Take your pick:

We have two kinds of Muslims: Terrorist Muslims and ignorant Muslims. The former are those who know Islam well and live by its dictums. The latter have no clue about their religion and have an idealized image of Islam that has no bases in facts.

Every “moderate” Muslim is a potential terrorist. The belief in Islam is like a tank of gasoline. It looks innocuous, until it meets the fire. For a “moderate” Muslim to become a murderous jihadist, all it takes is a spark of faith.  It is time to put an end to the charade of “moderate Islam.” There is no such thing as moderate Muslim. Muslims are either jihadists or dormant jihadists – moderate, they are not.  (by Ali Sina, FaithFreedom.org,)

Patton’s Rock Soup Method

Denis Schulz/thanks to Faithfreedom.org

Diogenes spent 1,400 years looking for a Moderate Muslim and never found one. Now Diogenes was a smart fellow, but maybe he didn’t look in the right places. Her should have tried California. What could be more moderate than a Muslima wearing a headscarf at a Disneyland Theme Park? (How about Heinrich Himmler wearing a Swastika at Dachau?)

Let me Know if You Find BigFoot While You’re Hunting for “Moderate Islam”

David Swindle: The Appeasers Pretzel Logic

Will New York’s Mosque Protests Aid Terrorist Recruiters?

Yesterday I published a post at NewsReal Blog explaining the anti-Semitism embedded within Islam and the consequences we see today as a result.

John Guardiano submitted a rebuttal. His response in a nutshell: I’m helping the enemy by agreeing that their interpretation with Islam is correct. Instead of telling the truth about Islam — “demonizing” Islam in John’s words — I should be embracing some supposed “moderate Islam.” I should be labeling those who want to kill Jews and impose Sharia on the planet as “misinterpreters” of true Islam. (Newsrealblog)

Opinion: Do moderate Muslims exist?

According to Tariq Ramadan, a Muslim needs just three things in order to be “European”: be law-abiding, speak the language, be loyal to the country and its values (critically and constructively). But, in fact, you can be the most radical Muslim and still be law-abiding, speak the language and be loyal to all the values you’re not critical of. A good example of such a Muslim is Tariq Ramadan himself.

I don’t think that’s enough. Integration is not about being law-abiding, or about accepting those values you think don’t conflict with your religion. It’s about integrating those values into your outlook and religion. (Islam in Europe)

• The ‘moderate Muslim’ is a Unicorn, more elusive than Big Foot and the Yeti (Brigitte Gabriel: “A moderate Muslim is a non-practicing Muslim.)

“Moderate Muslims” threaten to turn “radical” if they get angry

A very revealing AP puff piece on the horrors that “moderate” Muslims are supposedly experiencing in America today. “NYC mosque debate will shape American Islam,” by Rachel Zoll for AP, August 29 (thanks to Robert Spencer):

NEW YORK – Adnan Zulfiqar, a graduate student, former U.S. Senate aide and American-born son of Pakistani immigrants, will soon give the first khutbah, or sermon, of the fall semester at the University of Pennsylvania. His topic has presented itself in the daily headlines and blog posts over the disputed mosque near ground zero.What else could he choose, he says, after a summer remembered not for its reasoned debate, but for epithets, smears, even violence?

And whose fault is that, exactly? Mosque supporters have consistently smeared mosque opponents as racists, bigots, hatemongers, “Islamophobes” — the usual array of charges levied at those who are leading the fight to raise awareness of the jihad and Islamic supremacism, but it was a new thing to see these charges levied promiscuously at the 70% of Americans who oppose the mosque.

As he writes, Zulfiqar frets over the potential fallout and what he and other Muslim leaders can do about it. Will young Muslims conclude they are second-class citizens in the U.S. now and always?

No one, of course, is saying the Muslims are or should be second-class citizens in the U.S. We have raised legitimate questions about the Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf’s support for Sharia and Hamas, and about the symbolism of the Ground Zero mosque as a triumphal mosque. None of this has anything to do with Muslims being second-class citizens. It is simply asking that they accord to non-Muslims the consideration and respect that they demand for themselves. It is asking that they not engage in activity that amounts to sedition, in working to replace the Constitution with a system of laws that would deny basic liberties, and asking law enforcement and government authorities to be cognizant of the nature of Sharia and how it is at variance with those liberties.

“They’re already struggling to balance, `I’m American, I’m Muslim,’ and their ethnic heritage. It’s very disconcerting,” said Zulfiqar, 32, who worked for former U.S. Sen. Max Cleland, a Georgia Democrat, and now serves Penn’s campus ministry. “A controversy like this can make them radical or become more conservative in how they look at things or how they fit into the American picture.”…

Threat noted. But why would it do that? Islamic supremacists and Leftists know: no matter how much they lie about the words, deeds, and positions on various questions of mosque opponents, and no matter how much they defame and smear them, those who oppose the mosque are never, never going to strap bombs on themselves and blow themselves up at the next hand-wringing meeting about “Islamophobia.” In other words, some people, no matter how hard you push them, never become “radicalized.” Why is it that adherents of the Religion of Peace who supposedly reject the version of Islam of Al-Qaeda and its ilk as a twisting and hijacking of their peaceful religion might nevertheless adopt that version of Islam as their own if they believe that some people are being mean to them?

Eboo Patel, an American Muslim leader and founder of Interfaith Youth Core, a Chicago nonprofit that promotes community service and religious pluralism, said Muslims are unfortunately experiencing what all immigrant groups endured in the U.S. before they were fully accepted as American. Brandeis University historian Jonathan D. Sarna has noted that Jews faced a similar backlash into the 1800s when they tried to build synagogues, which were once banned in New York….

Yes, yes, of course. You may recall from the histories of those days that Jews in New York loudly proclaimed that they were there to take over, and numerous Jews in New York engaged in terror plotting. You remember the Fort Hood jihad shooting, the Arkansas recruiting center jihad shooting, the Christmas underwear bomb jihad attempt, the Times Square jihad car bomb attempt, the Fort Dix jihad plot, the North Carolina jihad plot, the Seattle jihad shooting, the JFK Airport jihad plot, and on and on. No, wait! Those weren’t plots by 19th-century Jews in New York, but by 21st-century Muslims all over the U.S.! My mistake!

And no, the point is not that all Muslims in America are responsible for these and other jihad plots. The point is that when the Ground Zero imam and so many other Muslim leaders support Sharia, refuse to condemn Hamas and/or other jihad terror groups, and are manifestly dishonest, it makes the demand that Americans assume that they are different from the Muslims who were responsible for those jihad plots seem like sheer bullying, and a refusal to engage the legitimate concerns that people have about Sharia and the intentions of the Ground Zero mosque organizers.

Patel believes American Muslims are on the same difficult but inevitable path toward integration.”I’m not saying this is going to be happy,” Patel said. “But I’m extremely optimistic.”

Yet, the overwhelming feeling is that the controversy has caused widespread damage that will linger for years.

No, all the jihad terror, all the supremacist declarations, all the lies and all the smears have caused widespread damage that will linger for years. And the Muslim advocacy groups behind the lies and smears, such as CAIR, just don’t care about that damage — because they can turn around after causing it and exploit any resulting “backlash” to reinforce their claim to privileged victim status.

American Muslim leaders say the furor has emboldened opposition groups to resist new mosques around the country, at a time when there aren’t enough mosques or Islamic schools to serve the community….

Actually there are large mosques being built all over, for Muslim communities that have neither the numbers nor the money to sustain them. And that, too, raises questions that if you dare to ask, you’re accused of “Islamophobia.”

U.S. Muslims who have championed democracy and religious tolerance question what they’ve accomplished. If the “extremist” label can be hung on someone as apparently liberal as the imam at the center of the outcry, Feisal Abdul Rauf, then any Muslim could come under attack. Feisal supports women’s rights, human rights and interfaith outreach.

Oh, and Hamas.

“The joke is on moderate Muslims,” said Muqtedar Khan, a University of Delaware political scientist and author of “American Muslims, Bridging Faith and Freedom.” “What’s the point if you’re going to be treated the same way as a radical? If I get into trouble are they going to treat me like I’m a supporter of al-Qaeda?”…

What’s the point? Did he really ask that? How about this for a point: Muslims should not support Al-Qaeda because of human decency. Because of respect for human life. Because of the importance of human rights. Because the “radicals” are perpetrating great evil, murdering innocent people and working for the subjugation of women and non-Muslims, and the extinguishing of the freedom of speech and the freedom of conscience. And apparently all that is just fine with Muqtedar Khan, if you make him angry.

That’s “moderation”?

Carl in J’lem presents:

I trust the Imam and the Muslims at the new Ground Zero “Cordoba” mosque to tell me the truth of what they think about Israel and the United States. After 9/11, the Imam said America shared responsibility for the destruction of the World Trade Center. Now, that same imam refuses to condem Hamas. And hesupported the anti-Israel flotilla that led the international political ambush of Israel. This imam is honest. He’s just anything but “moderate.”

The Mosque’s Imam Is A “Moderate” But Abe Foxman Is A Bigot?

The imam of the Ground Zero mosque has been characterized as a ‘moderate.’ The Anti-Defamation League’s Abraham Foxman came out against the mosque and has been branded as a ‘bigot.’ In light of the organized Jewish community’s leadership’s failure to back Foxman, the Jewish Week’s Jonathan Mark explains why you can trust what you hear from the imams, but you cannot trust what you hear from many American rabbis.

How about all the Jewish leaders and rabbis who call this imam “moderate” and support his proposed mosque? How honest are they?

How many of these rabbis, these professional dialoguers, ever can be counted on to speak up about the state of Islam in the United States — other than to constantly trot out the so-called moderates? Remember, when these rabbis say “moderate” they mean the masquerade of an imam who supports the flotilla and who refuses to condemn Hamas. That’s their idea of “moderate.” Would these rabbis say the imam is more “moderate” than, say, Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s foreign minister; or Hillel Lieberman, a sweetheart of a settler?

How many of these rabbis — how many Jewish newspapers and organizations supporting the Ground Zero mosque — had anything to say when Obama’s counter-terrorism advisor started calling Jerusalem (the entire city that is ruled by its Colonial Governor Obama, who forbids the building of Jewish apartments there) by its Islamic name, “Al-Quds?” Dear reader, do you call Jerusalem “Al-Quds”? You can watch Obama’s advisor calling it Al-Quds here. You can watch that same Obama official, John Brennan, saying that jihad is a legitmate expression of Islam here.

