How to Tell Who is a “Moderate Islamist:” An Exam
By Barry Rubin
The Muslim Brotherhood held a rally at Cairo’s most important mosque, al-Azhar. This is sort of a central headquarters for official Islam in Egypt. Demonstrators chanted, “One day we shall kill all Jews.”
Question 1: How can you tell they are “moderate Islamists?”
Answer: They said “one day,” in other words, they aren’t going to do it this week.
Question 2: At the rally someone said:
“In order to build Egypt, we must be one. Politics is insufficient. Faith in Allah is the basis for everything. The al-Aqsa Mosque is currently under an offensive by the Jews.” Who was it?
Answer: Ahmed al-Tayeb, the “moderate” president of al-Azhar University and arguably the most important Muslim cleric in Egypt. Note: al-Aqsa Mosque is not under attack by Jews.
Question 3: Why did al-Tayeb talk this way in the context of calling for a Jihad against Israel?
Answer: Maybe he isn’t so moderate. But more importantly it is part of the general radicalization of Islam that is going to happen in Egypt now that the Brotherhood will be running the place and thus also his desire to survive rather than be branded a lackey of the Zionist-imperialist crusade to destroy Islam and have his head cut off. (See Question 1.)
Question 4: Can someone be a “moderate Muslim” or “moderate Islamist” and call for a Jihad to wipe Israel off the map?
Answer: Apparently yes. Muslim Brotherhood spokesmen made such calls at the rally yet the Obama Administration holds that the Brotherhood is moderate and the U.S. government supports its taking power in Egypt.
Question 5: How did the Muslim Brotherhood get the Jewish calendar wrong?
Answer: ”Tel Aviv, Tel Aviv, judgment day has come.” In fact, Yom Kippur was last October 8
Question 6: An elementary school teacher Ala al-Din said, “All Egyptian Muslims are willing to embark on Jihad for the sake of Palestine.” What does he teach little children in school?
Answer: that all Egyptian Muslims should embark on Jihad to destroy Israel.
Question 7: Why don’t American officials, journalists, and “experts” understand Islamists?
Answer: Ala al-Din explained it: “Why is the US losing in Afghanistan? Because the other side is willing and wants to die. We have a different mentality than that of the Americans and Jews.” In other words because they don’t understand that people in the Arabic-speaking world have “a different mentality.”
Question 8: Is this mentality somehow biological or innate in Islam?
Answer: No, it is the result of historical processes, political culture, indoctrination in school and mosque and media, dominant ideology, and from the demagoguery of leaders.
Question 9: Why don’t Western reporters see what’s going on and report it fully?
Answer: They weren’t’ wearing their glasses so they didn’t see the signs; they weren’t’ wearing their hearing aids so they didn’t hear the chants.
Question 10: But these journalists, along with the officials and “experts” are idols of the Western elite, so is there any precedent for this?
Answer: Yes indeed! See here on line 16.
Question 11: Who said that the Muslim Brotherhood is “a very heterogeneous group, largely secular, which has eschewed violence” and what is he doing now?
Answer: Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and he’s still director of national intelligence.
Question 12: Who said “Parties committed to democracy must reject violence….And in a region with deep divisions within and between religions, they cannot be the spark that starts a conflagration” and does that person react to what the Muslim Brotherhood actually says?
Answer: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and no.
Question 13: What possible rationale could she have for not dealing with the Muslim Brotherhood’s bloodthirsty totalitarian orientation and intolerance?
Answer: See Question 1.
Answer: I don’t know. I only write about the Middle East.
Thought provoking, but very frightening. There are NO moderate muslims. After the fiasco (or was it planned?)in Pakistan today, we will soon experience how radical they are.
Question 7: Why don’t American officials, journalists, and “experts” understand Islamists?
Answer: Ala al-Din explained it: “Why is the US losing in Afghanistan? Because the other side is willing and wants to die. We have a different mentality than that of the Americans and Jews.” In other words because they don’t understand that people in the Arabic-speaking world have “a different mentality.”
