Topic: Decline of the West
Writing in the print edition of National Review, Theodore Dalrymple makes a point worth pondering: how can any religion that criminalizes apostasy be characterized as a “religion of peace”?
“Islam is a religion of peace,” we are told—by the President of the United States and his subordinates, by the mainstream media, by progressive intellectuals and even by airhead celebrities. Those who commit acts of terror in the name of Islam are not real Muslims at all but “violent extremists.” Whether the President and Ben Stiller actually believe this nonsense is a good question but it would be unfair to saddle them with the blame for creating the religion-of-peace meme. We heard it from George W. Bush on the morrow of 9/11 and on many subsequent occasions. One can easily understand Bush’s desire to avoid alienating Muslim nations whose cooperation would be necessary in the war just then beginning: Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, etc. But we’ve accumulated a good deal of experience since that time, enough to show that it does no good to cling to a claim that simply isn’t so.
To point out this obvious fact is to court charges of “Islamophobia,” so let me be clear about what I am and am not saying. Of course it’s true that the majority of Muslims are decent, peaceful people. But Islam does little to support the better angels of their nature. Take the example cited by Dalrymple: apostasy. As a Roman Catholic I know that I’m free to leave the Church at any time. No one will come after me with a summons to some religious tribunal; no one will pronounce the anathema against me, exhorting the faithful to kill me if they can. The only authority that the Catholic Church asserts over me is moral authority: an accounting to God alone—not to my parish priest, to my bishop or even to the Pope. But if I were a backsliding Muslim I’d have good reason to fear the religious authorities and in some countries even the secular authorities. The Quran, the hadith (Islamic records and traditions outside the Quran) and Sharia (Islamic law based on the Quran and the hadith) all prescribe death for apostasy—and anyone who regards these prescriptions as out of date or metaphoric hasn’t been paying attention to the news.
It’s bad enough that Western leaders like Barack Obama lie to their own people about the true character of Islam. But what is worse, these lies reach the ears of Muslims as well and they know the truth better than anyone. The small cohort of reforming Muslims hears such words with despair. So-called moderate Muslims hear them and are the more prepared to conclude, as the radical Islamists claim, that the West is weak, degenerate and fearful. And Islamists receive them with glee. Islamofascism, as it ought to be called in defiance of political correctness, openly proclaims its hatred of all that is un-Muslim, openly declares war on the West—and the West will not recognize them for what they are. This willful blindness, this moral cowardliness, is dangerous for the West and tragic for Muslims themselves—Muslims being by far the most numerous victims of Islamofascism.
There are many good, decent people in Europe and America who suppose that if they speak softly, voicing no harsh truths, Islam will eventually reform itself. Surely the vast majority of Muslims are also good, decent people who sooner or later will come to see that the ideology of Islamofascism is a perversion of their peaceful religion. History teaches otherwise. The vast majority of Germans living between 1933 and 1945 were good, decent people. But this did not prevent Adolph Hitler and his National Socialists from seizing control of Germany, then plunging it and the world into the cauldron of total war. Today the Führer is remembered as a madman and a monster, and we’ve mostly forgotten that much of what he said seemed plausible at the time. So it is with the Islamofascists. Those monsters can plausibly cite Islam—the Quran, the hadith, Sharia—in support of their totalitarian ideology. Pretending that it just isn’t so, that Islamofascism is “violent extremism” that has nothing to do with the “religion of peace,” amounts to a futile and pusillanimous flight from reality.
