Linguistic Correctness: Sharia Supremacism
First, a tweet:
I am India
— Rishi Bagree 🇮🇳 (@rishibagree) August 17, 2017
I am Charlie
I am Paris
I am Orlando
I am Brussels
I am Nice
I am Munich
I am Berlin
I am Westminster
I am #Barcelona
I am tired
Andrew McCarthy, an Islamo-realist expert on the religion, writes at NRO about why we should use the term "sharia supremacism" instead of "radical Islam" or "radical Islamic terrorism":
Most of us do not dispute that there are authentically "moderate" interpretations of Islam (non-aggressive is a better descriptor). We recognize, however, that there is a straight-line nexus between Islamic scripture and Muslim aggression and -- critically -- that this aggression is not only, or even mostly, forcible. That is why "sharia supremacism" is more accurate than "radical Islam," and by leaps and bounds more accurate than "radical Islamic terrorism.""Sharia supremacism" conveys the divine command to implement and spread Islam's societal framework and legal system. It demonstrates that our quarrel is not with a religion per se but with a totalitarian political ideology with a religious veneer. Violent jihadism is only one way -- the most immediately threatening way -- of carrying out the mission. Muslims who adhere to sharia supremacism are Islamists, and all Islamists -- violent or non-violent -- have essentially the same goal, even if their methods and the strictness of their sharia regimens differ. Not nearly all Muslims are Islamists, and only a small percentage of Islamists are jihadists. But jihadists, like all Islamists, quite legitimately call themselves Muslims. Fourteen centuries of scholarship supports them.
McMaster's familiar bipartisan Beltway camp holds that Islam simply must be good because it is a centuries-old religion that nearly 2 billion people accept. Sure, it has scriptures ill-suited to the modern world, but so does the Bible. Bellicose Muslim scriptures have, in any event, been nullified or "contextualized" to apply only to their seventh-century conditions -- just ask anyone at Georgetown . . . even if they don't seem to have gotten the memo in Riyadh, Tehran, Kabul, Baghdad, the Nile Delta, Peshawar, the Bekaa Valley, Aceh Province, Chechnya, or in swelling precincts of London, Paris, Berlin, Brussels, Malmö, Copenhagen, Rotterdam, Vienna, or pretty much anyplace else in the West where the Muslim population reaches a critical mass (roughly 5 to 10 percent).
Thus, we are to believe, the Islam that terrorists claim to be relying on no longer exists (not that it ever did, of course). Terrorists must, therefore, be understood as perverting the "true Islam" -- indeed, they are "anti-Islamic." In fact, they are best seen as "violent extremists" because Islam is no more prone to instigate aggression than any other religion or ideology taken to an extreme (you know, like those violent extremist Quakers). If more Muslims than other religious believers are committing terrorist crimes, we must assume there are economic and political explanations -- or dodge the charge by pointing out that Muslims, far more than others, are victims of terrorism (a non sequitur that more exposes than explains away the problem).
The principal flaw in the second camp's reasoning is that, by removing Islam as an ideological catalyst of terrorism, it turns terrorists into wanton killers. With the logic and aims of the violence thereby erased, also concealed is the cultural (or even "civilizational") aggression spurred by the same ideology. This, in turn, diverts attention from the tenets of that ideology, which are virulently anti-constitutional, anti-Western, anti-Semitic, and corrosive of individual liberty, equality, privacy, free speech, freedom of conscience, and non-violent conflict resolution. To accommodate the ideology in the West is to lose the West.
Islam calls for the death or conversion of "infidels" and the spreading of The New Caliphate around the globe. Not all Muslims practice Islam accordingly, but a good many do.
How many tourists and other innocent people need to get run down, gunned down, or blown up before we stop with the comfortable fiction that Islam is "a religion of peace."
Again, many individual Muslims are peaceful, good people, and it's essential that we take people as individuals -- innocent unless proven otherwise.
However, the reality is, Islam is a totalitarian political system that's dressed up as a religion, and we do ourselves no favors (and have no hope of doing anything but leaving flowers at the location of attacks) if we continue to pretend it's something more benign, more equivalent to how most people in the modern world practice other religions.
Oh, and in case you think it's just that Muslims are mad about the Palestinians, here's a cleric quoting that lovely bit about the rocks and trees (except for the gharqad tree, by the way!) telling Muslims where all the Jews are hiding so they can slaughter them. Via MEMRI:
In a lecture titled "Who Will Liberate Al-Aqsa," Saudi cleric Sheikh Mamdouh Al-Harbi said that the Muslims' war is with the Jews and not just with Zionists and that saying otherwise "constitutes a denial of the words of Allah and of the Prophet Muhammad." The lecture was posted on Al-Harbi's YouTube channel on July 26.