Just a quibble: Afghanistan isn’t part of the Arabic-speaking world. They mostly speak Pushtun and Dari, along with a polyglot of other languages.
I generally agree with your thesis, but I’m curious: have you read the book “The Accidental Guerilla” by David Kilcullen? He presents a differently-nuanced version of Arab and Muslim culture and the reasons for the insurgency…
On a granular level I agree with much of what you write above. But on the macro level, you should be concerned about what many non-Jewish Westerners are likely to take away from your typical narrative. Since you almost exclusively focus on the danger which virulent Muslims pose to Jews and Israel, here’s the Short Barry Rubin many will take away:
One ME tribe, the Muslims, passionately hate the other ME tribe, the Jews. What does that have to do with me? Why should I care about a squabble between desert people’s thousands of miles away???
My comments are regularly censored at PJM – so I don’t know if this will even be posted, but turning off the truth doesn’t help anyone. Until the narrative expands to include the menace Islam poses to all non-Muslims, the huge confusion about Islam will continue.
Re: Morton Doodslag’s #…..because the Judeo-Christian traditions span those thousands of miles as if they’re nothing. If you are a part of, and can connect to that tradition, the conflict of those “two ME desert peoples” has a lot to do with you.
This shared Judeo-Christian heritage is the indirect and direct foundation of the education of this American in Deepest Central Maryland, even if I’d never ever been to Israel.
I feel very directly involved.
Charlie – you widen the narrative, but my point is that Barry Rubin does not. To read Rubin, and many others at PJM, you’d think (as I state above) that Jihad is only or mainly targeted at Jews, or that Jew-hatred is the main or perhaps anly lens through which Islamic Jihad is focused. This is unfortunate, and it is a deep distortion of reality.
Islamic doctrine does set aside a special hatred of Jews, but Muslim hatred explicitly extends to all so-called “unbelievers”. Muslims hate hate hate apostates above all, who explicitly must be slaughtered. They explicitly hate Christians who don’t submit to the superiority of Islam. This is also explicit Islamic doctrine, that “people of the Book”, i.e. Jews and Christians, can be suffered to live if they accept the superiority of Islam and live as subordinates, even to the lowest Muslim. This revolting doctrine is often used by Muslims, who conveniently leave out the groveling and the taxes levied on the inferior “people of the Book” to explain how Muslims have no problem with Jews and Christians.
But Muslims hate animists, agnostics, gnostics, Zoroastrians, Buddhists, etc., in other words, all so-called non-Muslims are targets of Jihad and Muslim hatred. Unfortunately we have adopted the derisive terminology of our Islamic enemy to describe ourselves viz. Islam: “non-Muslim”, “infidel”, “unbeliever”. Why should we use such terms of derision, implying that we are lacking something by not being Muslim? Is a Christian or a Jew really an “unbeliever”? Really an “infidel”, one who doesnt adhere to proper belief? Muslims say so.
The narrower story as told by Barry Rubin does not touch on these fact, and failing to do so, loses the opportunity to show how all should be united against the onslaught of the intolerant tsunami of hatred which spews forth from Muslim communities across the planet. See Jane Stair’s comments as prime examples of a distorted narrative in action. She is the logical end result of political correctness run amok, corrupt U.N. Groupthink, and narratives which suggest Jihad is just a squabble over a few hundred square miles of sand.
Of course jihad is aimed at other lands and peoples, not only Israel and Jews, and in fact Jews have repeatedly, indeed all but incessantly warned about that.
So much so, it’s de rigueur, and if they don’t universalize their message, Jews are open to the accusation that, as usual, they’re just self-centered and selfish.
And what thanks do Jews get when they do universalize it? They’re more often than not felt to be trying to inveigle others into fighting their battles for them.
Lay off Barry Rubin.
When other people being targeted for genocidal slaughter draw attention to it, nobody is so crude as to berate them for not also mentioning jihad against the Jews.
