A development in Islam we should support

Sar Shalom

The other day, I was listening on the Brian Lehrer Show in New York to United Arab Emirates' ambassador to Russia talk about his book about how someone can be both a good Muslim and a good citizen of the world. From his talk, I came away with the impression that most Muslims have the approach that being a good Muslim means saying "the umma, right or wrong." Of course, once someone takes that attitude, there is no way to support Israel over the Palestinians, because even if the Palestinians are wrong, as part of the umma, it is one's duty to support them. Without getting into any specific manifestations, Ambassador Ghobash rejects this tenet. In so doing, he makes it possible to reach an accommodation with Muslims in that he expands the grounds on which one can be a good Muslim and accept the presence of Israel.

How to discuss Islam

Sar Shalom

Much has been made about President Barack Obama's refusal to name Islam as a culprit in the attack at an Orlando night club last week. While Obama, and to lesser extent Bush before him, does leave this gap in his description of the threat, ignoring the valid motivation for doing so does nothing to address this shortcoming. What's needed is language that will define who we are at war with and that will let everyone not in that group that we are not at war with them. Failing to include those who are not a threat on our side both decreases our potential base of support and increases the needed work in order to prevail in the war, which provides a reason not to be overly broad in defining the threat.

With that said, the threat that the West faces is those who think that avenging the honor of Islam is a valid action. For instance, insulting Islam's prophet Mohammed is considered an affront to Islam's honor as is the existence of Jews living in dignity in the middle of Dar-al-Islam, which incites a rage that something must be done. In contrast, the practice of Islam, whether consisting of fasting on Ramadan, attending mosque daily, or wearing the hijab or even niqab, just so long as it does not include support for avenging Islam's honor is not a threat. Thus, when Obama, and before him Bush, try to convey the message that we do not consider the mere practice of Islam to be a threat, it is altogether proper to do so.

The proper criticism of Obama's treatment of Islam is that while he is correct to limit opprobrium to the vengeance of Islam's honor, Obama's definition of vengeance of Islam's honor is too narrow. It seems to be that Obama's proscriptions would be limited to those who either pick up arms for the sake of Islam's honor or who explicitly call upon others to do so. While Obama goes to the ends of the earth to confront those two categories of Islamists, and saying otherwise simply displays your ignorance of actions like the drone strike against Anwar al-Awlaki, there are other categories of those who provide tacit support for avenging Islam's honor. This quiet support for avenging Islam's honor comes most notable from the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) and related organizations that deploy rhetoric to conflate exposure of those who take action for the sake of Islam's honor with simple practitioners of the religion. A frequent feature of such groups is that they are constitutionally incapable of condemning violence on behalf of Islam's honor without also condemning "Islamophobia" in a manner that puts Islamophobia on a par with Islamicly motivated violence.

A further category of action for the sake of Islam's honor is the deployment of various forms of thought control such as that which prevails at the School of Oriental and African Studies at London University. While not including any violence, the creation of such cultures undermines the free flow of information that is the basis of Western civilization.

In conclusion, the language we need to discuss Islam is one which will say that avenging the honor of Islam is unacceptable. This includes not just directly engaging in violence for the cause or explicit advocacy or direction to do so, but also apologia for those such actions or saying that one would not personally engage in such actions but that doing so is a legitimate path within sharia. However, any practitioner of Islam who uncategorically portrays avenging Islam's honor as illegitimate will be welcomed with open arms as a citizen of the West.

Western Islamophobia: Who Are We Kidding?

The Canary

{Editor's note: please welcome The Canary to Israel Thrives.  This guy definitely has something to say. - ML}

There is so much talk these days about Islamophobia and anti-Muslim discrimination, yet worldwide statistics demonstrate convincingly that, despite all the atrocities committed by Muslim extremists, anti-Semitism is actually growing much faster than anti-Muslim fervor, especially in Europe.

This is a rather fascinating observation, considering that Jews in Europe never threatened the lives of others, never proselytized their religion and never wanted to change their host countries’ governances. Radical Islam openly threatens innocent lives on a daily basis and openly proclaims its goal of upending Western society and democratic government structures in favor of Islamic Sharia law. This is no longer only a desire of radical Islam; the Muslim Brotherhood, considered by much of the European Union and the Obama administration to represent moderate Islam, is openly committed to governance under Sharia.

