Yale University’s Yale Global Online has published a piece by Ooi Kee Beng, deputy director of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, asserting that “Islam has no centralized controls; any power-hungry despot can use religion as an excuse.” But it’s no excuse; it’s a theological imperative.
The article complains about “the excessive use of ‘Islam’ in denoting as many aspects of daily life as possible. With Islam being a holistic religion, modern leaders of Muslim-majority societies tend to encourage the description of as many aspects as possible of modern life under a restrictive Islamic paradigm. Regrettably, this tendency mirrors and sustains the simultaneous propensity of non-Muslims to regard Muslim societies as being steered by a rigid religious ideology.”
Ooi suggests that some of the major horrors committed in Islam’s name and justified by its texts and teachings have nothing to do with Islam: “The kidnapping of the school girls in Nigeria is but the latest extreme event involving a claim to know ‘Islam.’ The 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon, major bombings in European cities, the bombings in Indonesia, the attack on the Boston Marathon, and America’s war on terror have all made ‘Islam’ a modern newsmaker that is second to none.”
Ah, yes. It’s all because modern Muslim leaders ascribe everything to Islam that we see violence and atrocities committed in the name of Islam every day, you see. Yet we do not see power-hungry despots or majors in the U.S. Army at Fort Hood or doctors in Glasgow or students at the Boston Marathon invoking Jesus or HaShem in order to kill, maim, and control. They only invoke Islam, and they only quote the Quran with its promise of Paradise to those who “kill and are killed” for Allah (9:111) and mandate to wage war against and subjugate Jews and Christians under the rule of Islamic law (9:29).
Ooi doesn’t tell readers, of course, that the Quran allows for captured infidel women to be made into sex slaves, as Boko Haram has done in Nigeria (4:3, 4:24, 33:50). In regard to the bombings in European cities, Indonesia, and the Boston Marathon, he doesn’t mention the Quran’s repeated exhortations to “kill them wherever you find them” (2:191, 4:89, 9:5).
So blinded by willful ignorance is Ooi that he is mystified by the imposition of Sharia in Brunei: “in Brunei, a stable country living off oil wells, the sudden implementation of hudud has left many baffled.” It only baffles Ooi and his ilk because they refuse to study or understand the centrality of Sharia in Islam and the necessity that many Muslims will feel for its implementation. For Ooi, the vast majority of Muslims are “moderate,” democratic pluralists who fully accept equal rights for women and non-Muslims, as well as freedom of speech and freedom of conscience. But he has no evidence for this assumption.
The illusory moderate Islam is just that, an illusion – and that is not the belief of the Islamic State or al Qaeda, Boko Haram, or Hamas. The Prime Minister of Turkey, Recip Tayyip Erdogan, has repeatedly said that there is no moderate Islam, and there is no extreme Islam – there is only Islam.
And despite attempts by Islamic apologists and stealth supremacists in the West to obscure its teachings, those teachings are clear. What delusion has overtaken the West that its elites engage in the most excruciating intellectual gymnastics as the bodies pile up in the cause of Islam? The more videos of mass executions in the cause of Allah, of Islamic tests being given to would-be victims, and the more countries are besieged and overtaken by jihadist armies, the more the apologists and effete elites attack those of us who have spent our careers and entire reputations of warning freedom-loving peoples about the jihad threat.
The Yale Global Online piece will make non-Muslim liberals feel good, secure in their illusion that opposition to jihad terror is just “hatred” and “bigotry.” But when jihad terror sets its sights on these same non-Muslim liberals, their apologies will do nothing to deter the violence.
Pamela Geller is the President of the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), publisher of PamelaGeller.com and author of The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America and Stop the Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the Resistance. Follow her on Twitter here. Like her on Facebook here.