Are We Fighting Islam Or Islamofascism? There Is A Difference!

Olaf from extrablog, a blog from germany and a new friend recently sent a track back to the Photoshop efforts below contributed by Jeremy Brown/Dr. Sanity. Too, Olaf asks a good question and one that I think deserves an answer. His question, as presented in his blog is:

Would you try to enrage the Ummah, all the Muslim communities in the world, if your brother, your husband or your friend was in Iraq or in Afghanistan?"

The Enduring Freedom Coalition fights terrorism, not Islam. So shouldn't we. Many Muslim nations are our coalition partners: Djibouti, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, United Emirates, Yemen and more."

First, let me say that I have the utmost respect for anyone's faith if that faith is expressed in terms of kindness, charity and love. I also expect that the faith of others will exhibit the same tolerance for my faith, and the faith of still others.

Having said that, let us take a look at the Ummah. The Ummah is described as the worldwide community of those of the Moslem faith and the question directly asks would I deliberately insult the worldwide community of Muslims if I had a relative or friend fighting in Iraq or Afghanistan. The underlying question is will the Muslim faithful harm my relatives or friends if they are offended by me. There in lies the threat. If insulted, will my friends/family be harmed by those who are insulted? Those are the terms of the debate. Do we knuckle down to the threat of violence by a so called community of believers?

Going back to the 80's, we have the Marine Corps barracks bombing, the WTC (This coming Sunday is the 13th Anniversary of the WTC bombing in '93), the US Embassies in Africa being bombed, the USS Cole, Military Barracks in Saudi Arabia, and of course 9/11. These attacks were not initiated by Baptists, Anabaptists, Confuscians, Buddists, Methodists, Catholics, Hindus, anamists, pagans, Mormans atheists or agnostics. They were carried out by Muslims of a particular mindset that we call Islamofascists. Those rioting and burning and killing and threatening to behead the insulters are also Muslims upset that someone had the temerity to draw cartoons of Mohammad. The countries that Olaf mentions, while nominal partners in the so Called Global War On Terror (GWOT) have neither discouraged nor put down the riots. In fact, many "official" spokesmen (read Imams) of some of these countries continue to urge greater violence up to and including offering a bounty of a million dollars for the execution of one of the cartoonists. So, are they complicit in the rioting and threats of violence, or are they willing dupes or are they really, part of the problem all along?

In normal circumstances, I deplore making fun of the faith of others. But these circumstances are not normal. One does not react to a damned cartoon with threats of beheading. One does not react to a damned cartoon with acts of war (attacking and burning the Danish Embasssy). One does not react to a damned cartoon by murdering people of other faiths (Christians murdered by Muslims in Nigeria = and in this case, the Christians rioting back and killing Muslims).

Islam is a faith, no more, no less. In my faith, Islam is wrong, that the Son of God is Jesus the Christ. But not everyone shares my faith and that is OK. I did not riot or burn or kill when Piss Christ was published, when a rapper wraps a crown of thorns around his head for a Rolling Stone issue and I have no respect for those that would. The threat of violence by the Islamofascists because they are "offended" is offensive to anyone who is at least semi-civilized.

The countries mentioned by Olaf are indeed part of the GWOT, but they are also part and parcel of the problem. Olaf, take a look at some of the cartoons published in the pseudo-official papers of the countries you mentioned. The slurs against Christians, Jews and other Non-Muslims are horrific. Yet, are we not THEIR partners in the GWOT? Do they not have an equal obligation to not "offend" us? In order to obtain respect, one must give respect. Respect is not the fear of reprisal, respect is the full acknowledgement that one does not have to believe as you do in order to be accorded the same rights as someone that does.

I have no quarrel with Islam. My quarrel is with any Muslim that is not willing to give the same respect that he or she demands. My quarrel is with those that believe that it is ok to toss out death sentences against those that do not cower in fear of the threat of violence. My quarrel is with Islamofascism. There really is a difference.

