Steer by my star
and the world shall live as one
Thanks to Holger Danske for the heads up the following story, and it’s real a doozy. The Lefty political think tanks around Europe and the US have been peddling their warped version of reality concerning “moderate Islam” for a number of years. So much so, that the entire sector is soaked through and through with the highly falacious meme, in spite of
careful documentation that tells a different tale.
The meme would have you to believe that if the West would allow the
moderate “Islamists” to take part in the democratic experience, the effect of the “give and take politics” of daily governance will have a further moderating effect upon them.
Of course, no one can point to any of the liberal notions that these so called, moderate Islamists adhere to, but it’s enough for them to deem any Muslim who doesn’t call for violence in obtaining their Islamic state, to earn the mantle of a “moderate Islamist”. There’s a disconnect in the logic behind their thinking. Would the German National Socialists be anymore endearing to the people at the time, just because they eschewed violence in obtaining their racial purist, socialist enterprise?
There is no such thing as “moderate” radical supremacist ideas, you either do believe you’re superior to everyone else not like you, or you don’t. The thinking of some analysts that Arab Muslims can somehow be only “half a racist and supremacist” is highly foolish, and interestingly enough, will never be considered a possibility in the arena of traditional Western politics.
If you’re a Western politician and you hold, or thought to be holding “racist” and/or bigoted views, you’re are racist through and through. It’s only in the context of Middle Eastern Arabs/Muslim politics and about Islam are such foolish notions entertained. For example, Israeli leaders who are indistinguishable from their European counterparts are easily labeled “hard liners”, while Arabs such as the Holocaust denier, Mahmoud Abbas, earns the title of “moderate”. See how it works? KGS
Splits within the Arab world’s foremost Islamist opposition movement, the Muslim Brotherhood, with its ties to Muslim communities in Germany and elsewhere, could be signs that the group is not interested in democracy.
For much of its 80-year history, the Muslim Brotherhood’s very name symbolized promotion of a violent, anti-western movement bent on strict imposition of Islamic law. Much of the first generation of the current violent Islamist movements trace their roots to the Brotherhood and were inspired by the organization’s radical ideologues.
Yet, for the past 30 years, the Brotherhood’s loosely aligned chapters in various Arab countries have participated in elections, shed secrecy for internal party democracy and justified the electoral path as their way forward. When asked in 1980 after the fall of the Shah of Iran, whether the Islamic revolution constituted a model for Egypt, then Muslim Brotherhood leader Omar el Telmesani told this reporter: “No, our Shah died in 1970,” a reference to the late Egyptian nationalist leader Gamal Abdel Nasser.
But rather than encouraging the Brotherhood’s more recent democratic inclinations, Arab governments are cracking down in a move that threatens to widen the credibility gap between regimes and public opinion and could drive moderate Islamists toward the movement’s radical jihad-preaching fringe.
[…]
Some politicians and officials in Europe, on the other hand, endorse the notion of embracing rather than repressing a moderate Islamist Brotherhood. In a break with the conservative Arab and US approach and in contrast to the European Union’s blacklisting of Hamas, parliamentarians from the UK, France, the Netherlands and other European nations have this year met with Hamas representatives. Moreover, German Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) intelligence officials this year helped mediate the release of Hamas prisoners in Israeli prisons in exchange for a video of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, held captive by Hamas since 2006.
Privately, several European officials and diplomats say they favor integration of moderate Islamists into the political life of the Arab world. They note that the Brothers in Egypt and Jordan are seeking non-violent ways to survive government repression. In Palestine, Hamas, the only Brotherhood group holding political office, is struggling to cater to the needs of 1.5 million mostly destitute Palestinians under its rule.
Prominent Jordanian journalist Rami Khouri argues that contact with Hamas, the Muslim Brothers and other marginalized groups in the Middle East offers Europe an opportunity to carve out a role for itself, particularly in the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “It is precisely the militants on both sides … who have to be brought into the talks for peace and coexistence,” he told Deutsche Welle.
“The castrated American political system lacks the ability to act with conviction on the really tough issues so as to talk to all actors; Europe is not so emasculated, and should avoid at all costs following the United States’ route to impotent self-marginalization,” Khouri said.