“The State Department has no responsibility to send fruitcakes around as if they are representatives of America,” says former United Nations Ambassador John Bolton, who told Fox News that Imam Rauf should be dumped from the trip and that the State Department should investigate how he was included in the first place.

How many of these rabbis, Jewish newspapers and columnists, or Jewish organizations, had anything to say when Obama’s director NASA, Charles Bolden, told Al-Jazeera that as director of the National Aeronautic Space Administration a big part of his job is “outreach to the Islamic world,” as if that has anything to do with the space program. Of course, most Jewish newspapers, or general newspapers, didn’t find this worth reporting, it not being anywhere as interesting as news regarding a celebrity who might be or is sort of Jewish, or who is studying fake Kabbalah. Is that more important than illuminating the increasingly obsequious relationship between the United States and “moderate” Islam? You can watch Obama’s NASA director explaing all this to Al-Jazeera right here. Surely, Jewish experts in dialogue and Islam think this is perfectly normal, placing outreach to Islam — a religion of moderates and peace — at the top of the space program. Have any Jewish leaders spoken up?

How many of these Jewish leaders, experts in moderate Islam, who neverthless claim they know Islamic terror when they see it, spoke out when Attorney General Holder refused to say that there was any Islamic terror at all, other than a fluke, a coincidence that means nothing? Holder only sees peaceful, moderate Islam. Is there any other? How many of these rabbis or Jewish newspapers, or Jewish organizations, spoke out against Holder? Or do the professional dialoguers essentially agree — that all of Islam is moderate except when it’s not and when it’s not it’s not really Islam?

After the attempted bombing of Riverdale synagogues in 2009 — when some Jewish newspapers didn’t even refer to the suspects as Islamic — there was a response from the Jewish community. A rally in the street for Jews who refused to see their synagogues threatened? No, Jewish leaders provided no leadership, no expression for the Jew in the street. Instead, the Jewish leaders held a limited-seating interfaith dialogue that featured a monologue by an imam who was scathing about the very idea that the FBI should dare to even look for possible terrorists in mosques. The rabbis response? They applauded the imam. He was moderate.

The answer to Mark’s questions is actually quite simple. The people he is quoting – and I don’t care who they claim has ordained them – are not rabbis. They are the high priests of Liberalism, which has unfortunately replaced Judaism for so many Jews. They are more interested in ingratiating themselves with the Obama administration than they are in ensuring the future of the Jewish people.

The Talmud in both Sotah and Sanhedrin says that in the times leading up to the Messiah’s arrival, the generation’s face will be like that of a dog. The (real) rabbis explain that when one walks a dog, the dog seems to run ahead, but constantly turns around to make sure that the ‘master’ is following. So is the dog leading the ‘master’ or is the ‘master’ leading the dog? In reality, the ‘master’ is leading the dog, even though the dog gives the illusion that the opposite is the case. The dog symbolizes the Jewish communal leadership; the ‘master’ symbolizes the Jewish public at large.

Much of the Jewish community has been lost to the scourge of Liberalism, and has no idea what real, authentic Judaism is about. Their ‘rabbis’ are trying to ‘lead’ them by finding ‘moderates’ who vindicate their positions.

The good news that it’s a sign that the Messiah is coming soon.

Read the whole thing.

Idiot of the month: Juan Williams:

“We Don’t Want To Antagonize Moderate Islam By Using the Terms ‘Jihad’ or ‘Muslim Radicals’“

Robert Spencer:

I recently participated in a FrontPage Symposium, “The World’s Most Wanted: A ‘Moderate Islam,’” about that great unicorn in which everyone believes and depends upon but which no one has ever actually seen, moderate Islam.

In this special edition of Frontpage Symposium, we have invited four distinguished guests to discuss the question: Is there a moderate Islam? Our guests today are:

Timothy Furnish, a former U.S. Army Arabic interrogator, he is a consultant and author with a Ph.D. in Islamic History. He is currently working on a book on modern Muslim plans to resurrect the caliphate. His website, dedicated to Islamic eschatology, is www.mahdiwatch.org [1]

Tawfik Hamid, an Islamic thinker and reformer who is the author of Inside Jihad: Understanding and Confronting Radical Islam. A one-time Islamic extremist from Egypt, he was a member of Jemaah Islamiya, a terrorist Islamic organization, with Dr. Ayman Al-Zawahiri, who later became the second in command of al-Qaeda. He is currently a senior fellow and chairman of the study of Islamic radicalism at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies.

M. Zuhdi Jasser, M.D. is the President and Founder of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy (AIFD). [2] A devout Muslim, he served 11 years as a Lieutenant Commander in the United States Navy. He is a nationally recognized expert in the contest of ideas against political Islam, American Islamist organizations, and the Muslim Brotherhood. He regularly briefs members of the House and Senate congressional anti-terror caucuses and has served as a guest lecturer on Islam to deploying officers at the Joint Forces Staff College. Dr. Jasser was presented with the 2007 Director’s Community Leadership Award by the Phoenix office of the FBI and was recognized as a “Defender of the Home Front” by the Center for Security Policy. He recently narrated the documentary The Third Jihad [3], produced by PublicScope Films. His chapter, Americanism vs. Islamism is featured in the recently released book, The Other Muslims [4] (Palgrave-Macmillan) edited by Zeyno Baran.

and

Robert Spencer, a scholar of Islamic history, theology, and law and the director of Jihad Watch. He is the author of ten books, eleven monographs, and hundreds of articles about jihad and Islamic terrorism, including the New York Times Bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad. His latest book, The Complete Infidel’s Guide to the Koran, is available now from Regnery Publishing, and he is coauthor (with Pamela Geller) of the forthcoming book The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America (Simon and Schuster).

FP: Timothy Furnish, Tawfik Hamid, Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser and Robert Spencer, welcome to Frontpage Symposium.

Dr. Furnish, let me begin with you. Robert Spencer recently entered a debate at NewsReal Blog [5] where he argued that there is no moderate Islam. What is your perspective on his argument?

Furnish: I find myself in the curious (and somewhat uncomfortable) position of disagreeing with my friend Robert Spencer, for whom I have the utmost respect and with whom I almost always totally agree. However, on this issue of whether moderate Islam exists, I think Robert may be missing something.

He is exactly right that Sunni Islam-whence comes directly Salafism, Wahhabism and jihadism-promotes violence against non-Muslims in order to make Islam paramount over the entire planet. I have no quarrel with that stance. But I would argue that this is largely because within this majority branch of Islam the only acceptable exegetical paradigm regarding the Qur’an is a literalist one: and of course when passages such as “behead the unbeliever” [Suras 47:3 and 8:12] are read literally the good Muslim had better reach for his sword-or be rightly accused of infidelity to Allah’s Word.

However, perhaps because Robert is so well-versed in the theology of Islam, as opposed to the historical record of how that religious theory has been acted out on the stage of history, he seems to overlook the key fact on the ground that certain minorities within Islam have developed a non-literalist, even allegorical, approach to reading the Qur’an. Foremost among these moderates are the Isma`ilis, the Sevener Shi`is, whose global head is the philanthropical Aga Khan. Isma’ilis may number only in the tens of millions (out of the total Muslim community of some 1.3 billion, second only to Christianity’s 2+ billion), but they do exist and they define, for example, jihad not as killing or conquering unbelievers, but as economic development and charity work.

In general, all branches of Shi`ism (which makes up perhaps 15% of the world’s Muslims), including the Twelvers of Iran, Iraq and Lebanon, allow the practice of ijtihad, “independent theological-legal judgment”-which is decidedly not the case for Sunnism. And while this has allowed for the ayatollahs to come up with negative novelties such as vilayet-i faqih (Khomeini’s “rule of the jurisconsult”), it also leaves the door open to non-literal exegesis of the anachronistic passages of the Qur’an.

Even within Sunnism, many of the Sufi (Islamic mystic) orders are more akin to the Shi`i than the woodenly literalist Sunnis in their exegesis. (Yet I would not go as far as Stephen Schwartz, who in his book The Other Islam: Sufism and the Road to Global Harmony thinks Sufis are basically “Quakers with beards” and sees them as the antidote to jihadists. This rosy view overlooks the historical facts of the many jihads led by Sufi shaykhs and fought by Sufi adherents over the centuries.)

Today, many Sufis are non-literalists and focus on the batini, “inner” or “esoteric” meaning of the Qur’anic verses rather than on the zahiri, “outward” or “exoteric”-i.e., literal-meaning as Bin Ladin and his ilk do. Another sect of Islam that is rather moderate in its approach to the Qur’an is the Barelwi (or Barelvi) one in India and the U.K.

In fact, the recent 600-page “anti-terrorism” fatwa [6] that received much media adoration was written by Muhammad Tahir al-Qadri, a Barelwi. As I observe in the “Washington Times” article, al-Qadri’s adherence to what is essentially a sect of Islam makes it very problematic that his fatwa will have any major effect on the jihadists in the short term-but, over time, if enough sectarian Muslims keep condemning the purely literalist approach to Islam’s holy book, perhaps Islam might enter into its own much needed Enlightenment, or at least Reformation. But it’s clear from these examples that moderate Islam, not just moderate Muslims, truly does exist-even if often in a minority, often persecuted, status.”

Spencer: In all this my friend Timothy Furnish, whose work I admire, is entirely correct. That is why I am always careful to say that there is no “mainstream” sect of Islam, or one that is generally recognized as orthodox by Muslim sects in general, that does not teach the necessity to make war against and subjugate unbelievers. But I am not sure that the existence of Muslims who are generally considered heretics and persecuted for their heresy, which often consists precisely of their rejection or reconstitution of the jihad doctrine, constitutes the existence of a “moderate Islam” upon which Westerners should place any hope. The likelihood that these groups are going to stop being persecuted minorities and eventually attain mainstream status without abjuring exactly the elements of their beliefs that make them appealing to Westerners is slim at best.

How much longer will we be chasing this mythical creature, like the unicorn, bigfoot or the Loch Ness monster?

Childish detractors like John R. Guardiano only add nonsense to rubbish and annoy the s*#t out of those who know their stuff.  Why should those who sound off in ignorance be accepted as partners in debate?   Today, the “moderate Muslim”  remains more elusive than a cure for cancer. There is at least a theoretical possibility that a cure for cancer can be found one day… unless of course Islam takes over and drags us all down into its own endless Dark Ages.

