MY ANSWER TO "A GERMAN'S VIEW ON ISLAM"

I recently received an Email on the threat from Islam and Muslim refugees entitled: 

“A German’s View on Islam” credited to Dr. Emanuel Tanya [sic]. 

I remember reading something nearly identical to this but attributed to another person, so I searched for it on Snopes.com and found this:

A German's View On Islam. Dr Emanuel Tanya. Is this a true publication?

Origins:  On 21 February 2006, Canadian Paul Marek published on his blog Celestial Junk an article titled "Why the Peaceful Majority is Irrelevant." [article link: http://cjunk.blogspot.com/2006/02/why-peaceful-majority-is-irrelevant.html]

In passages such as the following, Marek's essay warned about the dangers of Islamic fanaticism and dismissed as irrelevant the notion that the overwhelming majority of Muslims are peaceful: 

“We are told again and again by "experts" and "talking heads" that Islam is the religion of peace, and that the vast majority of Muslims just want to live in peace. Although this unquantified assertion may be true, it is entirely irrelevant. It is meaningless fluff, meant to make us feel better, and meant to somehow diminish the specter of fanatics rampaging across the globe in the name of Islam. The fact is, that the fanatics rule Islam at this moment in history. It is the fanatics who march. It is the fanatics who wage any one of 50 shooting wars worldwide. It is the fanatics who systematically slaughter Christian or tribal groups throughout Africa and are gradually taking over the entire continent in an Islamic wave. It is the fanatics who bomb, behead, murder, or honor-kill. It is the fanatics who take over mosque after mosque. It is the fanatics who zealously spread the stoning and hanging of rape victims and homosexuals. The hard quantifiable fact is, that the "peaceful majority" is the "silent majority" and it is cowed and extraneous.

“History lessons are often incredibly simple and blunt, yet for all our powers of reason we often miss the most basic and uncomplicated of points. Peace-loving Muslims have been made irrelevant by the fanatics. Peace-loving Muslims have been made irrelevant by their silence. Peace-loving Muslims will become our enemy if they don’t speak up, because like my friend from Germany, they will awake one day and find that the fanatics own them, and the end of their world will have begun. Peace-loving Germans, Japanese, Chinese, Russians, Rwandans, Bosnians, Afghans, Iraqis, Palestinians, Somalis, Nigerians, Algerians, and many others, have died because the peaceful majority did not speak up until it was too late. As for us who watch it all unfold, we must pay attention to the only group that counts; the fanatics who threaten our way of life.”

Marek's article has been republished in books such as How to Achieve a Heaven on Earth and Getting Through: How to Talk to Non-Muslims About the Disturbing Nature of Islam, and it has been widely circulated on the Internet under the title "A German's View on Islam." However, in the latter form the essay has most commonly been attributed to the late Dr. Emanuel Tanay, a psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor who isn't German (he was born in Poland and immigrated to the United States) and had nothing to do with writing it.

It is uncertain how Dr. Tanay's name became attached to Internet-circulated versions of this essay. Some versions of the message state Tanay was one of the people (perhaps the first) who forwarded Marek's article to a wider audience, but this explanation does not seem likely and has not been proved.      [From www.snopes.com at this link: http://www.snopes.com/politics/soapbox/germanislam.asp ]

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My response. . .

I've seen this email before. Of course what it says, in general, is true: it is always the “silent majority” who allows by their inaction the evil in the world to increase. But what is striking to me about Mr. Marek’s full post (wherein he cites the tens of millions of deaths as a result of WWII and Communist purges) is that the vast majority of all of those tens of millions of people killed in WWII were not killed by Muslims, but by Christians and atheists and Buddhists or the followers of Shinto.

The obvious response is that governments orchestrated the bloodbath of WWII and all the wars before and after. Their participants were aligned with one religion or another or with no religion in the case of Communist nations, but the nations who responded with their armies in the conflicts that have consumed so many precious lives throughout history are the agents of death and destruction. The soldiers, regardless of their beliefs, are only pawns.

So in reality, the only way for Muslims as a standing army in countries bent on destroying the West to succeed would be if said Muslim countries could actually muster a viable army and equip it with arms and then successfully wage wars or military assaults on their "enemies." Only ISIS is in that category and they are isolated in Syria and Iraq and exist solely as a result of the civil war in Syria and the power vacuum left in Iraq when the US and its allies pulled out.

And the fact that the under-equipped and outnumbered Kurds have been more than capable of countering and defeating ISIS in their military engagements speaks volumes about the long-term ability of ISIS to seize and hold territory against a committed opposition. Add to this the fact that ISIS is spending nearly all its time and attention on killing other Muslims, not Christians. All other Muslim countries engaged in warfare are similarly targeting mostly other Muslims from different sects. 

Christians who desire the extermination of Islam and Muslims should be rejoicing at this information, and it's no secret that Christian-led and atheist-led governments are happily selling arms to any and all Muslim nations who can afford to buy them. So while Islam represents a cultural and ideological "threat" to western European and Christian societies based on the perceived differences (real or imagined) between Islam and Christianity, this is nowhere near the threat level that resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of people (nearly all non-Muslims) from the 1930s-1970s. 

Nor are there any forms of terrorism or warfare being propagated by Muslims (against themselves or anyone else) that even comes close to matching the civilizational destruction caused by the Western nations in the two Gulf Wars and by Russia and Syria in the current civil war in Syria, where close to half-a-million Syrians -- most of them innocent women, children, and non-militia members -- have been killed. If you wanted a conspiracy theory about the West's plan to eradicate Muslims from the world through wars and the fostering of sectarian Muslim violence, you wouldn't have to dig too deeply to find your damning evidence.