Threats no longer come from just the radical sectors of Muslim countries. The same ideology expressed by longtime radicals is now expressed by recently-radicalized Muslims living in Western societies, where they (or their parents) had settled to supposedly improve their lives over what they had left behind. Now, they paradoxically attempt to convert their host nations to the same 16th century-style governance that they (or their parents) fled before receiving sanctuary in the West.

Yet despite increasing fear of radical Islam, statistics in European countries and the U.S. persistently record significantly more anti-Semitic than Islamophobic hate crimes. The reasons are unclear but, at least in Europe, growing Muslim populations, characterized by overt societal anti-Semitism, are widely suspected as a principal cause of this.

Dictionaries define the term “anti-Semitism” as discrimination, prejudice or hostility toward Jews for no other reason but their Jewish heritage. Islamophobia is similarly described as discrimination, prejudice and hostility being unjustly directed at Muslims.

Superficially, these definitions are almost identical. Closer examinations of their meanings, however, reveals very obvious differences: While anti-Semitism is directed at a peaceful religion and a well-integrated ethnic minority, to many that are full participants in their local societies, Islamophobia represents a different phenomena, and is a far more urgent concern.

First of all, it is didactically misleading since phobias are irrational, psycho-socially abnormal behavior patterns, and concerns about radical Islam are neither irrational nor psychologically abnormal behavior. The term, therefore, is factually incorrect because, in contrast to Judaism and all other major world religions, Islam is not only a religion but also a political movement with its own distinct anti-democratic political ideology.

If one were to discriminate or express prejudice and hostility toward Muslims because of their religion, such activity would be labeled as anti-Semitism. To publically express opposition to the political ideology of Islam, which is anti-democratic and contradictory to constitutions of practically all Western democracies, cannot, however, be labeled as discriminatory, prejudicial or hostile to a religion. The protection of a democratic constitution against undemocratic dictatorial forces is, indeed, the sworn duty of every citizen in Western democracies.

Nobody would be considered a religious bigot just because he opposes Communism, Fascism or other dictatorial ideological movements. Yet, criticism of Islamic political ideology immediately conjures the b-word, and raises the specter of Islamophobia. If the Muslim Brotherhood (widely present in most U.S. mosques, and representing most of the organized Muslim political power structure in the U.S.) were to restrict itself only to representation of Islam as a religion, it would be viewed as are representatives of any other major religion. But by actively propagating the introduction of Sharia in their many mosques, the Brotherhood becomes a political organization whose goals are incompatible with the U.S. constitution.

Paradoxically, it is exactly the political ideology of Islam that explains the strong association that the political left in Western democracies has forged with Muslims over the last few decades. On first impression, such a coalition would appear unlikely since the political left has, traditionally, been secular. Yet, despite the obvious religiosity of Islam, its religiously motivated anti-democratic tendencies, its radical discrimination of women and the ideological overlaps between Islam and the third-world, anti-imperialistic socialist ideology (including anti-colonialism, anti-Judeo-Christian morality and strong, third-world, underclass affinities with people of color) have established a strong emotional as well as a political alliance between the political left and Islam.

This coalition has been developing since the mid-1960s, and came together for the first time following the Arab-Israeli Six-Day War in 1967, in which Israel annihilated the combined armies of the Muslim Arab world and conquered all of the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, the West Bank from Jordan and the Golan Heights from Syria. Suddenly, the prior underdog, Israel, morphed in the eyes of the political left into a White European Colonial outpost in the Muslim Middle East, obviously overlooking the fact that almost half of Israel’s Jewish population were not of European descent but actually refugees from African and Muslim countries. Picking up the argument of the Muslim world, the political left concurred that the Crusaders had returned and conquered Jerusalem again: but that this time, the Crusaders were not Christians but ‘The Jews.’

History demonstrates that anti-Semitism was religious at times over the past centuries, and at other times economic; but it always was used as a political tool of governing classes, whether during the monarchies in England, Spain or Russia; the Catholic church in her fiefdoms in Italy; rightist political parties in Fin-de-Ciecle Vienna at the end of the 19th century; Nazism in Hitler’s Germany or Communism in Russia (and later in the Soviet Bloc under Stalin and his successors).

In other words, anti-Semitism has over centuries been used as a political tool by both the political right as well as the political left. We now appear to have entered another historical period of political anti-Semitism on the political left.

