The Mod Squad

Så har Mark Steyn gjort det igen!

Ja, jeg bliver ved med at referere til ham, men for dælen da, han er skarp.

Last month, during the Vatican’s Easter vigil, Magdi Allam, the deputy editor of Corriere della Sera, converted from Islam to Catholicism. And not for the first time I was reminded of an old joke I modified for America Alone:

A ten-dollar bill is in the center of the crossroads. To the north, there’s Santa Claus. To the west, the Tooth Fairy. To the east, a radical Muslim. To the south, a moderate Muslim. Who reaches the ten-dollar bill first?

Answer: The radical Muslim. All the others are mythical creatures.

Signor Allam is merely the latest mythical “moderate Muslim”. There are, to be sure, millions of Muslims who just want to get on with their lives, raise their families, do their jobs, get a nice house in the suburbs, and practice as much or as little Islam as they can get away with. But there is no “moderate Islam” to provide any institutional support for such individual Muslim moderation, and there is an acute shortage of western Muslims who can plausibly demonstrate to their coreligionists a viable balance between Islam and the western world, and who can act as a counterweight both to the explicitly jihadist radicals and to the lavishly endowed Muslim lobby groups who more discreetly share their aims. Magdi Allam was a key figure in the “Secular Islam” summit held in Florida a year ago, and one of several prominent signatories of the “St Petersburg Declaration” issued at its conclusion. He was by that point being reviled by Tariq Ramadan as a Copt – ie, a Christian – which wasn’t true: On the eve of his 40th birthday, he accompanied his mother on pilgrimage to Mecca. Yet he has now, and very publicly, found Christ, and so retrospectively confirmed Tariq Ramadan’s point – that Magdi Allam was never a credible model for 21st century Islam.

And so it goes. Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a phenomenally brave woman but she is not a “moderate Muslim”: she is an atheist. Irshad Manji is a brilliant dissecter of Islam’s pathologies but she is not a “moderate Muslim”: she is a lesbian and, thus, to almost all her co-religionists, cannot be any kind of Muslim. Dr Wafa Sultan is the Californian psychiatrist who at huge personal risk intellectually clobbered an A-list Sunni scholar live on Al Jazeera, crushed every one of his arguments, and yet nevertheless lost. Why? Here’s the answer:

“I am not a Christian, a Muslim, or a Jew,” Dr Sultan told her interrogator. “I am a secular human being who does not believe in the supernatural…”

“If you are a heretic,” scoffed Dr Ibrahim al-Khouli, “there is no point in rebuking you, since you have blasphemed against Islam, the Prophet, and the Koran.”

(...)
What the west calls “moderate Muslims”, Islam regards as apostates. Sometimes, as with Dr Sultan, they’re atheist apostates; sometimes, as with Miss Manji, they’re lesbian apostates; and sometimes, as with Magdi Allam, they’re Christian apostates. To Islam, it doesn’t matter which branch of apostasy you opt for: As the Prophet Mohammed puts it, “Whoever changes his religion, kill him.” All four principal schools of Islamic jurisprudence agree. So do the 36 per cent of young Muslims in Britain who believe apostasy should be punished by death.

Og i den hjemlige andedam? Tja, der er naturligvis Naser Khader, men som Ahmed Akari så smagfuldt spøgte, så kommer der nok nogle og sprænger ham i luften. Er der andre selvproklamerede muslimer, der har fordømt mord og terror uden det berømte lille "men" til at indlede den uundgåelige bisætning?

Jeg mindes ikke umiddelbart nogle, men jeg kan naturligvis tage fejl. I så fald hører jeg gerne fra dem!


Update: Og ganske apropos udgiver Hodja denne video:



Moderate Muslimer? ... Ja? ... Hallo? ... Is there anybody out there?