A Voice in the Wilderness In Defense of "Mere Conservatism"

Prager: The Reformation of Islam

My intellectual mentor and hero, Dennis Prager, has a new column out in which he makes the case that Islam must be reformed and it can be reformed.

After having studied Arabic at college and lectured on comparative religion for decades, and having devoted years to writing my upcoming book comparing American values with leftist and Islamist values, I have become convinced of two things regarding Islam: It must be reformed, and it can be reformed.

Both suppositions are highly controversial. Few believing Muslims think that Islam needs to be reformed; the suggestion would strike most religious Muslims as absurd, if not insulting and ultimately blasphemous. And it would strike many non-Muslim critics of Islam as naïve. As Lord Cromer, British consul-general in Egypt 1883 to 1907, put it in a quote known to all Western students of Islam, “Islam reformed is Islam no longer.”

Continuing on, Dennis gives some reasons why it is Islam does need reforming:

• Majority-Muslim and Islam-based countries are not, and have not been, free societies. According to the 2010 Freedom House “Freedom in the World” survey, of the world’s 47 Muslim-majority countries, only two are free, 18 are partly free, and 27 are not free. There is no honest explanation for this nearly total absence of liberty in Muslim countries that does not reflect in some way on Islam.

• Muslim treatment of Jews and Christians in places such as medieval Spain was morally far superior to the treatment of non-Christians by European Christians during the same period. But in the modern period, nowhere Islam controlled afforded non-Muslims anywhere near the equality that non-Christians came to take for granted in the Christian world.

• Regarding women, one cannot name a culture or religion in which the status of women is as low as it is in many Muslim societies. Moreover, the status of women has actually declined in many Muslim societies in the present generation. For example, the veil is more common in Egypt today than it was a hundred years ago.

• In nearly every Muslim country in which non-Muslims live (usually Christians) — from Nigeria to Egypt to Iraq — they suffer persecution.

• A very small percentage of Muslims are terrorists. But nearly every international terrorist is Muslim. And according to every poll I have seen, at least 70 million of the world’s more than 1 billion Muslims support Islamist actions and theology.

Then, pivoting to what needs to happen in order for Islam to be reformed, Dennis lists:

1. Honestly acknowledge the Muslim moral record, i.e., the lack of liberty in Muslim nations, the killing of large numbers of non-Muslims, the low status of women, etc. This does not necessitate rejecting the Koran or Islam.

2. Eschew incorporating sharia into state law and oppose the establishment of any Islamic theocracy (which is not, in any event, Koran-based, according to moderate Muslims).

3. Publicly and unambiguously condemn all violence in the name of Islam, including violence against Israel.

4. Express a deep appreciation of the moral record of America, including its superb treatment of both its Muslim citizens and Muslim immigrants, along with a complete rejection of the Islamist notion that America is hostile to Muslims.

5. Fully accept the existence of Israel as a Jewish state, and distance themselves from the Muslim/Arab obsession with Israel.

You can read the entire column here, and I recommend that you do.

Steyn and Krauthammer on murder of US soldiers in Germany

Last week two members of the US Air Force were gunned down by a radical Muslim in Frankfurt, Germany.

Arid Uka, the Kosovo Albanian gunman accused of killing two U.S. airmen and critically injuring a third, was an employee at the busy Frankfurt airport where he opened fire Wednesday, reports The Daily Mail.

German officials are investigating whether the fatal shooting could be considered an act of Islamic terrorism. The 21-year-old suspect, who authorities say has confessed to targeting American military members, claims he acted alone and does not belong to a terrorist network or terrorist cell.

Uka, a devout Muslim nicknamed Abu Reyann, reportedly yelled "God is great" in Arabic as he boarded and opened fire on a bus loaded with U.S. airmen Wednesday on their way from their base in England to serve in Afghanistan, said Marine Col. Dave Lapan, a Pentagon spokesman.

