Moderate Islam Radical Islam and in Between

A year ago the first case of “bulldozer terrorism” unfolded in Jerusalem.  This atrocity was carried out by a young Palestinian Muslim of East Jerusalem.  He  worked in Israel, lived there comfortably with his family and had no apparent quarrel with authorities.  Thus, he would have been considered representative of “moderate Islam”. When this young Palestinian suddenly went on a rampage with his bulldozer, overturning buses hitting cars and passers-by, and as a consequence was gunned down by police and alert civilians, the media rushed to describe him as a representative of “radical Islam”. The use of a bulldozer as a weapon of terror was repeated twice more over the past year, with observers wondering what had turned Muslim quietism into Muslim terrorism. After three similar events, the families of these new terrorists set up large sheds sporting Hamas and Hizbullah banners outside their homes. This was in order to accommodate the large Muslim crowds who came, not with “condolences” but rather with “congratulations” for the “martyrdom” of their sons, Outpourings of jubilation for this carnage, in the Palestinian street, reflected the attitudes which had triggered it in the first place.

It is often claimed that the strict interpretation of Islam with its concomitant abuses, is only the purvey of “fanatic”, “radical”, “fundamentalist”, or “Islamist” Muslims. This is quantified at some 15% of the 1.5 billion world Muslims, as if it is a different faith, embracing different principles from those followed by the majority of rank-and-file Muslims.

In fact, we are talking about the same creed upholding Shari’a law to various degrees.  Those who do not follow it to the letter, are not in fact, adepts of an alternative “moderate Islam”, the one described as the “religion of peace”, to distinguish it from the faith of aggressive “extremists”. The truth of the matter is that there is no moderate Islam though there are certainly many truly moderate Muslims who have broken away from the bloody road of Islamic Shari’a.  These are usually the Muslims who have conveniently moved to the West, able from a safe distance, to criticise the phenomenon of the Islamikaze”  bombers of Westerners and Israelis, the culture of death cultivated in many Islamic lands and indeed the unbridled anti-Semitic calumnies that are rife in their own culture. But they have yet to produce an alternate doctrine and worldview to rival official Islam or posit a creed and a set of rules to attract Muslims to relinquish Shari’a and embrace another way. If they did, they would no longer be Muslims according to Islam.

Moderate Muslims often accuse the radicals, of having “hijacked” Islam or “distorted or misinterpreted its “real” meaning.  On the contrary, these radicals are, in fact, Muslims behaving in strict accordance with Shari’a, . The standards of the radicals, like the Jihad war or the strict implementation of the shar’ia, are those that prevail in the Islamic world. There are no accepted yardsticks for “moderate” Islam. One only has to watch the mass demonstrations in the streets of Gaza, Quetta, Casablanca, Durban and Jakarta, or in the Muslim neighborhoods of Paris, London, Marseille, Amsterdam, Sydney and Toronto, to realise how alive, universal and popular are the Muslim slogans and rampages, among Muslim masses of men, women, children, including lay leaders and clerics. Are they all “Islamists”? No, they are simply Muslims, and the common denominator which unites them in their hatred of the West and the Jews, is Islam, standard Islam,  as  justified by the Shari’a, as promoted by their Imams.

There will always be moderate and courageous Muslim individuals trying to save the honor of Islam, by raising their  voices against the abuses perpetrated in the name of their faith. However the mainstream world of Islam, including westernized and modern professionals and intellectuals, will also always be there to glorify the killings of westerners and Jews, to write or broadcast, with exhilaration, about the Islamikaze, and to distribute sweets in the streets to “celebrate” the death of Americans or Israelis.

The  non Muslim champions arguing for the spurious distinction between the so-called “islamist”  minority and the “peaceful” Muslim  majority, have become trapped by their reluctance  to condemn Islam lest they be accused of Islamophobia or racism (as if Islam were a race).    They explain to us that Islam has never been anti-Semitic, proof of their ignorance of Islamic sources, arguing that the current dislike of Jews is no more than a case of Judeophobia.  It is a Judeophobia which has no historical roots, being rather a modern, circumstantial and fleeting phenomenon which does not warrant anxiety. If anti-Semitism is reduced to Judeophobia, it becomes a junior counterpart of Islamophobia,  and a lesser evil than anti-Semitism, and therefore less objectionable.  It  is thus more “acceptable”, on par with “Islamophobia”, as a modern phenomenon in Western society. Generally speaking, they simplistically argue: “how can Muslims, or at least Arabs, themselves Semites, be Anti-Semitic?

It is a war of words, which has been engineered to obfuscate the substance and increase the currency of Muslim terminology, while at the same time depriving the Jews and their supporters of their traditional arsenal in the battle against anti-Semitism. Can anyone explain how the Qur’anic condemnation of Jews as “descendants of pigs and monkeys”, preached universally  and routinely to Muslims (not Islamists) by their clerics in both the Islamic world and Europe, is “Judeophobic” and not “anti-Semitic”? Is this hallowed Qur’anic reference, eternal as the Word of Allah, a circumstantial and fleeting pronouncement? To say so would be a blasphemy. It is taught by Muslim clerics, as a matter of course, in such “moderate” and “pro-Western” countries as Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, as a continuation of the traditional way of demonizing and de-humanizing the Jews in order to facilitate their annihilation. What further evidence is needed to prove that it is a blatant expression of anti-Semitism?

Words were created to transmit conventionally agreed upon meanings. If each actor chose to lend to his words a different significance or accuse others of “distorting” their meaning, then we would no longer be able to call a spade a spade or communicate at all. Anti-Semitism is the millennial irrational hatred of the Jews, and it has been so called since  modern research first focused on this sinister issue in the 19th Century.  No amount of masking, manipulation of words and creation of parallels to dilute this terminology, can succeed, exactly as no coupling of the unique term  “Holocaust” with the Armenian or Darfurian genocides (incidentally both perpetrated by Muslims), can blunt the poignancy of the Jewish Holocaust or rob it of its uniqueness.

No wonder, then, that the most frequent manifestation of anti-Semitism in Europe, these days, and among Muslims and their anti-Semitic allies everywhere , is Holocaust denial.  The devaluation of the meaning of the word “Holocaust” by its deniers has been further distorted through its generic use to describe all sorts of massacres. Appallingly, in today's world, the hated Jew cannot even claim to have acceded to the ”honor” of being one of its victims.