I've been keeping a photo gallery of Muslim terrorists who, in days or months or years prior to their act of pious slaughter in the name of their bloodthirsty god Allah (and his bloodthirsty prophet, Muhammad), invariably had taken pictures of themselves smiling like a perfect Moderate.
Here's my latest addition, Mohamed Bouhlel, the Muslim who seemed to lead a secularly gregarious life previous to the fateful day on July 14 of this year, when he plowed through crowds celebrating Bastille Day in Nice, France, massacring over 80 people (and wounding over 200) with the truck he drove (also with the gun he shot out the driver's window), all the while screaming "Allahu Akbar!".
And not only is this Mohammedan smiling in that selfie above, and not only is he beardless, but according to reports, he regularly went out clubbing, picking up women and men, taking drugs -- and, according to his cousin, he drank alcohol and was not averse to eating pork. All together, signs that he must have been a moderate secular Muslim, right...?
We may add Bouhlel to the Martyrs Hall of Infamy & Shame. To see the others in the growing roster, see my posting I began two years ago, Smiling Faces.
2 comments:
Hi Hesperado,
I'm familiar with your Good Cop/Better Cop analogy. I was thinking about the issue of moderation in islam from another angle. And when it comes detecting "the imposter", or Better Cop in your vocabulary, my conclusion is that there is a simple test for it.
Here it is: if someone who argues about islam does not explicitly (and emotionally) disavow, denounce and reject Muhammad as any sort of good role model for humanity, he or she is either performing (non-violent) jihad, if muslim, or is working for jihadists, if non-muslim.
This way, I don't look to find "cracks" in someone's public argument about islam, to see if he or she is Good or Better Cop. I look if they explicitly distance themselves from Muhammad, and all muslims who follow him. If this distancing is missing, I know they are fighting along with other jihadists, in one way shape or form. As such, I see them one notch below violent jihadists, in muslim ranking, whether they are what you mark Good or Better Cop.
What's your take?
Thanks Henry.
Well, your stipulation theoretically would be impossible for any Muslim to do -- so it would be a transparently roundabout way of simply rejecting any Muslim as a reformer, no matter what he says. There's just no way that a Zuhdi Jasser or a Maajid Nawaz or an Asra Nomani or a Tarek Fatah or a Tawfik Hamid or an Irshad Manji (some of the more famous Muslim "Better Cops" out there) could impugn Muhammad that way. It would be like asking a German Nazi (who is preposterously claiming to be a "Nazi reformer") to reject Adolf Hitler.
Now if by some astronomically unlikely chance one of these actually did repudiate/denigrate Muhammad wholly (if it's going to be done, it would have to be wholly & utterly, not "partially"), we then would have to wonder if he or she is not doing some ultra-stealthy taqiyya.
I say we just abandon all taxonomies of Muslims altogether, and simply reject them all, with absolute prejudice (beyond the mere fact of knowing they are Muslim).
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