“I do not want to be misunderstood. I am . . . not [talking] about individual Muslims.”
– Nonie Darwish; Now They Call me Infidel p.148
“History is full of the most terrible examples of what happens when governments and peoples ascribe undesirable traits to minorities, and no decent person would wish to participate in the crimes to which this ascription can give rise; yet it would also be folly to ignore reality. All that is needed, then, to deal with the present situation [our confrontation with violent Islam] is the wisdom of Solomon.”
– Anthony Daniels, M.D.; L.A. Times, July 8, 2007.
"Muslims are the first victims of Islam.”
-Ernest Renan
A MORE PERFECT RELIGION
For good and honorable reasons we Westerners want the reason for the high level of Muslim violent conflict with “the other” (non-Muslims and Muslims who dishonor Islam) to be explainable in familiar terms. We want the reasons to be the reaction of an emerging society organized by tribal custom to the assaults of modernity and change; or a consequence of socio-economic disparity; or a reaction to colonialism or “occupation”; or a response to ethnic or identity discrimination by us against them; or the understandable – and demonstrable – belief by Muslims that their culture is threatened by a corrupt culture.
And all of these reasons – and other sociological explanations – are indeed explanatory to some degree. But:
· They do not really tell us why, among the many peoples of the world affected by the above factors, so many Muslims have chosen the specific responses they have as opposed to innumerable other possible peaceable responses to the same crises and conditions.
· They do not tell us why societies dominated by Islam today – filled with intelligent and brilliant people with access to virtually unlimited amounts of capital – create next to nothing of use by the outside world.
· They do not tell us why some followers of Islam today, many of whom must be thoughtful and wonderful people, support schools in Gaza and Pakistan that teach children as young as three years old that committing suicide and mass homicide to advance Islam is beautiful in the eyes of Allah.
· They do not tell us why so many Muslims today are in self-declared wars against virtually every other religion (including their own various sects) on earth.
For all these questions, I submit that we need to look beyond bare sociological explanations.
My thesis is simple: most of us in the Western world do not understand the intensity, complexity and comprehensiveness of Islam. We believe it is a restricted religion more or less like modern Christianity where the specific requirements of human behavior and inter-personal interaction are guided by large ethical and moral principles with the details left to (non-divinely commanded) custom and secular government. Our belief is incorrect and constitutes the main part of our misunderstanding.
Jesus’s “render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s” [Matthew 22:21] is a vastly different philosophy of government than that contained in many other religions (just as Jesus’s admonitions regarding “the other” in the Good Samaritan parable is vastly different). While the Christian world has not always (often?) followed this model it remains the ideal and has become, in modernity, a generally recognized model embodied, for example, in the first right in the U.S. Bill of Rights.
This model of a religion that dismisses much of the worldly from the purview of God’s relationship with man contrasts radically and fundamentally with the model set forth in the Koran and in the sayings and reported actions of Muhammed. In the Islamic model, political sovereignty, law and cultural regulation of personal behavior rests with God alone as revealed through his Prophet – and the legal order and specific rules of human behavior are founded and ordered by divine command to be discovered in Shari’a law. In the Islamic model, the Koran and the sayings and actions of Muhammed act, in a sense, as a true, earthly, Supreme Court. “What would Allah command as revealed by his messenger Muhammed?” is not an interesting religious question, it is a question with substantial legally and culturally enforceable significance.
To those in the secularized West who are willing to think about the situation, this Koranic model seems to be an artifact of primitive history that will evolve into something different. But this interpretation misses the point entirely. Because from a very defensible and logical interpretation by Muslim scholars, the Islamic/Koranic vision is superior to the Christian vision which is not only wrong but dangerous and corrupting.
This perspective is not that of misguided terrorists or poor, uncultured, tribal Muslims living in the past. Rather, numerous leading Islamic scholars – including a large number of those who have grown up and gained tenure in prestigious universities in the west – argue with complete sincerity and impeccable logic that the Koranic vision is evidence of Islam’s profound superiority to other religions.
