Sun Rising

In a seminal piece (read the whole thing) written in London, Milo Yiannopoulos discusses the current "brand" that is Islam. He writes:

It sometimes feels as though it might be too late to save Islam’s reputation in the west. If that sounds like an alarmist or absurd thing to say, consider the facts. For decades, Muslim communities turned a blind eye to what was going on in their mosques and schools, with the result that thousands of young western boys have flown to Syria to join ISIS to commit barbaric acts in the name of Allah.

They also failed to denounce terror where it happened, allowing hate-mongers to blur the distinctions between Islam and Islamism to such a degree that the subtleties are now lost on non-Muslims. Myself included, at times, if I am completely honest. Non-Muslims like us were left to conclude that they must, on some level, secretly sympathise with the acts of their radicalised cousins. Who could really blame us?

The answer to the last question is easy. Perched on a moral plateau far above the rest of us, progressive writers (and many leftist and a few moderate politicians) tell us that any suggestion that Islam must reform or that Muslims must universally condemn Islamist thinking and actively work to irradicate it is "Islamophobia" or flat out "bigotry."

The charge of Islamophobia is so ridiculous, it's actually laughable. The West has shown commendable (actually incredible) restraint in the manner in which it has treated Muslims—after 9/11, after London, after Madrid, after Ft. Hood, after Boston, after Nigeria, after Sydney, after dozens of other instances of Islamic terror, and now after Paris. But no matter, our moral betters warn us repeatedly that we're on the edge of a pogrom. Brendan O'Neill comments:

Across Europe, among the right-thinking sections of society, among the political classes, the response to the massacre of the cartoonists and satirists has been the same: to panic about how Them, the native masses, especially the more right-wing sections of the French population, might respond to it. The blood on the floor of the Charlie Hebdo offices was still wet when brow-furrowed observers started saying: “Oh no, the Muslims! Will they be attacked?” It’s the same after every terrorist attack: from 9/11 to 7/7 in London to last year’s Sydney siege to Paris today: Liberals’ instant, almost Pavlovian response to Islamist terror attacks in the West is to worry about a violent uprising of the ill-educated against Muslims. The uprising never comes, but that doesn’t halt their fantasy fears. What’s it all about?

The unreal, unhinged nature of this elite preemption of mass Muslim-bashing has been thrown into sharp relief by the foul events in Paris over the past few days. The massacre of journalists by Islamists was followed today by a violent hostage-taking in a kosher shop in Port de Vincennes by a gunman reported to be part of the same small cell of Islamic extremists from which the Kouachi brothers, who shot up Charlie Hebdo, sprung. Why invade a kosher shop? Well, it’s very likely there will be Jews in there, and if there’s one thing Islamists love more than executing those who insult their prophet, it’s attacking Jews. The kosher-shop siege and hostage situation is now over, and while the information coming out of France is sketchy, Reuters says four of the hostages — who may well have been Jews — are dead. So the gulf between the fears of he multicultural elite and the reality on the ground in France is colossal. “Leave Muslims alone,” they plead as the news wires report that four kosher shoppers have been killed. Many European observers seem far more exercised about the possibility of Islamophobic violence than they are by the reality of anti-Semitic violence.

It's far past the time to "leave the Muslims alone" but that that does not mean a violent reaction. Few would countenance violence against innocent Muslims in Western cities, and that's why there has been virtually none. But if we continue to "leave them alone" in the 'communicational' sense, the rot within their religion/ideology will fester and grow. It's time to ask the questions that I've raised in earlier posts, here, here, and here. It's time to demand reform, as Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has done (it's curious how little MSM coverage his remarkable speech received).

Milo Yiannopoulos continues:

[The] extraordinary display of [Western] tolerance [toward Muslims] will not last forever, which is why Muslim leaders may wish to think carefully about their next moves. Simply repeating the mantra “this has nothing to do with Islam” isn’t working. Muslims have been handed out lines to take by these people; pleasant fictions about “tiny fringes” and peace and love and the transcendent virtues of diversity and multiculturalism and how there is no link–none whatsoever, nothing, nada, don’t even think it–between the Islam as practised by supposed moderates and the Islam proclaimed by killers and, finally, by poisonous insinuations about Israel in places like the Guardian and the BBC and the New York Times that make it harder to sympathise with Jewish suffering.

The man in the street knows better, for the most part. He instinctively understands that there is something a little different about Islam, some reason it is not able to reconcile itself with modernity, or integrate itself into modern liberal democracies. He may not know about the structural uniqueness of Islam, which, unlike any other major world religion, makes claims of finality and perfection in regards to its holy text that leave little space for progress in science or society.

He may not be able to articulate what he has read about the Koran in terms of abrogation to explain why bellicose verses are legitimised by clerics over peaceful ones, or know much about Islam’s founder besides incriminating biographical details, such as the age of Mohammed’s youngest wife. He may not know that security services estimate the number of radicalised Muslims to be in the hundreds of millions worldwide. (Perhaps it is best he does not know this.)

But he knows–he feels–he is not being told the whole truth about Islamic terrorism. And he is right. The longer politicians and silly left-wing columnists keep parroting the old lie that there is no relation whatsoever between the faith and the fundamentalists, the longer the honesty gap widens between what is happening in our streets and what our leaders say in press conferences, brand Islam has no future in the west. Dialogue, and compromise, and understanding, cannot begin.

The Leftist elites tell us that they fear for Muslim populations in the West, who, they argue, are somehow "oppressed." To protect Muslims after still another Islamic terror instance, they castigate those who demand an honest conversation about Islam with all Muslims. The Left refuses to ask why Islam has been hijacked, how many Muslims are radicalized, and what mainstream Islam going to do about it. Because they block that conversation with accusations of "Islamophobia," they hurt the very people they want to help. It's as predictable as the sun rising in the East.