"[T]he real insult to Islam is not a line from a papal speech or a cartoon about Mohammed. It is the violence, terror, and bloodshed that Islamist fanatics unleash in the name of their religion -- and the unwillingness of most of the world's Muslims [which I read as referring primarily to influential Muslims, not the average Muslim who's not in much of a position to do much -EV] to say or do anything to stop them."
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You are among the last people I would expect to be making 'good German' exceptions.
Not really. There are plenty official and unofficial "barriers" that stand in their way.
I'm not sure how much the moderate Muslim leaders can really do to counter the extremists - I mean, these people are effectively following a different religion by the same name, and it's likely impossible to "convert" them - but I've seen a number of speeches in the past several years by moderate Muslim clerics renouncing the extremist ideology and making the case that the religious underpinnings of that ideology are misguided, i.e. the extremists are misinterpreting the Koran.
In addition, of course, a large number of Muslim nations have been very helpful in fighting the war on terror.
I can only speculate as to why comparatively little attention is paid to these sorts of things.
I find this particularly disturbing when the "group" consists of people who have little choice but to belong: putting the onus on ethnic groups is particularly offensive, but most people aren't going to change their religion either just because some wacko claims that he too follows it.
Personally, I think individual responsibility is a good thing, collective not so much.
Your point is a good one, but I wonder whether a distinction could be made between men/American/Giants fans and militant Islamists. For the latter group, their actions are done insofar as they are Muslim and they say that they are acting "in the name of" Islam, as representatives of their religion. For the former group, I don't think it's accurate to say that the man/American/Giants fan are acting in their capacity as man/American/Giants fan, on behalf of all men/Americans/Giants fans.
I truly question the ability of anyone other than a Muslim to really understand Muslims. Their entire outlook is so foreign to me (a Christian) that I can't fathom their world view. When someone questions or criticizes Christianity, the Christian fundamentalists pray for the souls of the critics. On the other hand, when someone questions Islam, they die (or are at least threatened with death). How do you understand that?
Mark, can we assume, then, that you would have no problem whatsoever with a leader of the pro-life movement who refused to condemn violence against abortion providers?
For the peaceful Muslims to be unable to speak against violence reflects as badly on Islam as if they're unwilling, though for different reasons.
If the violent Muslims have enough influence to intimidate other Muslims, then the violent Muslims have enough influence to be a concern to us.
The problem with this is that any nutcase can claim to act "in the name of" X. Are Christians required to disavow Jerry Falwell or James Dobson (or Daniel Berrigan or William Sloane Coffin)? Should they cease being Christians in protest? There are a billion Christians in the world and lots of them say and do stupid things in the name of religion. I can't see any point in demanding that the average person keep track of them all and issue a statement each time. Their only real responsibility is to reject the wrongful conduct in their own lives.
Same with Americans. George Bush, IMO, does horrible things. While I do denounce them, I'm not sure why that would be considered a requirement. And I really don't see why I'd have to renounce my citizenship in protest.
Absent other facts, no. Obviously, the smaller the movement, the more voluntary it is, and the closer the nexus between the doer and the speaker, the closer we get to some responsibility to speak up. Using my baseball fan example, I'd expect the owner of the Dodgers to speak out if the general manager made racist comments. I wouldn't expect every Dodgers fan to be held responsible for failing to do so.
I say let the religionists of the world duke it out!
Mark,
I agree that we shouldn't be expected to denounce every nutcase who acts "in the name of" X. But I think it's slightly different when you have the prominent leaders of X, political and religious, supporting an outrageous position. (For Islam, there are many religious (probably dozens of imams around the world) and political leaders (eg, Iran, Taliban Afghanistan) supporting the outrageous position of violence. If your leadership is taking your entire organization down an illegal or immoral path, shouldn't you speak up?
Maybe a better way of considering this is to add a few more factors to your "nexus": you proposed that the smaller movement, and the more voluntary it is, the closer we get to a responsibility to speak out. Perhaps add the factor of the more outrageous the statement, the more responsibility to speak out: your Dodger owner wouldn't be expected to speak out if the manager made a snide insult to Giants fans, but he would be expected to speak out if the manager made a snide racist insult. I'm proposing a third factor: the more that the outrageous statement is identified with the general leadership of an organization, the more that the members of the organization should speak out.
We cannot win the hearts and minds of these barbarians. But, if we show resolute strength and use force against the effectively, they will fear us. From fear will come respect.
If the public and people or like mind with jimbino knew and understood our Islamic enemies, they would be scared enough to support an effective strategy to overcome them.
What does a moderate Muslim do wrt the WOT? Moderately oppose it? Moderately support it? Keep his head down until he can see who wins? Strongly supporting the terrorists wouldn't be "moderate" from our point of view. But what about strongly supporting the west in the WOT? Would that be immoderate? Strongly support the west in the WOT but restrained as to techniques?