But hey, don’t curse Guardiano just yet: there  is always another wakademic f*kcwit who can do you one up; meet Philip Jenkins from Pennsylvania State University, who is also the author of books  like ‘Jesus Wars’.

There is no end to this.

“Much to my surprise, the Islamic scriptures in the Quran were actually far less bloody and less violent than those in the Bible.”

‘Is the Bible more violent than the koran?’

Its not like we haven’t heard it before:   Yashiko Sagamori wrote the following article 2003:

• The Mythical Moderate Muslim

Take a look! Has anything changed?

Frontpagemag.

Robert Spencer:

Over at the NewsReal blog they’ve been arguing for several days, while I was flying through the air in a tin can, giving a talk, flying elsewhere in another tin can, etc., over whether or not I am right about the non-existence of moderate Islam. And so now it is time for a Marshall McLuhan moment. If you don’t know what I mean by that, watch this clip.

Here’s the latest: “David Swindle’s Complaint is a Diversion,” by John R. Guardiano at NewsReal, March 15. In it, Guardiano takes issue with Swindle, a fellow NewsReal Blog writer, for saying that he “‘viciously’ and ‘harshly’ attacked Robert Spencer” by apparently calling me “ignorant,” “caricaturing,” and “right-wing.” And Guardiano says:

The bottom line is this: Robert Spencer is a big boy and an accomplished scholar. Surely, he can handle a little mild-mannered criticism. I certainly have nothing against him.

In fact, I respect Mr. Spencer and his work, even if I think (as I do) that he is ultimately and profoundly wrong or mistaken about Islam and the war against radical Islam.

And he adds: “My hope is that we can discuss substantive issues without all this Sturm und Drang over hurt and bruised feelings.”

Absolutely, Mr. Guardiano. My feelings are not now and never have been hurt. I appreciate David Swindle’s defense of my work, but I don’t care what anyone calls me, and I’ve been called far worse than anything John Guardiano has said here. If such things bothered me, I would never have lasted so long doing this work publicly, especially given the viciousness, dishonesty, and taste for ad hominems of the Leftist/jihadist attack machine.

Anyway, to the point: does a moderate Islam — by which I mean a version of Islam that does not teach that believers must make war against unbelievers and subjugate them under the rule of Islamic law — exist at all?

Perhaps Mr. Guardiano would take issue with that definition of moderate Islam. He says here:

But the idea that Islam is inherently threatening and irredeemable also isn’t true. This charge, in fact, is a dangerous and malicious lie. In reality, as Dinesh D’Souza observes in his excellent (albeit much misunderstood) book, The Enemy at Home: the Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11:

The Koran, like the Old Testament, has a number of passages recommending peace and others celebrating the massacre of the enemies of God.

D’Souza doesn’t mention, of course, and probably doesn’t know, that the Qur’an’s violent passages are presented as open-ended commands for believers to wage war against unbelievers, while the Old Testament’s violent passages are specific to particular individuals and situations, and are never presented as open-ended commands to all believers.

Nor does D’Souza ever manifest any awareness of the fact that the Qur’an is not simply a book containing passages with different emphases that are more or less up for grabs as to how believers interpret them. In reality, in stark contrast to the Jewish and Christian traditions that have worked to spiritualize in various ways the violent passages of the Bible, the literal understanding of the violent Qur’anic passages has always held sway in Islamic theology — and they have been considered binding. They are also considered to take precedence over the Qur’an’s more tolerant passages.

Don’t take my word for it. Let’s see what Muslim authorities say:

1. Muhammad’s earliest biographer, a pious Muslim named Ibn Ishaq, explains the progression of Qur’anic revelation about warfare. First, he explains, Allah allowed Muslims to wage defensive warfare. But that was not Allah’s last word on the circumstances in which Muslims should fight. Ibn Ishaq explains offensive jihad by invoking a Qur’anic verse: “Then God sent down to him: ‘Fight them so that there be no more seduction,’ i.e. until no believer is seduced from his religion. ‘And the religion is God’s’, i.e. Until God alone is worshipped.”

The Qur’an verse Ibn Ishaq quotes here (2:193) commands much more than defensive warfare: Muslims must fight until “the religion is God’s” – that is, until Allah alone is worshipped. Ibn Ishaq gives no hint that that command died with the seventh century.

Question for John Guardiano: I take it you believe that Ibn Ishaq was wrong, and misunderstood the true, peaceful teachings of the Qur’an and Muhammad?

2. According to a 20th century Chief Justice of Saudi Arabia, Sheikh ‘Abdullah bin Muhammad bin Humaid, “at first ‘the fighting’ was forbidden, then it was permitted and after that it was made obligatory.” He also distinguishes two groups Muslims must fight: “(1) against them who start ‘the fighting’ against you (Muslims) . . . (2) and against all those who worship others along with Allah . . . as mentioned in Surat Al-Baqarah (II), Al-Imran (III) and At-Taubah (IX) . . . and other Surahs (Chapters of the Qur’an).”

Question for John Guardiano: I take it you believe that the Chief Justice of Saudi Arabia also was wrong in thinking that warfare against unbelievers was obligatory, and that he misunderstood the Qur’an?

3. The great medieval scholar Ibn Qayyim (1292-1350) outlines the stages of the Muhammad’s prophetic career: “For thirteen years after the beginning of his Messengership, he called people to God through preaching, without fighting or Jizyah, and was commanded to restrain himself and to practice patience and forbearance. Then he was commanded to migrate, and later permission was given to fight. Then he was commanded to fight those who fought him, and to restrain himself from those who did not make war with him. Later he was commanded to fight the polytheists until God’s religion was fully established.”

The idea that one must fight the “polytheists” until “God’s religion was fully established” was understood throughout Islamic history as referring to a responsibility Muslims had as an umma to wage war against unbelievers until Sharia was established over them. This was the impetus for the jihadist incursions into North Africa, Europe, Persia, India and elsewhere. Question for John Guardiano: I take it you think that all that was wrong, and was based on a mistaken understanding of the Qur’an and Islam?

4. Al-Suyuti says that the Verse of the Sword (9:5) abrogates no less than 124 more peaceful and tolerant verses of the Qur’an. Tafsir al-Jalalayn asserts that the Qur’an’s ninth sura “was sent down when security was removed by the sword.” Ibn Kathir declares that Qur’an 9:5 “abrogated every agreement of peace between the Prophet and any idolater, every treaty, and every term….No idolater had any more treaty or promise of safety ever since Surah Bara’ah [the ninth sura] was revealed.” Ibn Juzayy agrees: the Verse of the Sword’s purpose is “abrogating every peace treaty in the Qur’an.”

None of them say that the Verse of the Sword applies only to the seventh century.

Question for John Guardiano: I take it that you believe that all these Islamic scholars misunderstood the Qur’an and formulated Islamic teaching incorrectly as a result?

5. A Shafi’i manual of Islamic law that in 1991 was certified by the highest authority in Sunni Islam, Cairo’s Al-Azhar University, as conforming “to the practice and faith of the orthodox Sunni community.” This manual, ‘Umdat al-Salik (available in English as Reliance of the Traveller), spends a considerable amount of time explaining jihad as “war against non-Muslims.” It spells out the nature of this warfare in quite specific terms: “the caliph makes war upon Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians . . . until they become Muslim or pay the non-Muslim poll tax.” It adds a comment by a Jordanian jurist that corresponds to Muhammad’s instructions to call the unbelievers to Islam before fighting them: the caliph wages this war only “provided that he has first invited [Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians] to enter Islam in faith and practice, and if they will not, then invited them to enter the social order of Islam by paying the non-Muslim poll tax (jizya) . . . while remaining in their ancestral religions.” Also, it says if there is no caliph, Muslims must still wage jihad.

Question for John Guardiano: I take it you believe that the imams of Al-Azhar were wrong and misunderstood Islam when they certified this book as a reliable guide to the true teachings of Sunni Islam?

But perhaps Mr. Guardiano will dislike those questions, for he goes on to say this:

This is not to say that Islam is a religion of peace. Rather it is to say that Islam is far more rich and complicated than the simple caricature of Islam created by vehement right-wing critics like Robert Spencer at Jihad Watch, Andrew McCarthy at National Review Online, and yes, my colleague here at NewsReal Blog, John L. Work. [...]

A better approach would be to follow the counsel of Islamic scholar Daniel Pipes. Pipes urges Western leaders to encourage and promote moderate Islamic thinking and scholarship. This to help promote a moderate reformation of Islam.

But to follow this approach, you first have to believe that Islam has an inherent truth which is worth explicating and developing. I believe that it does; my right-wing critics believe otherwise; and therein lies the crux of our dispute.

Islam has an “inherent truth”? I can’t see anyone but a believer in Islam affirming that, so Mr. Guardiano and I do indeed part company on that one. But in any case, he seems to be saying that Islam is not a religion of peace, but that he thinks it can change, and that I think it cannot change. Actually, I have never said that it cannot change, but any realistic appraisal of the prospects for Islamic reform has to take into account such impediments to change as the content of the Qur’an and Sunnah, its traditional interpretation by the schools of Islamic jurisprudence, the death penalty for those who engage in heresy or innovation, and the closure of the gate of ijtihad.

For example, Guardiano quotes Daniel Pipes invoking the Sudanese reformer Mahmud Muhammad Taha, but fails to add that Taha was executed for heresy. In fact, all of the quotations he uses from Pipes show Pipes arguing that moderate Islam can exist, not that it exists now. Guardiano also apparently doesn’t know that Pipes has said: “Robert Spencer and I have discussed the perceived differences in our view of Islam. He and I concluded that, although we have different emphases – he deals more with scriptures, I more with history – we have no disagreements.”

Anyway, I hope Mr. Guardiano can handle a little mild-mannered criticism, and look forward to his substantive response to these points.

Geert Wilders & Lars Hedegaard

The Muslim happens to be on the same Free Press Society board as Lars Hedegaard. He would like to see that the FPS becomes just a little less free and a little bit more politically correct. He is just doing his Islamic duty.

Islam, however, is not a race but a violent political ideology in the guise of religion….

Denmark: “Muslim girls aren’t human beings” (UPDATED)

Danish Muslim:

“Hedegaard is not accepting the basic premise that one should make a distinction between Islam and Islamism.”

