The Vanity of “Counting Islamists”

Refuting Daniel Pipes' column on this issue, JP, 8 October, 2008, p. 15.

 

By Raphael Israeli

 

On  Thursday night, the 6^th of March, 2008, a lone Muslim gunman from East Jerusalem, who was employed by Israel and enjoyed the services  offered by   its  city government ,  surreptitiously made his way into a yeshiva ( Jewish religious school) in the heart of the Jewish neighborhood, and opened gun fire on unsuspecting teenage students who were rehearsing the end of the month portion of the Torah  and Talmud that they were routinely studying and debating. Eight of them lost their lives, many others were wounded more or less seriously, until a passing-by reserve soldier, who had incidentally graduated from the same institution a few years earlier, was alerted by the  shooting, rushed to the reading hall of the library where the carnage was unfolding and  put an end to the massacre. That rampage was not the initiative of a lunatic and lone hatred-filled man, or the idea of a hallucinating misguided fanatic, exactly as the perpetrators of September 11 (2001)  in New York and July 7 (2005) in London,  even if locally grown, were the satanic messengers of  worldwide Muslim organizations bent on  murder and destruction. Until, his rampage, he would have been considered a "moderate Muslim", since he was well-behaved and never espoused violence. Where do we categorize him if one day he is moderate, the other he is Islamist?

 

            The next day,  the well- to- do family of the killed murderer erected a huge tent at the entrance to their house, to accommodate the Muslim well-wishers who began streaming by the hundreds to  greet the bereaved family, not to present condolences, for his feat of  hitting their enemy at its heart, thereby attaining the hallowed status of shahid (martyr)^[1]. To boot, the  mourners hoisted the flags of Hizbullah and Hamas on the tent, all under the open eye of the Israeli forces of order and the liberal  attitude of non-interference with the lives of the Arab Muslims in Israel's capital city. Soon the Hamas took "credit" for that senseless massacre, driving any sensible human being to wonder why a young man of 21, about to wed a wife within three months, would take that harrowing step and  destroy his own life and his future. It could not be economic want, personal despair, momentary madness or a family rift. It was simply hatred, inspired by the relentless Muslim "education"  in order to  despise the "unbelievers", demonize them and dehumanize them to the point of making their lives cheap and unworthy of respect. But it must be more than that, for that horrific act, like the many other acts of terror and killings that we witness in the Muslim world, or emanating from it,  day in day out, does not explain in full the intensity, the unbearable ease and the persistence of this unending and revolting  manifestations of contempt and abuse of human life. No one would categorize  the visitors of that mourners' shade as "islamists", exactly as no one dubbed as such  all the columnists in "moderate" Egypt, or the kids in Gaza who jubilated after September 11.

 

                        In these outbursts of hatred by Muslim youth there is also an element of contempt and abuse of other faiths,  as when in the case cited above that same Muslim murderer indiscriminately shot and ripped to pieces Torah and Talmud  books, which the students were consulting, and which they left stained with their blood when they fell to the bullets of the assassin. And save for a few human and courageous voices of reason in Kuwait, the mood in the Arab/ Muslim world was not one of consternation,  sorrow, shame or embarrassment, but when it was manifested, as in Gaza and among other Muslim circles, it was one of jubilation  at the sight  of  the "feat" that their great "hero" had "achieved" in that religious school at the heart of the enemy. It was as if a Jew, or a Christian, burst into a madrasa at the heart of the Muslim world and massacred students bent on their study. Can anyone in a civilized country imagine any sign of jubilation at that carnage? The rest of the Muslim world was busy with its own domestic massacres where people in countless thousands are eliminated on a daily basis in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sudan, Iraq,  and many other unreported places where human lives do not count. Expectedly, when the killings, intentional or incidental, are committed by non-Muslims, as in Iraq or Israel, they are invariably dubbed as "aggression" or "murder" against Muslims, which in every case reaches the scope of a "massacre" or a "holocaust". But the many more Muslims who are slaughtered by other Muslims and whose deaths cannot be directly blamed on the West, are simply disregarded and discounted,  and no grief seems to accompany them or any account taken of them.

 

                        It is often claimed that this strict interpretation of Islam with its abuses, is only the lot of "fanatic", "radical", "fundamentalist", or "Islamist" Muslims, usually quantified as some 15% of the 1.5 billion world Muslims, as if that were a different faith embracing different  principles than those followed by the rank-and-file Muslims. In fact, we are talking about the same one creed which upholds Shari'a law to various degrees, but those who do not follow it to the letter, as in any other religion, are not adepts of an alternative "moderate Islam", the one that is sometimes dubbed "religion of peace", to distinguish from the faith of aggressive "extremists". The truth of the matter is that no such Islam exists,  for  those moderates have yet to produce an alternative doctrine and worldview that could rival official Islam and posit a creed and a set of rules which can attract Muslims to relinquish the Shari'a and embrace another way. If they did, they would no longer be Muslims in the eyes of established Islam.

           

            IT makes therefore no sense to categorize Islam into moderate and extremist, one has just to spell out the principles of Islam which is are universal, including the element of violent Jihad inherent in them and only distinguish between the active militants who stick out their necks and the masses of their sympathizers and supporters, the silent majority who would jubilate when a mass murder occurs, but would not dare to lend it an active hand. The articulation of that silent majority can follow ups and downs according to the basic attitudes of the media or of Islamic leaders. Rare are the occasions when any Muslim institution, state or cleric has condemned violence on moral grounds, save when it is directed against other Muslims, or when we are told that it "does not serve Muslim interests". Against Jews and Israel, against the "arrogance" of the US,  including Sep. 11, it is universally  approved and celebrated by that Muslim  silent majority,  even by those who would not dare commit it themselves. In that regard, none is moderate, except the few who denounce it from the safety of their western shelters.

 

Raphael Israeli

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

 

 

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^[1] . For a discussion of martyrs and their motivations, see Raphael Israeli, Islamikaze: Manifestations of Islamic Martyrology (Frank Cass, London, 2003)