Mr. Rubin is not ignoring the wider –the worldwide– threat posed by Islam. He has perceptively written about it for years. Here he is highlighting the Obama Administration’s deliberate whitewashing of the Muslim Brotherhood, of a piece with its call for Israel’s return to the 1949 cease-fire lines and a consistently pro-Muslim, anti-Western tilt in what passes for foreign policy.
Barry,
Why don’t Israelis understand Islamists?
Here is a recycled post I made at “Contentions”:
Honesty in one’s enemies is to be welcomed, I think.
Abbas is a corrupted fraud, who can’t even be trusted to hold up his end of the fraudulent collusion that is the ‘peace process’.
Why so much effort and ink is spent trying to divine the nuances of what Hamas does or will do is is hard to understand.
Time was, that unrepentant genocidal enemies were simply neutralized, those remaining having to reform if they wished a life for themselves.
Now, we try and understand them, so as better to bribe and cajole them into taking baby steps in the direction we would like them to go, and they humor and exploit us, taking the money, knowing full well they will never be deterred from their aims short of death, and calculating that as long as we are trying to understand them and give them money, the potential for death is far, far away.
The problem is that in the meantime, Israelis die, and Israel is further legitimized. In this regard, the way the world currently works, it is truly a zero some game.
The more legitimate Hamas is, the less legitimate Israel is.
Israel would do better with Hamas out of the picture – and by being irredeemably genocidal, Hamas deserves to be out the picture- permanently.
These people want personal freedom and jobs, not to discomfit Jews and have even more religion. What in the world about that don’t you get? You might as well say the Egyptian revolution is about watermelons.
I’ve heard of ethno and Eurocentrism but this is 5-star provincialism.
My father used to tell me that you’d be surprised how little people think about you.
Re: Jane Stair’s #5
In another setting I used the concept or term,”wired differently” to point out the futility of us Westerners doing anything at all in the Muslim/Islamic controlled areas to effect lasting rational change for the betterment of the world as a whole….. because Muslims/Islamists and their spokesmen are simply wired differently than those of us raised in the Western curricula. There’s a basic polarity difference.
In that vein, I’d suggest that you are “jumping”,forgive me, in the electrical sense, to post your #5.
So, your next “charge”…forgive me,
is to pin me to the board as a male chauvinist specimen.
That’s the closest analogy….we’re simply not “wired” the same way.
It’s not a question of chauvinism or being wired differently but a question of actually knowing what the heck is going on in Egypt.
People make blithe statements that Egyptians hate Jews: really? What percentage? 12% 75% What is it.?
These Islamists who actually do make anti-Semitic statements: do they reflect general feeling in Egypt? Are they a small minority? I can show video of Israeli settlers making inflamatory statements about Arabs; is that Israel? The U.N. says attacks against West Bank Arabs by Israeli settlers is up threefold in the last couple of years; is that wrong, is it a lie?
If the parties involved spent as much time trying to find ways of getting along as they did demonizing each other, maybe this all would go away and stupid bigots on both sides marginalized.
A lot of civilians outside the middle east have been blown to pieces over this ongoing nonsense and if you haven’t noticed, a lot of them aren’t very happy about being proxy victims.
So okay fine: the Egyptians are jerks and they hate Jews; now that we’ve established that for the 1 millionth time, now what? The Muslim Brotherhood in fact do seem to be authentic morons – now what? We’ve spread the alarm. Without hatred those morons wouldn’t have a pot to spit in.
It’s the economy stupid is appropriate here; the MB lives in a fantasy world if they think the average Egyptian is salivating to have even more religion in their lives. The more the MB tries that on for size the more into background noise they’ll become. You can’t eat a Koran. Trust me, Egyptians are not fanatics who think so. They’re sitting in their frickin’ parents apartment til they’re 30 years old cuz they can’t get married on the average Egyptian salary of 75 dollars a month. On top of that, they can’t make a move without paying off some policeman who is corrupt cuz he also makes 75 dollars a month.