Sheikh Mamdouh Al-Harbi: "The Prophet Muhammad foretold that we would kill the Jews. He foretold that we would kill the Jews. Let nobody claim [that the Prophet talked] about us killing the Zionists. Anyone who claims that our war is with the Zionists rather than the Jews is mistaken. This constitutes a denial of the words of Allah and of the Prophet Muhammad. Our war is with the Jews, not [just] with the Zionists, even though the Zionists are among the most dangerous kind of Jews. But the war is with the Jews. What Allah said in the Quran, and what the Prophet Muhammad said in the true Sunna... The Prophet did not say: 'the Zionists.' He said: 'the Jews' - even though the Zionists are among the worst of them. So I say: Our war on Judgement Day will be with the Jews.
..."The Prophet Muhammad said: 'Judgment Day will not come until the Muslims fight the Jews. The Muslims will kill them, and the Jews will hide behind stones and trees.'
..."'The stones and trees will say: "Oh Muslim, oh servant of Allah..."' Pay attention now: '"Oh Muslim, oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me. Come and kill him."' The Prophet said: 'Except for the Gharqad tree, which is the tree of the Jews.' The Gharqad tree is an ugly tree, full of thorns. That tree will not speak because it is with the Jews."
Lovely, huh?
More charming thoughts:
When #AltRight barks at Jews they r rightfully slammed, but when we #Muslims curse #Jews with hatred, why is it OK? pic.twitter.com/6Tydb01cDl
— Tarek Fatah (@TarekFatah) August 19, 2017
> Lovely, huh?
I love sarcasm, except when someone's trying to persuade me something. Maybe it's from growing up in a culture of advanced commercial development: When a salesman flatters me by implying a brotherhood of shared cynicism —as if to suggest I've already paid for half of the purchase— I check to make sure my wallet is still in it's pocket. (See Snoopy's recent & juvenile argument that actually, we're all racist, just as he breezily confesses to be.) (No.)
You'd be a lot more convincing with all of this if you could recognize and acknowledge the other cultural gulfs between the modern west and the arriviste miscreants now defacing Europe.
Islam is certainly one notable characteristic for these newcomers... Though we've not read of blossoming religious devotion in their new countries, which you'd presumably expect if it were such an overwhelming component of their character.
Most of them come from places without rule of law, literacy, education, enfranchisement, equality for women, concern for the disabled, nutrition, freedom of expression or the hundreds of civic institutions which you take for granted, having grown up around them.
You want to complain about Islam. Okay, but why are you ignoring all those other things, as if they had nothing to do with this savagery?
Did someone tell you that if the rest of us decide we don't like Islam, it can simply be made to go away?
Crid at August 19, 2017 2:40 AM
(Can't remember: Did they ever capture the Hebdo murderers?)
Crid at August 19, 2017 2:41 AM
I see - let's call the problem something else, so we can all think something has been done about it.
Radwaste at August 19, 2017 4:18 AM
Raddy- 1.) See the discussion about sarcasm, above. 2.) To whom was your comment addressed?
Crid at August 19, 2017 4:59 AM
recognize and acknowledge the other cultural gulfs between the modern west and the arriviste miscreants now defacing Europe.
These "cultural gulfs" are largely or greatly due to Islamic beliefs and practices, from cousin marriages to treatment of women as property under Islam, as well as the notion that anyone not Muslim is dirty, wrong, and worthy of death or humiliation.
Amy Alkon at August 19, 2017 6:14 AM
Amy, that's ludicrous. Your monomania is inexplicable. And unlearned. And mean.
Crid at August 19, 2017 7:04 AM
So you're saying that Islam has a terrorism problem. Would that be racist?
Snoopy at August 19, 2017 11:05 AM
Crid, you'd be more convincing -- as if less was a possibility -- if you would recognize and acknowledge that there is no reading of Islam that isn't supremacist.
Just as you would be more convincing if you would recognize that despite the cultural gulfs between the modern west and non-Islamic arrivistes, they don't seem to be blowing people up when then aren't running them down or through.
Jeff Guinn at August 19, 2017 11:49 AM
> there is no reading of Islam that
> isn't supremacist.
No, this is like how Paglia views the French theorists: All they see is culture. Or how she pegs the feminists: All the know is their resentments.
Also, that second paragraph is a mess.
Crid at August 19, 2017 4:09 PM
It can't possibly be. Islam, is an entity. French theorists are people. Completely different things.
Sadly, you are correct.
Should have made preview my friend.
Jeff Guinn at August 19, 2017 10:23 PM
Italics are an entity.
Crid at August 20, 2017 12:06 AM
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