Derbyshire leaves me with the distinct impression that this matter doesn’t rise, in his mind, to the level of grave import that I believe it warrants:
He repeats his promise to not look too closely at Islam — previously describing it as “boring”, this time simply saying he has no intention of looking at doctrinal scriptures any time soon.
There’s a bizarre quality in his non-chalance. He admits he’s far more familiar with Christian doctrine — after all, apparently he once was a nominal Christian. Yet he seems altogether EAGER to treat a doctrine which he professes little to no knowledge whatsoever (Islam) in a dreamy, abstract, intellectual and roughly equivalent manner.
I think this is exactly the purpose of Robert Spencer’s thesis — we treat Islam and all other religious roughly equivalently at our peril, and those who argue such rough equivalency are making a grave mistake and misjudgment.
What would it take for persons such as Derbhyshire to delve a little more deeply into the foundational tenets of Islam?
For me, 9/11 set all my bells and whistles off — and though I am an agnostic, I felt it was an incumbent duty I bore to myself, not to mention the 3,000 dead, to find out what these Islamic maniacs were acting upon.
It didn’t require a deep immersion into the texts of Islam to come to my conclusions. In fact, once I learned a few facts about Islam’s founder Muhammad, and double checked those facts to verify I wasn’t reading misrepresentations of his violence and the atrocities he committed during his lifetime — the fog began to clear, and the motives of both the Jihadis, and the so-called “moderate majority” of Muslims, ALL of whom wish to see Islam dominate became very clear.
I think Derbyshire is tilting at his own windmills of his mind — He feigns a certain level of indifference viz. educating himself about Islam — But in truth I get the impression he is actually exerting effort to keep his head in the sand.
I believe he has placed so much stock in his notion that 1. all religions are roughly equivalent, and 2. that Christianity can be just as bad as Islam if given the proper circumstances, that he has too much invested in his current mindset to learn anything new.
This is truly bizarre. One wonders what it will take to yank the heads of such ostriches out of the sand.
I was an ostrich with my head in the sand when I woke up at 6:50 AM on the West coast. The first building had been struck, and I wiped my bleary eyes and watched, still half asleep, trying to grasp the event. The media was obviously unsettled, but was still discussing the first crash as an “accident”. I got up — brushed my teeth, turned on the shower, and then the second plane hit.
For the first time in my life I did one of those cartoon like double takes in the mirror. Also, in a preposterous fashion, I pinched my face, as they say in the movies, to make sure I wasn’t just having a bad nightmare.
That done, I removed my head from the sand, and truly woke up to a world which hadn’t changed in the slightest — it was I who didn’t understand. It was I who had made the mistakes about assuming too much. On that day, my education about Islam began in earnest.