The leader of the MB political party was kicked out of Tahrir a week ago cuz the protesters are sick of their political maneuvering. The protesters just nominated Barradei to head a new interim gov’t – he is not an Islamist.
There’s a hell of a lot more going on than a few idiots spewing Jew hatred – trying to reduce events to that is absurd.
Jane,
You should study this poll and then draw your own conclusions. http://www.pewglobal.org/2010/12/02/muslims-around-the-world-divided-on-hamas-and-hezbollah/
Ruth – You owe Jane an apology for confronting her with facts.
Also – Ruth has a great blog.
You owe yourself an apology for setting up a straw man argument I in no way said anything about and then declaring victory. Read your own link, I never said anything about this one way or the other.
I’m talking about Egypt and the revolution, you’re talking about oranges. When I have something to say about Muslims around the world and Hizbollah and Hamas I’ll let you know and then you can trot out the link although I may agree with it. First you have to hear me write about it though.
Based on this, my own conclusion is that in fact Ruth does not have a “great” blog since parsing English and critical and contextual logic is “de rigueur” in writing circles.
Jane,
This is ridiculous. Obvioulsy I know English. Contrary to you I also know German (and Hebrew and French). Since there are enough blogs from Israel in English, I write mine in German. You cannot understand it, so you cannot judge it. Agreed?
Regarding the “straw man argument”: Your wrote “You can’t eat a Koran. Trust me, Egyptians are not fanatics who think so.” The PEW poll I link to shows that 95% of Egyptians think it is good that Islam plays a large role in politics as opposed to 2% who think this would be bad.
Somehow I have the feeling that you did not read the poll at all but rather decided because of its title that it could not possibly be relevant. You show the opposite of an open mind.
Ask yourself what happens when the Egyptian protester finds that the revolution will produce neither job or freedom, and is told the Jews and Americans are responsible?
Thanks the future.
Thanks for projecting what you wish to be true based on nothing into the future.
Prove both statements!
I have noticed, over and over, that Barry Rubin makes statements about the Obama’s attitudes toward each country, and they’re never ever backed up. I should really collect all of them and fact check them. I bet that most of them are projections, not backed up by reality.
Barry if your rhetoric isn’t just an inappropriate (given your position) attempt at misinforming crowds for the sake of political manipulation, how about you start giving quotes and referencing documents when you make these statements, because you know what, I don’t believe you. You’re just trying stir up the crowd to the constant fever pitch of “Obama the traitor” chants that are so common in your comment section.
Josh Scholar challenged BR to “Prove both statements! (that the Obama administration assesses the MB as moderate and supports its taking power in Egypt) and demanded citations. Are you new here Josh? BR frequently dissects the statements of administration officials. It’s painful to see what a bunch of arrogant, naive wimps are in charge of U.S. policy, but it is also enlightening.
Josh Scholar alleged that BR is “just trying stir up the crowd to the constant fever pitch of “Obama the traitor””. My recollection is that BR often debunks the “Obama the traitor/Muslim” memes. he does make the case, week after week that the guy is an arrogant and naive wimp. So why don’t you “prove” that that is BR’s hidden intent? What are you going to do, sneak into his home and take notes as he mumbles in his sleep?
Hey Josh Scholar – speaking of challenging people to “prove” it, why don’t you “prove” what you indicate, that you are closely wired, based on many real-time and first-hand reports, to what is going on in Egypt. While you are at it, why don’t you “prove” that any national security policy maker has ever hired you to give expert advice on these matters? If you can’t “prove” it, why should we care about your assertions?
Great column, BR, although I don’t completely accept your answer #8.
Also I have an acquaintance in Alexandria, a Copt who is somewhat involved in this revolution. He maintains that there is a distinction between the revolution and the Brotherhood, and they have totally different aims.
Beyond this, the Army seems to be backing the Brotherhood against the revolution.
