Less Violent Islamists Are Still IslamistsISRAELeNEWS: A fierce debate is brewing among jihadists, it seems. To hear pundits and the CIA boss describe it, the rupture is growing over interpretations by radical theologians about whom to kill and how to do it in the name of God.
It is progress of sorts flushing out mea culpas from repentant Islamists and widening divisions within Terror Inc., but far from advancement toward a triumph in a war of terror.
A more serious shortcoming is an accompanying refrain promoting “moderate Islam” to fill the void. That is tantamount to saying: “Okay, we take bin Laden heavy off the table and give you Sharia light.”
A month ago I was on a panel discussion on “Confronting Radicalism in the Arab World” that included Tawfik Hamid, whose pedigree includes serving in al-Gamaa al-Islamiyya, the bloodiest of Egypt’s terror groups that assassinated Egypt’s Anwar Sadat in 1981 and carried out assaults on hundreds of intellectuals, writers (including Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz), Christians, and government officials in the eighties.
Hamid has developed a good gig as speaker and op-ed writer (mostly at the Wall Street Journal). He passionately expounds on “conditional” interpretations of Koranic verses urging killing of apostates, non-Muslims, infidels, and renegades, explaining that his former colleagues misinterpret them. His subtext is trickier, pleading for a second chance for “moderate Islam” to accomplish what radical Islam clearly is failing at.
Why are we debating on such uneven playing fields? If Muslims want to reeducate radicals in their midst, the argument should not be about laying out more space for moderate Islamists.
Both never differed on their rejection of secular civil society. Indeed, scholarship accumulated since 9/11 demonstrates that Islamist groups — the Taliban, Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, and so on, as well as the declared leadership of Muslim communities in Europe and America — are all spawned from the umbrella Muslim Brotherhood school of thought. Like it, moderate Islam’s single-minded pursuit has never been about blending.
The most prominent such group in America, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, CAIR, was first to leap to the defense of 700 Somali Muslim cab drivers who at the Minneapolis airport in 2007 launched a boycott of passengers with seeing-eye dogs (animals are dirty) or those carrying liquor (that’s sinful). CAIR again latched onto the seven imams taken off a commercial flight in 2006 after staging a flamboyant public prayer at an airport boarding area and requesting special seating arrangements on the flight in an obvious provocation of fear.
Less Violent Islamists Are Still Islamists >>> By Youssef Ibrahim | June 15, 2008
The Dawning of a New Dark Age (Paperback - UK)
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