Anyway, what good are moderate Muslims doing us? The folks in Iraq fighting against the terrorists don't seem to be moderate, considering the shari'a that will be in place shortly.
It is unfortunate that Muslims not in Islamic countries still have to face the real possibility of violence and death at the hands of their home-grown zealot co-religionists.
If the buttheads have so much influence in various ways, then as a practical matter the existence of the moderate Muslim may not be particularly important.
"...and the unwillingness of most of the world's Muslims [which I read as referring primarily to influential Muslims, not the average Muslim who's not in much of a position to do much -EV] to say or do anything to stop them."
On it's face it's wrong because Jacoby says "most of the world's Muslims" and makes no thoughtful limitation on that phrase like Prof. Volokh has done. And in the context of the article, Prof. Volokh's editorial is also inaccurate. Much of the article is spent describing violence perpetrated by Muslim fanatics who may or may not be influential, and the article specifically references Muslims who "demonstrated outside Westminster Cathedral," hardly conduct for influential people. The article's last paragraph is seeking to lay blame (right or wrong I do not know) on "most of the world's Muslims" for failing to speak out against or do anything to prevent Muslim inspired violence.
The problem is not merely that most Muslims and almost all Muslim leaders fail to speak out against Islamic extremism. The problem is that most Muslims and almost all Muslim leaders ARE Islamic extremists. They oppose the existence of Israel, they support almost every genocidal, Islamic terrorist group, they support the monsters that are trying to take over Iraq not in order to institute freedom and democracy, but in order to create some horrible form of dictatorship.
How do I know this is true? Listen to the few Muslims who, through their statements, have proven themselves to be truly moderate. Every single one of them that I have read or listened to has said something like the above.
-Cynical, power hungry leaders
-Toxic loyalty among adherents
-Terror and threats of terror to maintain discipline those within the movement and to cow those outside the movement
-Prepackaged violent responses with prepackaged justifications for them
-Doublespeak and/or farcicial manipulation of the obvious truth
I could go on, but haven't we been here before when we faced Fascism and Communism? How did we prevail against them? Certainly not by being willing to always compromise our values out of fear, a desire for expediency, or a desire to be loved. Certainly not by always seeking to blame ourselves and our civilization for most of the world's ills.
For example, most people in the West (or at least the US) can agree that the freedom of speech is one of our bedrock values. Therefore, we shouldn't be implying that we are willing to curtail it in order to just get along.
I have a similar problem with the complaints about generic Muslims. I don't know enough about the religion or its "organization", but it doesn't seem to be like Catholicism, where the Pope speaks for all. Instead, it's more like Protestantism, where each congregation runs itself. Or maybe some other example is right; I don't know. In any case, unless a worshipper's own imam is the one making the statement, I'm not sure that the relationship is close enough to justify speaking out as a requirement. Obviously, I think that those who do speak out should be honored for doing so.
All this is aside from whether people there ARE speaking out and we just don't read about it. I have no idea whether this is the case, but I suspect Jeff Jacoby doesn't either.
1. Lumping Falwell and Dobson in with Islamic terrorists is disingenusous at best. Or did I miss them running airplanes into folks buildings and cutting the heads of non-believers.
2. When conservative Christian leaders say stupid things, you often hear other conservative Christians criticize those stupid comments. And for some reason, the critics don't get holy wars declared on them.
Of course moderates don't have any meaningful role to play in this struggle within Islam. By definition they are moderate. Go along to get along, don't make waves. That's what moderate means. Why do people expect moderates to drive a revolutionary shift in Islamic theology?
This is an important point. When I see CAIR or Muslim student organizations denounce the violence, I'll buy the theory that they don't need to speak out. However, at nearly every occasion I can find, not only do they not denounce them, they defend them.
By doing so, they become the enemy we have come to detest.
Eugene, can you reconcile your dinner-table-discourse civility standard with this lovely sentiment: “I find it heartwarming that the Catholics are now suffering murder and mayhem at the hands of the Muslims, who along with the Catholics themselves, have always been at the vanguard of persecuting Infidels.”
The term "moderate Muslim" can mean two different things:
a Muslim who is moderate, or a Muslim who is moderate for a Muslim. I use the first definition, since the second is uninteresting.
Since I didn't do that, I guess I'm relieved to find that I wasn't disingenuous.
I don't hear any such thing. I guess I just don't read the right blogs. It's barely possible that Jeff Jacoby hasn't looked in the right place to find the condemnations he seeks.
The question is under what circumstances do they wish to lead normal lives. A land free of Jews? Burka'd women? No worship allowed but Islam? Miniscule punishment for honor killing?
Isn't that the more important question?
There are moderate Muslims.
There is no moderate Islam.
Looking back from 1945, I bet there were lots of Germans who had been unenthusiastic about Hitler in the '20s and '30s who said to themselves, Maybe it would have paid to have spoken up 15 years ago.
