Dear "Moderate" Muslims, Stay Out of the Way

After every Islamic terrorist attack, after every push to bend the West a little further, the endless demands for accommodation, the steady imposition of Islamic custom onto the societies that took these communities in, the calls to take over the West, the so-called ‘moderate’ Muslims overwhelm the world: ‘this has nothing to do with Islam, Islam is a religion of peace, these men have hijacked our faith.’

The problem is that the men who commit these acts, and the men who issue these demands and calls, do not invent their justifications. They cite the Quran, the hadith, the biography of the Prophet, the centuries of jurisprudence built on all three, and they say, with textual precision, that what they are doing is divinely commanded. The “moderate” then steps forward to condemn the “Islamist” while pronouncing the very texts he quoted holy, perfect, and beyond revision.

The “moderate” is telling us that the source code is flawless and that everyone who reads it as a mandate for violence and Islamic hegemony has simply misread it, century after century, across every school and every continent. More than 60,000 Islamic terror attacks have taken place in the last few decades. At some point the claim that the text is innocent and only the readers are guilty must be rejected. When a document is read the same dangerous way by enough people for long enough, the problem is no longer confined to the readers.

If your son runs with a gang and you cannot control him, you have two options. You can hand him over to those who will stop him, or you can step aside while they do. What you cannot do, not without becoming part of the problem yourself, is stand in the doorway defending the gang’s code, the very code that keeps producing more thugs like him.