Take, for example, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, a highly honored professor of religion at George Washington University, author of over fifty books about Islam published in university presses in the West and honored with his own “Beacon of Knowledge” conference (GW’s most prestigious honor) in 2001. Professor Nasr and numerous other Islamic intellectuals argue that Christianity is an incomplete and inferior (to Islam) system because, unlike Islam, it offers no divinely revealed, comprehensive system for governance or societal arrangement.
Nasr notes correctly the same thing that Mana suggested, that Jesus was largely silent on matters of state and society and the nitty-gritty of interpersonal relations. More importantly, and contrasted with Muhammed, where Jesus was not silent, he taught that power was largely irrelevant to faith rather than commanding that power be acquired and used in order to control the behavior of believers and convert non-believers.
My Muslim friends agree with Roger Scruton, Professor of Philosophy and History at Princeton and numerous others that this absolute difference between Christianity and Islam as it relates to the worldly explains the profoundly smaller distinction between church and society that exists in the current Islamic world than exists within the modern Christian world. Within Islam, the very idea of a culture with a religion that fails to explicitly govern the behavior of believers or that fails to restrict the rights of non-believers is an absurdity. That Muslims live in areas outside this culture is viewed by Islam as a temporary inconvenience to be rectified at some later date by the incorporation of those areas into the “House of Islam.”
Nasr, in his academic writings, asserts (correctly) that because Christianity had no “divine legislation it had to absorb Roman law in order to become the religion of a civilization.” Therefore, he states, “in Christian civilization, law and custom governing human society does not enjoy the same sanction as the [spiritual] teachings of Christ” or the divinely ordained teachings revealed to Muhammed. To Professor Nasr and Muslims in general, this is an extraordinary weakness in Christianity – allowing for the corruption of society because so much human activity has absolutely zero direct divine admonition.
And they are, of course, quite right.
This contrast between Islam’s comprehensive and theologically more perfect system and Christianity’s minimalist and imperfect system is profound – and difficult for Westerners to fully understand. Muhammed never gave unto Caesar what was Caesar’s rather, he attempted, for understandable and sensible reasons (he was, after all, a tribal chieftain and the military leader of a band of people almost constantly at war with multiple enemies) to integrate the domain of Caesar itself – namely political, social and economic life – into an encompassing religious worldview. Had he been, say, a poor itinerant preacher imbued with a direct pipeline to God but with only a handful of followers operating in the middle of a region controlled by an all-powerful empire, he would have probably come up with a different view.
It is true that the Christian world has caused a stunning amount of bloodshed. But, as Scruton (and Nasr and numerous others, both on Christianity’s behalf and as evidence of its weakness) observes, with rare exception “throughout the course of Christian civilization we find at minimum a recognition and usually a full acknowledgement that social order must be maintained by political and cultural institutions rather than by divinely ordained religious jurisdiction.” The reason for this is clear. Except for a few guiding principles, Jesus, as befits a man with no power, was silent or profoundly elliptical on the vast majority of questions about human behavior and interaction.
Scruton[i] (and Nasr and other Muslim scholars) and many others have suggested that it is this vast and gaping void within Christianity that allowed the Reformation to begin, that played the major role in the secularization that took place in the West during the Renaissance, that allowed the Enlightenment to occur, that allowed the American experiment in limited government to begin and go forward. While these events were viewed with alarm by many fundamentalists of the day, none of these events actually threatened the core of the Jesus’s religion – a personal relationship with God for each individual – which can survive, at least theoretically, without reference to society as a whole.
THE PROBLEM FOR ISLAM
To Islam however, a Reformation would present devastating threats to its underlying social/cultural/legal framework – the core of Islam. Secularization of society within a Renaissance would be a disaster. And an Enlightenment – according to Ibn Warraq who has written eloquently about this – would effectively be the death knell of the religion. Any of these events would destroy virtually all of the major tenets of the faith. Hence, the intensity that committed Muslims fight against such events.