That, in itself, is a rather strange claim, given that only Allah is all knowing. But since  ”moderate Muslims” like Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s PM,  insist that  ” The term “moderate Islam” is ugly and offensive — Islam is Islam and that’s it”- why should it be Lars Hedegaards obligation to sort the hardcore from the -not so- hardcore Muslims?

With thanks to Islam in Europe

Not so moderate Syrian-Danish Muslim Nasr Khadr

Søren Pind (Liberal Party) and Naser Khader (Conservative Party), announced that they’re quitting the Free Press Society’s advisory board.

“Lars Hedegaard’s regret isn’t good enough, since he’s still not accepting the basic premise that one should make a distinction between Islam and Islamism. Islam is a religious, while the latter is a dangerous ideology we should fight,” says Naser Khader. Khader adds that he also saw that Hedegaard’s original statement were supported by DPP members, which shows that the Free Press Society is a branch of the DPP.

In his announcement Søren Pind pointed out that he’s never actually been a member of the Free Press Society, but only served on its advisory board. (DA, DA)

There is also a very excellent interview with Lars Hedegaard here, well worth your while, which shows that the man is very knowledgeable and outspoken.

Update 3:

Yilmaz Evcil, deputy chairman of Århus’s integration council, lodged a complaint by the police against Hedegaard.

Evcil wrote in an email that Hedegaard was reported for his racist comment on Muslims on his blog snaphanen.dk and parliamentarian Søren Espersen of the DPP was also reported for racism.

Parish priest Katrine Lilleør demands that Hedegaard quit as head of the Free Press Society, or else she will quit the society’s advisory board.

“I don’t want to be a background group in a society where Muslims are being generalized in any way and shoved aside as an extremist group. Therefore I think that she should quit as chairman, and if he doesn’t quit, then I will quit.” (DA, DA)

Update 2:

Lars Hedegaard regrets his controversial statement that Muslim men rape their female family members and see women as less-worthy birth-machines.

“First, I will apologize, if I gave the impression that I wanted to accuse all Muslims – or most of them – of abusing their children. That of course wasn’t my intention,” writes Lars Hedegaard in a press release.

He emphasizes that his statements are ‘about Islam and not Muslims’, which he says is a crucial distinction.

“Muslims aren’t responsible for being born into a certain religion, and I am completely aware that many of them would like to reform the religious practice and make it conform to Western norms. Unfortunately it’s difficult, what one can convince himself by studying Islam’s canon writings and listening to statements by Islam’s authoritative interpreters – the imams and the ulema.”

Hedegaard says that he’s speaking on his own behalf, and is threatening to sue 180Grader.dk and Berlingske Tidende’s blogger Niels Krause-Kjær, if they don’t retract that he’s calling for lynchings in the following quotes from the interview:

[…] Our leaders do not take this seriously and I am afraid that it will take a public uprising before they will take this seriously. But they must. After the German occupation of Denmark there were quite a few who had collaborated with the enemy who came into very hot water. The same thing could happen here… This cannot be solved with a compromise, it’s either our civilisation or their non-civilisation and barbarism. Our two ways of life are like fire and water. One of them must be victorious.” (DA)

Update: Naser Khadder, integration spokesperson for the Conservative Party, is threatening to quit the Free Press Society. Khadder says that he can’t live with Hedegaard being so generalizing. He feels offended and says that when he started on the Free Press Society’s advisory board, one of his conditions was that it would be more politically open, and not only have DPP members. (DA)

———-

Søren Krarup of the Danish People’s Party (DPP) completely supports Lars Hedegaard’s criticism of Islam. Lars Hedegaard, head of the Free Speech Society, said in a recent interview that Muslim girls were raped by their family.

“He’s absolutely right, and the outrage is wholly because of the ignorance of you journalists,” says Søren Krarup.

In the interview Hedegaard said as follows: “Girls in Muslim families are raped by their uncles, their cousins or their father [...] They are not human beings. They have a function as a a womb – they bear the offspring of the warriors and create new warriors, other than that.. well, they can be used for sexual purposes, but they have no value.”

According to Krarup the evidence can be found in the book “Mødom på Mode”. “It’s a Danish immigrant girl who tells about how she was raped by her uncle, and how she didn’t dare say anything to her own family. He’s absolutely right,” says Krarup.

Jette Dali of the Free Speech Society, who is also a candidate for parliament for the DPP, also agrees with the substance of Hedegaard’s statements, but says that people shouldn’t generalize.

“There’s a kernel of truth in it. There’s more which have been shown in the past,” she says, and adds that there was once a study in Denmark which showed their [ed: Muslim girls and women] loneliness and isolation. It’s obviously not only in Muslim community, but in addition to the attacks, they have to deal with it on their own and can’t count on anybody’s support. Also not from their own parents.

Q: But according to Krarup there’s no issue of generalization

A: It’s not generalizations, because he’s not speaking about Muslims in general, he’s speaking of what Islam says, and what Islam expresses, she says.

Source: Berlingske (Danish)

There is an update here from the Tundra Tabloids:

THE PARALYZING NOTION OF ISLAMISM AND MODERATE ISLAM….

The Paralyzing Notion of Islamism and Moderate Islam
In the on-going public outrage in Denmark about the Danish Free Press Society’s public face, Lars Hedegaard’s, comments about Muslim girls, where he stated that they have no value inside Islam except for creating new warriors for the jihad, and the fact that they can be used as sexual objects, something interesting caught my eye: It was the comment of Naser Khader, who resigned from Free Press Society’s advisory board because of Hedegaard’s statement.

Naser Khader’s comment was as follows:

“Lars Hedegaard’s regret isn’t good enough, since he’s still not accepting the basic premise that one should make a distinction between Islam and Islamism. Islam is a religious, while the latter is a dangerous ideology we should fight.”

Although Hedegaard’s only regret was concerning the fact that his statement had been misunderstood, and not about his statement in itself, the point I want to make lies elsewhere.

Now, if I was to formulate my own view about Islam and Islamism in a similar phrasing as Naser’s, it would be something like this:

“Islamism is just a western word for the aspects in Islam which are not compatible with western values. Islam is a religious, dangerous ideology that we should fight.”

What struck me was the similarities between these two opposing views: The former is the publicly accepted and politically correct view, where Islam itself is refused to be seen as the problem, and the latter is the politically forbidden view, where Islam itself, is seen as the problem.

Actually these two sentences neatly show the whole debate about Islam in the west in a nutshell: On the one hand we have the equation where Islam, as a major religion can not be a problem, but because some kind of a problem clearly exists in connection with Islam, the concept of Islamism is created – and on the other hand we have the equation where Islam equals the problem.

What is interesting in these two equations is that if you take away the concept of Islamism, the first equation automatically turns into the second equation.

So how to take Islamism out of the equation?

If we look at the concept, it becomes apparent that Islamism – with it’s many different names like radical Islam, political Islam, or militant Islam – is just a made-up concept created in the west for the purpose of supporting another, equally imaginary concept called moderate Islam – also known as true Islam or worldly Islam.

It is obvious that these two imaginary concepts were created together, as a pair, as neither of them can exist without the other. However, as both of the concepts support each other, it is clear that moderate Islam is the actual concept that is at the heart of this whole thing, and that the concept of Islamism is created to support the concept of moderate Islam.

After all, Islamism is just a word that was made up for the aspects inside Islam that we don’t agree with in the west: For example, even as the Quran tells him do so, if a Muslim kills infidels, it is Islamism. On the other hand, if a Muslim that treats other Muslims well, as advised in the Quran, he is practicing the so-called true, or moderate Islam.

In other words, everything in Islam that is not compatible with western values is Islamism – and everything else in Islam is moderate Islam.

The only problem is that we can not divide Islam in this way: Islam is a religion that is based on holy scriptures and these holy scriptures simply contain what they contain – everything they contain is Islam, regardless of how we categorize it in the west.

So, as psalmists base their actions on the holy scriptures of Islam, it’s completely absurd to claim that their Islam would not be true Islam.

Actually, if we use the simplified example I gave above, the Muslim who kills infidels and treats other Muslims well, is in fact practicing a more “true” Islam than the Muslim who is only treating other Muslims well, because the latter is putting into effect the commands of the Quran only partially, whereas the former is doing everything that the his holy scriptures are commanding him to do.

On the other hand, as the Quran really commands Muslims to kill infidels, a moderate Islam can not even exist by definition, as long as this and similar commandments stand.

Moderate Muslims of course do exist, but if we were to say it more precisely, we would have to call them bad or lazy Muslims.

And exactly here, I think, lies the key to this whole optical illusion where Islam mystically turns into Islamism and moderate Islam: People do not understand that the fact that moderate Muslims exist, does not in any way prove that moderate Islam exists.

Actually this misconception is very understandable and it goes somewhat like this: “There’s a lot of Muslims in the world who are not terrorists – they are all practicing moderate Islam.”

What these people do not understand is that the Qurans in the homes of those nice Muslims says the same thing about killing infidels than the Qurans of the terrorists: Regardless of whether you find the Quran in a home of a nice, moderate Muslim or in the ashes of a suicide-bomber, it says the same thing – Kill the infidels.

So Islam itself doesn’t become more moderate no matter how many Muslims are nice, as I am sure many Muslims of course are.

In other words, moderate Islam does not exist before the parts of the Quran that are not compatible with western values are either removed, or until somebody from inside Islam, who has the authority to do so, says that those parts are no longer relevant in today’s world.

Until one of the above-mentioned scenarios become reality, moderate Islam does not exist – and it must be mentioned here that in the case of the second scenario becoming a reality – where the person with the necessary Islamic authority would be discarding central parts of the Quran as outdated – this person must have considerable support from inside the Muslim population before we can start talking about a moderate Islam with any relevance.

The situation being such, and as at least I personally have never heard of any kind of moderate Islam that would have any relevance, we will proceed from the basic premise that no such thing exists as moderate Islam.

The concept of Islamism is also a totally absurd concept as Islamism (in the sense as the word is commonly used) is included in Islam and can not be separated from Islam before somebody from inside Islam does it in one of the above-mentioned ways.

So, regardless of which side we approach the subject from (meaning from the concept of moderate Islam or Islamism), in the end we end up with the holy scriptures of Islam. For this reason I advise everybody who might find themselves talking about the subject to really read at least the key-points in the Quran, or at the very least, to read the chronologically latest part of the Quran, that is, to read the so-called sura of the sword. Also abrogation is a concept one should be able to explain. As an absolute minimum, we should at least be able to explain the difference between Muslims and Islam.