When the activist Muslims provoke the Americans into replacing the appeaser Bush with some hard man -- as they are determined to do -- it will not be only activist Muslims who are punished.
It would not be easy or safe for the inactive Muslims to reject their religion. It would be possible to be more passively resistant, to back up the few (very, very few, so far) activist Muslims on the other side of the equation, the ones who are committed to peaceful coexistence with infidels. To quietly withdraw support for the crazies, to refuse to be the 'sea' that the activist 'fish' swim in, to borrow an idea from Mao.
When Benedict said what was only the truth -- Islam has been violent -- the self-proclaimed moderate Muslims jumped him. Perhaps it was too much to ask them to endorse his statements, but they could at least have kept their mouths shut.
I do not recall any Americans calling for the destruction of German cities in 1939, but by 1945 it was accomplished anyway.
People inclined to shrug and excuse the inactive Muslims are not doing them any favors.
Go ahead and give it a try, if for no other reason than the commenters here are coming at this from quite a few different, even contradictory, angles, and so no one reading your statement can possibly have any clue what it is you find objectionable.
What does "a Muslim who is moderate" even mean?
That is a meaningless statement. Most Nazis wanted exactly the same thing. We even have a phrase for it: "the banality of evil". You can't expect evil people to go around acting like B-movie mad scientists with a light shining underneath their face, ranting about how they're going to destroy the world. Most of the time they do perfectly ordinary things.
Christians are not required to disavow Jerry Falwell or James Dobson precisely because they already do disavow these people without needing to be required to do so. Falwell can't credibly claim to speak for all Christians because we know that there are thousands of other Christian leaders, and millions of other Christians, who disagree with him regularly on issues of religion and politics.
(But someone from, say, Liberty University should indeed be expected to denounce Falwell if he says or does something akin to what these nutcases say/do, because he can credibly claim to speak for Liberty University.)
It's an empirical question.
Oh, and while we wouldn't expect people to "cease being Christian" (or Muslim, as the case may be), we might legitimately expect them to cease being members of that particular congregation, if the head of it did something outrageous along these lines.
The violent Islamists by the way are diffent from any predecessor: they have atomic bombs.
There are Muslims who are opposed to the thugs. I don't know if they are 5% or 75%, but they exist. Many American conservatives seem to want to prove that the reasonable Muslims are wrong and that the Taliban, Hezbollah, and Ahmadinejad are right.
Of course, the thugs who commit violence in response to verbal slurs deserve condemnation, but the reaction of some conservatives is giving a whole new meaning to the phrase, "Taliban wing of the Republican Party."
I have read an allegedly moderate Muslim commentator say that, eg, remarks like Benedict's play into the hands of al-Queda, but that commentator is not an 'American conservative.'
Both your factual predicates are wrong, so your conclusion fails on that basis alone. There are a billion or so Muslims in the world today. Perhaps a thousand or so are terrorists. That's one in a million. As for dissenters, I see no reason to believe you're the least bit familiar with the private or public opinions of most Muslims.
This misstates my argument. First, there are Muslims who disavow terrorists too -- there were many of them on September 12. Second, the issue was the responsibility of all group members to speak out. Since all Christians have not denounced Falwell, I must therefore conclude that he speaks for them? That's ridiculous. Third, what evidence are we talking about here? Do I personally have to hear the denunciation? I've never heard you denounce torture; does that make you complicit with torturers?
Agreed.
Agreed. I said this above.
Yeah, but Bush just loves those Pakistanis. What are we to do?
Why don't normal Muslims see them that way? Some people invoke Iraq and Israel as explanations, but I wonder if the problem goes deeper than that. It certainly predates Iraq, at any rate, and elements of the problem predate the creation of Israel.
I assume that most Muslims have the same interests you or I do in having our mail delivered, our trash picked up, access to clean water, etc. It will be interesting to see if the more radical groups can maintain their radicalism in the long run in a government faced with demands for more prosaic services. Could this be a case where the demands of everyday life actually civilize people (analogous, perhaps, to the argument that trade tends to break down despotism)?
We westerners didn't start disinfecting our water until 1904 (in one place, Middlekerke, Belgium), and if Islam is about 800 or 900 years behind, then I wouldn't count on an uprising in the name of public utlities in our lifetimes.
How do you figure that?
Remember, we'd have wiped out polio except for imams. Muslims really are not like us; they do not respond to the same stimuli we do.
Because, you know, only Muslims (never Christians) get violent and form mobs.
How do I figure which part? My estimate of the number of Muslims was low; the actual figure is 1.3 billion. My estimate of the number of Muslim terrorists was pretty much a guess, but I don't think it's unreasonable. Unless you increased to an unreasonable level, it wouldn't change my point.
The Soviet Union eventually bankrupted itself trying to provide both guns and butter. I don't think there's much dispute about this.
Nor in the later ones either. That's ultimately what caused its internal collapse.
I just thought someone should say it.