The Left faces an examination in the coming days, and peaceful survival for all of us depends on its registering a passing grade: can the Left comprehend that, while we embrace Muslims — the people — as siblings in humanity, simultaneously we can and must circumscribe the lethal ideology that derives from a frank reading of the Quran and Muhammad’s hadith?
For internationalists in the Thomas Paine tradition (“The world is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion”), Rep. Peter King’s question as to the scope of the domestic Islamic terrorist threat is immaterial. The 17,000 murders motivated by Islamic ideology since 9/11, four or five every day (as movingly memorialized here), are quite enough, thank you.
To be clear, the calling for ordinary citizens is to a peaceable campaign of ideas. And we need all hands on deck. But the Left remains on the sidelines as we watch the stack of dead bodies — better understood by dutiful jihadists as punched tickets to paradise — pile towards the sky.
The Left won’t say an unkind word about Islamic ideology, either because true faith is so alien to liberals that they can’t internalize the fact that, for some other people, holy books are the leading indicator, or because the community that once gallantly condemned Nazism and racism has now become persuaded that, however bad rape and butchery are, having a bad word to say about someone else’s convictions is worse. On the Left, tolerance of the harmless has over-ripened into tolerance of the harmful.
In either case, the Left seems content to play police-versus-terrorist Whac-A-Mole until our Milky Way collides with Andromeda. The truly compassionate are ready to get into the undercarriage of this arcade game and stop the mechanism.
Numerate people, for example, have had it with the Rachel Maddows and the Eugene Robinsons telling us that the 50 million viewers who curl up for Yusuf al-Qaradawi’s Sunday “Shariah and Life” broadcast on Al Jazeera — on which the Sunni scholar and spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood praises suicide bombings against Israel, condones wife-beating, and prescribes execution for homosexuals — are a tiny number.
Numerate people can’t buy that a tiny band of jihad-minded Muslims were able to bob and weave through the “vast majority” of their peace-defending co-religionists to burn down the Danish embassies all over the Islamic world after the Jutland Post published cartoons satirizing Muhammad, and then effect a devastating subcontinent-wide economic boycott of Danish exports, while every one of Keith Olbermann’s Muslimswas standing by the Danes.
Literate people felt unrepresented when President Obama said of Islam, “All of us recognize that this great religion, in the hands of a few extremists, has been distorted.” After all, Osama bin Laden has simply been paying attention when Allah commands, via Gabriel via Muhammad, to slay the infidels, wherever they may be hiding, until Islam reigns supreme, and when Muhammad says, as recorded in the hadith collection Sahih al-Bukhari, 8:387: “I have been ordered to fight the people till they say: ‘None has the right to be worshipped but Allah.’”
Literate people don’t cotton to non-words, such as “Islamophobia.”
To be sure, many people who call themselves Muslims are happy to disregard swaths of the Quran. Maajid Nawaz, founder of Quilliam, a London-based counter-extremism think tank, is working hard to reform Islam despite public death threats by Anjem Choudary and other British Islamist gangsters.
Maajid’s version of Islam is so elastically interpreted from the original that it probably merits a new name altogether, but that’s somebody else’s business.
What can be done?
First, don’t hurt anybody. Challenge ideas.
And that doesn’t mean making chicanerous recriminations of Christians whenever the topic of Islamic extremism comes up. Serious people can look at the numbers and know that the single-digit number of Biblically inspired slayings of abortion doctors and gay people does not compare to the 17,000 Quranically inspired slayings of doctors, gay people, Christians, Jews and, most numerously, other Muslims.
Honoring Christianity’s relative peacefulness is especially important because Christians will be key teammates in the struggle to diminish fundamental Islamic ideology. As Ayaan Hirsi Ali observes, her atheism is not a palatable alternative to many Muslims, but Christianity often is. “All options,” goes another of Obama’s favorite sayings, “are on the table.”
The thing to do is to read the Quran, encourage others to do so, and challenge its logic wherever appropriate.
Challenge causes reconsideration. Reconsideration causes people to doubt bad ideas. We’ve done this before; the Christian Church’s grip on Europe was diminished by an intellectual broadside from Enlightenment science and Darwin.
In the wind of stiff challenge, hardliners moderate. Moderates agnosticize. Once-quiet agnostics become challengers themselves. In Islam’s case, the candidate pool for jihadist violence will drain, and the communal insulation around hardened terrorists will dissipate. Passive sympathizers will join the counterterrorism informants.
The Left’s contrary and vain hope is that barbarous Islamic ideology will wither under the kindness of compliments.
The Left is up to the plate now, with a chance to use logic and reasoning to defeat Islamist thinking and instate peace. If the Left goes down looking, behind them in the batting order are people who will be happy to fight this battle — from both sides — with heavy aluminum.
David Andrukonis is a technology entrepreneur and occasional contributor to The Daily Caller.