Sayyid Qutb, the best-known jihadist theorist and Osama bin Laden’s spiritual guide, captured this problem perfectly when he wrote: “It is not the function of Islam to compromise with the concepts of Jahiliyya [the societies of the unbelievers] which are current in the world or to co-exist in the same land together with them. Islam cannot accept any mixing with Jahiliyyah. Either Islam will remain, or Jahiliyyah; no half-half situation is possible. Command belongs to Allah, or otherwise to Jahiliyyah; Allah’s Shari’a will prevail, or else people’s base desires will prevail. The foremost duty of Islam is to depose Jahiliyyah from the leadership of man….”
Of course to us modern, secular Westerners this whole argument about the differences between ancient theologies propounded by a couple of primitive desert mystics appears quaint. And our relationships with Muslims who have incorporated large portions of the Western way of thinking about society – or who are not devout about some of the more troublesome admonitions of Islam toward “the other” – lead us to believe that the differences between the doctrines of Islam and Christianity are trivial and that the “threat” of Islam is highly overwrought and limited to a few (million?) fundamentalists – and don’t we have “fundamentalist Christians” too!?
My courageous Muslim friends at the Secular Islam Summit tell me that this belief on our part is a potentially existential mistake. They tell me that the specific teachings of Islam combined with its hyper-dominant role in the public and private spaces in Muslim society – reinforced by child-rearing and family practices that are, in effect, created and sustained by the Koranic and Hadithic teachings – have given rise to a large population of Muslims who accept Allah’s revelations to Muhammed to bring Islam to the world by force.
And what are these revelations? My Muslim friends and those published Muslim writers I trust have written (in several cases to me personally) about the significant teachings of Islam in which Allah (God himself) through revelation to his Prophet and Guide, Muhammed, commands absolutely shocking oppression and violence against “the other” – and specifically and by name, against Christians and Jews as well as against Muslims (usually women) who defile Islam. Of more concern, they say that a significant percentage of the world’s billion plus Muslims take these admonitions of the Koran and the Hadiths as the divine word of God; and worse, they say that a non-trivial percentage of that portion of believers is prepared to act on those admonitions.
And what, specifically, does Allah say -- in part -- that Muslims should do to “the other”? I do not want to create cognitive dissonance by repeating the seemingly countless and relentless specific statements of the Koran and the Hadiths admonishing Muslims to commit horrific violence and oppression against non-Muslims. But here are a few to give you the flavor:
· "Slay them wherever you find them...Idolatry is worse than carnage...Fight against them until idolatry is no more and Allah's religion reigns supreme." (Koran Surah 2:190 )
· "Fighting is obligatory for you, much as you dislike it." (Koran Surah 2:216)
· "If you should die or be slain in the cause of Allah, His forgiveness and His mercy would surely be better than all the riches..." (Koran Surah 3:156-)
· "Seek out your enemies relentlessly." (Koran Surah 4:103-)
· "Believers, take neither Jews nor Christians for your friends." (Koran Surah 5:51)
· “… smite ye above their necks and smite all their finger-tips off them. This is because they contend against Allah and his Messenger . . . (Koran Surah 8:9, 12-13)
There are numerous other statements in the Koran saying roughly the same thing. And the sayings and actions of Muhammed as reported by his first biographer – Ibn Ishaq, whose biography, therefore figures prominently in Shariah law and is held as gospel (if I can use the term) – and the Hadiths contain even more gruesome and specific commands about how and when to kill or oppress infidels and apostates – especially Jews.
A highly influential, Muslim-world famous (though not to the West of course) and extremely prolific twentieth-century Muslim philosopher Syed Abul Ala Maududi (who died in Buffalo, New York about thirty years ago in his son’s [the doctor] hospital) writes that non-Muslims (us) have “absolutely no right to power in any part of God’s earth, nor to direct the collective affairs of human beings according to their own misconceived doctrines.” If they do, “the believers would be under an obligation to do their utmost to dislodge them from political power and to make them live in subservience to the Islamic way of life.”
