2010 and beyond |
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How to Make Islam Respectable
by Mark
Tapson 26 December 2010 |
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Copied here on 10 Jan. 2011
Source: NEWSREALBLOG |
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Regardless
of whether one subscribes to the notion of a clash
of civilizations, I think we can all agree that relations between “the
Islamic world” and “the West,” however one defines those labels, are, well,
strained.
President Obama was elected at least partly because, with childhood roots
in Muslim Indonesia and an Arabic middle name no one was allowed to mention
until after the election, the Left believed him to be the perfect candidate
to heal that rift. When he wasn’t healing the racial divide, America’s
reputation abroad, and the
planet, that is.
So right out of the gate, Obama made
his first order of business an
appearance on al-Arabiya TV, in which he made seven references to “respecting”
the Muslim world, his flashing neon semaphore to them that he was no imperialist
exploiter like his predecessor (Daniel
Pipes notes here how common a motif the word “respect” was for Obama,
ironically so for a man who commands none either at home or abroad). Then
it was on to a
self-important speech from Cairo, in which Obama flattered the Islamic
world so effusively that one wondered if he was angling to ask it to the
prom. And of course, who can forget his
show of contemptible dhimmitude – I mean deep respect – to the Saudi
King?
His efforts haven’t exactly mellowed
the clash of civilizations into a Kumbiya campfire circle. And yet Obama
was at least theoretically on the right track. Because a
recent poll by the new Abu Dhabi Gallup Centre reports that a large
majority of Muslims say that the best way for the West to improve relations
with them is to “respect Islam.” But the West has made every effort at
“Muslim outreach” and bent over backwards to make social and cultural concessions
to its Muslim citizens. President Bush himself expressed a distasteful
degree of deference toward Islam, and Obama far surpassed even that; so
how much more respect will it take to make the Muslim world feel sufficiently
respected?
The issue needs to be reframed. Since
even our most gushing genuflection seems to have accomplished nothing except
to incite further expectations of respect, it’s time for the West to take
charge of this dialogue on our terms. We in the West – apart from
Obama and his sycophants – are accustomed to the understanding that respect
cannot simply be expected, much less demanded; it has to be earned.
So now the question becomes, what must that majority of Muslims who want
respect for their religion do to earn it? How can they make their religion,
well, more respectable?
What follows are ten suggestions
(some of which mirror Robert Spencer’s
five
ways to end Islamophobia) for those Muslims cited in the Gallup poll
to take to heart – those who, like Rodney Dangerfield, lament that they
can’t get no respect. |
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First
up: Stop.Attacking.Us!
Number 10. Stop waging
violent jihad.
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Let’s get the most obvious one out
of the way first. If Muslims are tired of having the words “Muslim” and
“terrorist” linked (on those rare occasions when our leaders and media
actually do link them), a painfully obvious solution leaps to mind:
stop committing acts of terrorism in the name of Allah and his prophet.
Ending atrocities against innocents
and non-combatants (as we define them, not as the Islamists define
them), and striving to actually live up to Islam’s Religion of Peace™ label,
would be a nice good-faith gesture to lay the groundwork for better relations
with the West. It’s certainly the most urgent step to take, and the most
necessary – without it, none of my subsequent suggestions will matter.
For Muslims who already are not
plotting or committing acts of terrorism, confront your co-religionists
who are and nip them in the bud. After all, as it’s often pointed
out, they constitute a TME – Tiny Minority of Extremists™ - that should
easily be overwhelmed by the moderates’ superior numbers. At the very least,
report the TME to the authorities… |
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Which
brings us to number nine: The police are your (and our) friends.
Number 9. Cooperate
to the fullest with law enforcement to
root out the terrorists
in your midst.
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A New
York Times article last week noted that Rep. Peter T. King of New
York, who will become the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee,
intended to look into a lack of cooperation in terror investigations:
When I meet with law enforcement, they
are constantly telling me how little cooperation they get from Muslim leaders. |
He cited the case of Najibullah
Zazi, arrested last year for plotting to bomb the New York subway system.
