DAR AL HARB - U.S.A.: ISLAMIC HANDMAIDENS IN THE MSM SILENCE TRUE 'MODERATE' MOSLEMS

Moderate Muslims silenced
By Rod Dreher

I've asked myself a thousand times since 9/11: Where are all the moderate Muslims? We're assured that there's a silent majority of Muslims who want nothing to do with the jumped-up jihadists. But those voices are few and far between.

The good news is that the makers of the PBS-commissioned documentary "Islam vs. Islamists: Voices from the Center" found some outspoken moderate Muslims and made a film profiling them and their astonishing courage. The film shows these men mounting a lonely resistance against Muslim leaders in the West who are fronting a false moderate face to the public while using oil money from Gulf Arab sources to make their hard-line version of Islam the norm.

Here's the bad news: PBS refused to air the film as part of its recent "America at the Crossroads" series, even though it had previously been scheduled. I saw a copy of "Islam vs. Islamists" and concluded that it's absolutely vital to informed public debate. That PBS has decided not to air such an important film is shocking.

Or is it? Most of the American media has done a lousy job of critically covering Muslim organizations in this country, of asking serious questions about what their leaders believe and where they get their funding. Groups like CAIR and the Islamic Society of North America are quick to shriek "Islamophobia!" when a journalist points out their connections to radical Islam or asks straightforward questions about what they believe. The idea is to squelch a legitimate and necessary public discussion.

As "Islam vs. Islamists" documents, it's a tactic they use with far less finesse on dissenting Muslims. Tarek Fatah and Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, two of several moderates featured in the film, told me that the Islamophobia canard is useless against them because they are proud, practicing Muslims. That is why it's so important to Islamists to marginalize them. Both men say that they can't get a hearing at many mosques or Islamic institutions because those places have been taken over by Islamists -- adherents to a politicized form of the Islamic faith.

"They've basically turned our mosques into a political party of their own," says Dr. Jasser, a Phoenix physician. "We have nowhere to go to have this debate." He's talking about the discussion regarding their religion and its role in a pluralistic society, especially in this time of war. Dr. Jasser warns that many Muslim denunciations of terrorism are deceptive.

"Terrorism is simply a means. The ends, nobody is debating. The Muslim community has not had a debate about whether or not they endorse the ends of the Islamists" -- namely, an America that is thoroughly Islamicized and built on sharia.

In the film, Dr. Jasser expresses confidence that most American Muslims are not violent but advises that most accept the Islamist view of world politics -- conspiratorial, self-pitying and quick to blame America for all the Muslim world's problems. We also see in the movie a leading Arizona imam denouncing the reasonable and patriotic Dr. Jasser as an "extremist liberal." Which raises a question the film does not answer: how representative of the Muslim mainstream are these Muslim moderates? The truth, as one counterterrorism investigator told me, is that the Jassers and Fatahs are probably in the minority -- "but their voices need to be heard." Indeed. Muslims, especially young ones, need exposure to competing voices from within their own traditions making the case for pluralism.

And the rest of us need to take seriously the warnings these anti-Islamist Muslims are sounding: Muslim leaders' honeyed words when talking to the media and English-speaking audiences do not necessarily make them moderates or friends of peace.

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