The misconception about Islamism and moderate Islam must be corrected. It must be corrected because if we can not prove the existence of moderate Islam, and Islamism is just a name we have invented in the west for the un-acceptable actions of Muslims done in the name of Islam, the whole conceptual structure that is preventing people from seeing the connection between Islam and the things done in the name of Islam will break, and when it breaks, it will take out the foundation of everything that is harmful in today’s political correctness.

Now let’s go back to the publicly accepted equation that the politicians and the media is using:

“Islam is a religious ideology which we should support, while Islamism is a dangerous ideology that we should fight.”

Then, let’s add a new factor into the equation:

Islamism = Islam And suddenly the equation changes into:

“Islam is a religious, dangerous ideology that we should fight.”

- WFT

How the so-called moderate Muslims are part of the problem of Islamic extremism and terrorism…

• US Muslims are up to their old tricks: New York: Muslims complain about “racial profiling” in wake of arrests in major jihad terror plot
• Muslim engineer at European Organization for Nuclear Research “expressed a desire to carry out attacks”
• Toronto 18 jihad leader confesses to 9/11-style bomb plot

But not to worry: as always, none of the above has anything to do with Islam. You know the routine: can’t blame the religion of a gazillion people for…., can’t tar all Muslims with….,  Islam is not a monolith…..blah blah….

Islam Watch

We all remember a fateful day of September 11, 2001, when 19 Muslim men, proclaiming the greatness of Allah, “Allahu Akbar”, acted on the dictates of their faith.

Pictured: Al Qaeda regularly murder people they consider enemy collaborators, or infidels, or not “True” muslims. (Pat Dollard)

Related Link:

• Father Zakarias Botros: Muslims pretend to be nice people

But, do you ever recall loud denouncements from all Islamic institutions that soundly rebuked these hotheads? Do you remember if mosques, from Quetta to Cairo, repudiated Osama Bin Laden, and ever issued fatwas against Mullah Omar? Do you marvel at the facts that 99% of Muslims, who call themselves “moderates”, ever swiftly showed their solidarity with the western world, making the remaining 1% (”extremists”) outcaste and pariah of the society?

Hmmmmm… Me neither!

Nevertheless, I do remember bellicose statements, that could ever be called upon the discourse, to exempt Islam from all actions taken in its very name. I do remember a sizable population of Muslims calling it an inside job by the Bush Administration, or a Jewish plot — a conspiracy theory still believed by large masses of Muslims. And of those Muslims, who believed it was a Muslim act, I do remember them telling that Islam is unquestionably a “Religion of Peace and universal-brotherhood”, and that some disgruntled youths, misguided by the mullahs, were exploited to inflict harm upon us, and bring dishonor upon the glorious name of Islam. Whatever we do, we ought not to hold Islam liable?

Moderate Muslims’ Silent as a tomb!

I did not see any of those good moderate Muslims, who are so touchy about an unkind word directed at Islam, were ever outraged at the fact that Muslim youths had besmirched Islam’s glory. I did not even see these same moderate Muslims being infuriated at Osama bin Laden for insinuating that bin Laden was driven by the true Islamic faith; they never called for Mullah Omar’s expulsion from Pakistan. I also did not see these same moderate Muslims ever pressure the Pakistani establishments to expel the masterminds of the 1999 hijackings or even Dawood Ibrahim or the members of Lashkar-e-Tayyeba, who authored carnage in New Delhi and Mumbai. I did not see these moderate Muslims to pressure Saudi Arabia and the UAE to terminate their diplomatic relations with the Taliban and to their funding of Jihadi outfits in Pakistan. These moderate Muslims just stood by in pious silence!

All these actions are left to infidel governments to take up and pursue. These good Muslims just sit by passively, and they surely rose in vociferous or violent protests if Islam is ever implicated in the analysis of Islamic terrorism the world over. At that point, the fangs of moderate Muslims are bared and the quills are raised. They threaten to label us “Islamophobes” so stirringly that we, with our fetish for multiculturalism and the mazlooms [oppressed], just folded our tents and depart silently into the night. Consequently, all our analyses and actions are tempered by the desire not to inflame the “moderate Muslim Street”.

Result is Resurgent Taliban!

The Taliban is now resurgent in Afghanistan again. Dissatisfied with being restricted to the badlands of the NWFP only, they have spread to the Swat Valley and their domain reaches now within 100 miles of Islamabad and Rawalpindi, the nerve center of the Pakistani power structure. There they have unleashed unprecedented brutality by shooting Pakistani civilians, beheading Pakistani dissenters, flogging Pakistani transgressors, driving out Pakistani civilian administrators, establishing the Shariah to oppress Pakistanis, and subjecting minorities to jizya.

And pray, what is the Pakistani commentariat most exercised about? The drone attacks, which target foreign Jihadists and their hideouts! This is the same set of “moderate elements”, who have readily consumed the generous aid packages (in excess of US $10b at last count), but also those, who chafe at the prospect of any of that aid-money being used against Taliban/Al-Qaeda operatives.

These folks are not “extremists” or “Jihadists”. Indeed, they have not actively participated in acts of violence or terrorism against anyone. They are just the ‘Moderate Muslim Street’. Yet, they have been mute spectators as the shining stars of Islam rolled out the green carpet crushing Pakistani citizens in its wake, but reserved their most fiery rhetoric for occasions, when an American drone interrupts a tea-party of the Holy Beards. I have yet to hear a squeak from the “Moderate Muslim Street” decrying the Sudanese genocide in Darfur, where Sudanese Christians are being murdered by maniacal Islamists. Perhaps the moderate Muslims are exhibiting their exemplary restraints and their legendary moderation!

In conclusion, I am unimpressed by the refrain from Muslim folks, who moan that they are unfairly tarnished by the actions of a few and yet fail to denounce those very same actions so convincingly. In fact, when I see themdeflect responsibility with lame excuses and their feeble justifications, I want to treat them as a part of the problem. They knowingly or unknowingly provide cover for Islamists to operate unencumbered; and hence, they abet the crimes committed by the extremists. And, therein lies their culpability (if not complicity)!

If it oinks, it is a pig!

Let me clarify that I DO NOT advocate ANY harm or harassment of ANY person on the grounds of their faith. However, let me also clarify that I do not accept the exemptions of anyone’s ‘responsibility’ on any similar grounds. If Islam’s stature means anything to you then YOU should be the first one to denounce and debar those that tarnish it. If you fail to do so, then you have just chosen to include the swine in your society. You cannot live in a sty and not be called a pig!

Because it worx so well in other places, especially in those places which will become Islamic within the next 20 years.  If we don’t dig our heels in and stand up to those who are doing this to us, it will happen here too:

Andrew Bolt – Monday, July 20, 09 

There is, of course lots more where that came from. There’s plenty more in the annals of this blog, and if you really want to learn about the ideology of jihad and Mohammedanism, you can log on to Jihad Watch, or Faith Freedom International where your questions will be answered by ex-Muslims. What more does it take for you to educate yourself?

* Update: and who came up with this “guidebook?” look no further than  Hass Dellal OAM, an ”Australian of Turkish descent” He is also the “executive director of the Australian Multicultural Foundation”. At Monash you can find other illustrious characters like Waleed Aly. Waleed is currently a lecturer at the Global Terrorism Research Centre at Monash University.

A better move by the KRudd government would have been to print a booklet on Islamic Jihad to educate the public. Or a single pamphlet, with questions like these from the Muslims against Sharia blog:

Does Islam Need to Be Reformed?
Should Muslim community accept responsibility for terrorism?
Should Islam have a dominant status?
Should Sharia be abolished?
Should people be free to portray Prophet Muhammad?
Who holds moral high ground in the Arab-Israeli conflict?
Is Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization

 Although the above questions cannot provide complete accuracy, they will paint a lot clearer picture about how “our” Muslims really feel, provided they are honest with their answers. Due to the nature of  the beast we seriously doubt that, though.

KRudd the Dud:  The prize how sweet it is to be handcuffed

Andrew Bolt – Monday, July 20, 09 

Australian Apologetics for Islam

Peter Day /Quadrant

The degree of thought control, of limitations on freedom of speech and expression [imposed by political correctness and multiculturalism] is without parallel in the Western world since the eighteenth century and in some cases longer than that.

—Professor Bernard Lewis, keynote address to the Conference of the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa, Washington DC, April 24–26, 2008

In 2004 the Australian government produced a glossy promotional booklet on Islam—an eighty-page presentation titled Muslim Australians: Their Beliefs, Practices and Institutions. This booklet—commissioned, published and promoted by the Department of Immigration and Citizenship in partnership with the Australian Multicultural Foundation, and “in association” with the University of Melbourne—may fairly be taken as representative of Australian government-sponsored educational efforts in relation to Islam.

In the Australian Parliamentary Library’s “E-Brief’ on Muslims in Australia, Muslim Australians is one of the most prominently featured publications recommended to interested enquirers. These typically include politicians, media, students and interested stakeholder institutions such as police forces. The publication is authored by perhaps the most high-profile Islamic Studies scholar in Australia: Professor Abdullah Saeed, the Sultan of Oman Professor of Islamic Studies and Director of the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Islam at Melbourne University. Professor Saeed is also Director of the Australian National Centre for Excellence in Islamic Studies—a joint initiative between the University of Melbourne, the University of Western Sydney (UWS) and Griffith University, funded by the Australian government to the tune of $8 million.

The wording of the title of Muslim Australians is somewhat misleading however: only a small part of this booklet is directly to do with Muslim Australians as such. Mostly, the booklet presents an overview of Islam in general. This includes Islamic beliefs, the historical beginnings of the religion, how Islamic teachings are or are not reflected in its history, and a more or less apologetic treatment of various controversial issues to do with Islam.

In the light of the high current level of interest in international human rights and instruments for enforcing these rights, the booklet’s treatment of the right of Muslims to leave Islam (apostasy) is perhaps the most timely topic to look at as an example of the booklet’s overall approach to explaining Islam. This topic is dealt with in a section of the booklet headed “Stereotypes and Misconceptions”, where the proposition that “People who leave Islam (apostates) will be killed” is listed as one of the “misconceptions”. The text that addresses this explains Muslim teaching on the matter as follows:

From a religious point of view, the Qur’an stipulates that “there is no compulsion in religion” (2:256), and a person can neither be forced to become a Muslim nor to stay in the religion.

