BRADLEY R. GITZ: Islam and the left

In the days after the terrorist attacks in Paris the left quickly moved into its usual defensive crouch regarding the relationship between terrorism and Islam.

Going beyond a refusal to even use the words "radical Islam," Hillary Clinton outdid the rest in the denial sweepstakes when she said "Let's be clear ... Muslims are peaceful and tolerant people and have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism."

Really? "Nothing whatsoever?" Not even a teensy-weeny bit? Not even a smidgen? And if so, just who were those people shooting up Paris? And attacking the World Trade Centers with hijacked airliners on 9/11? Or killing cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo? And ... well, you get the point.

Certainly it is appropriate to say (lest it become true) that we are not at war with 1.5 billion Muslims. And both accurate and prudent to also say that most Muslims are, like most people of other faiths, "peaceful and tolerant." So far, so good.

But what good does it do to outright lie? To claim, in transparently preposterous fashion, that Islam has "nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism?" That the two are completely unrelated?

A thought experiment, which requires at least a small dollop of honesty at the expense of politically correct lockstep: did any of the readers of this column, upon initially hearing of the atrocities in Paris, assume that they were carried out by Hindus, Buddhists or Christians?

No, we pretty much knew the sort who had committed the heinous deeds, and even if we'd been surprised to find we were wrong in this case, we would very likely have been right the next time, and the time after that, and the one after that, too.

So let us, to use Hillary's words, "be clear"--an abundance of evidence indicates that the majority of the world's Muslims don't support terrorism. But it has been reported that the majority of the world's terrorist acts in recent years have been committed by radical Muslims in the name of Islam. And that a difficult to determine but likely higher than we would prefer percentage of Muslims sympathize with the terrorists and their theocratic objectives.

These are facts; not expressions of Islamophobia. And they are facts that the vast majority of both Muslims and non-Muslims, including almost certainly a majority of the American public, knows to be true.

At the root of the left's efforts to ignore the obvious, to shut up the eyes and clap the hands over the ears lest they hear the (presumably irrelevant) cries of "Allahu Akbar," then, is a certain dismal, insulting view of both Muslims and non-Muslims alike.

In the case of the "Muslim world" (a peculiar but common formulation), the underlying liberal assumption is that unless we bend over backwards to absolve Islam of blame for any acts of terrorism committed in its name, hundreds of millions of Muslims will abruptly take offense and join the terrorist ranks.

Put differently, all those "peaceful and tolerant" Muslims are thought to be so highly sensitive that any perceived insult, even purely rhetorical, will bring out their inner terrorist, at which point they would presumably and suddenly cease to be so peaceful and tolerant.

Thus, it isn't the right that actually thinks all Muslims are terrorists, but the left, by virtue of its offensive depiction of them as highly volatile children susceptible upon even modest provocation to the siren call of ISIS. For the left, how we talk about Islam and terrorism is presumably a significant determinant of whether a Muslim becomes a terrorist.

But of course one can't have it both ways--Islam can't be a "religion of peace," as we are so often told, and at the same time have legions of followers who can be easily insulted by cartoons and mere words ("radical Islam") into horrible acts of violence.

The second, perhaps even more offensive assumption in the liberal Islam-terrorism bob and weave is that Americans are inherently and incorrigibly Islamophobic; to such an extent that unless we are "educated" by our liberal, morally enlightened superiors on the peacefulness of Islam we might, out of our reflexive bigotry and nativism, lash out and commit all kinds of unspeakable acts against innocent Muslims.

For the left, if there is a terrorist inside every Muslim just waiting to get out (unless we speak carefully), inside every American is a xenophobic redneck just itching for an excuse to burn down a mosque.

To be fair, the challenge in all this is formidable--how to wage war against a radical minority of Muslims without provoking the very "clash of civilizations" between the West and Islam that the radicals desire.

President Barack Obama, for his part, recently claimed that 99.9 percent of Muslims worldwide reject terrorism.

Alas, a Pew Research survey of Muslim opinion in predominantly Muslim countries found that one in four viewed Hezbollah favorably and one in three viewed Hamas favorably. And only 57 percent had an unfavorable opinion of Al-Qaida (!!).

As the Washington Times' Wesley Pruden put it, "Mathematicians, even math majors, generally regard 57 as less than 99.9."

Yes, Donald Trump and some of the other Republican candidates can be fairly accused of encouraging anti-Muslim hysteria. But the solution isn't to err in the opposite direction, at the expense of truth.

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Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.

Editorial on 11/30/2015

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