How to Make Islam Respectable
newsrealblog.com
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What follows are ten suggestions (some of which mirror Robert Spencer’s five ways to end Islamophobia) for those Muslims cited in the Gallup poll to take to heart – those who, like Rodney Dangerfield, lament that they can’t get no respect.
First up: Stop.Attacking.Us!
10. Stop waging violent jihad.
Let’s get the most obvious one out of the way first. If Muslims are tired of having the words “Muslim” and “terrorist” linked (on those rare occasions when our leaders and media actually do link them), a painfully obvious solution leaps to mind: stop committing acts of terrorism in the name of Allah and his prophet.
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9. Cooperate to the fullest with law enforcement to root out the terrorists in your midst.
A New York Times article last week noted that Rep. Peter T. King of New York, who will become the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, intended to look into a lack of cooperation in terror investigations:
When I meet with law enforcement, they are constantly telling me how little cooperation they get from Muslim leaders.
He cited the case of Najibullah Zazi, arrested last year for plotting to bomb the New York subway system. A Queens imam had tipped off Zazi that he was the target of a terror investigation.
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8. De-radicalize your mosques
Estimates are that upwards of 80% of all mosques in the United States are controlled by the fundamentalist Wahhabi strain of Islam promoted by the Saudis’ bottomless funding. Preaching Jew-hatred, the supremacy of sharia, and the downfall of democracy isn’t likely to win us over. I’m just sayin’.
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7. Start respecting the rights of women
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6. . Start reciprocating religious tolerance
There is no more religiously tolerant country in history than the contemporary United States, although you’d never know this from the constant wailing refrain of “Islamophobia!” from Islamists and their leftist sympathizers. The notion of a tsunami of Muslim-hatred washing over the nation is a shameful PC myth, as a November “hate crimes” report reveals. Muslim-Americans enjoy as much, if not more, religious freedom here as anyone else.
By stark contrast, no Bibles, churches, temples or synagogues are allowed on the Arabian peninsula, the home of Islam. Non-Muslims are not even allowed in Mecca. Under Islamic rule elsewhere, no new non-Muslim houses of worship are allowed to be built, and existing ones may not be repaired.
Then there is the violent persecution of non-Muslims. My friend Mark Durie, the brilliant scholar of Islam, notes in his The Third Choice that
The human rights situation of Christians in many Muslim countries has been getting steadily worse over the past half-century. This deterioration has been directly linked to the worldwide Islamic revival and reinstatement of sharia law.
A report last month at the Hudson New York think tank states that
Christians in Arab countries are no longer being persecuted; they are now being slaughtered and driven out of their homes and lands.
And then, of course, there’s the Koran-mandated Jew-hatred and Muhammad’s command of death for those who leave Islam.
Muslims want us to respect Islam? End the persecution of non-Muslims, reciprocate religious tolerance, and abolish the death penalty for “apostasy.” Then we’ll talk.
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5. Update your penal code from “medieval.”
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4. Let the whole cartoon thing go.
Speaking of barbarity…
This would seem to be a no-brainer, but apparently it bears explaining: “taking offense” is not a license for frenzied rioting, murder and mayhem.
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3. Stop trying to curtail our free speech and to criminalize Islamophobia.
From the Salman Rushdie affair to Molly Norris’ sad vanishing, the list of Islamist assaults on our precious freedom of speech is far too long to do justice to here. And the West has too often responded not with firm resistance, but by preemptively censoring itself: witness Random House rescinding its offer to publish The Jewel of Medina, a novel that an academic warned might outrage Muslims, or the Yale University Press publishing a book about the Danish cartoons that will not include the cartoons themselves.
Islamists know that the key to winning the war of ideas against the West is to keep hammering away at our freedom of speech – our right and our ability to critique and denounce a totalitarian ideology that is hell-bent on bringing the West under its heel. Criminalizing blasphemy, defamation of religion, “Islamophobia” and the like will put us at a mortal disadvantage. Indeed, the world’s largest Islamic assembly, the Organization of the Islamic Conference, has made the criminalization of religious defamation, specifically “Islamophobia,” its number one priority – and Obama has sent a sympathetic envoy to that party to help them achieve it.
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2. Stop letting the Muslim Brotherhood speak for you.
For decades now, the Muslim Brotherhood has shrewdly worked to establish its subversive presence in America through a complex network of front groups and “legacy groups” which includes virtually every recognized Muslim organization in this country. Over time these groups – most notably the ubiquitous CAIR, the Council on American Islamic Relations – have gradually muscled their way into position as the representative voice of all Muslim-Americans.
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1. Start taking responsibility for your own destiny instead of blaming the West
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