At ShrinkWrapped, the author responds to "Taking Islam Seriously" and has a very smart historical analogy and a large bite of doubt as to whether moderate Muslims, if they exist in any numbers, will ever help themselves:
By the late thirties, Hitler had been legally elected by a minority of voters and once in power he unleashed a growing band of bullies and thugs who were the spiritual ancestors to Zarqawi and his ilk. By the time the danger of Nazism was noticed by the population, opposition became deadly dangerous. It is one thing to risk your life to protect yourself and your family, it is something else altogether to risk your life to defend an outsider, like the Jew. As it was by the late 1930's and increasingly into the 1940's, to be an anti-Nazi German was to risk a horrible, lonely death; today, in "1930's Islam", to be a moderate Muslim is to risk death.
We cannot expect any help from Moderate Muslims in saving their own hides. Their governments cynically use the radical Islamists to keep pressure on their enemies and to keep their own populations under control. There will be minimal help from that direction. Further, every poll taken of an Islamic country shows a sizable population supporting the most rigorous and most intolerant, often Wahhabi or Wahhabi influenced (thanks to Saudi oil money), brands of Islam.
The good doctor points to a feature that I have noted in the past. This is the woeful citation that even in the US, "where dissenters are safer than most anywhere else, a rally for Muslims against terror draws minimal numbers." He is also right to state that just because we wish for there to be a population of moderate Muslims, that does not necessarily make it so.
But is this situation as hopeless as he depicts? Are there in fact sufficient numbers of moderate Muslims or are we all just whistling past the graveyard?
Maybe we are wrong to put our faith in moderates. After all, Nazism was not defeated through half measures. It certainly seems that Islamism demands that it either be destroyed or anointed. Our enemies are not pulling their punches. It may be time for us to answer measure for measure.
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