Moderate Islam is Our New Religion

Sultan Knish ^ | 9/3/2014 | Daniel Greenfield

[markomalley]

I have been searching for moderate Islam since September 11 and just like a lost sock in the dryer, it was in the last place I expected it to be.

There is no moderate Islam in the mosques or in Mecca. You won’t find it in the Koran or the Hadiths. If you want to find moderate Islam, browse the newspaper editorials after a terrorist attack or take a course on Islamic religion taught by a Unitarian Sociologist wearing fake native jewelry.

You can’t find a moderate Islam in Saudi Arabia or Iran, but you can find it in countless network news specials, articles and books about the two homelands of their respective brands of Islam.

You won’t find the fabled land of moderate Muslims in the east. You won’t even find it in the west. Like all myths it exists in the imagination of those who tell the stories. You won’t find a moderate Islam in the Koran, but you will find it in countless Western books about Islam.

Moderate Islam isn’t what most Muslims believe. It’s what most liberals believe that Muslims believe.

The new multicultural theology of the West is moderate Islam. Moderate Islam is the perfect religion for a secular age since it isn’t a religion at all.

Take Islam, turn it inside out and you have moderate Islam. Take a Muslim who hasn’t been inside a mosque in a year, who can name the entire starting lineup of the San Diego Chargers, but can’t name Mohammed’s companions and you have a moderate Muslim. Or more accurately, a secular Muslim.

An early generation of Western leaders sought the affirmation of their national destinies in the divine. This generation of Western leaders seeks the affirmation of their secular liberalism in a moderate Islam.

Even if they have to make it up.

Without a moderate Islam the Socialist projects of Europe which depend on heavy immigration collapse. America’s War on Terror becomes the endless inescapable slog that the rise of ISIS has once again revealed it to be. Multiculturalism, post-nationalism and Third World Guiltism all implode.

Without moderate Muslims, nationalism returns, borders close and the right wins. That is what they fear.

If there is no moderate Islam, no moderate Mohammed, no moderate Allah, then the Socialist Kingdom of Heaven on Earth has to go in the rubbish bin. The grand coalitions in which LGBT activists and Islamists scream at Jews over Gaza aren’t the future; they’re the Weimar Republic on wheels.

Flash back to Obama in his tan suit wearily saying that he has no strategy for ISIS. The original plan was to capture Osama alive, give him a civilian trial, cut a deal with the moderate Taliban and announce the end of the War on Terror before the midterm elections.

So much for that.

Moderate Islam is a difficult faith. To believe in it you have to disregard over a thousand years of recorded history, theology, demographics and just about everything that predates 1965. You have to ignore the bearded men chopping off heads because they don’t represent the majority of Muslims.

Neither does Mohammed, who did his own fair share of headchopping.

The real Islam is a topic that non-Muslims of no faith who hold sacred only the platitudes of a post-everything society are eager to lecture on without knowing anything about it.

Their Islam is not the religion of Mohammed, the Koran, the Hadiths, the Caliphs or its practitioners in such places as Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq or Indonesia. Their Islam is a religion that does not exist, but that they fervently believe must exist because without it their way of life is as doomed as the dodo.

They aren’t Muslims. They have no faith in Allah or the Koran. Instead they have faith in the goodness of an Islam that exists without resort to scriptures, theology or deity. This may seem strange to actual believers, but after all their own poor tattered scraps of Christianity or Judaism don’t bother paying too much attention to deities or scriptures except when it comes to cherry-picking quotes about tolerance.

Is it any wonder that they treat Islam the same way?

The true moderate Muslims are secular liberals of loosely Christian and Jewish persuasion who have invented and believe in a moderate Islam that doesn’t exist outside of their own heads. This secular Islam, which values all life, is dedicated to social justice and universal tolerance, is a counterpart of their own bastardized religions. And they are too afraid to wake up and realize that it doesn’t exist.

