Moderate Muslims: Like Snuffleupagus

The frequency with which you're told they exist seems to be inversely proportional to the likelihood of sighting one.

But exist they do. And here's where they all seem to have been hiding. (via Crooked Timber)

It's a (surprisingly successful) attempt at an Islamic Onion, with headlines like "Man Blames Everything on Jews" and fake articles such as the one satirizing the likely impotence of a Muslim electoral bloc, assuming one should emerge. (There's a genuine effort. Good luck to them, in all sincerity. Having to pander to Muslim voters might at least partially offset the electoral incentives for both Republicans and Democrats to pander to Israel supporters.)

"Sometimes you have individuals who support homosexual values, abortion, and marijuana legalization, but at the same time take an anti-Israel stance. BOOM! The lesser of two evils," Harris says enthusiastically.

I shouldn't have to make this disclaimer, but it says a lot about our day and age that I feel that I have to. I don't hate Muslims. [irony]Some of my best friends are Muslims.[/irony] Whatever Islamophobia you perceive here is because this blog serves as an outlet for all the things I would really like to say to my Muslim friends' faces but don't feel I can. What infuriates me is the sanctimonious harshness with which Muslims and their postcolonialist allies castigate Western imperialism, reserving an extra serving of bile for the United States, which never even had a Muslim colony (until now). However, when confronted with their own record of colonialism, genocide, persecution and slavery, they retaliate with charges of racism, Islamophobia and "neo-colonialism." What's the problem with that?, you might ask, Most 'advocacy groups' are inexhaustible fountains of self-serving cant. Well, thanks to postcolonialism, the same Western Left that claims to stand in solidarity with the persecuted around the world displays abject indifference to the most egregious violence if it's perpetrated by Muslims, whether it's the 8th century expulsion of the Parsees from their ancestral home of Iran or the hacking to death of three Buddhist monks in southern Thailand, one of whom was only thirteen, just this past January (Though I parted ways with "the Left" a long time ago, its complete silence and indifference to the murder in the most horrific fashion of a non-white 13-year-old under vows of poverty and pacifism can still provoke the most angry, sorrowful and profound disappointment. Even after all this time, "the Left" can still break my heart. Isn't taking up arms, both literal and intellectual, against exactly this what "the Left" is for? Is solidarity with the Saidists worth letting them debase your integrity like this? Or did you give it up eagerly and willingly? Because from where I'm standing, I'm not the one who abandoned my principles and started whoring myself out.); right-wing critics are tarred with the broad brush of racism (and some of them deserve it). Only V.S. Naipaul, whose Hindu (by way of Trinidad) background perhaps makes him sensitive to the otherwise unchallenged Muslim assumption of blamelessness as well as, in the words of Edward Said, "ascrib[ing] to him the credentials of a man who can serve as witness for the third world," has had the courage to apply the postcolonial critique to the colonialism of Muslims, evoking from "the Left" little but scorn.

What I would like to tell the Muslims in my life is this, If you are going to excoriate the West for its colonial transgressions, your response to charges of Islamic colonialism had better be repentant rather than retaliatory. Or, if you want to gloss over Islam's imperial sins, you had better be prepared to extend the same absolution to others, not least the West. I leave the choice entirely up to you. But anything less is the most obscene, blatant, self-serving hypocrisy.

Islamica News has been linked under It's Funny Because It's True and Dhimmi under Fighting the Good Fight