So it kind of amazes me how some people can raise the alarm over an influx of Muslim refugees -- created by the instability of their war-torn countries to which the West has much blood on its hands -- and signal the doom and downfall of their own countries when they do nothing to help prevent the death and destruction in Muslim countries which produce these unwanted refugees in the first place. 

Go back a decade or so before Syria, Tunisia, Egypt, Iraq, Libya and Yemen were embroiled in their political and military upheavals and you'll see tens of millions of Muslims living relatively peacefully in relatively stable societies. True, most were ruled by iron-fisted dictators, but the reality is that America and other Western nations, as well as Russia, were often instrumental in putting those dictators in power and were more than happy to turn a blind eye to these dictators' evils and repression of their respective populations. 

So it's hardly a surprise when these same populations rise up and demand their freedoms the first chance they get. Sadly, power vacuums are rarely, if ever, filled by altruistic, kind-hearted, benevolent statesmen who love their countries, but usually by murderous tyrants and despots who only crave self-enrichment and power. 

The answer to this whole debacle is simple: the US and all those who seek to end the problem of radical Islam need to empower the reformist and moderate forms of Islam such as the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community (visit Alislam.org, MuslimsForPeace.org, KhalifaofIslam.com) and also work to re-educate the Muslim world that, for the past half-century, has been fed a steady diet of hate and ignorance from the Saudi-funded madrasas (Islamic schools) teaching their radical Wahhabi-Salafi doctrines and intolerant, violent Jihadist version of Islam. (I know, easier said than done, but that’s the real solution in a nutshell.)

Then, at the same time, the US and her allies must stop supporting -- with their dollars, guns, and silence -- the root sponsors of this self-destructive interpretation of Islam. Then, after a generation of Muslims has been raised without this Saudi-financed Wahhabi-Salafi doctrinal cancer in Islam, you will see the Islam that existed for at least a millennia after the birth of Islam in the 7^th century AD. 

History is the best barometer of what is actually true -- be it in a culture, a philosophy, a religion or a civilization. Barbarism never produces civilization. Even a cursory review of Islamic history demonstrates a worldview and reality where education, literacy, science, freedom of religion and interfaith tolerance, freedom to dissent, and technological advancements were all in evidence for well over a thousand years. This was not the result of the absence of true Islamic thinking and government in the world, but the presence of true Islamic thinking and government in the world.

Of course, Islamic history is not pristine, let alone perfect. As I often remark, “Religion would be great if there were no people in it.” But because people are often driven by fear, greed, insecurity and hate, it is no surprise that you have in a religion’s Holy Book all the good things it commands its followers to do and live by, and then you have the lives they often choose to live according to their own lower, animalistic natures instead of their own higher, moral and spiritual selves. It’s a wonder God puts up with us at all, given our frequent disobedience, arrogance, and outright disbelief in Him and His prophets and His Teachings. But all that is on us, not God.

All Holy Scriptures give the same core of ethical and moral tenets so we can freely choose to strive to better ourselves instead of butcher each other. Thank God I believe in a God Who is Patient and Forgiving or we would all be doomed and in deep spiritual trouble. The liability and responsibility, of course, are still firmly and entirely laid upon our shoulders. And this goes for the believers in any Faith, or for atheists who believe in no god but subscribe nonetheless to an ethical code and the sense of having an innate moral compass to be adhered to and not ignored.

For those who do believe in a Higher Power, God never forces us to do or be good. If He did, we would be little more than meat puppets. God gives us the freedom of choice and also the responsibility for the consequences of our choices. It is the key moral and spiritual arrangement between God and mankind that validates our purpose in this life.

The downside of this is that it does not remove evil from the world. But that, in fact, is also the upside as well and the main point of our existence. In whatever form evil takes and in whatever religious garb evil people seek to cloak themselves in, combating and defeating evil is our job, not God’s. That is why Islam clearly states that it is a Muslim’s duty to stand up to and fight against tyranny and evil – especially when it hides behind the name of Islam.

It would be nice to believe that Muslims can and will do this by and for themselves, but the reality, like the reality of Hitler and Nazi Germany, forebodes otherwise. When someone is dying from cancer – one they may vociferously deny is afflicting them in the first place – it becomes incumbent on others to do whatever they can to help affect a cure. The silent majority on every side of the issue needs to step up and speak out and be proactive and not just reactive. As the famous adage goes, “All that is required for the triumph of evil is for the good to do nothing.”

So decrying a “problem” is good in that you call attention to it, but unless you understand the problem and how it came to be and what you can actually do about it, you will find yourself woefully ill-equipped to solve it. This is the case with almost all the articles and essays and blogs and videos out there calling Islam a “terrorist religion” out to destroy the West.

The “solutions” presented are usually knee-jerk, reactionary, emotionally or religiously biased, and they invariably suffer from faulty and misinformed perspectives mired in fear and ignorance that only exacerbate the situation, making real, substantive and effective responses nearly impossible to achieve. The danger of this is obvious and often lost in the din of alarm bell rhetoric and the stampede of the frightened herd.

And it is this danger of rushing headlong into a hasty and flawed reaction to the very real problem of ”Islamist” terrorism that will doom the fight against it from the very start. As in any battle with an unpredictable opponent, the secret to winning depends on understanding your adversary, knowing the geography and pitfalls of the battlefield, and having the knowledge and resources to thoroughly defeat your enemy.

In this battle, the weaponry is overwhelmingly ideological and not military. The physical fight is always the “Lesser Jihad” – while the “Greater Jihad” is the much more difficult challenge to heal the hearts and minds of those infected with the deadly myopia of extremist, radical Islam. But that battle can be won. It must be won. The consequences are too dire to contemplate if we – Muslims and our religious and secular allies – fail to act. There is no room anymore for a “silent majority” on either side. In that respect Paul Marek is right.