By Barry Rubin
Mohamed Azahaf, a 28-year-old immigrant from Morocco, was hired by the east Amsterdam district to build trust between Muslims and non-Muslims there. But a journalist did some careful research to discover he’s a supporter of Usama bin Ladin, said Muslim women who didn’t wear “proper” clothing weren’t real Muslims, and even issued death threats against those criticizing Islamic doctrine.
His response? Only after this was exposed publicly did he claim his remarks–never changed by him until that moment–didn’t represent his current views. The district council’s response? To defend him, though it’s starting to get worried.
But here’s the best part: After the murder of Theo Van Gogh, the filmmaker, by a radical Islamist, Holland’s queen met with several Muslims who supposedly represented the “real” views of the community opposing such violence. Azahaf was one of them. However, apparently she and everyone else didn’t know that Azahaf had already written that he supported the murder!
How typical is this kind of situation all over Europe and North America: honoring or even paying money to revolutionary Islamists to spread their movement on the false assumption that they are fighting against it.
And if someone points this out, at best they are ignored; at worst, he is subjected to insults and intimidation.
Among the main victims of this ridiculous situation are truly moderate Muslims who are, at best, also ignored and, at worst, are also subjected to insults and intimidation.
Well, we armed the “moderate” PLO because they needed it to fight the exteremist Hamas and Islamic Jihad. How well did that work?
As for moderate Muslims, take, for instance, Khaled Abu Toameh who by all signs seems to be a real moderate, liberal and very courages Muslim Arab, but no one in the so-called mainstream media wanted to print his articles when he criticized the PLO’s corruption, which was forbidden in most of the Western press just as it was forbidden in the Palestinian Authority’s PLO-controlled press which Toameh used to work for and left because it repressed free speech and journalistic freedom. Apparently when it comes to certain issues the Western press is dangerously close to the Arab or Muslim press in both content and standards. So there is no room for true moderates or liberals like Khaled Abu Toameh. Instead we get wolves in sheep’s cloths. They don’t even need to work so hard to disguise themselves since the current Western elites prefer to keep their eyes closed anyway. Liberal moderate Muslims like Toameh might even be labled “right wing” and even “racist” because, like liberals everywhere, they criticize their own society and not just the US, Israel and the West (though he criticizes them too).
It’s inevitable for liberal or moderate Muslims to criticize their own society since for a liberal there’s a lot to criticize in the Muslim society, but since any criticism of Islam or Muslim societies is almost invariably labed “Islamophobic” or “racist” most such individuals don’t get to the forefront.
What we consider moderate Muslims are a minority anyway. They have little influence as it is. Being marginalized also in the West, with all the legitimacy and resources bestowed on Mulsim Brotherhood fronts and other radicals who claim to be moderates just exasperate the problem.
Here in Canada we have Tarek Fatah (most recent book: “The Jew is Not My Enemy”.
Last year he went to visit Auschwitz.
He constantly writes and speaks out against Jihadis everywhere.
He coined the term for this tolerance of violence “The Racism of Reduced Expectations”.
He rails about the way that Muslim on Muslim violence is ignored as well as that agains all others.
He is termed by the press as an “angry man”.
Yet another voice in the wilderness.
OT (technical)
May I ask you a favor? Some of us have older computers with more limited resources. In the post about the situation in Syria you posted many videos. These many video embeds create a load on the memory. I succeeded to load the blog once (though it took ages), but it crushed my browser three times and I had to restart my computer twice. Is it possible to create a second page to that post and post most of the videos on the second page so they won’t be all on the front page? This way I still won’t be able to load that post, but I’ll be able to load the blog.