Roger Simon on Wilders and Islam, cont.

Roger Simon’s take on Geert Wilders, quoted and discussed at Powerline, suggests to this reader that realism about Islam may be slowly spreading among conservatives due to Wilders’s influence. However, based on a further reading of Simon, it is only a beginning, as I discuss in an update in the same entry. Here’s what I wrote:

On the issue of interest to us here, Simon’s substantive view of Islam, the article shows the intellectual dilemma in which Simon now finds himself. On one hand, by agreeing with Paul Mirengoff that Islam, as set forth in the Koran, “commands Muslims to exercise jihad … to establish shariah law [and] … to impose Islam on the entire world,” he is opening himself to the truth about Islam, as I indicated before. On the other hand, he also says (a) that he fears that truth, (b) that he doesn’t want to face that truth because he would find the results too depressing, and (c) that if the truth about Islam is what he fears it is, then the only solution, other than something akin to a “global armageddon,” is an “Islamic reformation.” Thus, even as Simon agrees with Mirengoff that Islam commands Muslims to exercise jihad, establish shariah, and impose Islam on the entire world, he imagines that Islam can be “reformed,” meaning that it can turn itself into the opposite of itself and still be Islam.

The thinking process of all Islam-aware mainstream conservatives without exception is limited to these two sterile options when it comes to what to do about Islam: destroy the Islamic world and kill hundreds of millions of Muslims, which of course is out of the question; or hope that the Muslims reform themselves, which can be no more than a hope, since we cannot make it happen, and in any case it’s inherently impossible. Nevertheless, since killing a fifth of humanity is out of the question, hoping that Islam reforms itself is the only acceptable option. But since Islam will not reform itself, and since Islam commands Muslims to impose Islam on the entire world, Simon’s seeing the truth about Islam leads him to the realization (unstated by him, but I think it’s why he’s depressed), that our destiny is to be taken over by Islam.

Such is the intellectual incoherence and practical helplessness vis a vis Islam that people remain in, so long as the possibility of rationally discriminating against Muslims and removing them from the West has not occurred to them. I lay out such a program here. See also the collection of my writings on What to do about Islam.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 12, 2010 12:03 AM | Send