It wasn’t always like that: Israel was founded on socialist principles in 1948. Her political leaders were among the founders of the Socialist International: the social-democratic leadership forum of social democratic political parties that were established after WWII. But everything changed with the 1967 war. Though widely recognized as a war of defense for Israel, the subsequent occupation of Arab lands branded the country as a neo-colonialist power in the eyes of the left. Even today, almost 50 years later, it is the only functioning democracy in the Middle East. But the majority of the Socialist International continues to view Israel with political distain. Through becoming a dominant military and economic power in the Middle East, Israel, like the U.S., is seen as a vestige of unmitigated capitalism and economic as well as military colonialism: little Satan and big Satan, as the Islamic Republic of Iran likes to call both countries.

Until the Obama administration came to power, following their Judeo-Christian believe systems, Israel and the U.S. shared most definitions of political rights and wrongs. The political left, however, believes that this view leads to neo-colonialism, and that it is reactionary in its rejection of the political relativism of the left.

This political relativism of the left allows and even encourages those considered to be suppressed by colonialism to revolt. Under the believe system of political relativism, the “oppressed” can practically do no wrong, and are even in the right when committing acts of terror, kidnappings, mass murder, abuses of civilian populations and initiating wars if it is in the name of freedom and social justice. So naturally, Hamas (an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood) and Hezbollah (a vassal of Iran) are considered moderate political organizations to the political left. It is almost surprising that the left has not embraced ISIS.

Threatened since its creation by the United Nations in 1948 with extinction, the country of Israel, despite its founder’s socialist traditions, could not afford to go along with the moral relativism of the political left, which increasingly sided with those who openly sought her destruction. The country, along with over 200 member states of the United Nations, is the only that is openly threatened with extinction by other member states (Iran and others). Yet no resolution ever condemned such threats. Indeed, over 90 percent of resolutions of condemnation in the various bodies of the United Nations are directed at Israel every year. Though it is the only parliamentary democracy in the Middle East, Israel cannot even get nominated as a member of the United Nations’ Human Rights Commission. In the meantime, human rights pariahs like Iran, Libya and Saudi Arabia are routinely elected.

So, the history of recurrent political anti-Semitism appears to repeat itself: the world needs a bogeyman, and nobody is better suited for this role than ’The Jew,’ – this time in the form of the Jewish state of Israel, which, objectively, is one of the world’s great national success stories.

Even the U.S. political system is proof of the connection between anti-Israel polemics and unadulterated anti-Semitism. One just has to listen to some of the sermons of President Obama’s longtime pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright and of his ideological twin, the Nation of Islam’s Minister Louis Farrakhan. Both are well-known Afro-centric racists and anti-Semites who discovered their Jewish bogeyman!

Like many politicians of the political left in Europe before them, members of President Obama’s foreign relations team have expressed the opinion that the creation of Israel was a political mistake. This is not a new opinion in this country’s foreign policy establishment. Indeed, when President Truman ordered a United Nations vote in favor of Israel’s creation in 1948, he overruled his own Secretary of State. Such opinions voiced by the current administration, however, deserve attention, since the Obama administration’s policy toward Israel has been clearly influenced by the administration’s leftish ideology. So it should not surprise that we have witnessed a clear turn away from the traditional support of Israel, and more alignment with antagonistic policies toward Israel from the European Union.

Economic and academic boycott movements against Israel started in the UK and Scandinavian countries (mostly Norway and Sweden). They were initiated by leftish fringe groups but appropriated over time by social democratic politicians all over Europe, and became official policy of some social democratic political parties and governments led by those parties in Sweden and Norway. Boycott movement have also crossed the Atlantic and are now present on most college campuses in the U.S., once again demonstrating the common cause of the political left fringe and Muslim groups.

Outright anti-Israel stances are still rare in U.S. politics but, as noted before, the U.S.–Israel relationship has changed decisively under President Obama. Moreover, it was surprising to see how much political support Israel has lost from the left in Congress, when even prominent Jewish politicians in the Democratic Party publically supported President Obama’s Iran deal, which was considered an existential threat to Israel. It was also interesting to note that, desperate to secure votes to prevent the override of a potential Obama veto, the administration did not hesitate to subtly raise concerns about Jewish dual loyalty, an argument that has fed anti-Semitic prosecutions of Jews for centuries.

Though he describes himself as “Israel’s best friend in the White House,” he is a politician brought up on the extreme Marxist left, with a Muslim Marxist father dedicated to fighting British Colonialism (for details see The Canary’s earlier biographical series on President Obama). Obama’s psychological affinities to leftist ideologies render him sympathetic to the European Socialist view on Israel. Socialist ideology has dominated his presidency from the beginning, whether in domestic or foreign policy. In one of his first acts as President, he actually removed Winston Churchill’s bust from the Oval Office because he did not, unlike most Americans, see him as a WWII hero but as the villain of British colonialism between the two World Wars. Considering Obama’s foreign policy toward Israel, his very public support for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Muslim Brotherhood offshoots in the U.S., is no wonder that President Obama’s relationship to ‘The Jews’ has been questioned. Some media outlets have publically questioned whether President Obama should be considered anti-Semitic.

