Here are seven sentences on terrorist atrocity:
- I remember praying and hoping and wishing that the killer wasn’t a white nationalist […] because then there’d be more attacks on people like me.
- Muslims are horrified by this, absolutely horrified by this terror attack, because this gives our opponents just the kind of ammunition we don’t want them to have.
- What does this attitude of distrust and guilt do to young white men? It pushes them into the arms of extremists.
- If we want to prevent further terrorist attacks like this, the absolutely wrong thing to do is to keep piling on this notion of guilty Muslims
- I am not special. There are loads and loads of people like me […] who are never given a microphone.
- The truth or significance of each of these points can be debated and each can be evaluated in terms of whether it is a genuine grievance. But part of the grievance is that these points are not debated.”
- In the rush to take action after the Strasbourg killings we are already doing things that will make similar attacks more likely, not less.
Please guess who said which about what. Was it:
a) a Muslim apologist talking about jihad terrorism, or
2) a white nationalist talking about neo-Nazi terrorism?
Easy, right? One and three are obviously a white nationalist, two, four and seven are obviously a Muslim apologist, and five and six are so similar that they can barely be distinguished.
In fact, numbers two, four, six, and seven are taken from Jared Taylor’s comments on the Charleston atrocity, and one, three, and five are from Sam Harris’ podcast featuring Deeyah Khan. Go read Taylor’s comments and listen to the last 30 minutes of Khan’s. All I did was change “white” for “Muslim” and vice versa.
This podcast is the most depressing thing that I have heard in a very long time. Khan comes across as a brave and decent woman. She’s been prepared to risk her neck to get up close with jihadis and nazi headcases – I’m looking forward to seeing her documentaries Jihad and White Right. Even more astonishingly, in her guise as a western leftist she’s been prepared to extend her empathy to some of these jihadis and nazis, and some change their minds as a result.
And in her guise as a muslima, she lacks a molecule of empathy for us Infidels.
You may say I’m exaggerating. Go listen. I’m really not. She says that Jared Taylor has no concern, and appears to have no understanding at all, of the reality of racism in America and what it has meant historically. In the same way, you can listen to the entire podcast and not get the slightest hint, the faintest suggestion that Infidel lives even exist.
She says that in the debate between left and right about Islam, Muslims are the collateral damage because the dialogue is uncomfortable for them.
Well maybe they are and maybe they aren’t. Here are some others who might be better called collateral damage:
- 19 year old Ashwaq Haj Hamid, a yezidi who fled from the Islamic state only to meet her former slaver in Germany (brought in under Merkel’s delightful policies)
- Ruhila Adatiya Sood, gunned down when Al-Shabab attacked the Westgate mall in Kenya
- 17 year old Esther who saw her father shot and was kept as a sex slave by Boko Haram
- Sulaiman Vall, 33, who lives every day in fear of his life in Britain, because he rejected Islam and came home
- Ella Hill, who was gang raped by Muslims who chanted the Koran as justification for what they were doing
Mandela said “A Nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones”. Very true, and the same applies here. When the Muslim community treats vulnerable Infidels like this, it is saying loud and clear how it would happily treat you if given half a chance.
These are our brother and sister Infidels, and I can multiply those stories endlessly. Where is a word of compassion, of empathy, for any of these victims from Khan? If you can find it, please let me know.
It’s the same thing when she complains about the “obsession” with the hijab, which she solely casts as an obsession with Muslim women. But what concerns us Infidels is that the message of the hijab is that any woman not wearing one is fair game for rape and assault.
In the conversation she promises to introduce Sam Harris to ‘amazing Muslims’ who are very secular and who just want to live their lives and not get involved. I’m German, and we know all about amazing people who just want to live their lives and not get involved. If those amazing people are not getting involved when their neighbors are being loaded on the trains, that is just not good enough, and it is not good enough for these amazing, liberal Muslims not to get involved when there is ongoing ethnic cleansing of Infidels throughout the Islamic world.
I want to pause and stress that Khan is still an amazingly brave and decent woman. That is what is so depressing. Khan is among the best, the most enlightened and courageous that the Ummah has to offer and she won’t care about Infidel lives. What do you suppose the rest of the Muslim community is like? What conceivable reason can any Infidel have to trust it?
Here I need to pause and explain what “trust” means. When I write that someone can’t be trusted, I doesn’t mean that they are a monstrous Grima Wormtongue and people should avoid them at all cost and spit at them in the street.
