Hunting the Unicorn of Moderate Islam

By Glenn Fairman

In hunting the unicorn of moderate Islam, the West has occupied itself by passing through a mental gauntlet of Herculean moral contortions in separating the proverbial sheep from the goats. As I see it, those "moderate" voices of Islam, which have been protesting the violence of their brethren by thundering at the volume of a hushed whisper, will diminish even more fully as the Islamicist ascendency moves towards its apex. Who can doubt that in time the faint defiant murmurs of "peaceful Islam" will ultimately become qualitatively indistinguishable from the bloody rancor of the vox bellicose?

I say this not because I am a despiser of the Arab people. Quite to the contrary, I have found them hospitable and courteous in all my private dealings. But those dealings are primarily with Western Arabs and Muslims, who have for the most part, been saturated in the subliminal American ethos of free intellectual exchange -- although one can make a case that such an exotic hothouse flower as intellectual liberty is a rose whose bloom has incurably faded as a species from America's more halcyon days.

How then do we separate the wheat from the tares? Does a moderate follower of Islam, who is not an Islamicist per se, guard his tongue when American ambassadors are sodomized, murdered, and paraded through the streets? Do they remain cryptic when twin towers of steel become sarcophagi for 3000 human beings? Do they counter-demonstrate in Tehran, Cairo, or Darfur against radicals co-opting their sacred religion and Holy Writ? How do these doves answer a teaching that patently instructs its adherents to sublimate and enslave -- to convert and war down the infidel? Do moderate Muslims, after the Friday Prayers (the Islamic Sabbath), stand in the path of marauding fanatics who have been whipped into agitated bloodlust by imams into storming embassies, murdering Coptic Christians, burning churches, and torching any symbolism of omnipotent and blasphemous Western evil?

Once again, the voice of these courageous saints of Islamic moderation are as crickets chirping, while the only sound to be discerned in the vacuum of the Middle East, where nobody can hear you scream, is the crescendo drumbeat of war -- conquering, subduing the unbeliever, and the infernal anti-Semitic rhetoric of foaming hatred that castigates Jews as: Apes and Pigs, or drinkers of Palestinian toddler's blood in the form of their Passover matzo.

No, Jews, and increasingly Americans, are as the blight of the earth whose kingdoms must be thrown down. Where is the significant Muslim response of righteous indignation against these calumnies? Where is this hallowed moderate face of Islam that we can draw common cause with against those who propagate the reptilian dogma of God?

Our invidious president, who has missed no opportunity to apologize for every perceived historical American slight, actual or fabricated, and who many have argued subscribes to the moral ascendency of Islam over Christendom, has played a dangerous game. In prostrating himself unto the Arab Street, he has sought through rhetorical triangulation to mollify the one hundred million or so Arabs who are hell bent in their desires for America, Israel, and the West to attain room temperature at the soonest possible moment.

The dilemma Obama may now be awakening to is that the whiff of fear and death in the atmosphere surrounding his stratagem of American obsequiousness has both emboldened the Islamicists and solidified their hand in the volcanic Middle Eastern arc. Our president has actively participated, in concert with the Islamicists, in spoon feeding the propaganda necessary to cultivate the ignorant into the devil's legions. Can it be doubted any longer that Obama's hands are complicit in shepherding those who were once silently and shrewdly straddling the fence? The Arab Street, waiting forebodingly to see whom the victor would be before pragmatically hitching their camels to the winners in this most precarious of political calculations, has tragically been sold down the Nile without a barge.

Barack Obama gave the Arab Spring his forked blessing, and in the bargain was instrumental in igniting the House of Islam in a firestorm that will swallow what little peace remains in the world. The Myth of Islamic Moderation will soon pass the way of all naive pipe dreams -- like the utopian Kellogg-Briand Pact that theoretically should have outlawed the powers of the earth from any longer waging war. Both this pact and the Arab Spring shared two things in common: they both made the coming conflagrations inevitable and in turn made the Spirit of the West incapable of adequately answering the inhuman mutating visage of unrelenting and unapologetic tyranny.