Once his White House tapes became public, President Richard R. Nixon did not mince words in his conversations with Kissinger, which could be viewed as anti-Semitic. But he likely saved Israel after the surprise attack by Egyptian and Syrian armies when he expedited weapon deliveries during the Yom Kippur War. President Lyndon B. Johnson was also known to have uttered anti-Semitic remarks at times. But a few such remarks do not yet make an anti-Semite.

While nobody reported President Obama to have made an anti-Semitic remark, his intimate 20-year relationship with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, a flaming anti-Semite with violently anti-Israeli view points, suggests that future presidential historians will have to pay close attention to this question when assessing Obama’s presidency. Such a close assessments of the administration’s attitude toward Islam will not be required because no other population, African Americans included, has received as much positive attention from the Obama Administration. But who would have expected anything else from the most socialist administration in decades?

Some thoughts for Chanukka

Sar Shalom

As we enter the month of Kislev, I would like to share a question posed by Rabbi Chayyim Angel. The issue is why was the Chanukka story not canonized into the Hebrew Bible? The simple answer is that the Chanukka story occurred after the time that the Bible was closed. However Rabbi Angel added a discussion about what happened in the Chanukka story and how it resonated with the late Mishnaic rabbis who finalized the decision of what was and what was not included in the Hebrew Bible.

The fundamental feature of the Chanukka story is that the Hasmoneans were zealots. As priests, their role model was Pinchas, who upon witnessing someone openly defy Moses' exhortation against sexual relations with the surrounding Moabites responded by killing the offenders as they commenced the act. Following in Pinchas' footsteps, when the Hasmoneans witnessed the Hellenizing Jews partaking of pig sacrifices and neglecting circumcision, sometimes even reversing their own circumcision, they reacted against both the Hellenizing Jews and Seleucid agents supporting them. The result of the Hasmoneans' zealotry was the restoration of Jewish sovereignty in Judah and with it the resumption of Jewish worship in the Temple.

Now fast forward to the late Mishnaic era. The rabbis of that era had witnessed a very different example of zealotry, that of the Bar Kochba rebellion. The result of the Bar Kochba rebellion is that when it was suppressed, the remaining Jews found themselves subject to Hadrianic decrees and Rome ceased to refer to the land as Judea, afterwards always referring to it as Palestine. Seeing this, the rabbis came to see the dangers of zealotry and thus not only excluded the Chanukka story from all sacred texts, but excluded nearly all mention of Chanukka at all from the Mishna.

Similar to Jewry's experience with the dangers of zealotry, European Christendom gained experience with the consequences of zealotry through centuries of interdenominational wars. Responding to this, the Enlightenment developed in Europe leading to the prevailing European ethos we see today that strongly frowns on religious zealotry.

In contrast to the experience of Jewry and Christendom, Islam* has no direct experience with the consequences of zealotry. The result is that the aversion to zealotry that has permeated Jewry and Christendom has not permeated Islam as deeply, hence the readiness of Muslims enlist in the zealous cause.

There are two implications of this distinction between Islam and Jewry and Christendom. One of them is that those warning of the dangers of Islam, whether of the religion or the civilization, are drawing on a kernel of truth. There is a strain that is genuinely part of Islam that tolerates and encourages the extremists' zealous actions.

However, the second point is that it is only a kernel of truth. There is nothing inevitable about adhering to the five pillars of Islam (the religion) leading one to zealotry on behalf of the faith or even to accepting that those who do are practicing the true faith. Indeed, parts of Islam have adopted doctrines that enable sharing the world with other faiths as equals. One such doctrine is dividing the classic concept of Dar-al-Harb (lands to be conquered) into multiple categories such as Dar-al-Hudna (lands where there is a truce) and Dar-al-Amn (lands where Muslims can practice freely as a minority). What we need to do is demonstrate the message to the 1 billion Muslims of this world that if they adopt any doctrine with the effect that they can accept the other faiths of the world as equals, then they will be welcomed with open arms. While no individual should be held accountable for their coreligionists, the Muslims who reject such doctrines must be dealt with forcefully.

