“Moderate Islam, Radical Islam”, and in Between.

 

by Raphael Israeli

 

A year ago, when the first case of "bulldozer terrorism" unfolded in Jerusalem, as a young Palestinian Muslim of East Jerusalem, who worked in Israel, lived comfortably with his family, and had no apparent quarrel with the authorities,  could have been considered a classic manifestation of "moderate Islam". And then, when he suddenly went on a rampage with his bulldozer, overturning buses hitting cars and passers-by, and was subsequently gunned down by policemen and alert civilians, the media rushed to dub him a case of "radical Islam". The same use of bulldozer as a weapon of terror was repeated twice more over the past year, with observers wondering what has turned Muslim quietism into Muslim terrorism. After all three events, their families set up large sheds outside their houses, sporting Hamas and Hizbullah banners, to welcome the large Muslim crowds which came to "congratulate" them for the "martyrdom" of their son, not to present "condolences". Manifestations of popular jubilation in the Palestinian street, for those carnages, also attested to the general mood which had triggered them in the first place.

 

It is often claimed that 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 it from the faith of the aggressive "extremists". The truth of the matter is that no such Islam exists, though there are certainly many truly moderate Muslims who have broken away from the bloody road of Islamic Shari'a, especially when they conveniently moved to the West, and can from a safe distance criticize the  phenomenon of the Islamikaze"  bombers against Westerners and Israelis, or the culture of death that is cultivated in many Islamic lands,  or indeed the unbridled anti-Semitic calumnies that are rife in their own culture. But they 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.

 

Moderate Muslims often accuse the radicals, who are, in fact, the common Muslims that behave in accordance with the accepted rules championed by the Shari'a, of having "hijacked" Islam or "distorted its "real" meaning, or misinterpreted it.  But the standards of the radicals, like the Jihad war or the strict implementation of the shar'ia, are those that prevail in the Islamic world. There are no accepted yardsticks of "moderate" Islam. One can simply watch the mass demonstrations in the streets of Gaza, Quetta, Casablanca, Durban and Jakarta, or in the Muslim neighborhoods in Paris, London, Marseille, Amsterdam, Sydney,   and Toronto, to realize how much alive,

universal and popular are the Muslim slogans and rampages, which are performed daily

 

 

by Muslim masses of men, women, children of all walks of life, and including their lay leaders and clerics, of all ages. Are they all "Islamists"? No, they are simply Muslims, and the common denominator which links them together in their hatred of the West and the Jews  is Islam, standard Islam,  under the  justification of the Shari'a, which is promoted by their Imams. While some moderate and courageous Muslim individuals will fortunately always be there to save the honor of Islam, when they raise their lone voices against the abuses perpetrated in the name of their faith,  the mainstream in the world of Islam, including westernized and modern professionals and intellectuals, will always be there to glorify, in mirth, the killings of westerners and Jews, to write or broadcast, in exhilaration, in favor of the Islamikaze, and distribute in jubilation sweets in the streets to "celebrate" the death of Americans or Israelis.

 

The champions of the spurious distinction between the so-called "islamist"  minority and the "peaceful" Muslim  majority, who  become entrapped in their reluctance  for a carpet condemnation of Islam lest they be accused of Islamophobia or racism (as if Islam were a race), if they are non-Muslim; and treason if they are, are also enslaved by  another distinction of their own making which has equally no leg to stand on. That is "Judeophobia", a parallel to Islamophobia, versus anti-Semitism, which is universally condemned in those circles, as it is no longer in vogue, at least not in public. They explain to us, that Islam has never been anti-Semitic, proof of their ignorance of Islamic sources, while the current dislike of Jews is no more than Judeophobia, which has no historical roots and has been a modern,  circumstantial and fleeting phenomenon which does not warrant uncalled for anxiety. If anti-Semitism is reduced to Judeophobia, it would merely become a junior counterpart of Islamophobia , and a lesser evil than anti-Semitism, and therefore less objectionable and more "acceptable", in par with "Islamophobia", as a modern phenomenon in Western society. Generally speaking, they would simplistically argue: "how can Muslims, or at least Arabs, themselves Semites, be Anti-Semitic?"

 

It is exactly this war of words, which has been engineered to obfuscate substance and increase the currency of Muslim terminology, while at the same time depriving the Jews and their supporters from their traditional arsenal in the battle against anti-Semitism. Can anyone explain  in what way the Qur'anic condemnation of Jews as "descendants of pigs and monkeys", which is routinely and universally preached to Muslims (not Islamists) by their clerics in both the Islamic world and Europe, is "Judeophobic" and not "anti-Semitic"? Is this hallowed Qur'anic reference, eternal as the Word of Allah, a circumstantial and fleeting pronouncement? To say so would be a blasphemy. It is used by Muslim clerics, as a matter of course, in such "moderate" and "pro-Western" countries as Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, as a continuation of the traditional way of demonizing and de-humanizing the Jews in order to facilitate their annihilation. What more would it take to call this blatant anti-Semitism?

 

Words were created to transmit conventionally agreed upon meanings. If each actor chose to lend to his words a different significance or accuse the others of "distorting" their meaning, then we would no longer be able to call a spade a spade or communicate with others. Anti-Semitism is the millennial irrational hatred of the Jews, and it has been called so since the onset of modern research on this sinister issue in the 19th Century. No amount of masking, manipulations with words and creation of parallels to dilute that terminology, can succeed, exactly as no coupling of the unique term  "Holocaust" with Armenians or Darfurians (Incidentally both perpetrated by Muslims), can blunt the poignancy of the Jewish Holocaust or rob it of its uniqueness. No wonder, then, that the most frequent manifestation of anti-Semitism these days, both among Muslims everywhere and their anti-Semitic allies in Europe, has been Holocaust denial, meaning that that devalued term in the eyes of the deniers has acquired a generic usage for all sorts of massacres, but the hated Jews cannot even claim to have acceded to the "honor" of having been one of its victims who, thereby, gained their uniqueness.

           

Raphael Israeli

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