Following the July 7 London bombings Muslims leaders in the West
were quick to denounce the attacks as un-Islamic. Nearly all of the
denunciations carried the now-familiar qualifier that no matter how
unjustly Muslims are treated, no matter how persecuted they might
be nothing justifies blowing apart innocent people. This qualifier
conveniently returned partial responsibility to the British
people.
In other words, the most moderate voices in European and
American Islam partly fault the British people for the subway
bombings. It has always been thus. After Muslim terrorists last
year murdered 344 children and teachers at a middle school in
Beslan, Russia, the British Muslim columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown
had the audacity (and the freedom) to write: “Much as it infuriates
my detractors, I can even make myself imagine the rage and mental
state of young suicide bombers brutalized by political oppression.”
No matter that the “oppressors” were not the innocent school
children that were butchered. Ms. Alibhai-Brown had no trouble
pinning the atrocity on the victims.
Moderate Muslims were so slow to speak out against the 9/11
terror attacks that one mortified Harvard professor, Ahmed
al-Rahim, founded the American Islamic Congress in order to voice
his disapproval of Islamic violence: “The mainstream, official
voice of Islam in America wasn’t forceful enough in condemning the
violence and the acts of terror on 9/11,” Dr. al-Rahim told Fox
News. “There was some hesitancy, and there was more concern with
hate crimes against Muslims, which I think were relatively low, and
there was more focus on that than actually looking at the violence
and the hate speech that has been committed in the name of
Islam.”
Moderate Muslims seem to have picked up the practice of blaming
the victims from the American left. In a recent commentary in the
New York Times, columnist Thomas Friedman predictably
blamed Muslim terror on Judeo-Christian racism: “Europe is not a
melting pot and has never adequately integrated its Muslim
minorities, making them easy prey for peddlers of a new jihadist
identity.” That explains it.
EVEN THE BRITS ARE blaming themselves. Well, maybe not themselves
as much as their leaders. Joan “Islam is a religion of peace”
McAlpine, an editor for one Scottish newspaper, quotes Tony Blair
saying: “In the end, this can only be taken on and defeated by the
[Muslim] community itself.” Ms. McAlpine adamently objects to this
patently unfair requirement of Muslims to police their own
community: “By doing this [Blair] put the onus on Muslims to defeat
terror, handily absolving himself of all responsibility.”
Complicating matters is the fact that too many moderate Muslims
are in denial regarding the root causes of Islamic terror. One
British Muslim MP suggested the terrorists are driven not by
religious zealotry so much as “feelings of isolation and
disaffection, the political anger at what they see as the double
standards of the West in relation to international Muslim areas of
conflict.”
Sorry, but this is not what motivated Mohammed Bouyeri, a
27-year-old Dutch-Moroccan national, and murderer of Theo van Gogh.
He’s confessed to shooting the Dutch filmmaker six times and
slitting his throat before plunging a dagger into his heart. Here
in his own eloquent words is Mr. Bouyeri’s defense:
“I take complete responsibility for my actions. I acted purely
in the name of my religion… I can assure you that one day, should
I be set free, I would do the same, exactly the same.”
Religion, not politics. Today European mosques
teem with imams, financed by Saudi Arabian oil sheiks, who preach
jihad, and where moderate voices are all but shut out. Hizb
ut-Tahrir, a militant Islamic youth group banned in Germany and
Holland, freely spreads its message of hate outside British
mosques. The British government likewise tolerates Al-Muhajiroun,
another Islamist hate group that preaches violence. “Moderate”
Muslim Council of Britain’s spokesman Dr Azzam Tamimi, a regular
guest on the BBC, declared last year that he was prepared to carry
out a suicide bombing in Israel. And that’s only scratching the
surface. In the past decade, notes Hebrew University of Jerusalem
academic Robert S. Wistrich, “the UK’s undisputed political,
economic, and cultural center has also become a major world center
of political Islam and anti-Semitic, anti-Israel, and anti-American
activism.”
Those “moderates” who have denounced terror seem to be speaking
out not because they genuinely oppose the end results of the
bombers (whether they renounce the end ideals remains unclear), but
because it is in their security interests to do so. Writing in the
Financial Times this week, Shahid Malik, MP for Dewsbury,
admitted that “the stakes are high and the choice is stark: either
we confront the voices of evil, or we sit back and allow wider
British society to regard us as a community that condones such
evil.”
THE CONFUSION OF THE MODERATES’ position is expressed in all its
usual muddled logic by Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong,
who told Radio Singapore that the reason “moderate Muslims are
reluctant to condemn and disown extremists is the wide gap that
separates the US from the Muslim world. The sources of this Muslim
anger are historical and complex, but they have been accentuated in
recent years by Muslim perceptions of American unilateralism and
hostility to their faith.”
What’s interesting about this ludicrous statement is that Prime
Minister Loong freely admits that moderates are reluctant to
condemn terrorism, even while he is unable to articulate
specifically why Muslims are so angry at the West (complex and
historical reasons) or why Muslims believe the West to be hostile
to their faith, when the exact opposite is true. Columnist Mark
Steyn believes the so-called moderates simply lack nerve: “It
requires great courage to be a dissenting Muslim in communities
dominated by heavy-handed imams and lobby groups that function
effectively as thought-police.” But I doubt it is courage that
moderate Muslims lack, as much as will.
Should the West expect moderate Muslims to go beyond qualified
denunciations of terror? Don’t be the trailer money on it. Most
seem more interested in averting (an almost nonexistent)
Islamophobia than stopping suicide bombers. Anyway, the moderates
and the terrorists are basically in agreement on everything but the
means to the end. In a recent column the Washington Post’s
Charles Krauthammer asked the long-overdue question: “Where are the
fatwas issued against Osama bin Laden? Where are the
denunciations of the very idea of suicide bombing?” Where
indeed?
The Muslim Council of Britain may denounce terrorism, but when
will it repudiate the Islamic obligation to institute global Sharia
law, or repudiate the goals of the jihadists who seek the return of
the Caliphate and a one-world Muslim community? To no one’s
surprise the MCB boycotted last January’s Holocaust remembrance in
Britain. Worse, MCB Secretary General Iqbal Sacranie has been
linked to Chowdhury Mueen-Uddin, former chairman of Muslim Aid
(slogan: “serving humanity”) and alleged war criminal “instrumental
in plotting the assassinations of intellectuals, journalists and
students during the 1971 Liberation War in East Pakistan (now
Bangladesh),” notes Chris Blackburn, a counter-terrorism
expert.
Terrorism is not just a problem for the infidel; it is a problem
within the Muslim community as well. In the midst of this fog of
unreason and religious fanaticism, one thing seems clear: the U.S.
and Britain cannot successfully fight terror if moderate Muslims
continue to sit the war out.
