FrontPage Magazine’s (probably unconscious) shift toward more honest speech about Islam

Geert Wilders has been named FrontPage Magazine’s Man of the Year. For once I’m in full agreement with FP. Wilders is the West’s foremost leader and spokesman against the Islamic threat.

What particularly interests me about FP’s unsigned article, however, is not its praise for and information about Wilders, which are familiar, but FP’s way of speaking about the Islam problem. The article contains the usual complement of evasive and dishonest words such as “Islamist,” which have been adopted by conservative Islam critics to avoid saying that Islam itself is the problem. But, significantly and hopefully, in this piece “Islamist” is not used so much to suggest that Islamism is bad and Islam is ok, but rather to say that the bad Islamism is Islam.

To show the significance of this verbal shift (which, by the way, I suspect was entirely unconscious on the part of FP’s editors), let’s start with a passage in the article in which “Islamist” is used in the usual, dishonest sense:

Braving daily death threats and sacrificing the security that his critics take for granted, he has opted for the often-thankless task of saving Western civilization from its Islamist discontents—beginning with the valuable reminder that the demands of Islamic zealots are not only not congruent with Western values but are, in fact, in direct conflict with them.

What is incongruent with Western values is not Islam, but “Islamic zealots.” This is the typical, evasive language of conservative Islam critics.

But then the article says:

A white flag was also unfurled by Dutch Foreign Minister Maxime Verhagen, who urged Wilders to give in to Islamist demands not to show the film, warning that it could “endanger the lives of Dutch nationals” abroad if he did. Dutch Muslims—inadvertently proving Wilders’s point about the incompatibility of Islamic beliefs and Western freedoms—demanded that the film be banned.

“The incompatibility of Islamic beliefs and Western freedoms“—so the problem is not “Islamism” or “Islamic zealots,” but Islam itself.

Similarly:

No wonder that many Dutch citizens are coming around to Wilders’s view of the Islamist threat. According to a May 2005 poll, 43 percent of the Dutch now believe that Islam is incompatible with Western society. Similarly, a 2006 poll found that the majority of native Dutch regard Islam as intolerant, violent, and hostile to women.

Again, FP starts with the usual conservative-PC expression, “Islamist threat,” but then shows that what it means by “Islamist threat” is that Islam—not “Islamism”—is incompatible with Western society.

And here is a further hopeful development: FP approves Wilders’s advocacy of ending Muslim immigration:

Even his more controversial measure to stop the Islamisation of Europe—an end to all Muslim immigration—is more about safeguarding Western traditions than locking out foreigners. That is why he has always stressed that Europe should remain a place of refuge, including, for instance, for gay Muslims fleeing persecution.

Just a month ago, FP took issue with its own contributor Robert Spencer’s call for ending Muslim immigration. Now it approves of Wilder’s similar position.

Unfortunately FP, revealing its underlying liberal mindset, still slips back into pure liberal-speak at times:

Wilders has also been correct that Western ideals of tolerance and equality are under assault by Islamic radicals. European police report that Islamic honor killings are on the rise. In 2005, for instance, a review by British police of 22 domestic homicides led to 18 of the cases being reclassified as “murder in the name of so-called ‘honor.’” Polls routinely find that a disturbingly large percentage of Muslims—one in 10 according to a 2006 BBC poll—would condone the murder of someone seen to have disrespected their families honor.

So, according to FP, what is objectionable about a man murdering his daughter is not that it is the most terrible violation of the laws of God, nature, and man, but that it’s a violation of “Western ideals of tolerance and equality.”

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 02, 2009 11:34 AM | Send