A Former Terrorists Cites the Trouble with Islam
Tawfik Hamid was once a member of Jemaah Islamiya, the Islamist terrorist group. Now he’s a doctor who is trying to convince the world that radical Islam is wrong. Very wrong. He wrote a piece in yesterday’s WSJ called The Trouble With Islam.
“Indeed there is much that is clearly wrong with the Islamic world. Women are stoned to death and undergo clitorectomies. Gays hang from the gallows under the approving eyes of the proponents of Shariah, the legal code of Islam. Sunni and Shi’a massacre each other daily in Iraq. Palestinian mothers teach 3-year-old boys and girls the ideal of martyrdom. One would expect the orthodox Islamic establishment to evade or dismiss these complaints, but less happily, the non-muslim priests of enlightenment in the West have come, actively and passively, to the Islamist’s defense.
“It is discouraging and ironic that many non-Muslim, Western intellectuals–who unceasingly claim to support human rights–have become obstacles to reforming Islam. Political correctness among Westerners obstructs unambiguous criticism of Shariah’s inhumanity. They find socioeconomic or political excuses for Islamic terrorism, such as poverty, colonialism, discrimination or the existence of Israel. What incentive is there for Muslims to demand reform when Western progressives pave the way for Islamist barbarity?”
Hamid cites the fact that nobody protested the publication of the famous Danish cartoons depicting Mohammed for four months until the magazine’s formal apology–then the riots began. He says the apology was percieved by the Islamists as weakness and concession. “It is time for all of us in the free world to face the reality of Salafi Islam or the reality of radical Islam will continue to face us.”
February 26, 2009 @ 9:12 pm
“Political correctness among Westerners obstructs unambiguous criticism of Shariah’s inhumanity. They find socioeconomic or political excuses for Islamic terrorism, such as poverty, colonialism, discrimination or the existence of Israel.”If by “political correctness” we are meant to infer that liberals or progressive left-center types are to blame, well, that’s simply not true.It was in fact such liberals/progressives here in North America who, as early on as the late 90s and pre 9/11 2000s, were some of the strongest critics of the Taliban regime. Feminist “liberals” in particular didn’t waste a single so-called PC breath when it came to attacking the Taliban’s abuse of women for what it was. Whoever it is that Hamid thinks is being too PC, you can stop blaming the progressive left-centre right now — or at least pick a much finer brush for your tarring than that.