A Queens imam had
tipped off Zazi that he was the target of a terror investigation.
Salam
al-Marayati, the executive director of MPAC, the Muslim
Public Affairs Council*, “expressed deep concern” that
[King] basically wants to treat the
Muslim-American community as a suspect community. |
I’m sorry to break this news to Mr.
Marayati, but the Muslim-American community
is suspect – not because
of bigotry or Islamophobia, but because the terrorists and radicals in
its midst have made it so. Resisting cooperation with law enforcement
naturally lends even more weight to that suspicion. It doesn’t help when
Muslim community leaders cry “civil rights violations” while claiming that
people like King are
undermining the relationship that Muslim
leaders had sought to build with law enforcement officials around the country. |
Relationship? Law enforcement officials
nationwide are complaining that there isn’t one. Short of infiltration,
which Muslim leaders also oppose, law enforcement has no way of
knowing what radical activities may or may not be going on inside the mosques.
And that brings us to our next recommendation… |
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Next:
Mosques are places of worship, not terrorist recruitment centers.
*Check out the
Investigative Project on Terrorism’s devastating piece about
MPAC’s unfitness to serve as a liaison
with law enforcement.
Number 8. De-radicalize
your mosques
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Estimates
are that upwards of 80% of all mosques in the United States are controlled
by the fundamentalist Wahhabi strain of Islam promoted by the Saudis’ bottomless
funding. Preaching Jew-hatred, the supremacy of sharia, and the downfall
of democracy isn’t likely to win us over. I’m just sayin’.
Now former Iranian Revolutionary Guard
Reza
Khalili reports that Iran is using mosques and Islamic cultural centers
in Europe and the U.S. as centers of terrorist recruitment and planning:
They recruit, they train, they sell
the ideology of martyrdom, and many, many are guided and connected to terrorist
groups. |
Robert
Spencer comments that
If Muslims don’t want their mosques
infiltrated or investigated by non-Muslim law enforcement, then it’s up
to them to clean house and rid themselves of the elements – including the
imams themselves – who might be fomenting and plotting subversion, hatred,
and terror. |
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Next:
Stop.Oppressing.Women!
Seditious
Number 7. Start respecting
the rights of women
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One of the West’s bigger bones to pick
with the Muslim world is the latter’s (mis)treatment of women, which rockstar
scholar Reza Aslanangrily
insists is a non-issue:
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If you’re somehow arguing that Islam
has a different conception of women in society than Europe does, it’s just
wrong. |
Women such as Ayaan
Hirsi Ali and my friends Brigitte
Gabriel and Nonie Darwish beg to differ.* Here is how Nonie’s must-read
book Cruel
and Usual Punishment begins:
For the first thirty years of my life,
I lived as a virtual slave. I was a bird in a cage; a second-class citizen
who had to watch what I said even to my close friends. Under Islamic law
I had to live in a gender-segregated environment and always be aware that
the legal and social penalty for “sin” could end my life. This is what
it is to live as a woman under Sharia law. |
Last week it
was reported that each year an estimated 600,000 lashes are dealt to
women in the sharia wonderland known as the Sudan, for such shockingly
heinous crimes against humanity as wearing pants. Women in sharia-controlled
Saudi Arabia must conceal their seductive charms in black Hefty bags and
veil their faces in public, of course; but now even that’s not enough for
the Saudi “Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice.”
A Commission
spokesman announced that
The Commission members have orders
to tell any women in public to cover up her face if they find that her
eyes are seditious. |
Ah, seditious eyes – potentially more
threatening than seditious bare ankles, although the Commission doesn’t
explain what constitutes “seditious.” No word either on how the Commission
feels about “Bette
Davis Eyes.”
* Not that Aslan will listen. In 2009
I
attended an event at which Aslan was speaking, and Nonie Darwish rose
in the audience to challenge him about the condition of women under sharia.
After conceding one small point, he said, “Everything else you said is
wrong” – and turned away from her, ending their discussion. |
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Next:
Stop persecuting and discriminating against Christians and Jews.