It means that I cannot have any rational expectation that they will behave in a certain way. They may be wonderful in all sorts of ways, but they cannot be reasonably expected to do something. As in “He’s a great guy and a good friend, but I just can’t trust him to have the level head to run a business with me.”
The trouble is that when the behavior in question is “standing up and defending our lives when their co-religionists come for us”, well, then it matters a great deal. Deeyah Khan says she knows all these amazing, liberal, wonderful Muslims who are absolutely everywhere, and that means absolutely nothing if they are not willing to stick up for Infidels when shit gets real.
Khan complains a lot about the toxic atmosphere in Western nations. If it’s so toxic here, why not go live among those amazing, liberal etc. etc. in Turkey or Tunisia or some other Muslim country? Of course the answer is that, as toxic as we Infidels are, she is treated better in the dar al-Harb that she would do in any Islamic country.
And she is treated infinitely better than any Infidel would in any Muslim country. I’m an atheist. Thirteen Muslim countries murder us outright. The majority of the rest make our lives very hard – see the following map of the persecution of atheists.
Imagine a political platform that said “We should treat Muslims in Infidel lands the way Infidels are treated in Muslim lands”. It would look something like this:
- All public Islamic worship to be forbidden.
- Most mosques to be closed and further mosque construction prohibited. No public funds given to Mosque maintenance.
- All Islamic associations to be dissolved and public gatherings of Muslims prohibited.
- Severe penalty for Islamic proselytizing.
- Ban on Halal slaughter.
- Ban on the practice of Ramadan in the case of minors.
- Prohibition of all Koranic schools and forbidding Muslim religious symbols in public places.
And so on. I’ve taken this manifesto from the French neo-Fascist Guillaume. Pause and let the full implications sink in. Listen to the very best, the most enlightened and tolerant Muslim you can find, and she sounds like Jared Taylor when the subject is the rights and lives of Infidels. Meanwhile, to find a European Infidel who even suggests behavior that is the norm throughout the Muslim world, I need to turn to the most extreme fringe fascist nutcase.
And even this understates the case. Even Faye doesn’t suggest the death penalty for conversion to Islam – and this is the law in thirteen countries, and the de facto penalty in far more.
This is why I keep writing that any “Islamic reform” is a fool’s errand. After much cogitation, I worked out what would be the bare minimum requirement for a ‘reformed Islam’. It would mean:
- Muslims renounce the murder of apostates
- Muslims renounce the murder of those who criticise Islam
- Islam is subjected to the same thorough criticism we direct at absolutely everything else. That is, in the same way we need to be honest and criticize the atrocities of the British empire, and in the same way Germany has had to face up to both the atrocities of Hitler and those of Kaiser Wilhelm, Islam has to face up to the thirteen centuries of brutal imperialism, the eighty million Hindus murdered by the Mughals, the genocides in Armenia and Greece and the Balkans etc.
The only way to be sure that the first two points are in practice is for the third to be there – for Islam to be actually criticized fully in public and people not to live under fear of death for it.
These strike me as the absolutely essential three points. Sure, I’d love it if Muslims were on board with women’s rights, gay rights and so on, but that’s asking for the moon. These are the absolute bare minimum for Islam to be treated as a halfway decent member of human civilization.
The problem is that Deeyah Khan doesn’t support these three. When it comes to the third point, she says “Oh, I absolutely, totally believe that Islam, like every idea, should be fully open to criticism, but…” You know the rule. Everything before the “but” is meaningless.
This is why I don’t think there will ever be a reformed Islam. Muslims whose basic humanity and decency and rationality start to question the faith will not reform it, but leave it. The solution to Islam isn’t reform, it’s apostasy. In the same way that Khan showed that a neo-Nazi who starts to feel common humanity for brown people will not remain a Nazi for long, a Muslim who can stick up for the rights of Infidels is on a fast track to apostasy.
And I am hopeful. Khan says something about the American Nazis that really made me sit up. It’s the most coarse and crude members who just had some sort of emotional connection to white supremacy that she managed to get through to. It was the intellectual types, the Jared Taylors and the Richard Spencers who resisted any such connection. I think the same thing is true in Islam – the great hope lies in the normal, average Muslim whose connection is mainly emotional. The intellectuals – the Reza Aslans, the Ibrahim Hoopers and, yes, the Deeyah Khans – won’t change, but for the vast majority… Well, I often think of the fate of the British National Party. When it was exposed for what it was, when it was really subjected to criticism, it imploded. Ninety-nine point seven percent of its members quit in two years. I think it is obvious that, subject to the same kind of criticism and scrutiny, we could expect even higher rates.
