“Moderate” Muslims Behaving Badly

This is a “must-read” from Don Feder writing in the FrontPage Magazine.

Some excerpts:

I was in London last week, where I gained a renewed appreciation for the religion of peace and insights into the war we are in.Thursday evening, I was lying in bed in my hotel room in Russell Square, less than 24 hours after MI-5 and the British police foiled a plot to blow up as many as 10 trans-Atlantic flights – with a potential death toll of 4,000. Officials described it as attempted “mass murder on an unimaginable scale.”On the show I was watching, a BBC reporter interviewed a neighbor of one of the 24 terrorism suspects arrested – all British-born Muslims.He was a good lad who played football, the local reported. Also, recently he became very involved with his religion.”

This a cliché on par with the “moody loner” label. When a serial killer is caught, he’s invariably described as a “moody loner.” (What would he be – a bon vivant or a hale fellow well-met?) When someone is arrested for plotting a suicide attack or terror bombing, we’re told he recently became very interested in Islam – as opposed to really getting into Kaballah or the I Ching.

When a Christian is reborn, he usually does good deeds and begins witnessing about Jesus. A newly observant Jew might keep kosher, become Sabbath-observant or start studying Torah.

When a devotee of the religion of peace feels the spirit move him, he quite naturally starts planning ways to commit “mass murder on an unimaginable scale.”

Again, like the London underground bombers of a year ago (who managed to kill 52 infidel commuters and injure over 700), those arrested last week all were native-born Muslims. Three were converts to Islam (like American Taliban John Walker Lind and shoe-bomber Richard Reid.) When was the last time a Catholic convert tried to blow something up?

…

A Pew Global Attitudes Poll of British Muslims and non-Muslims, released in late June, showed two communities with radically divergent views. Among other pertinent details, we learned that:

* While 63% of Brits have a favorable opinion of Muslims (less than a third believe they’re violent), a “significant majority” of the latter view Westerners as selfish, arrogant, greedy and immoral.

 *  Only 17% of the Prophet’s British followers believe Arabs were involved in 9/11, compared to 48% of French Muslims. Imagine that – Frenchmen who are more reality-connected than their British counterparts.

*  68% of British Muslims hold unfavorable opinions of Jews. For Muslim communities worldwide, tolerance is a one-way street.

*  While British Muslims are inclined to think the worst of their countrymen, British infidels don’t reciprocate. More Brits believe the West is responsible for terrorism (27%) than blame Muslims (25%). British Muslims were less ambivalent – nearly half blamed the West for the mayhem.

…

(Lest you think Lebanon had anything to do with the latest planned carnage, British authorities said it would take a least a year to hatch a plot this complex.)
…

Sound familiar?

As Loren Gunther points out in Canada’s National Post, it’s not just the suicide bombers. It’s not just the Nazi-clones of Hezbollah and Hamas. It’s not just fascist Syria and fundamentalist Iran. It’s not just the terrorists planting bombs and cutting off the heads of hostages in Iraq.
It’s the mullahs and imams preaching hatred. It’s the businessmen raising funds for jihad. It’s the Arab media inculcating anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism 24/7. It’s public opinion throughout the Muslim world (which fluctuates between paranoia and — paranoia) that believes the effort to establish democracy in Iraq is a war on Islam.
And it’s the apologists for holy war who equate Israel’s fight for survival and the West’s fight for civilization in
Iraq with jihadists plotting to blow up 10 airliners. This is terrorism’s infrastructure. Its auxiliaries number not in the hundreds, or the millions, but the hundreds of millions.

…

Britain’s great wartime leader cautioned another generation of appeasement-bent Brits: “If you will not fight for right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory is sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.”

The dismal prospect of those words coming to pass in another century, in another conflict, were in my thoughts as I departed
London on another trans-Atlantic flight.