It is also stated that:

In the time of the Prophet, if a person left Islam because of their own religious choice, then in general there were no repercussions. This is because the Qur’an instructed the Prophet that his duty was to preach the message of Islam but that “If then they turn away, We have not sent thee as a guard over them. Thy duty is but to convey [the Message]”.

It seems fair for a reader to conclude from this that Islamic teaching is summed up in the words given in the first quote, that “a person can neither be forced to become a Muslim nor to stay in the religion”. But as it happens, the author of the booklet, Professor Saeed, is also co-author of a major book on this very topic, published in the same year as Muslim Australians—and this book takes a very different view. This book—titled Freedom of Religion, Apostasy and Islam—is not promoted by the government, does not feature in any Parliamentary Library e-briefs on Islam or Muslims, and appears to have been completely ignored by Australian reviewers in general. Even the fact that in 2008 the book was actually banned by Professor Saeed’s native Maldives—the Muslim island nation in the Indian Ocean known to most Australians as a tourist paradise—has awakened no interest. Yet the explanation of Muslim teaching on apostasy presented here by Professor Saeed is of great interest. It is very different indeed to the impression left by the Muslim Australians booklet.

Professor Saeed uses Freedom of Religion to present his case for “rethinking” the Muslim position on apostasy. In the course of making his argument, he makes it perfectly clear that for the “vast majority” of Muslim scholars, that position is that people who leave Islam should be killed. His personal view is that this position is not well founded in Islamic scriptures. But throughout his book, he treats it as an uncontroversial fact that the death-for-apostasy position—the position which he is arguing against as a reformist Muslim scholar—is the one that today holds sway in the Muslim world.

Though this will not be news to other scholars of Islam, Saeed’s book Freedom of Religionwill be an eye-opener to anyone who has gleaned what they know of the religion from hisMuslim Australians. For example, after surveying the gloomy status of freedom of religion in various Muslim states, Professor Saeed summarises the consensus position on apostasy among Muslim religious scholars as follows:

While there is general consensus that coercion should not be used to convert anyone to any religion … the right of religious freedom is not extended to a Muslim who wants to change his or her religion to another.

He goes on to tell us that, according to “the majority of Muslim jurists”, to flout the prohibition on leaving Islam “is to commit the crime of apostasy, and a person so doing should be put to death”.

Saeed does state at one point in Freedom of Religion that there is now “a significant level of diversity among Muslim thinkers and scholars” on the issue. He immediately qualifies this, however, with the observation that the “pre-modern” position remains dominant:

the vast majority of Muslim scholars writing on the issue of apostasy today follow the pre-modern position … For those who follow the pre-modern position … apostasy is prohibited and no Muslim is allowed to convert to another religion or commit any of the offences which would make them an apostate. Apostasy, for these scholars, is punishable by death.

A few pages later, Professor Saeed describes this death-for-apostasy position as “largely unanimous”. Among scholars who differ from this “largely unanimous” view, Saeed includes those who merely argue for certain “restrictions” on it—for example that punishment for apostasy should be carried out only by the state, and not by private individuals. But Saeed tells us elsewhere in the book that even this position

is weakened … by the general belief that the apostate’s life is of no value, and is therefore forfeit. Thus, if the apostate is killed by a private individual there are no repercussions for the killer. Nor does killing the apostate require redress or recompense.

Based purely on the information presented in Professor Saeed’s Freedom of Religionbook, it is clear that the Muslim Australians booklet falls well short of an accurate presentation of contemporary Muslim teaching on this issue. That is to say, the booklet fatally confuses actual Muslim teaching on apostasy with what Professor Saeed believes Muslim teaching ought to be. This kind of confusion also affects the treatment in Muslim Australians of other controversial topics, such as the nature of jihad. (To be entirely fair to Professor Saeed, he does state in a couple of sentences introducing the “Stereotypes and Misconceptions” section of the Muslim Australians booklet that the responses given are “how Muslims often respond to such misconceptions”.)

On the question of current Muslim practices in respect of apostasy (as distinct from Muslim teachings on apostasy), the Muslim Australians booklet gives us the following account:

In the past, apostasy was often linked with state treason, and for that reason some Muslim rulers imposed the death penalty on apostates. Also, in some parts of the Muslim world today, the threat of punishment for apostasy exists and is often used as a political tool against people by their opponents.

It is clear however from Professor Saeed’s Freedom of Religion book, that both official and unofficial punishments for leaving Islam, including death, affect Muslims not just in “the past” but now. He acknowledges that some Muslim countries today incorporate the death penalty for apostasy in their legal codes; that in at least one country—Pakistan—blasphemy laws “function like an apostasy law as far as Muslims are concerned”; and that in recent years “a number of cases of apostasy that did not make international headlines were brought against converts, intellectuals, journalists and writers in a variety of Muslim nations”. Punishment for apostasy also appears to be much more pervasive in the Muslim world than is suggested by the reference to just “some parts” in Muslim Australians, as quoted above.

Professor Saeed shows in his Freedom of Religion book that the threat of punishment for apostasy is used not just as a “political tool”, but for much more fundamental reasons related to the history, psychology and anthropology of Muslim communities. In a section on the “fear” of apostasy in the Freedom of Religion book, Professor Saeed describes his own attempts to discover the specific reasons why some Muslims leave Islam today. Explaining why he has to resort to anonymous sources, he writes:

Because of the problematic nature of apostasy and its probable punishment, converts from Islam are highly cautious, particularly if they are living in Muslim communities. In order to explore possible reasons for conversion, it is therefore essential to find sources where converts can discuss their case freely without revealing their identity.

Among cases involving prominent Muslim “apostates”, Professor Saeed notes in his book the example of the Ayatollah Khomeini’s notorious 1989 fatwa against the novelist Salman Rushdie for his novel Satanic Verses (a fatwa recently re-affirmed by Khomeini’s successors and still supported by the offer of a substantial monetary reward for Rushdie’s murder). He also mentions the case of Taslima Nasreen, the internationally acclaimed Bangladeshi feminist writer, whose execution had been called for in numerous fatwas by Islamic religious leaders.

Since 2004, when Professor Saeed’s book was published, many more fatwas have of course been issued seeking the deaths of prominent ex-Muslim writers and thinkers. For example, in the very same year that the book was published, the Somalian-born free-thinker and best-selling author Ayaan Hirsi Ali was forced into hiding and has had to live ever since under personal security arrangements. “Ordinary” Muslim apostates, few of whom can afford such protection, must take their chances. The Times has reported on the existence of an extensive “underground network” for Muslims in the UK who, for one reason or another, wish to leave Islam but face varying degrees of punishment as a deterrent, including a not insignificant risk of being killed.

The recent results of a UK survey of young Muslims on the topic of apostasy represent perhaps the most startling example of a worsening trend on this issue among the younger generation. This poll, by a reputable polling company (Populus Ltd), showed that among UK Muslims aged between sixteen and twenty-four years, no less than 36 per cent believed that “Muslims who convert to another religion should be punished by death”. The figure for Muslims aged fifty-five or more was much lower, at 19 per cent, though of course still high enough to be of great concern.

The Human Rights Challenge

The right to leave a religion, for whatever reason, is one of the world’s most pressing human rights issues, affecting Muslims worldwide. It is clear, if only from information presented in the book on this topic co-authored by Professor Saeed, that most current Muslim teaching and practice in this area is in direct contravention of both Article 18 and Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), adopted and proclaimed at the UN over sixty years ago.

Article 18 reads: “Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.” Article 19 reads: “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”

It is hard to see how any Western government that minimises or effectively denies (if only by omission) that there is any real problem in this area, can do other than discourage serious reformers in the Muslim world and thwart the impetus to change.

Among the member states of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC) (the world’s main representative body for Islamic states), there are many brave human rights NGOs. But the obstacles facing these reformers are formidable. Western academic institutions, often themselves the recipients of substantial financial largesse from Middle Eastern powers, cannot be relied upon for support. In the prestigious, Cambridge-basedInternational Journal of Middle East Studies, the scholar chosen to review the Freedom of Religion book by Professor Saeed and his brother curtly dismissed their arguments for a rethink of the apostasy laws, noting that “all Muslim schools of thought have been in full and well-founded agreement” about this. “What the Prophet says” about the treatment of apostates, chided this reviewer, “cannot … be simply ignored or wished away”.

The reason the Maldives gave for banning the book was that it “violates Islamic principles”. This was despite the fact that Hassan Saeed has been for some years a prominent figure in Maldivian government circles (and despite Abdullah Saeed’s prominence as an Islamic scholar in Australia).

Though a small country, the Maldives in fact rather neatly exemplifies current trends on human rights in the Muslim world generally. A revised Maldivian constitution was introduced in 2008 that for the first time makes it a formal requirement for all citizens of that country to be Muslims; and that explicitly subordinates all of its citizens’ human rights to sharia. Notwithstanding this, the Maldivian foreign ministry announced in December 2008 that it was joining other members of the United Nations in Geneva to commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of the UDHR. There the country’s UN representative unblushingly stated: “In today’s Maldives, the ideals and principles contained in the Universal Declaration have found real-world form in our proud new Constitution”.

The ambassador also took the opportunity to note that his country was “an active and vocal participant at the [UN] Human Rights Council”. When a Sri Lankan-based Maldivian publication had earlier asked Hassan Saeed whether he would advocate freedom of religion in the Maldives, Saeed reportedly said the issue was of “very little relevance” as “we do not have a non-Muslim population”.) 

As in the Maldives, so elsewhere in much of the Islamic world: greater restrictions on freedom of thought and expression, including the continuing threat of punishment for apostasy; and greater enforcement of sharia, accompanied by an ever more strident insistence that “human rights” are being fully respected.

The trend at the time of the publication of the Saeeds’ book was not towards reform, but towards a tightening of the laws against apostasy and greater zeal in implementing them. That trend has continued. In Malaysia—a country identified by the Saeeds in 2004 as providing an important indication of future trends in the “moderate” Islamic world—secular courts have since then deferred to the rulings of sharia courts on apostasy by Muslims.

Egypt is another depressing bellwether. As Abdullah Saeed noted in his 2004 book,

accusations of apostasy in Egypt—which until recently was a haven for intellectuals, cultural activities and Islamic scholars—appear to have created a climate of fear for its intellectuals, literary figures and liberal Islamic scholars. Censorship of books, films, plays and television programs is on the rise, leading to a gradual stagnation of creative, intellectual and cultural work.

