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THE MYTHICAL MUSLIM EXTREMIST

by Yashiko Sagamori

The conversion of a savage to Christianity is the conversion of Christianity to savagery.
-- George Bernard Shaw

Why do we part more easily with even our hard-earned money than with our foolish misconceptions? Take, for example, a look at Iran. The popular wisdom asserts that its shah lost his throne because of his cruelty and oppression of the Iranian people. We have no illusions about the shah; we know he was no George Washington. But we also know that the regime instituted by the ayatollahs is a thousand times crueler and more oppressive than anything that existed under the shah. Nevertheless, we don't hear any popular outcry coming from the Islamic republic. The Iranian people, with the exception of a relatively few malcontents living, fortunately, in the West, beyond the reach of the Revolutionary Guard, don't seem to mind. Even at the height of the Iran-Iraq war, when the ayatollahs conscripted 14-year-old boys and used them to sweep the minefields left by Saddam's army, people obediently gave their young sons to the cannibals that ruled them. Of course, their obedience might simply indicate the oppressiveness of the regime; if they could resist, they would; but they can't, and so they don't. Very well. But how do you explain the results of the last presidential election in Iran, when the voters rejected the reform-minded incumbent Muhammad Khatami in favor of the hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, one of the masterminds of the siege of the American embassy in Tehran in 1979?

Everything has an explanation. I am about to offer you mine; please let me know if you have a better one. My explanation is that the shah was kicked out not because his regime was oppressive (can you point out an Islamic regime that is not oppressive?), but because, to the discriminating taste of his subjects, his regime was too secular, too liberal, and too pro-Western. From this, it follows easily that the Iranian people prefer the strictest rule of Sharia to any semblance of democracy, and their hatred towards the West exceeds their drive to improve their personal lives. They don't mind stoning adulteresses, hanging homosexuals, and sending their children to die for nothing. They display no desire to pursue their happiness; in fact, they don't seem to share our definition of happiness. They wholeheartedly support the ayatollahs' nuclear ambitions even though there is no way, even in theory, even in the most imbecilic dream, that the possession of nuclear arms can lead their country anywhere but towards self-annihilation. They volunteer en mass for suicide missions against the United States. You know what all that means? It means that they, just like the Arabs, hate us more than they love their own children. That, in turn, means that the Iranian people, or, at least the vast majority of the Iranian people, are religious fanatics. You can also call them Muslim extremists, Islamists, Islamicists, Islamofascists, or feel free to use any of the many synonyms that have been recently invented by Western pundits to explain the paranoid schizophrenia that has taken possession of Dar el-Islam.

A few years ago, the New York Times published an article about the poor state of public schools in the city. To show how very bad it was, the author mentioned that half of the students had grades below average. The state of public education in the United States can only be described as catastrophic, and I wouldn't be surprised to learn that only in the poorest areas of Arkansas one can find schools worse than some public schools in New York City. In other words, I agree with the article. Moreover, since the author does not understand that, by the very definition of average, half of the students in any school, regardless of the quality of education it provides, will have grades below average, I came to the conclusion that he himself was a botched product of the same deteriorating system.

And just as the average is, by definition, found in the middle of the scale, extremism, also by definition, is found at the end of it. In case of Iran, the scale extends from the progressive Khatami to the reactionary Ahmadinejad. Everything this side of Khatami gets stoned or hanged; nothing exists that side of Ahmadinejad, because nobody can be holier than the ayatollahs. Considering that, throughout his distinguished career, the liberal reformer Khatami has proudly, consistently, and eloquently professed his sincere hatred for everything that is not Islam and begged Allah to smite Israel and the United States, the width of the Iranian scale of political opinions appears to be miniscule. This shouldn't surprise us. Iran is an Islamic country. Islam discourages (usually, by means of torture chambers and firing squads) diversity of opinion. As a result, a simple American like myself finds herself incapable of discerning any meaningful difference between liberal Muslims and conservative Muslims, or, if you prefer different terms, Muslim extremists vs. moderate Muslims.

Nobody pays attention anymore to Arab terrorism against Israel. The world has come to the immutable conclusion that Israel is not a place for Jews, and Jews who don't know their proper place deserve to be killed. This is not the result of the ongoing final solution known as the peace process in the Middle East. This is the result of Christian anti-Semitism that's been an integral component of Judeo-Christian civilization since its very inception. Without it, there would have been peace, rather than the peace process, in the Middle East. But every time Islam manifests itself by a similar mass murder of infidels in the United States or Europe, Western apologists immediately bring up the subject of the negligible minority Muslim extremists who shouldn't be mistaken for the overwhelming majority of perfectly peaceful, comfortably moderate Muslims. The fact that the mass murderers are being produced, brainwashed, financed, and armed by the Muslim community, which sends them off on their mission and then, upon completion, openly celebrates them as heroes, does not attract the attention of our analysts and commentators. The general public, the very Joe Shmoes who are getting killed due to our governments' unwillingness to depart from their ideological dogmas in order to defend us, doesn't seem to mind.