When American and European leaders insist that Islam has nothing to do with the latest Islamic atrocity, they are not referencing a religion practiced by Muslims, but an imaginary religion that they imagine Muslims must practice because the alternative is the end of everything that they believe in.

Their moderate Islam is light on the details, beyond standing for social justice, fighting Global Warming and supporting gay rights, because it is really multiculturalism wearing a fake beard. When a Western leader claims that the latest batch of Islamic terrorists don’t speak for Islam, he isn’t defending Muslims, he’s defending multiculturalism. He assumes that Muslims believe in multiculturalism because he does.

Moderate Islam is just multiculturalism misspelled. Its existence is a firm article of faith for those who believe in multiculturalism.

Dissuading a believer in moderate Muslims from his invented faith by citing the long trail of corpses or the hateful Hadiths that call for mass murder is futile because these are not the roots of his religion. He doesn’t know what a Hadith is nor does he care. As a social justice man in good standing, he attributes the violent track record of Islam to European colonialism and oppression.

He has never read the Koran. He has read a thousand articles about how Muslims are oppressed at the airport, in Gaza, in Burma and in Bugs Bunny cartoons. They are his new noble savages and he will not hear a word against them. Having colonized their identities in his imagination (despite the marked up copy of Edward Said’s Orientalism that he keeps by his bedside) he treats them as reflections of his ego.

When you say that moderate Muslims don’t exist, you are calling him a bad person. When you challenge Islam, you are attacking multiculturalism and he will call you a racist, regardless of the fact that Islam is as much of a race as Communism, Nazism or the Mickey Mouse Fan Club were races.

The moderate Muslim is an invention of the liberal academic, the secular theologian, the vapid politician and his shrill idiot cousin, the political activist. Like the money in the budgets that underpin their plans and the scientific evidence for Global Warming, he does not exist.

And it is not necessary that he should exist. It is only necessary that we have faith in his existence.

The degraded lefty descendants of Christians and Jews wait for a moderate Muslim messiah who will reconcile the impossibilities of their multicultural society by healing the conflicts between Islam and the West. Until then they find him, it necessary to believe, not in a divinity, but in the moderate Muslim.

[TexasCajun]

A “moderate” muslim is one that is not yet in the majority!

[mjp]

On CNN’s Reliable Sources this morning, host Brian Stelter spoke with radical Muslim cleric Anjam Choudary...

“I believe that the Shariah is the best way of life,” he also said. “I believe that one day Shariah will come to America and the rest of the world.”

... He then contended that there is no such thing as “radical” Islam.

“There is no such thing as a radical or moderate form of Islam,” he said. “You know, a woman is either pregnant or not pregnant. If you abide by Islam, and you follow what is in the Koran and the traditions of the prophet — then, quite frankly, you’d never find anything that I say which does not have Islamic basis.”

Radical islam - there is no such thing as “radical” Islam.

[expat2]

Excellent article — explains a lot.

[livius]

The Protestant movement destroyed the unity of Christianity, and Luther was actually a great fan of Islam and one of his causes was polygamy because he felt his wife couldn’t service him properly. Since he died of extreme constipation, I’d say he had a lot of personal problems for which his wife was not responsible.

There were already changes going on in the Church aimed at reining in some of the more bizarre things that had established themselves, in many cases because some areas had been overrun by Islam and they had no bishops. The bishop is the teacher of his diocese.

In any case, Islam cannot be changed in any way, because it is utterly controlled by its scriptures, a combination of Mohammed’s writings and some early interpretations of them. And Islam has no power structure..it vaguely goes through, in one group, the descendants of Mohammed’s daughter, and in the other, through a cousin. So there’s no central point through which one can deal with it.

[Responsibility2nd]

Another great article from Daniel Greenfield.

[upchuck]

Ping.

[867V309]

This is an outstanding piece of writing. Greenfield rarely disappoints.