UPDATE: Captain Ed puts it pretty well methinks:

In fact, most Muslim journalists who have criticized the response to the cartoons find themselves either in jail or facing arrest, and the article itself provides a very telling look into why. The isolation and persecution of these journalists show that the riots and demonstrations represent mainstream Islam, despite the multicultural pablum given by most pundits over this eruption. Friends and relatives of these reporters remain silent for fear of violent retribution. A significant moderate faction within Islam has been cowed into almost-complete silence by the ascendant violent and radical factions."

Islam is under tremendous pressure and the Islamofascists are winning. The Moderate Muslims are unable or unwilling to confront their violent and vicious coreligionists, some significant percentage are basically in agreement that all non-Muslims are inferior, and there is no tradition of democracy or self-governance to fall back on."

UPDATE # 2: David Bernstein writing in the Volokh Conspiracy weighs in with a quote from his You Can't Say That that addresses the paucity of the argument of not offending (Muslims, or any others for that matter):

One price of living in a free society is having to tolerate those who intentionally or unintentionally offend others. The current trend, however, is to give offended parties a legal remedy, so long as the offense can be construed as "discrimination." Yet the more the American legal system offers people remedies for offense, the more they are likely to feel offended. This is true for two reasons. First, as economists point out, when you subsidize something, you get more of it. Therefore, if the legal remedies of antidiscrimination law, particularly monetary remedies, subsidize feelings of outrage and insult, we will get more feelings of outrage and insult, a net social loss. Second, economists have also noted the psychological endowment effect, which, in effect, means that people tend to consider something they own to be more valuable than it would be if they did not own it. Similarly, once people are endowed with a right, they tend to overvalue it and react passionately when it is interfered with.

Unfortunately, Americans increasingly coddle and even reward the hypersensitive, perversely encouraging ever more hypersensitivity. In one notorious incident, a Washington, DC city official was forced to resign for using the word "niggardly" at a meeting because the word sounded like a racial epithet, even though it is actually an innocent synonym of Scandinavian origin for "miserly." It should hardly be surprising, then, that people are suing for and winning damages when they are offended by colleagues at work, when they are excluded by private clubs or turned down as roommates, or when they are fired from church-run schools after reneging on promises to obey church doctrine. Neither should it be surprising that legislatures are increasingly succumbing to the temptation to expand the laws to protect from discrimination every group with a grievance, including the vertically challenged (short people, protected in San Francisco and Michigan), the body-pierced (among those protected in various jurisdictions, including Washington, DC, that ban discrimination based on personal appearance), recovering drug addicts (protected by the federal Americans with Disabilities Act and local equivalents), and the Hell's Angels (protected, along with other motorcycle gang members, in Minnesota).

Preserving the liberalism that defines the United States, and the civil liberties that go with it, requires Americans to show a certain level of virtue, including a phlegmatic tolerance of those who intentionally or unintentionally offend and sometimes�when civil liberties are implicated�even of those who blatantly discriminate. A society that undercuts civil liberties in pursuit of the "equality" offered by a statutory right to be free from all slights, protected by draconian antidiscrimination laws, will ultimately end up empty-handed with neither equality nor civil liberties to show for its efforts. The violation of civil liberties required to achieve this kind of equality will diminish constitutional restraints on the government, while the additional power garnered by the government, introduced for noble reasons, will end up in the hands of people who use it to promote their own interests. In these days of the Oprahization of public discourse, when even presidential candidates swear that they feel the public’s pain, asking Americans to display a measure of fortitude in the face of offense and discrimination is asking for a lot. But in the end, it is a small price to pay for preserving civil liberties."

I see it like this. You can sleep in peace and comfort today, and pay the price later when you wake up in hell�and I am not talking about that hell that Satan lives in, but the hell that Islam intends to bring to the whole world soon. Or you can sacrifice your peace now and make sure that future generations will never have to fight. The choice is yours."