Motus Mentis

Some of each, I suppose. I’m talking about W. Lewis Amselem’s latest on Islam over at Diplomad 2.0. It is good strong stuff.

We read:

All religions, of course, have odd and cruel features in their old texts. Islam, however, is unique among major religions for never having had an enlightenment. It has undergone a reformation of sorts, but a retrograde one. In much of the world, Islam now lies closer to its 7th century origins than it did 100 or 200 years ago; it recedes into the past for inspiration and validation.

Quite right. “Radicalism”, in the sense of returning to one’s roots.

Per its fundamental writings and its widespread practices, Islam is about conquest, not coexistence or tolerance.

As for those fundamental writings: one thing that is not well understood by enough people in the West is that Islam’s relation to its sacred text is very different from Christianity’s. The holiest, most unshakable foundation of Islam is the belief that Mohammed is the Messenger of God, and that the Koran is nothing more or less than a literal transcription of God’s own Word. There is not even any question, as there is with the Bible, of errors and ambiguities introduced by translation, because God explicitly and deliberately transmitted his recitation to Mohammed in Arabic. The Koran itself, then, is an aspect of God made physically present in the material world. Many people mistakenly imagine the place of Mohammed in Islam to be analogous to that of Jesus in Christianity, and the Koran to the Bible, but this is mistaken; Mohammed, though a very special man indeed, was only a man, while in Christianity Jesus is very much more: He is believed to be God Himself, descended to suffer among us as a man. In the same way, the Koran is very much more than a Book; it is an extrusion of Allah into this world — given to us, as Jesus was, for our salvation. The Koran is therefore sacred to Muslims in the same way that Jesus is to Christians. (And when you defile or disrespect a Koran, you are not defiling a book; you are defiling God.)

Koranic literalism, therefore, is not a “radical” approach to Islam. Koranic literalism is Islam. This will not change.

Diplomad again:

Our immigration policies must change dramatically. Just as we, at one time, excluded Nazis, Fascists, and Communists, we now have the right to exclude practitioners of the totalitarian cult known as Islam. We have the right and obligation to fight and to exclude those committed to the violent overthrow of our way of life. The West derives no benefit from importing millions of Muslims. It is not a question of whether they belong to ISIS, AQ, Boko, or JI. Their core beliefs pose the threat as we have seen from the large number of native-born Muslims in the West who have gone jihadi–including, for example, Somalis here in the US. At a minimum, we do not need to import more Muslims. The Syrian refugee crisis is a scam and we must recognize it as such.

Quite so. I invite readers also to go back and have a look at my own post from last year on this “refugee” issue.