Iran and Pakistan are perhaps the most noteworthy and significant other examples. In September 2008, the Iranian parliament voted in favour of a draft bill imposing the death penalty on any male who leaves Islam. Pakistan, which uses “blasphemy” as a proxy for apostasy, continues to sentence people to death on this charge.

Both these countries sit on the UN’s preparatory committee that is laying the groundwork for “Durban II” in Geneva in April 2009—the big multilateral anti-racism conference at which all Islamic countries will be making a concerted effort to push through global restrictions on criticising Islam (“Islamophobia”), which is indeed an offence against “human rights” as understood under sharia principles.

What general public policy conclusions can be drawn from all this? A couple of years ago, Paul Kelly of the Australian noted some of the questions that Catholic Cardinal George Pell thought that non-Muslims in Australia could usefully discuss with Muslims, such as: How do Muslims interpret the Koran? What are their views about its invocations to violence? How does Islam relate to the secular state? And so on. One obstacle that Kelly noted about this type of question though, was that

Western progressive secularism is either hostile to religion or not interested in religion. As a consequence, progressive secularists deal with Muslims on every basis except the meaning of their religion. Slight problem.

This has certainly been true in the past. However, for all the supposed no-nonsense, hard-nosed secularism of Australian public life, it is obvious that this is no longer the case. Taxpayer-funded government agencies spend significant amounts—often in “partnerships” with Islamic groups—supposedly educating the Australian public about both the history and the actual belief content of a particular religion. The government-produced Muslim Australians booklet is a representative example. This kind of officially sanctioned literature purports to educate all of us on religious issues related to Islam. Critics are not welcome.

Clearly, the problem here is not that government in Australia is steadfastly secular about religious issues. Rather, the problem is that government and government agencies, especially the Department of Immigration and Citizenship, have been actually promoting a form of partisan religious apologetics that serves not to enrich but to impoverish the quality of public discussion—and the public policy that inevitably flows from that.

The unstated policy seems to be to try to cement into place a kind of semi-official “acceptable opinion” on what is in fact a minefield of contention—and a vitally important arena of ongoing scholarly debate and public policy development. The main driver of policy here appears to be not the encouragement of such debate and policy development, but a perceived need to combat “Islamophobia” in all sectors of the Australian population. Even on its own terms, it is doubtful the policy works as intended. Its main premises deserve greater scrutiny than they usually receive.

Ideology and Public Policy

In his book People Like Us, Waleed Aly, a prominent member of the executive committee of the Islamic Council of Victoria, quotes the American scholar Hamza Yusuf addressing a London Muslim audience in September 2005, as follows:

I don’t like the term Islamophobia, because a phobia is an irrational fear. I think many people have instead a rational fear of Islam and Muslims in that they have valid reasons to be worried.

Aly comments: “It is difficult to disagree.”

Well, Aly can say that. However, a vast quantity of Australian academic research is based on the assumption that any expressions of such fear by non-Muslim Australians are, must be, irrational—and racist. Not that Australians are necessarily being picked on. As the statement by Professor Lewis at the head of this chapter indicates, this kind of stifling assumption prevails to an unprecedented degree on campuses throughout the West.

The assumption is rarely questioned, but is accepted as a given, very often on the basis of little more than the theories of the late Edward Said, author of a famous 1978 book bearing the title Orientalism. It was in this book that Said, a literary critic of Egyptian-Palestinian background based at Princeton University in the USA, popularised the dogma that “every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was … a racist, an imperialist and almost totally ethnocentric”. Sometimes described as the father of postcolonial studies, Said himself drew on the speculations of other radical theorists, notably Antonio Gramsci and Michel Foucault. Built into his argument was the notion of Islamic Middle Eastern peoples as the cultural “other” to whom anyone of European background could not help but bring a legacy of patronising cultural domination.

Said’s theories have been subject to withering criticism over the years from serious scholars of widely differing political affiliations. (Numerous examples may be found in Robert Irwin’s book For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and Their Enemies; Martin Kramer’s Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America; andIbn Warraq’s Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism.) Yet since its publication thirty years ago, the influence of Orientalism in Australian and other Western universities has been perhaps greater than that of any other book published over this period. This influence is also pervasive in the world of journalism. Peter Manning for example, a former head of both ABC and Network Seven’s News and Current Affairs, as well as Adjunct Professor of Journalism at Sydney’s University of Technology, is a well-known advocate of Said’s ideas. As he told the Australian Arabic Council in March 2005, Said was a “major thinker of extreme relevance to us right now”. In Australia, most of the large volume of locally produced academic literature that has appeared in recent years on racism, stereotyping, “othering” and so on explicitly acknowledges the inspiration of Said’s Orientalism.

The difficulty for all such sweeping theories is that the empirical evidence that might confirm them is lacking. Said dealt with this by substituting “representations” of nefarious attitudes in literature, movies and the media. As the Syrian critic Sadak Jalal al-‘Azm perceptively observed, for Said, representation seemed more real than reality.

An illuminating example of efforts to indict Australia in this way is a 1998 book calledWhite Nation by Ghassan Hage, still very popular on university reading lists. Hage acknowledges Said, while drawing more heavily on other fashionable theorists such as Pierre Bourdieu, Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Zizek. Hage explains that whereas Said deals with externally exercised imperialism, he, Hage, is concerned in Australia with “a national reality delineated by a discourse of internal orientalism”. In his assessment of the research in the book that supposedly underpins Hage’s elaborate theorising, Bob Gould—a veteran Sydney radical—pinpoints its shortcomings. Writing in OzLeft, Gould notes that although Hage

painstakingly describes the large number of interviews conducted by his team … it’s all window dressing … He nowhere gives any statistics or breakdown of what proportion of the interviewees had different views on anything … He selects from this pool of interviews only those that suit his purpose of constructing a totally white racist model of Australian society. He takes the most extreme interviews, or the interviews that most suit his already constructed model, and uses them to illustrate his point of view … The interviews are carefully selected and then used as objects for cultural criticism and deconstruction, within the framework of Hage’s already preconceived intellectual arrangement.

In much academic literature, such more or less endless theoretical elaborations on the theme of Australian racism go hand-in-hand with research purporting to show that the principal “other” in Australia—the adherents of Islam—are in general suppressed and threatened on a large scale. Hage’s book adopts this approach, going so far as to actually equate the historical treatment of non-Muslim minorities of Jews and Christians—so-called dhimmi minorities—in traditional Islamic societies, with the treatment of minorities in multicultural Australia.

To this end Hage first describes some of the standard officially imposed humiliations and discriminatory measures that dhimmis suffered over the centuries under Islam, concluding with the observation that in addition, they “had to suffer in certain circumstances from what Maxime Rodinson describes as ‘outbreaks of intolerance on the part of the Muslim mob’”. (Such outbreaks are still of course to be observed, for example, in the frequent violent attacks on Copts and their churches and monks by Muslim mobs acting more or less with impunity in Egypt.) But it is at this point that Hage adds the following remarkable sentence: “The same kind of ‘outbreaks of intolerance’ have also been a permanent feature of Australia’s multicultural society.” No evidence is offered to justify this allegation, which, if it were not so obviously silly, could fairly be described as a grotesque libel on Australia as well as an insult to the memory of numberless dhimmi victims over the centuries. Yet amid the fulsome praise for Hage’s book in academic journals, it appears to have attracted no criticism at all. (Hage iscurrently the “Future Generation Professor of Anthropology and Social Theory” at theUniversity of Melbourne.)

The Search for Evidence

Of course, one can always find instances of racist prejudice, if one looks for it, in Australia as elsewhere. Australia after all is not utopia, even if it does come closer to it than most other places. One favoured technique for gathering evidence of racism in Australia is the collection of anecdotes at focus groups and “community forums”. Even one person’s account of a hostile act in the street or in a shop carries weight. However, determining how representative such anecdotes are is another issue—as are methodological inadequacies arising from the absence of anonymity in such discussions, and the susceptibility of participants to the influence of dominant or intimidating personalities.

This point is well illustrated in a recent report by Anne Aly, a Muslim post-doctoral research fellow at Edith Cowan University, on Australian Muslim responses to the media “discourse on terrorism”. For her study—based on doctoral research funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant—Ms Aly explored the attitudes of Australian Muslims in ten focus groups with 150 participants. It should be noted that Ms Aly herself clearly identifies with the predominant academic view in this field, repeating, for example, in an extended introduction the standard tropes that the media is guilty of “constructing” Muslims as “a homogeneous monolith”; ignoring diversity; spreading “negative stereotypes” about Muslims as an antagonistic “other”; and so on.

Turning to the results emerging from her focus groups, she reports a general Muslim perception that the Western media is a “complicit and crucial actor in [a] conspiracy to destroy Islam”. Many of the Muslim participants therefore turned to “alternative media discourses that substantiate victimhood”, and for the majority, these were “Arab media, the internet and conspiracy theories”. Ms Aly then reports that, “In focus groups, individuals who hinted that Muslims may in fact be involved in terrorist activities were immediately overruled by other members of the group.” She relates one such over-ruling:

In one focus group of Muslim men for example, a younger participant suggested that Muslims should not “put all the blame on the media. We should put part of the blame I think on us as well because lots of people are fighting in the name of Islam”. He was quickly challenged by an older participant who insisted that Muslims were not to blame and that the media was influencing people to believe that Muslims were responsible for terrorism. Each time the younger participant raised global events in which Muslims were implicated as the aggressors such as the genocide in Darfur, the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait and attacks on the Kurdish people at the hands of Saddam Hussein, he was challenged by the older participant to provide evidence …

An especially influential example of the kind of search intended to produce community anecdotes of anti-Muslim prejudice is a 2004 report from the Australian Human Rights Commission (HRC)—then known as the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC). The research behind this report also relies heavily on the open forum or community “consultation” approach. The report bears a title in a mixture of Roman and Arabic letters which means “Listen”, and a subtitle reading: “National Consultations on Eliminating Prejudice Against Arab and Muslim Australians”.

