“The World’s Most Wanted: A Moderate Islam”

Yawn. A symposium at FrontPage Magazine on whether there is or can be a moderate Islam. Two of the four participants, including the absurd Zuhdi Jasser (he was the unnamed “Moderate Muslim” who played a large part in my 2007 post, “Frank Gaffney’s total disconnect on Islam,” about a screening and discussion of Gaffney’s movie on moderates versus radicals) say that there is a moderate Islam, though they acknowledge it’s a minority voice with no authority; and Robert Spencer and another participant ably shoot down the idea that there is any moderate Islam that matters or can matter. How many times do we have to keep going through the same thing? It’s as though, instead of fighting Nazi Germany from 1941 to 1945, we spent ten years having symposia on whether Nazism really stood for the use of force to achieve the complete supremacy of the German race over humanity, or whether there was a moderate Nazism which we should have been encouraging so that we wouldn’t have to engage in the unpleasant business of fighting and defeating radical Nazism. But since neither FrontPage Magazine, nor Robert Spencer, nor any of the respectable conservative Islam critics, have any practical agenda to stop and reverse the Islamization of the West, because such an agenda would require a decisive break with the prevailing liberal view of the world, what we get instead is an endless string of articles and symposia on a question that has already been satisfactorily resolved. Even the title of the FP symposium, “The World’s Most Wanted: A Moderate Islam,” keeps alive the hope that we can and must find that elusive moderate Islam. And if we MUST find it, well, we’re going to keep searching for it, aren’t we? And as long as we keep searching for that which does not and cannot exist, we are failing to take practical steps to defend ourselves from the Islamic reality that does exist.

Everything I’m trying to say is captured in this simple fact: that FP, instead of having a symposium called, “How to Stop and Reverse the Islamization of the West,” has a symposium called, “The World’s Most Wanted: A Moderate Islam.”

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LA writes:

Zuhdi Jasser is not just absurd insofar as he promotes a non-existent moderate Islam as the solution to radical Islam; he is also malign. See, in the post about him which I linked above, how he tried to prevent Geert Wilders from making an appearance at the Capitol, and how he lied about Wilders, saying that Wilders refuses to meet with Muslims.

So Jasser, the proponent of moderate Islam, is in reality an agent of radical Islam, his mission being to prevent the West from taking steps to protect itself from radical Islam, a.k.a. Islam. This is the same insight about “moderate Muslims” that I first had when I saw the Charlie Rose roundtable discussion with a bunch of prominent “moderate Muslims” about Steven Emerson’s Jihad in America documentary back in 1994. The “moderate Muslims” talking with Charlie Rose included then-Clinton crony and speechwriter Abdurahman Alamoudi, who is now in federal prison for funding Islamic terrorism.

LA continues:

By the way, do you think that Rose, after Alamoudi was convicted of funding terrorism, told his viewers: “Abdurahman Alamoudi, who was a guest on this program in 1994 and whom we described then as a moderate Muslim, was in reality a radical Muslim and a supporter of foreign terrorists. We regret that we allowed ourselves to be fooled by him”? Hah.

MBS writes:

As Daniel Greenfield states:

“A moderate Islamic terrorist is most in demand by people who are looking to surrender. They just wish there was someone reasonable around for them to surrender to.”

LA writes:

That’s funny—he even talks about a hypothetical search for a “moderate Nazi” in 1941, just as I did.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 27, 2010 08:58 AM | Send