Fjordman: On The Illusion Of A Moderate Islam

From Jihad Watch, via Gates of Vienna:

This essay overlaps to some extent with earlier essays of mine regarding the alleged existence of a "moderate Islam," including Do we want an Islamic Reformation? and Why We Cannot Rely on Moderate Muslims.

In this discussion I take as my starting point the fact that the traditional Islamic religious texts -- the Koran supplemented by secondary sources such as the hadith literature -- through a straightforward reading encourage perpetual violence against non-Muslims around the world until the global supremacy of Islam and its followers has been firmly established. There are plenty of studies available confirming this. Muslim scholars themselves, including prominent ones such as al-Ghazali and Ibn Khaldun, have supported this view for well over one thousand years and continue to do so in the twenty-first century.

One complicating factor is that lying to or deceiving non-Muslims using techniques known as taqiyya and kitman are perfectly permissible in Islam and widely practiced by Shias and Sunnis alike. The claim that this strategy exists within Shia Islam alone is false; for example, the Palestinian Sunni Jihadist leader Yasser Arafat (1929-2004) at the same time as he was talking about "peace" to Westerners -- a game of deception which earned him a share in the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994 -- to Arabic-speaking audiences suggested that the Oslo peace negotiations with Israelis were merely temporary measures similar to the Treaty of Hudaybiyya between Muhammad's followers and the non-Muslim Qurayshi tribe of Mecca, which was promptly broken as soon as the Muslims felt strong enough to get away with it.

Many Muslims, for instance Tariq Ramadan, are known to put up a "moderate" face in front of an infidel audience but present a very different message when addressing Muslims in their own language. Generally speaking it is permissible for Muslims to lie, or withhold the truth, if they cannot yet force their will on their opponents by brute force, as long as they keep the "true Islam" alive within their hearts. This does of course not mean that all Muslims do this always, but it is a common strategy employed particularly where Muslims are a minority.

In plain words this means that if Western countries ever become serious about closing their borders to Muslim immigration and expelling sharia-sponsoring persons from their lands, we should expect to see an immediate, massive increase in the number of "kind" and "tolerant" Muslims in the West, but many of them would be lying and biding their time for better days.

The trouble with self-proclaimed "moderate Muslims" is that many of them, most likely the majority, use deception to confuse the infidels while infiltrating their societies. This implies that non-Muslims cannot know for sure whether Muslims are being honest with them or not and can never fully trust them. It does not mean that "moderate Muslims" don't exist in the form of individuals who genuinely desire to live in peace with their neighbors -- people aren't born Jihadists just because they have a Muslim name -- but it is extremely hard for infidels to distinguish between those who are genuine and those who are merely trying to deceive us...
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Read the rest.

And consider the impact if, as one commenter on another blog described it, secular collectivism and Islam have struck a modern-day Molotov-Ribbentrop pact.