Number 6. Start reciprocating
religious tolerance
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There is no more religiously tolerant
country in history than the contemporary United States, although you’d
never know this from the constant wailing refrain of “Islamophobia!” from
Islamists and their leftist sympathizers. The notion of a tsunami of Muslim-hatred
washing over the nation is a shameful PC myth, as a November “hate
crimes” report reveals. Muslim-Americans enjoy as much, if not more,
religious freedom here as anyone else.
By stark contrast, no Bibles, churches,
temples or synagogues are allowed on the Arabian peninsula, the home of
Islam. Non-Muslims are not even allowed in Mecca. Under
Islamic rule elsewhere, no new non-Muslim houses of worship are allowed
to be built, and existing ones may not be repaired.
Then there is the violent persecution
of non-Muslims. My friend Mark Durie, the brilliant scholar of Islam, notes
in his The
Third Choice that
The human rights situation of Christians
in many Muslim countries has been getting steadily worse over the past
half-century. This deterioration has been directly linked to the worldwide
Islamic revival and reinstatement of sharia law. |
A
report last month at the Hudson New York think tank states that
Christians in Arab countries are no
longer being persecuted; they are now being slaughtered and driven out
of their homes and lands. |
And then, of course, there’s the Koran-mandated
Jew-hatred and Muhammad’s
command of death for those who leave Islam.
Muslims want us to respect Islam? End
the persecution of non-Muslims, reciprocate religious tolerance, and abolish
the death penalty for “apostasy.” Then we’ll talk. |
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Next:
Say no to barbarism.
Number 5. Update your
penal code from “medieval.”
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While our own legal system has a far-from-perfect
record of dispensing justice, and punishment can be harsh (that’s why it’s
called “punishment”), sharia is the very definition of draconian. This
“cruel and usual punishment,” as Ms. Darwish calls it, includes lashings
for drinking alcohol, amputations for thievery, beheadings for more serious
crimes, being hanged or thrown from a roof for homosexuality, and – the
real gem in sharia’s crown – the
stoning of adulterers.
This last method of execution requires
that the stones used be neither too small to do serious damage nor large
enough to cause a quick death. So it’s clear that the ordeal is intended
to be as excruciating and prolonged as possible.
Say what you will about our own electric
chairs and firing squads, which we’ve largely abandoned in our search for
the most humane method of execution (itself reserved for only the most
heinous of crimes); sharia’s punishments are characterized by barbarism.
News flash: barbarity doesn’t generate respect. |
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Next:
We truly, seriously do not like Rage Boy.
Number 4. Let the whole
cartoon thing go.
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Speaking of barbarity…
This would seem to be a no-brainer,
but apparently it bears explaining: “taking offense” is not a license for
frenzied rioting, murder and mayhem. The most notable example is the worldwide
rage over a set of cartoons published years ago in a Danish newspaper,
which no one outside of that tiny country would have seen if not for the
cartoons’ shrewd distribution by Islamists themselves eager to unite the
ummah, the worldwide Muslim community, against the blasphemous West. That
murderous outrage is ongoing: Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard was recently
set
upon in his home by a Muslim attacker seeking vengeance.
Similar, more recent examples include
the threats to kill the South Park creators for their
tame, satirical, animated take on that same hypersensitive hysteria,
and the death fatwa issued against cartoonist Molly Norris, who
has since “gone ghost” in fear for her life. Not to mention the death
threats, explicit or implied, over innumerable
other things that offend many Muslims.
Apologists like to point out that many
Muslims take disrespect toward Islam, Allah, and his prophet very seriously,
and they suggest we tiptoe respectfully around that religious sensibility.
I would like to point out that such apologists are cowards, appeasers,
and religious hypocrites, and remind them that violent lunacy is not deserving
of respect. And this segues into suggestion number three… |
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Next:
Leave free speech alone!
Number 3. Stop trying
to curtail our free speech
and to criminalize
Islamophobia.
