A River in Egypt: Denial Among the Apologists for Islam

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I have been having a debate with a dogmatic apologist for Islam, one D. Charles, who insists that Islam is no more violent than any other religion, and that Islamic terrorism is not supported by Islamic holy texts like the Koran or the Haddith.  Charles has more excuses for Islam than Islam has severed heads...and that's a lot.

If you want to follow the arguments, see the comments section for this blog post.

Meanwhile, Lawrence Auster of View From the Right supports my position in his blog post here.  Larry points out an even more extreme case of denial in one Karen Armstrong.  He writes:

Inspired by the reflexive anti-American fallacies of Ron Paul and his intellectual mentor Robert Pape, the blogger Stogie has coined a term that I will need to add to my catalogue of non-Islam theories of Islamic extremism: the Blowback Theory of Islamic Extremism.

I see that some of Stogie's commenters [i.e. D. Charles] are still in Standard Denial Mode. Thus one argues that the Barbary pirates had nothing to do with Islam--they were merely pirates who happened to be Moslem, along with lots of non-Moslems in their ranks. Evidently the statement by Tripoli's ambassador in Britain to Adams and Jefferson in 1786, in which he justified the piracy on purely Islamic grounds of divinely mandated aggressive jihad against all non-Moslems, made no impression on this commenter.

Karen Armstrong has of course similarly argued that the vast Moslem conquests of the seventh century had nothing to do with Islam; the armies that swept across Palestine, Syria, Mesopotamia, Persia, and northern Africa and subjected them to Islamic rule were merely conquerors who happened to be Moslem. And then consider the fact that probably the majority of America's "intellectual" class follow Armstrong's ideas.

Such is the continuing power (I'm almost tempted to call it a supernatural power, though of the dark kind) of the modern West's suicidal denial of the truth about Islam.

 But why the denial in the face of overwhelming evidence that Islam is a violent, aggressive form of tyranny, that it is so by its very nature?  We have 14 centuries of Islamic history and aggression to draw from, the statements and bloody example of the "prophet" himself, the ongoing wars and terrorism in the world today, the statements of the terrorists, Imams and Islamic leaders, and of course, the Islamic holy texts themselves.  Amidst the mounting death toll, it would seem sheer folly to disbelieve that Islam is inherently violent, intolerant, hateful and evil.  In spite of this, D. Charles and other apologists continue to insist that Islam is benign.  Who are we to believe, D. Charles and Karen Armstrong, or our own lying eyes?

I think there are some, mostly those on the left, who are unable to face the unpleasant reality of "the clash of civilizations," that our future is likely to be one of war for survival against a determined foe, or one of dhimmitude and darkness.  So they go into denial.  The worst of these deniers is the 9/11 "Truthers," who insist that the 9/11 attack on America was "an inside job," and not perpetrated by Muslims at all.

However, denial and wishful thinking will not alter basic reality, no matter how fervently the Islamic apologists wish it would.

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