QOTD: Mean Mister Mustard

Mean Mister Mustard on the limits of waiting for Islamic reform.

If you listen to [Dennis] Prager on the radio with any frequency, the tone and general thrust of his remarks would be fairly familiar to you: Israel cannot make peace with a population that is so overwhelmingly focused on death in general and Israel's destruction in particular.

Which is certainly true enough, but Prager, though I respect him, is constantly frustrating on questions like these in that he seems to refuse following the implications of his beliefs to their logical conclusions. [Michael] Berenbaum [in a debate with Prager] actually went farther in explicitly advocating separation between Israel and the Palestinians. Prager's rhetoric is still useful as a corrective to the vague and unreal suggestions about the peace process and moral equivalence that still litter the media landscape, but the fact that he doesn't speak beyond the present means that he can't offer any strategy or goal beyond an aggressive holding pattern modeled on the current situation, wherein Israel will presumably continue to kill Palestinians it considers threatening, but not do anything more ambitious or long-term. The underlying assumption that makes this at all tenable is that the Palestinians will eventually change and become acceptable neighbors.

This goes to the more basic problem that liberals like Prager have in discussing the wider problem of Islam: they are, for ideological reasons, unable to extrapolate a conclusion that Islam is inevitably (or nearly so) unreconcilable to the western world, no matter what the evidence says. On this point, Prager likes to say, "I don't judge religions, I judge practitioners," and he's quite willing to say that a huge proportion of Muslims are actively dangerous or at least hostile to us. But he categorically will not say that the belief system of Islam itself is such, holding always to the assumption that anything can happen in the future and that Islam will be whatever Muslims want it to be.

Which is true, up to a limited point. I suppose Muslims could tomorrow decide that the mandatory imposition of Sharia over the world is not one of Allah's commandments. But it fails to take Islam seriously as a religion. Indeed, it fails to take the entire idea of religion seriously. Either the Koran is the words of an all-powerful Creator or it itsn't. If it is, then by its own clear and unambiguous terms, it's impossible for a sincere Muslim to not "fight those who do not believe in Allah ... until they pay the tax in acknowledgment of superiority and they are in a state of subjection." It would be like telling a Christian that they can continue to be Christians, just so long as they drop this whole "Jesus is the son of God" stuff. I suppose it's not out of the realm of possibility that you could convince Christians to do that, but let's at least be honest enough to say that what you're really asking is for them to stop being Christians and become something else.

One of Prager's more frequent complaints about Jews is that most of them are only Jews in the ethnic sense, including those who profess to be believers. It's difficult, for instance, to find a (non-Orthodox) Jew who will express agreement with the statement that homosexual sex is an abomination. But he's essentially asking the same thing of Muslims, and in an even more egregious way, since there are some creative (but unconvincing) ways that one could try to abrogate Leviticus' banning of homosexual acts, but the Koran's orders to spread Sharia and politically subvert the non-Muslim world seem obvious and unquestionable in comparison.