Maududi’s work influences a wide range of Muslim clerics, philosophers and others (al Qaeda, the Saudis, etc) today. He did not originate these ideas. They are merely restatements of Koranic passages such as 9:29, which asserts that Muslims must wield state power over Jews and Christians, exacting from them a poll tax (jizya) and making sure that they pay it “with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.” There is no concept in the Koran, Islamic tradition, or Islamic law of non-Muslims living as equals with Muslims: Muslims must be in a superior position. Again, my friends tell me that Muhammad himself was more clear on this point than on any other. He told his followers:
“Fight against those who disbelieve in Allah. Make a holy war…When you meet your enemies invite them to three courses of action. If they respond to any one of these you also accept it and withhold yourself from doing them any harm. Invite them to (accept) Islam; if they respond to you, accept it from them and desist from fighting against them…If they refuse to accept Islam, demand from them the Jizya. If they agree to pay and submit, accept it from them and hold off your hands. If they refuse to pay the tax, seek Allah’s help and fight them. (Sahih Muslim 4294)”
Lest one cite Biblical injunctions, it should be noted that these teachings are not remotely equivalent to the more gruesome admonitions of the Old Testament about those who fight against Jews. There, it is God himself who deals directly with the infidel (which should be fine with you and me since we believe that God, in this context, is a myth, so why worry) or, if Jews fight their enemies, it is in defense of their infinitesimal tribe and its minuscule homeland as opposed to the universalist offensive warfare and jihad directed by Allah through Muhammed against anyone and everyone in the world who is not a believing Muslim.
These Koranic and hadithic teachings of God directly to Muslims coupled with the intensity by which they are held, help explain:
· the innumerable “bloody borders” of Islam described by the late Harvard professor Samuel Huntington in his book Clash of Civilizations – a book recommended and given to me by Tuna. If you count the number of small, and not-so-small, bloody conflicts that Muslims are currently engaged in you’ll quickly run out of fingers and toes and limbs – metaphorically speaking;
· Islam’s extraordinary franchise on terrorism;
· Islam's continued doctrinal and actual support of slavery in at least a half-dozen countries;
· the daily fomentings on television in the Middle East by highly regarded and famous Muslim leaders praising martyrdom for young Muslims (perhaps the cruelest example was Khomeini’s sending young boys across minefields with visions of virgins in their head) and urging the killing of westerners (e.g. you and me);
· this report about a female suicide bomber recruiter in the Feb 3, 2009 NYT as reported by Commentary Magazine:
'She Had to Work Diligently'
“There's a curious omission in a New York Times report from Baghdad on the arrest of Samira Ahmed Jassim al-Azzawi, a woman who goes by the nickname "Um Huda" ("mother of believers") and who confessed to Iraqi police that she had recruited at least 28 female suicide bombers for al Qaeda: The Times reported that she had to ‘work diligently’ to persuade women to become bombers, speaking to them many times. She also appeared to confirm what many military and intelligence officials had asserted: that Jihadi insurgents prey on women in dire social and economic situations who are often suffering from emotional or psychological problems, or abuse.
“What does it mean, ‘she had to work diligently’? What the Times leaves out can be found in many other news accounts, such as this one from London's Times: ‘She has confessed to helping to organise the gang rape of young women. She would then play on the shame associated with victims of rape in Islamic societies to convince the women to become suicide bombers as their only means of escape and salvation, according to a prison interview . . . .”
Assuming the rape story is true, consider the many levels on which this is depraved. A Muslim woman arranges for Muslim men to rape Muslim women in order to shame those Muslim women into committing suicide for the purpose of murdering other Muslim men, women and children – to the applause of various Imams and other leaders in the Muslim world.