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From the Salman Rushdie affair to Molly
Norris’ sad vanishing, the list of Islamist assaults on our precious freedom
of speech is far too long to do justice to here. And the West has too often
responded not with firm resistance, but by preemptively censoring itself:
witness Random
House rescinding its offer to publish The Jewel of Medina, a
novel that an academic warned might outrage Muslims, or the Yale
University Press publishing a book about the Danish cartoons that will
not
include the cartoons themselves.
Islamists know that the key to winning
the war of ideas against the West is to keep hammering away at our freedom
of speech – our right and our ability to critique and denounce a totalitarian
ideology that is hell-bent on bringing the West under its heel. Criminalizing
blasphemy, defamation of religion, “Islamophobia” and the like will put
us at a mortal disadvantage. Indeed, the world’s largest Islamic assembly,
the Organization of the Islamic Conference, has made the criminalization
of religious defamation, specifically “Islamophobia,” its number one
priority – and Obama
has sent a sympathetic envoy to that party to help them achieve it.
To earn our respect and the beginning
of trust, you must embrace, not threaten, our freedoms and our values. |
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Next:
Kick the Muslim Brotherhood to the curb.
Number 2. Stop letting
the Muslim Brotherhood speak for you
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For decades now, the Muslim
Brotherhood has shrewdly worked to establish its subversive presence
in America through a complex network of front groups and “legacy groups”
which includes virtually every recognized Muslim organization in this country.
Over time these groups – most notably the ubiquitous CAIR, the Council
on American Islamic Relations – have gradually muscled their way into position
as the representative voice of all Muslim-Americans.
Maddeningly, our government, law enforcement,
and media have taken the bait and embraced these groups unquestioningly
– blindly engaging an enemy that seeks the “elimination of Western civilization,”
as an internal Brotherhood document proclaims. Such Islamist groups completely
control this country’s dialogue with our Muslim citizens.
Americans have been asking since 9/11/01:
Where are the moderate Muslims? Why
have they not risen up en masse to show that they stand with us against
the extremists? |
For Muslims to earn the respect of the
West, those moderates in America and around the world must prove first
that they exist – by uniting, organizing, promoting themselves not
only to the media and government but to the public, and fearlessly confronting
the deeply-rooted network of Brotherhood groups. They must speak out forcefully
in unqualified solidarity with the West against their co-religionists’
terrorism and stealth agenda. |
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Next:
We
are not to blame for your problems. You are.
Number 1. Start taking
responsibility for your own
destiny instead of
blaming the West
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In contrast to Western notions of self-reliance
and free will, the Arab world suffers from what Hugh
Fitzgerald calls an “Islam-inculcated inshallah-fatalism” characterized
by the habitual mantra “Inshallah,” or “If God wills it,” used in reference
to virtually every action. As Fitzgerald writes,
Why try very hard when, in the end,
every fiber in your individual or collective being tells you that, in the
end, it’s all up to Allah, and he will intervene, quite inexplicably and
suddenly, whenever he wants? |
This is fatal to cultural, technological,
scientific, economic, and spiritual development. Without the culturally
ingrained confidence that human beings can, through their own decisions
and choices, impact the external world and to a large extent steer their
own destinies, a people is doomed to stagnation, jealousy, and parasitism,
and tends to look outside themselves to affix blame.
To earn the West’s respect, such Muslims
must stop shrugging “inshallah” about all things great and small, stop
laying the blame for their conditions on conspiracy theories of Western
imperialism and thievery, and actively take responsibility for a better
future and a peaceful, shared destiny with the West. |
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Mark
Tapson writes about the intersection of Hollywood and terrorism for Andrew
Breitbart's Big Hollywood and Big Peace, David Horowitz's Front Page and
NewsReal, Pajamas Media, the Investigative Project for Terrorism, and elsewhere.
He was the writer’s assistant and researcher for Cyrus Nowrasteh on, among
other projects, "The Stoning of Soraya M." and the controversial miniseries
"The Path to 9/11." Mark is currently co-writing a documentary for renowned
terrorism expert Steven Emerson. |
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