Robert Spencer, call Melanie Phillips

At a discussion on Islam hosted by the Centre for Social Cohesion, Melanie Phillips listened to Ibn Warraq say that Islam cannot be reformed, because Islam is based on the Koran which is Allah’s unchanging word. Then she listened to some “reformist” Muslims argue that the religion of Islam consists only of “interpretations” of the Koran, and therefore Islam can become anything that people want, including a “moderate” Islam compatible with “western values.” And she bought it:

If they are right, this is not only grounds for optimism but it means we should be giving every encouragement to reformist Muslims in their courageous endeavour to excavate from their own tradition precepts which marry their religious faith with an accommodation with the west. It accords with the conclusion reached by the former CIA spy Robert Baer in tonight’s Channel Four documentary, Cult of the Suicide Bomber that the human bomb death cult will be brought to an end not by intelligence or defensive actions by its victims—necessary as those are—but by the Muslim world itself reaching into its own theology to cast it out. Whether this is indeed possible is the great issue of our time.

If, as Phillips writes, the ability of Islam to reform itself is the “great issue of our time,” then it’s an open question whether Islam can reform itself. Meaning that we must make every effort to facilitate the creation of a “moderate Islam” before we can come to any conclusions about whether or not such a thing is possible. And how long must we keep trying? If fourteen centuries without a moderate Islam—fourteen centuries during which there have been repeated efforts to reform Islam, and all of them have failed—is not enough to convince the Melanie Phillipses of the world that a moderate Islam is a contradiction in terms and cannot exist, we’ll certainly need another century, maybe another fourteen centuries, before we and those who follow us can be really sure. And in the meantime, Islam will have taken us over.

Wouldn’t you think that after writing critically about Islamic radicalism for years and also being familiar with the work of far better informed Islam critics such as Bat Ye’or, Robert Spencer, and Andrew Bostom, Phillips would have a firmer conceptual grasp of the issue by now? In fact, she has been deliberately mushy all along, informing us at the beginning of her book Londonistan that she takes no position on whether radical Islam is intrinsic to Islam or not.

People who refuse to base their thinking process on first principles, as Phillips not only refuses to do but explicitly refuses to do, can never form clear concepts. Without clear concepts we can never identify the nature of the tyrannical religion that intends our subjugation and destruction, and we can never effectively oppose that religion. For liberals like Phillips, the question of the nature of our eternal adversary must be left forever open, even as our adversary continues to wage a war to the finish against us.

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N. writes:

Taking the paragraph by Phillips that you quote, I change a few words, demonstrating just how silly it is. Here is Melanie Phillips if she wrote in, say, 1942:

If they are right, this is not only grounds for optimism but it means we should be giving every encouragement to reformist Nazis in their courageous endeavour to excavate from their own tradition precepts which marry their political faith with an accommodation with the Western democracies. It accords with the conclusion reached by the former OSS spy Robert Baer in tonight’s NBC radio program, Cult of the Genocide Killer, that the mass murder cult will be brought to an end not by intelligence or defensive actions by its victims—necessary as those are—but by the Nazi world itself reaching into its own ideology to cast it out. Whether this is indeed possible is the great issue of our time.

Now I ask, would any adult have taken such drivel seriously in those days?

I started to do the same thing with Communism but stopped, because even today there exist liberals who believe in “reformist Communists,” much in the same way that they believe in “moderate Islam.” In fact, the desire to see every little shift in the policies of the evil empire that was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as some move toward moderation is quite similar to the endless search for moderate Islam today.

(Note: See my follow-up to this entry, “If Cassandra were a liberal.”)

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 14, 2007 05:57 PM | Send