The true Islamists are non-Muslims who advocate for Islam. The true Islamists are non-Muslims like Grover Norquist, Eric Holder, General Casey, Joe Sestak, Time magazine, the UN, et al .... non-Muslims and non-Muslim orgs that actively work to spread Islam. That is an Islamist. A muslim is a muslim. Period.
The use of the term Islamist is intellectually dishonest and misleading. Once again, attempting to obscure and confuse the multitude with deceptions manufactured for consumption of non-believers. The global jihad relies heavily on non-Muslims, aka Islamists, to further their nefarious goals.
Daniel Pipes and his wrongheaded ilk like to use the fallacious term Islamist for pious Muslims. There is no such thing. There are secular Muslims and practicing Muslims. As Andrew Bostom so brilliantly revealed in his piece Islamist or Islamic?:
And Robert Spencer weighed in on Turkey's PM Erdogan, who insisted that the term "moderate Islam" was ugly and offensive -- Islam is Islam:Layard’s narrative demonstrates how in mid-19th century parlance, “Islamism” and “Islam” were synonymous, and meant to be equivalent to “Catholicism,” “Protestantism,” and “Judaism”—not to “radical” or “fundamentalist” sects of any of these religions. Moreover, through at least the mid-1950s, scholars devoted to the formal study of Islamic doctrine and history were still referred to as “Islamists.”
Turkey’s current Prime Minister Erdogan, commenting in August, 2007 on the term “moderate Islam,” frequently used in the West to describe his ruling political party, the AKP, stated, “These descriptions are very ugly, it is offensive and an insult to our religion. There is no moderate or immoderate Islam. Islam is Islam and that’s it.” Erdogan’s displeasure is ironic, even somewhat humorous, given the contemporary Western apologetic obsession to recast the terms “Islamism,” and “Islamist,” to denote, exclusively, “radical” or “immoderate” Islam, and its adherents. But the irony of Erdogan’s ire aside, artificial distinctions between “Islamism” and Islam, “Islamist” and Islamic are logically incoherent, obfuscating irrefragable truths about living Islamic dogma, and its modern manifestations.
The 1990 Cairo Declaration, or “Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Islam”—not Islamism—was drafted and ratified by all the Muslim member nations of the Organization of the Islamic—not Islamist—Conference (OIC), a 57 state collective including every Islamic nation on earth. The OIC, currently headed by Turkey’s Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, thus represents the entire Muslim ummah (or global community), and is the largest single voting bloc in the United Nations.
And so in two sentences Erdogan dismisses the concept on which the Western world has placed its hopes of survival and peace.
Islam is Islam. Will this be discussed in the Western media? Will American and European analysts publicly take up the question of whether or not Erdogan is right, and what the implications might be if he is? Or will they ignore this and continue to assume in all their analyses that the opposite is true, and to dismiss as "ideologues" or "Islamophobes" those who point out that influential Muslims like Erdogan are saying things like this?
Which course do you think they'll choose?
Will Western leaders then begin discussing political Islam and its implications openly? Or will they ignore this and continue to pretend that Islam has no inherent or traditional political character, or if it does, it is infinitely malleable anyway, and can be massaged without difficulty into something completely benign?
Which course do you think they'll choose?