AN ACADEMIC ANALYSIS
One of the more convincing pieces of academic research supporting the argument about Islamic doctrine toward “the other” comes from physician, psychiatrist and Palestinian childhood development researcher Dr. Daphne Burdman.[ii]
She writes that Palestinian-Muslim hatred of the Jews and, by extension, the West, emanates from Koranic and Hadith injunctions that give rise to “the Muslim social and family practices that have led to highly successful indoctrination and incitement of children.”
She argues, in my opinion persuasively though I am not remotely an expert in this field as you know, that the evolution of this hatred is related to psychological processes arising from historical Arab-Muslim childrearing practices that are punitive and authoritarian and enshrined as the word of God and powerfully sustained by religious prescription. She suggests that an authoritarian upbringing (regardless of whether in the West or East), particularly when severely punitive, is associated with personality characteristics incorporating a Manichean thought process and a lack of empathy. She argues that it has been proven in numerous studies that severely dysfunctional families in the West are progenitors of particularly violent criminals: “the connection between child abuse and the eventual criminal, often violent adult is. . .well documented.” And she quotes “a consistent finding in the childhoods of extremely violent criminal recidivists . . . of severe abuse.”
She states that indoctrination into a pathological way of thinking (in her study, the numerous and varied Hadithic and Koranic injunctions to violence and rejection) of such personality types can readily orient them to extreme violence against the proposed target.
She asserts, again persuasively in my opinion (and if you read her entire study you’ll see why), that in the Palestinian world the natural family dynamic has the potential to create more of these progenitors of violence than in the West. Why, then, do these horrors not just produce criminality on an individual level as we see in the West, and why is so much Muslim aggression so collectivized in nature against “the other”? She argues that the reasons are rooted in Muslim theology and ideology that, says Burdman, has created cultural differences that, as suggested above about many things Islamic, many Westerners do not begin to grasp.
“In individualistic Western societies,” Burdman writes, “the affected individual may rebel against family and society, frequently with criminality.” But because of Arab-Mulim society’s strongly collectivist, authoritarian and patriarchal nature, the individual characteristically does not criminally act out against the mores of family and society. Instead the violence gets directed at a socially endorsed target – the “non-Muslim”, and specifically, the named targets of the Koran: Jews and infidels, e.g. the West and/or Muslims who don’t believe rightly.
DIVINE ADMONITIONS
While Palestinians are a special case, numerous Muslims and ex-Muslims have written and spoken out about the general problem of Islam’s divine admonitions to commit violence against unbelievers and those Muslims who dishonor Islam (especially women). Here are a few I have personally met, heard or read:
· Walid Shoebat and the other former Muslims heard at UCI a couple of years ago;
· Tashbih Sayyed, former director of Pakistan’s National Public Radio, a spiritual Muslim who despaired of the overweening influence of Muhammed’s sickest teachings in Muslim cultures who explained much of what I’ve written here to me at the Secular Islam Summit in 2007;
· Nonie Darwish whose father was killed in a targeted assassination by Israelis – and who has streets and schools named after him in Egypt and Gaza – who has made the remarkable transformation into a woman who promotes peace between Israel and Palestine. She confirms anecdotally and artistically all of Burdman’s observations about the profound problems that Islam creates in Muslim family life in her amazing book Now They Call Me Infidel;
· My friend Banafsheh Zand-Bonnazi, a main organizer of the Secular Islam Summit whose aging father, a film maker and journalist, has languished in an Iranian jail for what is, in effect, a ruling of apostasy;
· all the Muslim women I spoke with at the Secular Islam Summit from numerous countries who told me that a significant number of Muslim women who embrace Islam are effectively victims of a grand Stockholm syndrome;
· Parvin Darabi (whose elder sister, Homa Darabi was an American-Iranian physician who, at age 50, committed suicide in 1994 by burning herself in a public square in Tehran as a highly public protest against the Iranian government’s outrageous executions (stoning) of women who had committed adultery) whose book Rage Against the Veil discusses some of the concrete examples of extraordinary oppression of women justified by Islam;
· Seyran Ates, (a former Muslim) female lawyer whose practice is almost exclusively on behalf of battered Muslim women in Germany who talks at length on the issue in a fascinating – if difficult to stomach -- symposium entitled Murdering Women For “Honor” with three German Islamic researchers.[iii]
· Serap Cileli the title of whose book We're Your Daughters, Not Your Honor pretty much suggests her thesis though not the unbelievable and obscene problems that she documents in Europe’s Muslim communities and their extensions back to the Muslim world.
