The Extreme Moderates of Islam: Peter Smith
https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/muslim-extremists-vs-moderates-how-to-tell-the-difference/
Unless one is coming at you with a knife it can be hard to tell an extremist from a moderate, so here’s a handy guide: Muslim extremists will kill you while moderates deal in excuses and rationalizations for their more ardent brethren. Ultimately, though, both take their cues from the Koran.
Case one: Hassan Khalif Shire Ali drove a truck loaded with gas bottles into Melbourne’s CBD on November 9. After the vehicle became engulfed in flames, Ali attacked passers-by with a knife. He killed café bar owner Sisto Malaspina, 74, and wounded two other men.
Scott Morrison said that the Islamic community must do more to stop extremism. “For those who want to stick their head in the sand, for those who want to make excuses, you are not making Australia safer. You are giving people an excuse to look the other way and not deal with things right in front of you … If there are people in a religious community, an Islamic community, that are bringing in hateful, violent, extremist ideologies into your community, you’ve got to call it out.”
Australia’s Grand Mufti, Ibrahim Abu Mohamed sharply rebuffed Morrison. “This bloody Prime Minister, instead of turning the heat on somebody else, he should answer us about what he did. He has spent billions of dollars — billions — on security services. And what is the end result? We have crazy people in the streets.”
Since 9/11, the Religion of Peace website records 34,150 deadly Islamic terrorist attacks. Over forty since the Melbourne attack. Lots of crazy Muslims around the world apparently.
Case two: Asia Bibi, a Christian, is in hiding in Pakistan after being acquitted of blasphemy. New prime minister Imran Kahn, you might recall he used to play the civilised game of cricket, has refused, under pressure of the rabid Islamic mobs, to let her leave the country pending a review of her acquittal. Her lawyer has already sensibly skedaddled. She spent eight years on death row, despite the intercession some years’ ago of Pope Benedict XVI, who, for his trouble, was sharply rebuffed by Pakistan’s prime minister at the time, Yousuf Raza Gilani.
In 2011, the governor of the Punjab, Salmaan Taseer, was assassinated by one of his police bodyguards. His ‘sin’ was opposing the blasphemy laws which had resulted in Bibi facing execution. The assassin was celebrated by the aforementioned mobs. Reportedly the British government has refused to offer Bib asylum in case it causes unrest among the same kind of mobs which now inhabit Britain.
What have these two quite disparate cases got in common? Yes, they have Islam in common; but it is more than that. They have in common a rejection of Enlightenment values; of civilised values. We like to pretend that differences can be worked through and resolved, but they can’t between people who have quite different value systems. Scott Morrison is whistling in the wind as was Pope Benedict.
Of course, we have a common assumption among our great and good that most Muslims are peaceable. Very few would ever think of terrorism. That is true. At the same time, it is a meaningless consolation.
Unfortunately, no matter how refreshing is some political comment on Islam, and Morrison’s was probably better than we have yet seen in Australia from a political leader, it will never go to the point. It will always be couched in terms of radical Islamists surrounded by all those vast numbers of peaceable Muslims who we need on our side to dob in the extremists.
Listen to conservative commentators. They all sing from the same songbook. There are a small minority of extremists and a vast majority of moderates. Common-sense died decades ago.
It’s as though large disparate populations of people could sustain fourteen centuries of the most godawful conquest, pillaging, violence, enslaving and butchery by just happening, by accident, to always have a small coterie of those rascally radicals within their midst. Someone in power in the West needs to get to the bottom of it. Let me help.
All Muslims are followers of an immutable canon which warps their minds and incites supremacism. True, many Muslims don’t read it or know what’s in the Koran and hadiths but, nevertheless, they anchor and inform their culture. Without it they are effectively in no-man’s-land. When it comes to the crunch, they will come home to Muhammed.
What to do about it? The only thing that can be done is to keep the problem outside the gates. There is no other remedy. Everything else is futile. Unfortunately, the gates have already been well and truly breached.
Still, closing them tight now is better than doing nothing. Will that happen? No, almost certainly not. Welcome to a giant civilisational suicide pact.
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