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my thoughts on "moderate" islam, and the inherent incompatability of Islam as presently constituted and a democratic constitutional republic such as ours are illustrated by the following excerpt from a discussion held months ago on another website:

***(text follows)***

A while ago, M_____ floated the notion that the fundamentalists/islamicists (in contrast with some notional “mainstream” Islam) are roughly comparable to the Ku Klux Klan’s relation to the various flavors of Christianity.

More accurately, he stated that moderate Muslims would make such a comparison.

Of this I have no doubt – I am sure some "moderate" Muslims would indeed attempt to divert criticism of Islam with such a statement.

While I disagree with the intent of this comparison – I believe that fundamentalist extremism is the heart and soul of Islam and incomparable to the marginal and alien KKK’s remote link to Christianity - I did find it an interesting point of departure for more thorough thinking.

First off, let us dispose with the general marginalizing comparison. Islamicists have quite literally hundreds of explicit and clear-text lines of sanctified korannic suriyah and hadith from which to draw their legitimacy. The Klan has, what? One highly debatable interpretation of one passage of Genesis (the flood, and Ham)?

While there can be no doubt that Klansmen were and are Christians (or espousing believers in that creed), the Klan itself is derived extrinsically to the Christian scriptures.

ON THE OTHER HAND, Islamicism is INTRINSIC to Islam.

Secondly, let me revisit my original and consistent statement, that “Islam is intrinsically incompatible with secular government such as our constitutional republic.” The text of the Koran and Hadith are quite explicitly clear on this. Islam demands the creation of Islamic temporal government everywhere.

This cannot be disputed, yet some have tried – by arguing against what I did NOT state.

What I did not state, yet what some disputants here seem to believe I meant, was that MUSLIMS are intrinsically incompatible with secularism. This is either deliberate misconstruction on their parts, or a very typical intellectual slovenliness of the sort I find entirely too familiar.

This sloppiness of intellect - which confuses the creed with the behavior of the adherents - has led to the great display of silly savagery I have been saddened to witness on this thread and on most others wherein this topic has been discussed.

Allow me to end this nonsense:
I have known moderate Muslims, and have no doubt that they are many in number.
I have known IMMODERATE Christians, and am under no illusions as to their numbers.
ON THE OTHER HAND, Christianity itself is intrinsically moderate in terms of temporal matters, and ISLAM is intrinsically IMMODERATE.

Now, when M_____ spoke of the Klan, I am sure he was referring to the current anemic, low-membership, heavily-surveilled, and politically impotent gang of bedsheet-wearing cross-dressers… oops, cross-BURNERS. Had he meant the Klan at its peak of power, in the 1920’s, he’d have been closer to the mark, though still off-base.

First, the islamicists are internationally funded and staffed, in a way and to an extent that the Klan never was.

Second, the Klan had an extremely narrow focus of interest: the South, period – whereas the islamicists have interests and operations spanning the entire globe.

Third, and most important, the Klan was/is not a “religion” protected by law and shielded from thorough infiltration and investigation by the law, whereas, at the moment, unfortunately, the islamicists ARE.

I would think that a better Western comparison would be to say that the islamicists are like unto the Sicilian La Cosa Nostra, or Mafia. The similarities between the groups and the etiology of their spread into host organisms (cultures and nations) are great indeed, as are the tactics of bribery and clandestine infiltration under the cover of licit and innocuous “fronts”, the invasion of new lands in the midst of demographic flow, the betrayal, the infighting, the penchant for murder, extortion, and the ever popular beating-of-chests and declamations of innocence… Indeed, both act behind the walls of their homes and centers of power as very temporal shadow-governments, with their own leaders, laws, and enforcement arms, with their own domestic and foreign policies, and with total disregard for the legitimate laws of the lands in which they take root.

Very similar, indeed, these two groups.

However, like the Klan, the Mafia is not a religion, and thus can be and is heavily pursued by the law. If only La Cosa Nostra had been witty enough to declare themselves a spin-off of Catholicism... then RICO would never have been able to touch them. < /sarc. >

Now, gentle readers, if you have any intellectual integrity, it may amuse and enlighten you to try the following textual exercise:
1. Select a few of the hundreds of excerpts I provided several posts ago
2. Remove therefrom all iterations of “Allah” and “Mohammed” (they are essentially interchangeable, de facto if not de jure), and replace all said iterations with the words “The Leader”
3. Do what you can to ignore or delete the ritual figures of speech, the incessant “peace be upon his name” et omnia generis alia, with which all Arabic is rife
4. Now, read the edited version you have just created, and ask yourself, “What does this awful hate-filled crap most sound like?”

Yes, exactly: Nazism.

Now, I ask you, have you ever heard of “moderate, mainstream Nazism”?

If you did, would you be instantly willing to accept this undemonstrated (and amply counter-demonstrated) notion?

No, I rather thought you hadn’t, rather thought you wouldn’t.

Let us continue this line of inquiry.

I am willing to accept as fact that, just as there are moderate individual Muslims, there were moderate individual Nazis. Nazis who would not themselves have been happy to pack Jews and Gypsies and Catholics into boxcars and ship them off to death-camps. Nazis who would not themselves be happy to gun down prisoners of war with machine-guns. Nazis who, though convinced of German supremacy, may have thought that going to war with the whole world was foolish or excessive. Nazis who, though they may have bought into the notion of the supremacy of the “Aryan Race”, may have thought that old Adolph was a little too rabid and went a trifle too far...

I can see that such moderate Nazis may well have existed.

But would their existence have indicated that Nazism itself was moderate?

No. Of course not. No one would be so foolish as to claim that it did.

So why is it that so many people in the West point to some handful of identifiably moderate Muslims and exclaim “Eureka - Here is Moderate Islam!”?

Why, then, are so many people so very eager to accept the totally undemonstrated and amply counter-demonstrated notion that there exists such a thing as “moderate, mainstream Islam”?