So if the Brotherhood takes over, it’s not that the Arab Spring supports the Brotherhood, but that, in Egypt, the revolution failed.
The current unrest has the Brotherhood and the revolution on different sides.
Every account I’ve read, from him, from Totten from others is that the Brotherhood had no presence in Tahrir square until after Mubarak stepped down. Then they came out in numbers and, when they could, strong armed the revolution out.
Just because they benefit doesn’t make them part of it.
The people in Egypt who want democracy certainly don’t want to see the MB in charge. Rubin oversimplifies because he’s hoping to promote extremely oppressive policies, to prevent the instability that Liberal aspirations bring.
He pounds the table so that we won’t notice that his demand that we suppress the Arab Spring is a demand that democracy activists be suppressed, ie shot en-mass.
Funny, that he gets that wish but toward the wrong outcome. The Egyptian regime have arrested what, 12000 activists? They’re raping women and breaking their bones. They’re killing. And yes they’re still looking to the Muslim Brotherhood to maintain their privileged position.
How odd that Rubin is against the revolution, and yet the Muslim Brotherhood is supported by the other side.
Re: Josh Scholar’s #7…The Muslim Brotherhood is playing a nicely executed (forgive the term) tactic I’d call “opportunism”. Let’s use that term to perhaps, perhaps, explain the deep recesses of the Brotherhood’s leadership-think…they’re carefully choosing the timing of their participation in this mob-shift we call “Egypt”. Seems you’ve been lulled or duped.
Islamists are very, very good at that.
Duped? I got my information from people who, unlike you, are there, and some of them are participating.
The situation is not so simple.
But absorb this, the only power that is against the Muslim Brotherhood is the revolution out in the streets. Yes it’s true that Islamists are out in the streets as well, and some of them are siding with more secular elements, and (ha) I hear that some of the leftist groups are supporting Islamists (it was described as “a man choosing his own firing squad”). It’s a mess.
But the assumption that the Muslim Brotherhood is the cause of the unrest is wrong. Most of the unrest is against the army and against the Muslim Brotherhood.
The army is backing the MB.
You’re describing a batch of eggs being swirled into an omelette which can collapse quicky when another ingredient is added. None of us can be too sure how this particular egg-mixture will turn out….those on the scene (actually in among those steaming eggs in the hot skillet) are probably the most uncertain. Since they can’t know, how can you?
I know this: it is untrue the MB had no presence in Tahrir until after Mubarak stepped down. They initially announced publicly they would not participate in the Jan.25, 2011 demonstrations but when the protesters did unexpectedly well, the MB stepped in after Jan. 28. The MB never strong armed the civil protesters out. They don’t have the numbers on the ground for that. Keeping a guy off a stage is not the whole story.
The MB and secular/civil demonstrators are in fact are at cross purposes. The MB does not have a privileged position.
The army is not backing the MB; the MB doesn’t have that kind of pull. The army is backing itself.
Ignore people who say you’ve been duped due to their own keyboard acumen. Not knowing what’s happening on the ground, it’s their only rebuttal. In fact, those oh so clever MB have totally blown it this week and wasted what little headway they’d made in the last 10 months by not coming to Tahrir right now.
And ignore the biggest and most ignorant chant in the last year, that the MB are going to takeover Egypt; they don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of pulling off such a thing in the face of an intrenched military bureaucracy and civil/secularist revolutionaries. The MB hasn’t done it in over 80 years and they won’t now.
Actually when they held that large rally they brought more people to the square than the regular protesters ever had.
Unfortunately they do have numbers that they can bring out, at least on occasion.
Josh that is not true. A week ago the MB and salafis had to bus in people to Tahrir. They didn’t stay cuz they are far from home. The MB didn’t have the numbers to go against Mubarak in the street alone.
On a consistent basis, the MB cannot compete with the numbers the civil/secularists, revolutionaries and apolitical can put in Tahrir. Look at your TV now; those are not Islamists. The Islamists are laying low and the non-Islamists are doing just fine scaring the crap out of the army on their own.