The last two women, were part of a lengthy New York Times Magazine piece published on December 4, 2005 on the epidemic of female honor killings among Muslim families in Europe.[iv]
Theses courageous Muslims and former Muslims inform us that Muslims – women and children directly, men indirectly – themselves are by far and away the most numerous and harmed victims of the violence engendered by this belief system.
SO WHY SHOULD WE THINK ABOUT THIS?
Aside from simply wanting to avoid unpleasant subjects, I suspect that the squeamishness many Westerners face in acknowledging that mainstream Islam itself counsels intolerance and violence is the sense that full fledged criticism could make things worse!
We observe the striking violence that arose in response to the Danish cartoons. We conclude that by ignoring or downplaying the facts about Islam, we might help so-called “moderate” Muslims in what we believe is their efforts to reduce the conflict between Islam and the West.
But if you think about the problem as a realist, these beliefs by Westerners are clearly misplaced. And there are at least four reasons we should really think and talk and act more clearly with regard to what is going on in the Muslim world.
First, as Robert Spencer, author of a biography of Muhammed has pointed out, Islamic jihadists are already well aware of the most violent teachings of Islam and use them to justify the most gruesome behaviors. Avoiding discussing these teachings will hardly make them go away or reduce the Jihadists reliance on them.
Second – a point you have made by implication – if peaceful Muslims really abhor jihadism and the other intolerant aspects of Islam, they should have no reason to object to critical presentations of the elements of Islam that foster violence and intolerance. In fact, they should welcome them. You can’t reform what you won’t admit needs reforming. If identifying and objecting to the elements of Islam that jihadists use to justify their actions will be enough to drive peaceful Muslims away from reform, then how committed could they really have been to peace and moderation in the first place?
Third, the problem is real and could create hitherto unknown problems of mistrust in the larger society. Anthony Daniels, M.D., a psychiatrist in the British Health Service (quoted at the outset of this piece) – whose practice for the past twenty years was in part with British Muslim women seeking to get away from their religion – wrote in the L.A. Times on July 8, 2007 in the wake of the then latest virtually unreported atrocity (the bombing of the Glasgow airport, only the couple of jihadis died so why bother reporting it) in the U.K. (I have a copy if you want it):
“Mistrust of Muslims in Britain has developed quite quickly and could develop much further. . . . One of the most sinister effects of the efforts of the bombers and would-be bombers is that they have undermined trust completely. This is because those under investigation turn out not to be cranks or marginals but people who are either well-integrated into society, superficially at least, or who have good career prospects. They are not the ignorant and uneducated; quite the reverse. Seven people detained in the latest plot worked in the medical profession. . . .”
Daniels’ piece raises the most important reason we should think about and talk about these things -- and is another reason you raise explicitly: there are almost certainly many Muslims and ex-Muslims who understand and abhor the violence and intolerance of their religion. But they are frightened to say so. Their culture contains violent young men who might very well kill them if they speak out.
The unwillingness of Western intellectuals to talk about this makes those Muslims who might speak out against Islamic violence conclude they are not supported by intellectuals, the media and politicians in the West. The accepted story of Islam amongst Western academics, journalists, intellectuals and politicians on all sides of the political aisle! is that Islamic doctrine is not the problem, a very tiny minority of really bad guys who say they are Muslim but who aren’t really Muslims are the problem. So let’s not acknowledge the arguments of the brave people who, at the risk of their own lives, oppose the bad guys, rather, lets make nice.
