Easter 2007

I believe the West’s rejection of Christianity is complicating our ability to put Islam in proper perspective. Bernard Lewis’ correctly naming Christianity and Islam “exclusive” in that they claim to have received “God's final message to humanity” is part of the picture. The West has, of course, knocked Christianity off its “exclusive” pedestal. That’s part of the story. The secularization of the West is so recent, so fresh (in 1955, I visited a Spain and Italy politically and culturally very much under the Church’s thumb) that intellectuals, understandably, are still fighting yesterday’s war. To the elite, it’s still about being tolerant and understanding of those whose views differ from the Church’s, including Islamic terrorists.

Meanwhile, Islam’s shadow grows larger every day. Take it from Muslim Tawfik Hamid, a onetime member of the Islamist terrorist group Jemaah Islamiya, now a medical doctor and Muslim reformer. He writes:

there is much that is clearly wrong with the Islamic world. Women are stoned to death and undergo clitorectomies. Gays hang from the gallows under the approving eyes of the proponents of Shariah, the legal code of Islam. Sunni and Shia massacre each other daily in Iraq. Palestinian mothers teach 3-year-old boys and girls the ideal of martyrdom. [Yet] the non-Muslim priests of enlightenment in the West have come, actively and passively, to the Islamists' defense.

. . . I know firsthand that the inhumane teaching in Islamist ideology can transform a young, benevolent mind into that of a terrorist. . . the main tap root has a name--Salafism, or Salafi Islam, a violent, ultra-conservative version of the religion.

It is vital to grasp that traditional and even mainstream Islamic teaching accepts and promotes violence. Shariah, for example, allows apostates to be killed, permits beating women to discipline them, seeks to subjugate non-Muslims to Islam as dhimmis and justifies declaring war to do so. It exhorts good Muslims to exterminate the Jews before the "end of days." The near deafening silence of the Muslim majority against these barbaric practices is evidence enough that there is something fundamentally wrong.

. . . Political correctness among Westerners obstructs unambiguous criticism of Shariah's inhumanity. They find socioeconomic or political excuses for Islamist terrorism such as poverty, colonialism, discrimination or the existence of Israel. What incentive is there for Muslims to demand reform when Western "progressives" pave the way for Islamist barbarity?

. . . Americans demonstrate against the war in Iraq, yet decline to demonstrate against the terrorists who kidnap innocent people and behead them. Similarly, after the Madrid train bombings, millions of Spanish citizens demonstrated against their separatist organization, ETA. But once the demonstrators realized that Muslims were behind the terror attacks they suspended the demonstrations. This example sent a message to radical Islamists to continue their violent methods.

Western appease[rs] need to . . . awaken to the inhumane policies and practices of Islamists around the world. They need to realize that Islamism spells the death of liberal values.