*Judaism and Christianity have the words Jewry and Christendom respectively to indicate the civilizations associated with the corresponding religions. In contrast, the word "Islam" is used to denote both the religion and the civilization associated with it. In this post, unless otherwise noted, "Islam" is used to refer to the civilization.

Now for some music to get ready for Chanukka.
First, a chorus from Händel's oratorio Judas Maccabeus which is roughly about the Chanukka story.

Then the tune from that chorus applied to Hallel, the traditional Psalms of praise said during each holiday.

Lessons About Arab/Muslim Historical Treatment of Their Jews

Sar Shalom

{Editor's note - I could hardly be more pleased with Sar Shalom's debut piece for Israel Thrives.  There is a great deal to mull-over in Shalom's discussion, not the least of which are tactical considerations in how we criticize the historical Arab treatment of the Jews of the Middle East.  I would recommend that you guys give this one a considered reading. - ML}

Since I was introduced to this blog through a comment I made about the Muslim's historical treatment of their Jewish subjects, I thought my first post should deal with what we should learn from that treatment about Muslims today. A popular theory about Muslim opposition to Zionist activity is that it is a continuation of Muslim oppression of the Jews since the Muslims conquered the Middle East which in turn is dictated by sharia law.

There are a couple truthful elements to this theory. One, there have been multiple occurrences of brutal persecution by the Muslims of their Jewish subjects, spanning both time and space, that have resulted in the deaths of many Jews and the conversion to Islam of countless more. Furthermore, there are Muslims today who are engaged in similar repression or attempted repression against the Jews, many of them justifying their activity by sharia law. The issue is, is today's Islamic repression of the Jews a continuation of their practice from centuries ago, or is it a new phenomenon? Answering that question will require a look at the record beyond just what the Muslims did from 700 to 1800 CE and what they are doing now to look and what transpired in between those two eras.

One of the problems with drawing a connection between actions done centuries ago and actions done today is that we have to distinguish between a causal connection and a coincidental similarity between actions. One factor to consider in assessing which of these more accurately describes the relationship of past to present actions is what connection there is for other groups. While anyone who is familiar with the reality of Muslim-Jewish relations from the origins of Islam to the late Middle Ages can tell you about the oppression the Muslims visited upon their Jewish subjects, complete with occasional massacres, the Christians of that era often treated their Jewish subjects worse.

The question this raises is why did Christianity change in this regard whereas Islam did not? Another complication to the theory that current Muslim actions are merely a continuation of past actions is there was a time period during the early Yishuv when Arabs and Muslims were not almost universally hostile to Jews or to Zionism. For instance, it was not an aberration for Ahmed Zaki, a leading Egyptian intellectual of the 1920s, to declare, "The victory of the Zionist ideal is also the victory of my ideal." Even among the Palestinians, support for the uprisings against the Yishuv was not universal at the beginning of the 1920s, but became so by the 1930s, according to EoZ's psychological history of the Palestinian Arabs. Furthermore, a theory for the popularity of judeophobia and anti-Zionism in today's Arab world would need to explain why it is shared by the Christian-Arabs and the non-Islamist Muslims.

Given all this, what explanation is there for the Muslim world's actions towards the Jews and Israel? Via Michael Totten comes an article by Samuel Tadros in The American Interest that explores the nature of today's judeophobia in Egypt and its origins. Tadros traces this development to the Arab world's encounter with European culture as follows:

When Napoleon swept through Egypt, the Arabs began to realize how far behind Europe they had fallen. The initial way to catch up had been to imitate the ways of the West. However, Britain and France did not uphold their domestic standards of liberalism in their imperial holdings, setting the stage for a reassessment.

This reassessment was facilitated by Nazi Germany, assisted by their spokesman to the Arab world, Haj Amin el-Husseini. Even after the Nazi regime was eliminated, it maintained its influence in Egypt by means of refugees from the military tribunals [augmented by official Soviet cooperation in later years]. The message from these actors was that Egypt's failure to catch up with Europe was not due to a shortcoming in Egypt, rather, it was a Jewish conspiracy.

Now, how should we discuss the factors underlying the prevailing Arab judeophobic attitudes? In a way, unless we are trying to change those attitudes, we can ignore discussion about causes and focus on the supremacist attitudes. The important thing is that our audience come away with an understanding that this supremacist doctrine is the prime obstacle to arriving at a peaceable agreement. This means that convincing the Arabs, not just Muslim-Arabs, to abandon their supremacist doctrine without convincing Israel to yield to the maximalist demands they present to the West will produce peace, but that convincing Israel to yield to their maximalist demands as presented to the West without convincing them to abandon their supremacist doctrine will not produce peace.

