I’m astonished that this appeared in IBD. I agree with you that this is unprecedented in a mainstream conservative publication. Sperry is saying that Islam as such is the problem and we simply have to defend ourselves from it.
Since I don’t know if IBD articles remain on the Web, I’m copying it here.
Assuming The Best About Muslims
Mon, Sep 24 2012
By PAUL SPERRY
Newsweek’s latest cover story, titled “Muslim Rage,” is meant to shock the average American—as if Muslim fury is a new phenomenon. “Muslim rage” is in fact a tedious redundancy. When are the followers of Islam not enraged?
Still, the politically correct media elite appear at long last to be suffering tolerance fatigue. They’ve finally grown weary of pretending Muslims aren’t what they do.
Some are even expressing disgust with the perpetually offended and violent Muslim community. If the gang rape of a “60 Minutes” correspondent in Tahrir Square wasn’t enough to turn their stomachs, the parading of an allegedly gay American ambassador’s naked corpse through the streets of Benghazi is.
CNN host Wolf Blitzer, in a spasm of honest frustration, blurted out:
“Why do these people hate America after all that the U.S. has done to liberate” them?
Answer: religion. Not, as the New York Times whines, because of B-movies. Or drone strikes. Or waterboarding. Or Gitmo. Or Iraq. Or Afghanistan. Or Hiroshima. Or the countless other excuses offered.
They hate us because they are Muslim and we are not.
But then, Blitzer knew this. He also reported that CNN correspondents outside the U.S. embassy in Cairo were expecting a surge in violence “after Friday prayers.” It’s a remarkable thing when religious adherents grow angrier after worship.
Since 9/11, and in spite of 9/11, Americans have honorably assumed the best about Muslims. Our first assumption has been that the Muslim terrorists and even the extremists who support them are in the minority. And that the overwhelming lot of Muslims in this country and around the world are moderate and peace-loving, and share our basic values.
We’ve applied this assumption to the war on terror. It’s embedded in our combat rules of engagement in Afghanistan; our counterterrorism training at home; our diplomatic outreach; and our interfaith activities.
Yet our Judeo-Christian values aren’t winning over Muslims in the Middle East. It’s their totalitarian values that are influencing us. With the help of Muslim Brotherhood front groups in America, they’re imposing their blasphemy and other Shariah laws on us. We’re compromising our freedoms to accommodate them.
It’s time to stop deluding ourselves into thinking they’ll change. Our differences, tragically, appear irreconcilable. Hatred from Muslim quarters has only grown bolder following the so-called Arab Spring, and it’s boiling over into Western space at an alarming rate.
Hostility isn’t limited to our posts in the Middle East and bases in Afghanistan.
In the past week, a federal judge sentenced a 29-year-old Virginia Muslim to 30 years in prison after he plotted to detonate a suicide bomb inside the U.S. Capitol; and federal agents arrested an 18-year-old in Chicago for trying to set off a car bomb outside a bar.
U.S. citizen Adel Daoud, who claimed it was OK to kill any civilian supporting the war on terror, otherwise appeared a normal American teen.
“He’s always been a very nice kid,” said his shocked neighbor, Dorothy Leverson.
How many times have we heard this story? The Muslim next door was so “nice” and “moderate.”
Until he wasn’t.
Time after time, we’ve given our Muslim neighbors the benefit of the doubt. And time after time, we’ve been betrayed.
Muslims aren’t just the main source of terror overseas, they’re the main source of it in our own backyard. Muslims represent just 1% of the U.S. population, yet account for 82% of all domestic terrorism convictions.
If there is a religious debate within the Muslim community about Islam and violence, it’s the quietest in history. When it comes to speaking out against terrorism, there’s a conspiracy of eerie silence among the millions of Muslim-Americans.
Even on the rare occasions Muslim leaders are compelled to make a public statement, they always qualify terrorism as “unwarranted violence” against “civilians” or “innocent people.” They never condemn jihad. Ever. That’s because they don’t think it’s terrorism, just as they don’t believe U.S. troops or Jews or Christians are necessarily “innocent.”
Have you wondered why they’ve never condemned Osama bin Laden as an apostate? The al-Qaida kingpin is now dead and no longer a threat to any truly moderate Muslim. If he betrayed Islam, as some have said, why no posthumous fatwah or religious ruling declaring him an enemy of Islam?
The answer is obvious: The mass murderer is revered even inside our Muslim community. In fact, FBI agents and detectives say personal computers featuring bin Laden screen savers and other memorabilia are not uncommon in Muslim homes—even in the nation’s capital.
We are told our Muslims are patriotic. Except did you know that Muslim leaders in this country prohibit sending food and other aid to U.S. troops? The Assembly of Muslim Jurists of America has ruled it a “sin.”
Did you also know that:
- According to the U.S. government, virtually every major Muslim organization in this country is controlled by Muslims who believe “jihad is our way and death for the glory of Allah is our greatest ambition”?
- These “mainstream” Muslim groups were set up in America with millions of dollars in Saudi cash for the purpose of “destroying” America “from within”?
- Our Muslim establishment has raised millions for al-Qaida and Hamas here inside America?
- Roughly 80% of the more than 15,000 jihadist websites ID’d by the FBI operate off servers based inside the U.S.?
- “Honor killings”—murders of Muslim girls by relatives who claim the victim brought shame to the family—are on the rise in America? Just kissing a boy can trigger a justifiable homicide in Islam.
Enough with the pleasant platitudes about the “religion of peace.” Enough with the blind tolerance. It’s time to speak frankly about what we all see to be true but are afraid to say. It’s time to face up to the threat that won’t go away no matter how tightly we shut our eyes to it. And no matter how effusively we apologize to it or generously we accommodate it.
Yes, there are moderate (more precisely, passive) Muslims. There’s just no such thing as moderate Islam.
Sperry is a Hoover Institution media fellow and author of “Infiltration.”