One of the great ironies of our situation is that it is courageous former Muslims like Ibn Warraq, Hossain Salahuddin, Magdi Allam, Nonie Darwish, Ayaan Hirsi Ali among many, many others who have risen to the defense of the West (e.g. Christian-informed culture) rather than the people – like us – who should be its natural defenders. These former Muslims have adopted an uncompromising stance in favor of Western civilization with its personalized religion, secular guarantee of individual liberties and its secular-based constitutional legal framework over its Islamic rival. It speaks volumes to our predicament when the tolerance and intellectual ideas of the West are upheld by those who cross over from the opposing camp rather than by those who owe their freedom to write and act to the very life and world they seem unwilling to defend even at little risk to themselves.
It seems to me that that a kind of ideological insanity has taken hold of the Western intellectual sensibility with respect to Islam. Our intellectual elites blame conservative America (or, by implication, Israel) for our problems with Islam. But it seems to me we/they have it the wrong way around. The problem is self-induced, namely, the liberal West’s sophistry of neocolonial guilt and its belief in the possibility of brotherly co-existence with implacable adversaries. I suspect that the truth is we have grown disingenuous and afraid. We are joyfully lying to ourselves. Thus, I suspect that these “intellectuals” are intellectually lazy – or perhaps they are just scared of getting their heads cut off – or far, far, far worse in their world – being called a name: Islamophobes.
SO WHAT?
Of course Islam is the religion of tribal societies challenged by modernity. But, there are other tribal societies challenged by modernity that do not adopt the specific actions that Muslims adopt. Malawi, to pick a country at random, is a tribal country challenged by every single thing that Muslim-majority countries are challenged by and more – yet no one there is calling for – or actually committing – the murder of westerners or infidels or anyone else on a mass scale.
I submit, it is the embrace of the specific teachings of Islam as handed down and effectively enforced at the childhood level that makes Islamic societies susceptible to the specific words of Allah as provided by Mohammed (as Ibn Warraq said to me: “words drenched in blood and violence”) as their guide.
And, I submit, that it is these divine words and the family and societal structures they sustain that justifies and promotes violence, subjugation and rejection as against “the other” over innumerable other more peaceable and humane options available.
And, I submit, that it is important to acknowledge the truth of the above because there are millions of victims of this belief trapped within it and there are many, many thousands of brave Muslims who have escaped from it who are fighting at risk of their own lives to change it – for the benefit of you and me and our children (grandchildren?).
And, finally, I submit that because there are numerous secularized Muslims in America whom you and I meet on a daily basis and who have become our friends and who, no doubt, are the best people you could know, and who love their children more than they hate the Jews (or perhaps who don’t hate Jews at all), in no way disproves this thesis. They escaped. Their co-religionists are still trapped.
[i] Scruton makes the point that the protection of minorities, free thinkers and dissenters as equal citizens “requires secular government” which requires a tolerance of others within the reigning cultural values. Only a state that has as an underlying value (even if sometimes overlooked in practice) a tolerance of “the other” can allow people of differing religions to live in harmony as opposed to “dhimmitude” (e.g. the second class citizenship of non-Muslims in Islamic lands). Freedom of conscience can only be secured where one is free to change his religion or have no religion at all without incurring a severe legal penalty – such as death.
[ii] You can read her paper at:
http://www.jcpa.org/JCPA/Templates/ShowPage.asp?DRIT=3&DBID=1&LNGID=1&TMID=111&FID=253&PID=0&IID=1637&TTL=Hatred_of_the_Jews_as_a_Psychological_Phenomenon_in_Palestinian_Society
or I can give you my copy.
[iii] You can read the transcript here:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=71CE82DB-0E14-4178-9239-35ABC1DFFD4F
or you can read my copy.
[iv] You can read their stories here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/04/magazine/04berlin.html?pagewanted=2&ei=5090&en=2a16b54522cbc21d&ex=1291352400&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss
or I can give you my copy.
