Until the Dog Days

I am taking a break from FCP until mid-August or so. It is time to do something closer to the stars. Pepe, Enjoy. Take care, y'all, and as you watch the annointing of our future Chancellor Obama I'll leave you with a basic truth so inconvenient to all Versaillians that they'd rather we go to our grave than they admit it.


"And so it goes. Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a phenomenally brave woman but she is not a “moderate Muslim”: she is an atheist. Irshad Manji is a brilliant dissecter of Islam’s pathologies but she is not a “moderate Muslim”: she is a lesbian and, thus, to almost all her co-religionists, cannot be any kind of Muslim. Dr Wafa Sultan is the Californian psychiatrist who at huge personal risk intellectually clobbered an A-list Sunni scholar live on Al Jazeera, crushed every one of his arguments, and yet nevertheless lost. Why? Here’s the answer:

“I am not a Christian, a Muslim, or a Jew,” Dr Sultan told her interrogator. “I am a secular human being who does not believe in the supernatural…”

“If you are a heretic,” scoffed Dr Ibrahim al-Khouli, “there is no point in rebuking you, since you have blasphemed against Islam, the Prophet, and the Koran.”

In their debate, Wafa Sultan won every point but lost the match. Her innumerable aces only confirmed her opponent’s argument – that to embrace “modernity” (in the western sense) is to lose your faith: Dr Sultan is an incisive intelligent rational woman – and she is no longer Muslim. Signor Allam held out longer than most before concluding that the intellectual straddle required of a “moderate Muslim” is beyond even Larry Craig’s wide stance: “I asked myself how it was possible that those who, like me, sincerely and boldly called for a ‘moderate Islam’,” he said, “ended up being sentenced to death in the name of Islam on the basis of the Koran. I was forced to see that, beyond the contingency of the phenomenon of Islamic extremism and terrorism that has appeared on a global level, the root of evil is inherent in an Islam that is physiologically violent and historically conflictive.” The most “extraordinary and important encounter” in his decision to abandon Islam and embrace Christianity was the Pope’s address at Regensburg – the one that prompted Mr Allam’s (former) co-religionists to demonstrate outside Westminster Abbey calling for the Pontiff’s beheading. The newly baptized Christian knows that he will be targeted for murder, but he was already targeted for murder as a “moderate Muslim”, and, as he sees it, it is better to die for truth than for a tortured contradiction.

What the west calls “moderate Muslims”, Islam regards as apostates. Sometimes, as with Dr Sultan, they’re atheist apostates; sometimes, as with Miss Manji, they’re lesbian apostates; and sometimes, as with Magdi Allam, they’re Christian apostates. To Islam, it doesn’t matter which branch of apostasy you opt for: As the Prophet Mohammed puts it, “Whoever changes his religion, kill him.” All four principal schools of Islamic jurisprudence agree. So do the 36 per cent of young Muslims in Britain who believe apostasy should be punished by death. "