The Silent Majority or Dissent Crushed

Adam Brodsky writes of the problems within the Muslim community in speaking out against the insanities perpetrated in the name of Islam. The suicide bombings. The terrorist attacks. The daily carnage in places like Iraq, where the overwhelming majority of violence is Muslim on Muslim. And the reason that so many of the cannot speak out? Fellow Muslims who threaten, cajole, and otherwise stifle the words of those who speak out against the injustices:

Nonie Darwish knows one reason why: Their fellow Muslims won't let them.

Darwish, who comes from Egypt and was born and raised a Muslim, was set to tell students at Brown University about the twisted hatred and radicalism she grew to despise in her own culture. A campus Jewish group, Hillel, had contacted her to speak there Thursday.

But the event was just called off.

Muslim students had complained that Darwish was "too controversial." They insisted she be denied a platform at Brown, and after contentious debate Hillel agreed.

Weird: No one had said boo about such Brown events as a patently anti-Israel "Palestinian Solidarity Week." But Hillel said her "offensive" statements about Islam "alarmed" the Muslim Student Association, and Hillel didn't want to upset its "beautiful relationship" with the Muslim community.

Plus, Brown's women's center backed out of co-sponsoring the event, even though it shares Darwish's concerns about the treatment of women. Reportedly, part of the problem was that Darwish had no plans to condemn Israel for shooting Arab women used by terrorists as human shields, or for insufficiently protecting Israeli Arab wives from their husbands.

In plugging their ears to Darwish, Brown's Muslim students proved her very point: Muslims who attempt constructive self-criticism are quickly and soundly squelched - by other Muslims.

In the US, it is threats of violence and intimidation. Overseas, it includes murder, rape, and the regular and repeated use of violence to stifle any criticism of the acts of Muslims.

From Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses controversy that forced him into seclusion following death threats issued by the Islamists in Tehran to the rioting around the world following the publication of cartoons in the obscure publication Jyllands Posten, the Islamists have forced not only Westerners to subsume their freedom of speech and expression, but have silenced those within the Muslim community who would speak out.

Instead, conspiracy theories flourish with Jews controlling world events - everything from 9/11 to the war in Iraq, electoral outcomes, and the continuing problems in Islamist countries around the world because of their horrid economic and social policies that functionally and completely deny 50% of the population rights that Americans and those in the West take for granted. Misogyny is a regular feature of Islamist dialogue, and yet Western feminists do not tackle the problem as seriously as they should.

Then, there's the issue of those groups that have proclaimed themselves the spokesgroups for Muslims. CAIR to be specific. It's a group whose leaders have repeatedly come under investigation for ties to terror groups, whose members have been deported on terror related charges, and have otherwise ignored Islamic terrorism and instead blamed the victims for the violence. Jihad Watch and LGF have much more on CAIR's activities.

The thing is, that if the West countered the jihadist ideologies, it could defeat the Islamists on our terms:

The United States could discredit Al Qaeda in the Muslim world by challenging its violent Islamist ideology and muzzling its leading proponents, an independent report released on Thursday said.
The 364-page study, published by the RAND Corp think tank, described Al Qaeda’s Islamist ideology of violent resistance as a “global revolutionary creed” akin to the Marxism-Leninism philosophy that the West defeated with “a robust political warfare” campaign during the Cold War. “If the ideology is countered and discredited, Al Qaeda and its universe will wither and die,” concluded the two-part study, entitled “Beyond Al Qaeda” and funded by the Air Force. “It follows that a comprehensive US strategy needs to move beyond the boundaries of conventional counterterrorism theory and practice, and address these ideological and political factors,” it said.

The study’s authors recommended the Bush administration expand “decapitation strategies” to include ideologues, holding up as examples decisions by British and Indonesian authorities to either jail or deport hard-line Muslim clerics. “Preventing Al Qaeda’s ideological mentors from continuing to provide theological justification for terrorism could expedite the movement’s ideological deterioration,” they concluded. Much of the research in the RAND study was completed in 2004 but has never been released.

The problem is overcoming the Islamists grip on the Muslim community and their inability to reform from within due to the threat of violence that hangs over any reformer attempts.