The report’s findings have certainly been taken seriously. They provide the rationale behind a number of government-funded publications and other campaigns and anti-Islamophobia “initiatives” spearheaded by the HRC, with the backing of other important parts of the federal government such as the Department of Immigration. According to the HRC, it is explicitly on the basis of the Listen report that police forces and other public stakeholders have become involved in literally scores of workshops, training sessions and other ongoing programs and initiatives to assist Muslim communities, including media training and other activities aimed at “educating” non-Muslim Australians about Islam. For all these reasons, the empirical foundations behind the findings of the report deserve more impartial scrutiny than they appear to have so far received.

For example, to undertake “empirical and qualitative research”, including interviews arising from questionnaire returns, the HRC commissioned an “independent empirical research” team from the Centre for Cultural Research at the University of Western Sydney. This was “to obtain a more comprehensive picture of the nature and extent of unreported incidents of discrimination and vilification”. For anyone attempting to assess the outcomes and overall quality of the HRC research, the assumptions that this external research team brought to the task are obviously of interest. The assumptions of the HRC that are revealed in the selection of this group are also of interest, especially in trying to understand the kind of ideological baggage that may be weighing on public policy around this issue.

In fact, at the time of their commissioning by the HRC, the UWS team possessed a well-known ideological profile. About four months previously, the team’s “chief investigator/team leader”, a then-UWS academic named Scott Poynting, had very publicly taken to task David McKnight, a well-known Sydney academic and author with a left-wing background, for making public comments in support of some ASIO anti-terrorism raids.

Writing in the left-wing journal Arena, Poynting assailed McKnight—“he ought to know better”—for not understanding that

the suppression of “terrorists” serves an important function in the maintenance of the prevailing hegemony, just as did the repression of “communists” and their “fellow travellers” during the Cold War.

He offered his opinion in the same piece that Australia was “yapping like a terrier at the heels of our great and powerful superpower master”.

This was entirely consistent with Poynting’s previous publication record. About a year before his commissioning by the HRC for the Listen report, he had authored a journal article bearing the title “Bin Laden in the Suburbs”, which laid out his ideological approach. To Poynting, reported attacks against Australian Muslims during the Gulf War were not just deplorable criminal assaults—they were events which condemned Australians generally as selfish, materialistic racists. Labor PM Bob Hawke was not spared. Poynting wrote:

It was as if, as Ghassan Hage has recently put it, there were now manifold “borders” internal to the nation rather than around its edges to be patrolled against the non-Christian, non-western, “third-world looking” outsiders who might endanger the good life from within (Hage 1998, 2002). The Prime Minister’s appeal during the Gulf War for “us” to be “tolerant” only served to underline who was in a position to tolerate and who was to be magnanimously tolerated (or not) (Hage 1991).

Two years later—around the same time as the appearance of the Listen report—Bin Laden in the Suburbs became the title of a book co-authored by Poynting. (Another co-author of this book, Greg Noble, was “co-chief investigator” for the Listen report research team appointed by the HRC. The foreword was by Ghassan Hage.) Like countless other such books, Bin Laden in the Suburbs expressed an intellectual debt not only to Edward Said, but also to Antonio Gramsci, the Italian communist revolutionary of the 1920s and 1930s.

The authors here tell us that they analyse the situation of young, male, second-generation Arabic-speaking immigrants in Australia by using the class concept of “hegemony”, as developed by Gramsci in his Prison Notebooks. This they define as

a form of class domination through a political-cultural alliance of ruling class fractions, in which the ruling class secures a decisive measure of consent by the subaltern classes to their own domination.

The UWS authors then elaborate on that definition to include all of society’s institutions—schools, the media, the police, the legal system, and so on—as instruments of “ruling class” oppression.

In an interview with the weekly Green Left magazine on the release of the book, Poynting expanded further on the analysis, explaining that “the continual manufacturing of fear” could be “counterproductive for particular coalitions of class fractions inside the ruling class”. He added, however, that “all that means is that the relations of forces change and a new coalition of fractions of capital will come forward”.

It is hard to see how any of this would actually help these authors understand those Muslim Lebanese youth who are the subject of their analysis, suffering as they do from extremely high rates of unemployment and other forms of social dysfunction. It is also hard to see how any youthful subjects they were interviewing for the HRC could be assisted by a Gramscian understanding of themselves as victims of the ruling class. It might serve the revolution, but it does seem unlikely to be helpful to them. (Scott Poynting has since moved on to the UK, where he is Professor of Sociology at Manchester Metropolitan University.)

In any event, the HRC research process began with sixty-nine mainly Muslim community forums—or “consultations”—on discrimination, prejudice and so on, conducted by the Commission itself around the country. According to the HRC, 1426 people came forward to participate in these forums. A similar number of questionnaires—1475—were subsequently distributed, asking for responses to twenty-five “multiple-choice and open-ended questions about people’s experiences and responses to racism, abuse and violence”.

Significantly, the HRC questionnaires were issued not to randomly selected individuals, but for distribution “through community organisations and mosques”. In a reported comment in the endnotes of Listen, it is apparent that at some point the Survey Research Centre of the School of Population Health at the University of Western Australia was asked its opinion on the survey. The Centre’s observation, as reported in the HRC endnote, was that

as the survey was not random, as it was distributed through Arab and Muslim community organisations, this may have impacted on the likelihood that certain kinds of individuals would respond to the written survey.

Just so.

From this self-selecting group, the research team would certainly have been entitled to expect a high level of response. However, of the 1475 questionnaires, a mere 186 were returned—a response rate of just 12.6 per cent. And out of this group of 186, only thirty-four finally took part in the UWS team’s “open-ended semi-structured interviews”.

In the context of an attempt to measure perceptions of racism, prejudice and discrimination across a significant, Australia-wide population subset such as Australian Muslims, there is of course not a great deal to be said for a survey of 186 self-selecting individuals. Even so, it may be worth noting that even of these 186 questionnaire respondents, the vast majority—70 per cent, according to the relevant end-notes—reported personally experiencing no increase at all in racism, abuse or violence since September 11, 2001, or just “a bit” of an increase.

It is also striking that 64 per cent of the respondents reported “a lot more” discrimination and vilification directed at their community. In other words, the proportion who believed that their community had experienced a lot more racism-related incidents in recent years was about double the proportion who reported such increase occurring to them personally.

The UK broadcaster and writer Kenan Malik makes a salient comment on this kind of survey discrepancy. “Three years ago,” says Malik,

I made a TV documentary in which I asked dozens of ordinary Muslims across the country about their experience of Islamophobia. Everyone believed that police harassment was common though no one had been stopped and searched. Everyone insisted that physical attacks were rife, though few had been attacked or knew anyone who had. What is being created here is a culture of victimhood in which “Islamophobia” has become one-stop cause of the myriad problems facing Muslims.

Public Choice and Ideological Alliances

The UWS team report incorporated in the HRC’s Listen document interpreted the low response to their questionnaire as an indication that Muslim communities were so paranoid that they were even afraid of communicating with the team: “It is likely,” they wrote,

that some of the very same phenomena that we were investigating in relation to under-reporting of racism, that is wariness of the state and lack of trust in its authorities, militated against higher response rates for the survey.

How they determined that this explanation was “likely” is unclear. Some Muslims had apparently changed their mind about volunteering for interviews with the UWS team. The UWS team explained that they had been told that

despite their respect for the researchers and their appreciation of the research, and notwithstanding the anonymity, the level of state surveillance and intervention in their lives left them fearful of negative repercussion.

Again, no evidence is produced to support the statement.

Does any of this matter? Well, consider the response to a July 2007 report into radicalisation among young Muslims in Sydney’s south-west, by Muslim researcher Mustapha Kara-Ali. According to the Kara-Ali report, up to 3000 young Muslims are at risk of radicalisation. However, Irfan Yusuf, a Sydney Muslim commentator, was among those who more or less dismissed the findings of the report on the grounds that it was based on inadequate research. “His research methodology,” Yusuf wrote of Kara-Ali,

consisted of focus groups and discussions with 200 young Muslims and a number of imams. How were these people chosen? Which ethnic, sectarian or other backgrounds were these people from? From which parts of Australia?

Reasonable questions, for the most part—but Kara-Ali’s 200 young Muslims, plus the imams he interviewed, amounted to a lot more people than the “independent empirical research” team commissioned by the HRC could manage to talk with for the HRC’s Listenreport—or even obtain questionnaire returns from.

Apart from the more technical issues, the HRC’s choice of an ideologically committed group such as the Poynting-led UWS team for research into Muslim opinion in Australia was surely imprudent. Even the left-wing Melbourne commentator Robert Manne remarked on the possibly unsatisfactory nature of the UWS “independent” research—if only in passing: “I must admit,” he wrote in the Monthly, “to scepticism about advocacy scholarship of this kind”, quickly adding that many of the actual incidents reported “had about them the ring of truth”. This is so—many of the individual anecdotes in the HRCListen report, especially about abuse in the streets and other forms of casual incivility after September 11, are indeed convincing. But if research into such phenomena is worth doing, and it surely is, it is worth doing well—that is, with unimpeachable professionalism and impartiality.

The application of a little rigorous public choice theory here would not go astray. A large discount must be made for the HRC’s bureaucratic interest in presenting “Islamophobia” as a social pathology that would spiral out of control were it not for untiring interventions of … the HRC. The operating alliances that seem to have been formed by the HRC with radical academic ideologues on the one hand, and narrow community leadership groups on the other, reflect the strength of the bureaucratic interest in magnifying the day-to-day frictions that are part and parcel of democratic life.

Unfortunately, this kind of magnification may not be entirely harmless. Malik again puts the problem well:

what all the available evidence suggests is a huge gap between perception and reality, a gap that has been skilfully exploited by Muslim leaders. Inflating the threat of Islamophobia helps community leaders to consolidate their power base, both within their own communities and within wider society. The more that the threat of Islamophobia is exaggerated, the more that ordinary Muslims come to accept that theirs is a community under constant attack. It helps create a siege mentality, stoking up anger and resentment, and making the Muslim community more inward looking and more open to religious extremism.

It should be clear that excessive fear of Islamophobia is a poor foundation for the development of public policy in any field. And it is an especially poor foundation for the development of the sound knowledge bases—whether they are in human rights or national security—on which sound policy ultimately depends.

This article was first published in January 2009 by the Hudson Institute, New York, at www.hudsonny.org. It is also to appear in a forthcoming book, Islam, Human Rights and Public Policy, edited by David Claydon and published by Acorn Press Ltd (www.acornpress.net.au). The author is a former New York and Washington Correspondent for the Australian.