Jewish World Review, http://www.jewishworldreview.com
Of course, the great majority of Muslims are peaceful
-- so what?
Whenever the question of Islam and
violence, specifically terror, is raised, we are
repeatedly told
that "the vast majority of Muslims in the world
are peaceful people"
who never engage in terror. This is entirely accurate.
And entirely irrelevant.
The vast majority of Germans living in the Nazi
era were also
peaceful; very few ever so much as laid a hand on
a Jew. So, too, the
vast majority of Russians never killed anyone while
20-40 million of
their fellow citizens were murdered by their Communist
regime under
Stalin. The point here is that the threat to civilization
emanating
from within Islam is no more obviated by the fact
that the great
majority of Muslims are not violent than the threat
that emanated
from Nazism was obviated by the peaceful behavior
of the great
majority of Germans or the threat from Soviet Communism
was nullified
by the nonviolence among the great majority of Russians.
Germany was a threat to civilization because Nazis
and their ideology
took over German society while the majority of Germans
(the "good
Germans") either supported Nazi ideals or did nothing.
Russia was a
threat to civilization because Communists took over
the country, and
the great majority of Russians either supported
Papa Stalin or did
nothing. Some Islamic societies are today becoming
a threat to
civilization because Islamic totalitarians and terrorists
are taking
over those societies while a majority of Muslims
either support their
ideals or do nothing.
That is why it is meaningless at best and dishonest
at worst to deny
the threat to civilization coming from various Muslim
countries by
noting that most Muslims are not violent. Only a
handful of Saudis
terrorized America on 9-11-01, but a large majority
of Saudis support
Osama bin Laden. Few Palestinians strap bombs onto
their children's
bodies, but the majority of them support such evil
and none others
publicly morally condemn it.
At this moment, the dominant strain of Islamic thought
is
totalitarian, meaning that wherever possible, a
government should be
Islamic and govern according to a strict interpretation
of the Sharia
(Muslim religious law). Furthermore, when necessary
and when
possible, the Islamists believe these religious
laws should be
imposed violently -- as in Sudan, Nigeria, Afghanistan
and elsewhere.
In addition, the dominant ideological trend in much
of Islamic
society is hate-filled. What is said daily about
Jews in Middle
Eastern mosques rivals what the Nazis said about
Jews. And not only
in mosques. During Ramadan, Egyptian television
is running a 41-part
series based on the anti-Semitic forgery "The Protocols
of the Elders
of Zion."
For all these reasons, one's moral assessment of
what is taking place
in the Muslim world must be made independent of
the fact that the
great majority of Muslims are peaceful people. Their
peaceful
lifestyle is not influencing the bellicose trends
in their religion.
Thus, what is most frightening is not that there
are Muslim
terrorists, but by how little criticism of Islamic
terror emanates
from normative Islamic groups. While some Muslim
groups have
condemned individual acts of Islamic terror such
as 9-11, not one
significant Muslim group in the world, including
here in free
America, has condemned Islamic terror generally.
And the leaders of
Al-Azhar University, the most prestigious institution
of Islamic
learning, have actually morally and religiously
come out in support
of Islamic suicide terror against Israelis.
So the fact that the majority of those living in
the Islamic
countries are good people is of no consequence.
Unless they do
something to condemn and to isolate the Muslim totalitarians
and
terrorists in their midst, history will judge them
as it has all the
good Germans during the Holocaust.
Russian versia