“Muslims must reform their religion” (Yes, but in the meantime, what must we do?)

A Newsweek column by Michael Hirsh at the MSNBC website is entitled:

Exploring Islam’s ‘Death Cult’
Muslims must find a way to remove the cancer infecting their religion.

There you go again (“you” meaning the centrist opinion makers of the Anglo-American world), saying that Muslims “must” do such-and-such. And what if they don’t? What are you going to do? Send them to their room without supper?

However, it’s not quite as bad as I’m suggesting. Let’s watch as Hirsh takes the boringly conventional road to an unconventional conclusion.

He writes::

The Muslim communities in both Britain and America have vociferously denounced the U.K. plot. “These people are not from us and we are not from them,” said a statement by the Association of Muslim Health Professionals.

Hirsh doesn’t understand that when moderate Muslims say that the terrorists have nothing to do with themselves, they are saying that the terrorists have nothing to do with Islam. Which means that the moderates are not going to do anything to root out Islamic terrorism. Hirsh is too clueless to grasp this.

Then Hirsh makes this original and groundbreaking statement of the problem:

And it bears mention: homicidal rage of the kind we see in the British case is still very much a rare phenomenon in the Muslim world. Nor is the Koran or Islamic teaching uniquely permissive of violence; the Jewish and Christian God of the Old Testament is, let’s face it, a bloody-minded dictator, inflicting wholesale destruction of cities and other cruel and unusual punishments.

Does this guy get paid for not having a single thought in his head? Don’t answer.

Hirsh continues his trafficking in received slogans:

In fact, there is an argument to be made that “death cult” Islam is a relatively modern illness. Its genesis goes back to the 19th century, but it really took off in the latter part of the 20th century with the Wahhabist-influenced jihad movement in Afghanistan, and the advent of the Saudi petrodollar, which helped spread this extreme puritanical version of Islam.

More:

The Al Qaeda phenomenon was born of an Islam misshapen by modern political developments—many of them emanating from Western influences, outright invasion by British, French and Italian colonialists, and finally the U.S.-Soviet clash that helped create the mujahadeen jihad in Afghanistan.

Then Hirsh closes on this:

Muslims must find a way to remove this modern cancer—this fundamentalist death cult—that has infected their religion. None of us on the outside can do it for them.

In fact, this is interesting. After trotting out every false, conventional, Bernard Lewisian notion that denies the actual historical and doctrinal nature of Islam and attributes Islamic extremism solely to external and modern developments, Hirsh admits that, whatever the source of the death cult that infects Islam, Islam is infected with that death cult. Islam, as it now exists, is deadly dangerous, and ONLY the Muslims can fix it.

In other words, starting from purely liberal assumptions, Hirsch has wandered unexpectedly into the logic of separationism, which says that (as Islam now is and will be for the foreseeable future) we cannot assimilate Islam, and we cannot democratize Islam, and, of course, we cannot destroy Islam. Therefore the only way we can protect ourselves from Islam’s death cult is to separate Islam from ourselves. This means, at a minimum, that non-Muslim countries must stop all Muslim immigration and remove as many of their Muslims as they can.

Hirsh of course hasn’t said anything like that. I’m merely pointing to the inescapable logical implications of his own conclusions about the present state of Islam.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 07, 2007 08:23 PM | Send