Greenfield frikkin' nails it. Triggered images in my head of Bush hugging a Saudi schmuck or Kerry defending mooselimbs. Uck.

[IChing]

Virtually all Western heads of state rushed off to pray at mosques immediately following 9/11 BARF BARF BARF BARF BARF

[Admin Moderator]

Yours was pulled as a duplicate, but I’m pinging you to this one as a courtesy so you can ping your list.

[antidisestablishment]

This is one of Greenfield’s best by far. While I appreciate his erudite writing, at times he is too smart for the rest of us. This article strikes straight to the heart in plain, repetitive language. Too bad no liberal would admit one word as true.

It is of course, only a racist diatribe against Pax Islama, the only true peace since the seventh century.

[Louis Foxwell]

I understand the policy. I trust humblegunner had a hand in this.

[Admin Moderator]

No, this one was just posted first.

[Louis Foxwell]

Got it. Thanks for the heads up.

[Billthedrill]

I’ll restate Greenfield’s point: there are many believers in moderate Islam. Unfortunately none of them are Muslims.

[Oratam]

Amen.

[livius]

I don’t like Putin, but he’s your basic Russian nationalist. So he’s at least partially rational, and has some objectives that can be dealt with.

Islam wants total submission of everybody, throughout the world, to an insane law that would enslave us all and crush the West, modern civilization and Christianity. There’s a difference.

[Georgia Girl 2]

“There is no such thing as moderate Islam. There is only Islam” Former President of Eqypt.

Know it and believe it.

[Popman]

——The Protestant movement destroyed the unity of Christianity-——

You say that like before Luther the Church was unified....

You might want to check your history...

[Albion Wilde]

The Protestant movement destroyed the unity of Christianity, and Luther was actually a great fan of Islam and one of his causes was polygamy because he felt his wife couldn’t service him properly. Since he died of extreme constipation, I’d say he had a lot of personal problems for which his wife was not responsible...

The excesses of human nature and the inevitable corruption that comes with too much power concentrated in the hands of a few in Rome destroyed the unity of the church. Selling indulgences and oppressing people to pay for the construction of the Vatican destroyed the truth of the Gospel. Luther wanted to reform the church, not destroy it.

Unlike Catholicism, the Reform movement never had and still has no central leader. It had then and continues to have greater and lesser leaders, teachers and witnesses who give testimony and live their conscience, worldwide. But the Reform church does not depend on Kings or Popes for organization.

Luther was not the sole cause of the Reform movement, any more than Obama is the sole arbiter of U.S. government, although he might like to be. Luther did not excommunicate himself. Many died in the wars that broke out over the struggle for power between the HRE, the Vatican, and the various crowned heads of Europe. Over the centuries, however, the "competition" between the three branches of Christianity (Orthodox, Catholic and Reform) has meant that all branches of the church have made improvements and have adopted many of each other's ideas over time.

It's rather churlish to take to FR to spread anti-Protestant "trutherism", just as it is churlish of non-Catholics to use FR to spread anti-Catholism. How does snarking about Luther's wife and his illnesses (one of which was Meuniere's disease, another was seizures) have to do with the eventual development of the core beliefs of the various Reform churches, which were winnowed by many Reform theologians in the 16th century, leaving out some of the musings the prolific Luther sketched out in favor of his Large and Small Cathechisms that crystallized the essence of a personal approach to worship, conscience, prayer, church and family leadership, and which formed major philosophical underpinnings to the Enlightenment, which in turn eventually gave birth to American project of freedom?

For the record, Benjamin Franklin had so many kidney stones he had to do headstands in order to pee. Abraham Lincoln had depression. George Washington had wooden false teeth, and never fathered any children that we know of. All of us fall short of the glory of God.

[livius]

The Church was unified - except for the ebb and flow of mostly politically motivated difficulties between the Eastern and Western Church. The Latin Church survived better. If the Eastern Church had kept after things like Arianism and its related heresies, there would never have been an Islam.