Of course no official will acknowledge out-right what we all know to be true: Islamic extremism is a very real and very scary problem all around the Western world these days.  Author and columnist Mark Steyn has some thoughts on the situation in his latest column at National Review Online:

Remember Kosovo? Me neither. But it was big at the time, launched by Bill Clinton in the wake of his Monica difficulties: Make war, not love, as the boomers advise. So Clinton did — and without any pesky U.N. resolutions, or even the pretense of seeking them. Instead, he and Tony Blair and even Jacques Chirac just cried “Bombs away!” and got on with it. And the Left didn’t mind at all —  because, for a modern Western nation, war is only legitimate if you have no conceivable national interest in whatever war you’re waging. Unlike Iraq and all its supposed “blood for oil,” in Kosovo no one remembers why we went in, what the hell the point of it was, or which side were the good guys. (Answer: Neither.) The principal rationale advanced by Clinton and Blair was that there was no rationale. This was what they called “liberal interventionism,” which boils down to: The fact that we have no reason to get into it justifies our getting into it.

A decade on, Kosovo is a sorta sovereign state, and in Frankfurt a young airport employee is so grateful for what America did for his people that he guns down U.S. servicemen while yelling “Allahu akbar!” The strange shrunken spectator who serves as president of the United States, offering what he called “a few words about the tragic event that took place,” announced that he was “saddened,” and expressed his “gratitude for the service of those who were lost” and would “spare no effort” to “work with the German authorities” but it was a “stark reminder” of the “extraordinary sacrifices that our men and women in uniform are making . . . ”

The passivity of these remarks is very telling. Men and women “in uniform” (which it’s not clear these airmen were even wearing) understand they may be called upon to make “extraordinary sacrifices” in battle. They do not expect to be “lost” on the shuttle bus at the hands of a civilian employee at a passenger air terminal in an allied nation. But then I don’t suppose their comrades expected to be “lost” at the hands of an army major at Fort Hood, to cite the last “tragic event” that “took place” — which seems to be the president’s preferred euphemism for a guy opening fire while screaming “Allahu akbar!” But relax, this fellow in Frankfurt was most likely a “lone wolf” (as Sen. Chuck Schumer described the Times Square bomber) or an “isolated extremist” (as the president described the Christmas Day Pantybomber). There are so many of these “lone wolves” and “isolated extremists” you may occasionally wonder whether they’ve all gotten together and joined Local 473 of the Amalgamated Union of Lone Wolves and Isolated Extremists, but don’t worry about it: As any Homeland Security official can tell you, “Allahu akbar” is Arabic for “Nothing to see here.”

He continues:

Today, the Muslim world starts in the suburbs of Frankfurt. Those U.S. airmen were killed by Arid Uka, whose Muslim Albanian parents emigrated from Kosovo decades ago. Young Arid was born and bred in Germany. He is a German citizen who holds a German passport. He is, according to multicultural theory, as German as Fritz and Helmut and Hans. Except he’s not. Not when it counts.

Why isn’t he a fully functioning citizen of the nation he’s spent his entire life in? Well, that’s a tricky one.

Okay, why is a Muslim who wants to kill Americans holding down a job at a European airport? That’s slightly easier to answer. Almost every problem facing the Western world, from self-detonating jihadists to America’s own suicide bomb — the multi-trillion-dollar debt — has at its root a remorseless demographic arithmetic. In the U.S., the baby boomers did not have enough children to maintain their mid-20th-century social programs. I see that recent polls supposedly show that huge majorities of Americans don’t want any modifications to Medicare or Social Security. So what? It doesn’t matter what you “want.” The country’s broke, and you can vote yourself unsustainable quantities of government lollipops all you like, but all you’re doing is ensuring that when, eventually, you’re obliged to reacquaint yourself with reality, the shock will be far more devastating and convulsive.

Read the full piece here.

We mourn the loss of any US servicemen, but we also mourn the loss of Western resolve to confront the irreconcilable wing of Islam.  9/11 should have been a wake up call, but I fear it will take another preventable event to rouse even just the interest of people in America.

We would be remiss to leave out Charles Krauthammer's take on the tragedy in Frankfurt (and the president's lackluster response):