Excerpts from a very good piece by Reuel Marc Gerecht in the Washington Post, do read it all:
Juan Williams, the truthful dissident
Did journalist Juan Williams, who was fired Wednesday by NPR, show unacceptable insensitivity or unforgiveable stupidity when he expressed anxiety about Muslim airplane passengers during an interview with conservative TV host Bill O’Reilly? Free speech shouldn’t guarantee immunity from the standards of basic decency, but Williams’s comments were hardly a firing offense. We would all be better off — Muslim Americans first and foremost — if we could have a more open discussion about Islam, Islamic militancy and what Muslims, here and abroad, think it means to be Muslim…
Williams was wrong about the likelihood of a Muslim in traditional garb being a terrorist — Muslims who wear Western clothing and speak English with Marxist-Islamist vocabulary are vastly more likely to be suicide bombers in the West than a devout Muslim in an abaya or thobe or Pakistani shalwar qameez. But while his manner may have been clumsy, Williams was right to suggest that there is a troubling nexus between the modern Islamic identity and the embrace of terrorism as a holy act.
…Fundamentalists emphasize the inner spiritual jihad — an idea rooted in the Koran — as essential to combat moral turpitude. The distance between the inner spiritual jihad and the external violent one regrettably has been covered by many Muslims — far too many to call radical Islam a fringe movement. Violent militants have locked on to the age-old Islamic legal tenet dividing the world between the “House of Islam” and the “House of War,” where infidels rule, and often turned it into an offensive weapon — such as turning wives, sisters and daughters, whose honor men have lived to protect, into suicide bombers — that runs roughshod over other traditional Islamic teachings.
…So far, it’s unlikely that Muslim self-criticism — our ultimate salvation from Islamic holy warriors — has improved under Obama. Judging by the satellite channel Al-Jazeera, a vibrant hodgepodge of all things Arab, the opposite current, fed by Western self-doubt, appears to be gaining force. By being nice, we suggest that nothing within “Islam” — by which I mean the 1,400-year-old evolving marriage of faith, culture and politics — is terribly wrong. By being kind, we fail to provoke controversy among Muslims about why so many Muslims from so many lands have called suicide bombers against Western targets “martyrs” and not monsters. Worst of all, by being considerate we fail to echo the great Muslim dissidents, deeply religious men such as the Iranians Abdolkarim Soroush and Mohammad Mojtahed Shabestari, who see that something has gone very wrong within their country and their civilization. The president would do well to be more nuanced in his outreach to the Muslim world, giving more sustenance to those who see its systemic problems…
Reuel Marc Gerecht is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and author of the forthcoming book “The Wave: Man, God, and the Ballot Box in the Middle East.”
An earlier post on Mr Gerecht:
There may be much to criticize about Islam…
Meanwhile “Controversial Author Mark Steyn” (his full name, it would appear) is encountering PC and Muslim problems in our London:
And so it begins…
Gotta love some of those moderate Muslims.
Mark
Ottawa
I posted this comment over at BLY (yes she is back)in regards to the dissallowing of Mark Steyn because of “security” fears. I repost it hear because in my mind, we are quickly on our way to losing the war.
“How can any muslim say after this that they are not the problem. They are the problem and until they come out and demand changes within their group, they need to own the fact that they are forcing changes on the world simply through fear and intimidation.
The fact that governments kow tow to this pressure is scary. Look where we have come to in nine short years – the slippery slope is under us and we are going faster and faster into the abyss. Unless someone in some government somewhere stands up and says – no more – there is no stopping this!”
Maybe if government officials are too damned scared we, the people, need to stand strong and say no more.
And yes, to any muslim out there – seeing a fully garbed “person” in an airport scares me. It also angers me seeing them walking 10 paces behind their “man” fully garbed in 30 degree heat all the while being told – we want to do this – it’s our choice
BULL CRAP!
“Muslims who wear Western clothing and speak English with Marxist-Islamist vocabulary are vastly more likely to be suicide bombers in the West than a devout Muslim in an abaya or thobe or Pakistani shalwar qameez.”
Is that a fact or an opinion? I think any dedicated bomber would quickly realize that he would easily succeed in the mission to blow up the plane if he were safe from Security checks behind that garb.
What is to stop a group of terrorists clad in hijabs and burkhas from walking into a crowded place such as a shopping mall,with an AK-47 under said garment?
We are in a state of war with radical Islam. We have to wake up,and suppress political correctness before it kills a whole lot of us. If some people are offended,so be it.
Laws are constantly being passed that offend a lot of honest decent citizens,like the gun control laws in Canada,so why should we be so nervous about offending a tiny minority of people in whose ranks exists a terrorist faction?
I’d be damned nervous about getting on a plane with a covered person, no matter what their excuse.