Of course there are moderate Muslims. I know one. But, propaganda for Western consumption excepted, there are no moderate Muslims out loud in a place they’ll be slain for it … like the Middle East … or Africa … or Asia … or Europe … or, probably, in America.
There also is, alas, no moderate Islaam, to the contrary notwithstanding methodist Mr. Bush and, um, commited Christian Mr. Obama. A moderate Islaam might conceivably arise among moderate Muslims, if those who proposed or adhered to it were not likely to be murdered by more orthodox Muslims. Maybe it’ll happen in Australia. Don’t hold your breath.
The question will be
–what about Jonathan Pollard
–an American who betrayed his country and whose treachery killed 100s of US human assets in the USSR and cost us billions in betrayed SIGNIT
Why is there so much support for an American traitor?
Most Moslems are probably what could be called moderate. So what? They are irrelevant, just as non-Nazi Germans were in WW2, and non-communist Russians in the cold War.
Sir,
You have been posting at PJ media for a long time. Also, you have been writing there is a moderate Islam, and something called an Islamist.
It is hard for me to read through the lines on what you are trying to get across. Is it a lot of Muslims are moderate, but must sound like Islamists to live? Or, do you think moderate Muslims are being smart, and going along in order to one day change Islam from following Muhammad?
I find it strange you try to get people to believe there is something called moderate Islam. Perhaps, there is moderate Islam where you teach, or work. Do you have to have a PHD to become a Muslim moderate?
I agree that there can be no such thing as “moderate Islam”….the term itself has to be an oxymoron…….reminder: fourteen centuries of violent barbaric northwesterly aggression from Arabia up through the Balkans and their siege of Vienna, and across North Africa to the Iberian Peninsula upwards into present day France where they were stymied at Tours/Poitiers by…wasn’t it Charles Martel?….don’t forget lower Manhattan and the Pentagon Building and that heroic passenger effort ending so tragically in a Pennsylvania farm-field.
Let’s start to emphasize that the “moderate” Muslim/Islamist is a sleeping threat in America right now who is absorbing lectures in the mosque-associated madrassas in America where impressionable muslim teenagers become such as that Northern Virginia mosque trained American terrorist wiped out in Yemen, I believe it was.
Civil liberties for murderous American traitors living overseas….good grief! Political Correctness here in America is just as dangerous as these latent “moderate” Muslims/Islamists. Lethal, taken together as they exist now here at home…….and,standing by.
You hit the nail right on it’s head! It’s just another typical Oxymoron by morons and par for the course. I say Ill liberals are the gift that keeps on giving every time they open their mouths…:)
He doesn’t debunk the “Obama the traitor/Muslim” meme, he prods it. It’s a rhetorical trick. As I said, I’ve seen him attribute ridiculous attitudes to the administration over and over and not support them. But believe me when you do that and say something like “he’s not the traitor he seems, he’s just the dumbest, most naive man in all of history,” you’re just stirring the pot.
Anyway I have to go to work now.
Ooops messed up, somehow this appeared in the wrong place (the mouse hit cancel reply before submit).
It was meant as a reply to MarcH at November 27, 2011 – 11:19 a
very funny latma on the Arab spring
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbA0h0WfA4U&feature=feedu
The only ” moderate” arab is one without a gun or ammunition. Yes Park 51 and other Billary/Obama friends are ” moderates” to ill liberals that are just as bad if not worst. They celebrate the world very worst and just give Shari’a laws a pass everytime. The only ” moderate” Democrats are none as well, cos they hate America and are the biggest menace to the world for far too long. See the future ill liberals promise in CA and Europe today.
Article by Wadah Khanfar published in the Age in Melbourne Australia as well as the Guardian (neither a surprise) proves how ‘moderate’ political democratic Islamism is http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/politics/islamisms-positive-side-20111128-1o361.html. The best is the cartoon by Spooner who is always fantastic!
Not likely the Age will publish Barry’s article