unassailable legitimacy of Islam in our country. But, since there is no moderate Islam, the Islam that gets legitimized will, inevitably, be radical Islam.

The cultural peace process would distract and weaken us in other ways. Instead of spending our energy building up our own society and culture, which is within our power to do, we would be attempting to build up the Muslims’ society and culture, which is not within our power to do. We would be gambling our freedom and survival on the chance that we can bring something into existence that has never existed. 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—just as the leaders of Israel and the U.S. kept closing their eyes to the real nature of the Palestinians for all those years and are closing them still. 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. Like the Marxist dream with its 150 years on the road to nowhere, our dream of a moderate Islam will inevitably collapse one day, and the price might be nearly as high.

Now, Trento’s position is not as bad as the “moderate Muslims are the solution” position that my 2005 article was attacking. Warning against sharia is a very good thing to do, since Islam for all practical purposes is sharia. Though his notion of real Muslims as “phony” Muslims is ridiculous, he’s still telling everyone that sharia is the problem and must be opposed. And any Muslims, in order to win his approval as “real” (i.e. moderate) Muslims, must oppose sharia. So I’m not saying that this is all bad. The billboard is great. At the same time, Trento shows an intellectual softness about the nature of Islam and of Muslims that will inevitably undermine his announced purpose.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 22, 2008 12:52 PM | Send