While the underlying cause is beside the point, it can provide something equivalent to a motive in helping to sell the notion of their supremacist doctrine. In this case, we should endeavor to identify an underlying cause to which our audience would be receptive and thus be more likely to accept that the lack of peace is due to Arab supremacism. With that said, a committed anti-racist would have trouble accepting that merely accepting the five pillars of Islam commits one to the supremacist doctrine. If there was no other other motive to cite and identifying a motive could be avoided, this would be a chance worth taking. However, there is another motive to cite. It is Husseini's translation of Goebbels into the language of Islamic piety. While citing instruction from the Nazis runs the risk of being accused of running afoul of Godwin's Law, we can summarize it as indoctrination by European anti-semites and leave discussion of the Nazis to the details of how they were indoctrinated.

Radical Islam: From Right to Left

When I think about Radical Islam and the chopping off of Daniel Pearl's head and the taking down of the Twin Towers and the various Islamist attacks throughout Europe and India and Israel and throughout the Middle East, I realize that... oh... we have a little problem here.

And then when I think about American and western politics and the various approaches, from Right to Left, taken by westerners toward Radical Islam I realize that the problem becomes even more complex than the problem of Radical Islam, itself.

In a nutshell, both the Right and Left suck when it comes to Radical Islam.

Here's why:

The Right tends to think that the problem is not just Radical Islam, or Islamism, but Islam, if not Muslims, in general. Not everyone on the Right feels that way, but plenty of them do or use language that leans in that direction. For example, this is why Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar stormed off the set of The View when conservative / libertarian political commentator, Bill O'Reilly, claimed that "Muslims killed us on 9/11."



On the one hand, of course, O'Reilly is correct. The people who attacked the World Trade Center were Muslims. Thus it is more or less correct to say that "Muslims killed us on 9/11." Or, really, Muslims attacked us on 9/11.

The problem, obviously, is that by saying "Muslims killed us on 9/11" O'Reilly makes it sound like it was Muslims, as a group, as a whole, who did the killing. As I often say, the vast majority of Muslims, here, there, and everywhere, are simply not in the Jihadi Business. Most Muslims are too busy putting bread on the table to bother themselves with hatin' on Jews and the West.

Therefore, to lay the blame for Islamist violence at the feet of Muslims, in general, or Islam, in its entirety, is not only false, and not only entirely unjust to both Muslims and Islam, but it sets up a situation in which America and the West must be in conflict with 1.5 billion Muslims. Those on the Right who finger Islam, rather than Radical Islam, drag us into a fight that we cannot possibly win and that we should not want to have to begin with.

We cannot fight 1.5 billion Muslims and we shouldn't want to, anyway. Would it be nice if more moderate Muslims came out against Radical Islam? Certainly. Radical Islam's foremost enemies are not westerners, but moderate Muslims. Radical Muslims think of regular Muslims as "hypocrites" or the "near enemy." And it is the near enemy that is the foremost foe of the Islamists.

So, this is primarily a fight within Islam, not between Islam and the West. The solution will come primarily from the Islamic world, because we cannot impose a solution on a problem as massive as this. Or, if we can, no one has yet put forward a practicable way of doing so.

In this way the Right tends to have their heads almost entirely up their asses when it comes to the problem of Radical Islam. The only people on the planet who are even more screwed up when it comes to Radical Islam than the political right-wing in the West is the political left-wing in the West.

If the Right often views the problem as a problem with Islam, the Left tends to go all Ostrich on us, sticking their heads in the sand. The Left sees no evil and it hears no evil. The Left is not whistling past the graveyard, it seems not even to realize that the graveyard actually exists. The Left is even more worthless than the Right when it comes to the problem of Radical Islam because they refuse to really acknowledge that Radical Islam is a genuine problem and then when people who do recognize this problem speak up, the Left starts screaming their heads off about "Racism!" and "Islamophobia!"

Taken as a whole, this is why we cannot even begin to reasonably approach the problem, because the Right tends to misdiagnose and the Left is in denial.

Thus to my friends on the Right, I say:

Calm down. The problem is emphatically NOT 1.5 billion Muslims.

And to my friends on the Left, I say:

Snap out of your coma, your vegetable torpor, and, yes, Wake the Fuck Up.

{That is all.}