Moderate Islam is Our New Religion
By Daniel Greenfield
SultanKnish.Blogspot.com
I have been searching for moderate Islam since
September 11 and just like a lost sock in the dryer,
it was in the last place I expected it to be.
There is no moderate Islam in the mosques or in
Mecca. You won’t find it in the Koran or the
Hadiths. If you want to find moderate Islam, browse
the newspaper editorials after a terrorist attack or
take a course on Islamic religion taught by a
Unitarian Sociologist wearing fake native jewelry.
You can’t find a moderate Islam in Saudi Arabia or
Iran, but you can find it in countless network news
specials, articles and books about the two homelands
of their respective brands of Islam.
You won’t find the fabled land of moderate Muslims
in the east. You won’t even find it in the west.
Like all myths it exists in the imagination of those
who tell the stories. You won’t find a moderate
Islam in the Koran, but you will find it in
countless Western books about Islam.
Moderate Islam isn’t what most Muslims believe. It’s
what most liberals believe that Muslims believe.
The new multicultural theology of the West is
moderate Islam. Moderate Islam is the perfect
religion for a secular age since it isn’t a religion
at all.
Take Islam, turn it inside out and you have moderate
Islam. Take a Muslim who hasn’t been inside a mosque
in a year, who can name the entire starting lineup
of the San Diego Chargers, but can’t name Mohammed’s
companions and you have a moderate Muslim. Or more
accurately, a secular Muslim.
An early generation of Western leaders sought the
affirmation of their national destinies in the
divine. This generation of Western leaders seeks the
affirmation of their secular liberalism in a
moderate Islam.
Even if they have to make it up.
Without a moderate Islam the Socialist projects of
Europe which depend on heavy immigration collapse.
America’s War on Terror becomes the endless
inescapable slog that the rise of ISIS has once
again revealed it to be. Multiculturalism,
post-nationalism and Third World Guiltism all
implode.
Without moderate Muslims, nationalism returns,
borders close and the right wins. That is what they
fear.
If there is no moderate Islam, no moderate Mohammed,
no moderate Allah, then the Socialist Kingdom of
Heaven on Earth has to go in the rubbish bin. The
grand coalitions in which LGBT activists and
Islamists scream at Jews over Gaza aren’t the
future; they’re the Weimar Republic on wheels.
Flash back to Obama in his tan suit wearily saying
that he has no strategy for ISIS. The original plan
was to capture Osama alive, give him a civilian
trial, cut a deal with the moderate Taliban and
announce the end of the War on Terror before the
midterm elections.
So much for that.
Moderate Islam is a difficult faith. To believe in
it you have to disregard over a thousand years of
recorded history, theology, demographics and just
about everything that predates 1965. You have to
ignore the bearded men chopping off heads because
they don’t represent the majority of Muslims.
Neither does Mohammed, who did his own fair share of
headchopping.
The real Islam is a topic that non-Muslims of no
faith who hold sacred only the platitudes of a
post-everything society are eager to lecture on
without knowing anything about it.
Their Islam is not the religion of Mohammed, the
Koran, the Hadiths, the Caliphs or its practitioners
in such places as Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq
or Indonesia. Their Islam is a religion that does
not exist, but that they fervently believe must
exist because without it their way of life is as
doomed as the dodo.
They aren’t Muslims. They have no faith in Allah or
the Koran. Instead they have faith in the goodness
of an Islam that exists without resort to
scriptures, theology or deity. This may seem strange
to actual believers, but after all their own poor
tattered scraps of Christianity or Judaism don’t
bother paying too much attention to deities or
scriptures except when it comes to cherry-picking
quotes about tolerance.
Is it any wonder that they treat Islam the same way?
The true moderate Muslims are secular liberals of
loosely Christian and Jewish persuasion who have
invented and believe in a moderate Islam that
doesn’t exist outside of their own heads. This
secular Islam, which values all life, is dedicated
to social justice and universal tolerance, is a
counterpart of their own bastardized religions. And
they are too afraid to wake up and realize that it
doesn’t exist.
When American and European leaders insist that Islam
has nothing to do with the latest Islamic atrocity,
they are not referencing a religion practiced by
Muslims, but an imaginary religion that they imagine
Muslims must practice because the alternative is the
end of everything that they believe in.
Their moderate Islam is light on the details, beyond
standing for social justice, fighting Global Warming
and supporting gay rights, because it is really
multiculturalism wearing a fake beard. When a
Western leader claims that the latest batch of
Islamic terrorists don’t speak for Islam, he isn’t
defending Muslims, he’s defending multiculturalism.
He assumes that Muslims believe in multiculturalism
because he does.
Moderate Islam is just multiculturalism misspelled.
Its existence is a firm article of faith for those
who believe in multiculturalism.
Dissuading a believer in moderate Muslims from his
invented faith by citing the long trail of corpses
or the hateful Hadiths that call for mass murder is
futile because these are not the roots of his
religion. He doesn’t know what a Hadith is nor does
he care. As a social justice man in good standing,
he attributes the violent track record of Islam to
European colonialism and oppression.
He has never read the Koran. He has read a
thousand articles about how Muslims are oppressed at
the airport, in Gaza, in Burma and in Bugs Bunny
cartoons. They are his new noble savages and he will
not hear a word against them. Having colonized their
identities in his imagination (despite the marked up
copy of Edward Said’s Orientalism that he keeps by
his bedside) he treats them as reflections of his
ego.
When you say that moderate Muslims don’t exist, you
are calling him a bad person. When you challenge
Islam, you are attacking multiculturalism and he
will call you a racist, regardless of the fact that
Islam is as much of a race as Communism, Nazism or
the Mickey Mouse Fan Club were races.
The moderate Muslim is an invention of the liberal
academic, the secular theologian, the vapid
politician and his shrill idiot cousin, the
political activist. Like the money in the budgets
that underpin their plans and the scientific
evidence for Global Warming, he does not exist.
And it is not necessary that he should exist. It is
only necessary that we have faith in his existence.
The degraded lefty descendants of Christians and
Jews wait for a moderate Muslim messiah who will
reconcile the impossibilities of their multicultural
society by healing the conflicts between Islam and
the West. Until they find him, they have to believe,
not in a divinity, but in the moderate Muslim.