Here's a letter I received from an Israeli reader in response to my article A NAMBLA Kindergarten in a Ukrainian Village, [See in this issue.] in which I state that the British people share responsibility for the terrorist acts in London, because they have allowed their country to be infested with Islam, but blamed the murders committed by Muslims on the Israeli non-existing occupation of the non-existing "Palestine":

I began to respond to him that there is no such thing as a Muslim extremist, and soon discovered that my arguments look strangely familiar. I checked my own old articles and saw that I was repeating my own arguments from The Mythical Moderate Muslim. It makes sense: if there are no moderate Muslims, there can be no Muslim extremists either. They are like the two magnetic poles that cannot exist without each other.

As to my reader's objections, to the best of my knowledge, Londoners have proven that they deserve their leaders by making no attempt to recall their Islamophiliac Mayor Ken Livingstone. Tony Blair's references to "Muslim extremists" were nothing but an attempt to reassure British Muslims that their community will not be blamed for the mass murderers it has produced. And Karzai - who is he? What's his reputation? I have heard of only three acts he has committed independently of his American handlers. One was to declare the "liberated" Afghanistan an Islamic republic. The other was to announce undying friendship between his country and Iran. The third was his comment on the farewell speech of the retiring Prime Minister of Malaysia calling for the extermination of the Jews. Karzai's comment was brief and to the point: "Very correct." Blair could not have possibly picked a better witness to one of his many acts of abject cowardice in the wake of the recent attack on his country. And you would think that Israelis should know better...

It's time for us to learn that our customary ways of classifying people are not universal. An Islamic scholar, responding to questions regarding the recent terrorist acts in London, explained that Islam does not distinguish between unarmed civilians and armed soldiers. The only meaningful distinction in Islam is between Muslims and infidels. He wasn't talking about Sunni Islam, or Shia Islam, or moderate Islam, or extreme Islam. He was talking about the only Islam there is. None of the commonly recognized Islamic authorities found it necessary to correct him. If you want my personal opinion, when it comes to real Islam, not the "religion of peace" invented by Jewish and Christian liberals to accommodate their suicidal social theories, I trust Islamic scholars more than our own experts and politicians. While the latter mumble something unbelievably sweet about "moderate Muslims", Muslims, who are neither moderate nor extremist, but simply observant, honestly tell us that their goal is to conquer us. I see no reason whatsoever to doubt their genocidal intentions or their ability to follow up on them. Just look what they have already achieved in Europe. We are still behind, but we are moving in the same direction.

And this brings me to this very important point. If we want to survive as a civilization, we must learn to classify Muslims not as moderate and extremist, because such distinctions only exist in our imagination; not as Sunni and Shia, because both are our mortal enemies determined to exterminate us before they go for each other's throats; but simply as observant and non-observant. A non-observant Muslim, even if his name happens to be Osama bin Saddam, is just a person. An observant Muslim, even if his name happens to be Chaim Baruchovich Shapiro, is our enemy for the simple reason that his religion demands him to be. And unless we treat him as an enemy before he gets a chance to blow himself up or slam an airliner into an office building, he will either do it himself or help his more stupid coreligionists do it. Depending on his choice, we will call him a moderate Muslim or a Muslim extremist. In both cases, we will be equally wrong; he is just an observant Muslim.

Finally, here is a tricky question: Why do the Muslims resort to terrorism? They don't need violence to conquer us. They have invaded Europe, including the no longer Great Britain, without firing a single shot. Our liberal immigration laws are powerless to stop their peaceful invasion. They come in throngs, settle on our land (and nobody calls them settlers), and avoid any assimilation to a degree that can make Russian babushkas from Brighton Beach look sparklingly cosmopolitan. They out-reproduce us approximately seven-to-one. In a couple of generations, they will have enough voting power to abolish the Constitution of the United States and turn this country into just another Islamic republic. Violence seems to be counterproductive in this scheme of things. As a matter of fact, it isn't. It helps the enemy maintain the myth of bad Muslim extremists who, by the time they are detected, are usually beyond our reach, as opposed to good moderate Muslims, the peaceful followers of just another religion that should be immune from prosecution while they are turning our country into just another province of the Caliphate. It is in the best interest of the invaders to appear peaceful and law-abiding. Without 9/11, their massive, ever growing presence on our soil might raise some hard questions, because it does not change our country for the better. Without Al Qaeda, CAIR would have looked... well, like a branch of Al Qaeda rather than just another perfectly legitimate anti-American organization.

We are living through the opening stages of global jihad. Our enemies are wonderfully innovative. Their army is organized differently from ours. They don't wear uniforms. They live among us. They don't hesitate to use their own children as human shields or even as sacrificial human delivery systems. Nevertheless, it is an army. No army can function without support from home. It may seem difficult to deny that a suicide bomber was an extremist; it seems absurd however to label as moderate the community that made his martyrdom operation possible.

It is vitally important for us to understand that neither the perfectly real terrorism nor the imaginary Islamic extremism are our enemy. Islam is.

Yashiko Sagamori is a New York-based Information Technology consultant. To read other articles by the author, go to http://www.middleeastfacts.com/yashiko/ or email ysagamori@hotmail.com