The gay-killing, female-genital-mutilating, Holocaust-endorsing moderates

Glenn’s link to this discussion of a New York Times assessment of Holocaust-denying Islamist Yasir Qadhi (“the new face of ‘moderate’ American Islam”) just stuck in my craw yesterday. Not just because Yasir Qadhi is anything but a moderate, but because of the pattern it represents.

The New York Times has pattern of whitewashing radical Islamists by calling them moderate. A perfect example was an apologetic account of Yusuf Qaradawi’s triumphal speech which Professor Jacobson linked last month.    

Reading the Times account again this morning, I got the creepy feeling that I was reading a puff piece: 

As the uprising here intensified in recent weeks, Sheik Qaradawi had used his platform to urge Egyptians to rise up against Mr. Mubarak. His son, Abdul-Rahman Yusuf al-Qaradawi, is an Egyptian poet who supported the revolution, and, though Sheik Qaradawi is considered a religious traditionalist, three of his daughters hold doctoral degrees, including one in nuclear physics.

Scholars who have studied his work say Sheik Qaradawi has long argued that Islamic law supports the idea of a pluralistic, multiparty, civil democracy.

But he has made exceptions for violence against Israel or the American forces in Iraq. “You call it violence; I call it resistance,” said Prof. Emad Shahin of the University of Notre Dame, an Egyptian scholar who has studied Sheik Qaradawi’s work and was in Tahrir Square for his speech Friday.

“He is enormously influential,” Mr. Shahin added. “His presence in the square today cemented the resolve of the demonstrators to insist on their demands from the government.”

Egyptians streamed back into Tahrir Square, the epicenter of the revolution, for a rally that was part prayer service, part celebration and part political protest. State television put attendance at two million.

A raucous spirit of flag-waving celebration prevailed. Women in full face veils painted their daughters’ faces in the colors of the Egyptian flag. Young men danced to thrumming drum beats on balconies, lampposts and trucks. There were many signs bearing the dual images of a crescent and cross, the symbol of Muslim-Christian unity.

What sort of a unifier is this new champion of moderate Islam?

A man who leads millions of Egyptians to chant against the Jews? A man who is on record as calling for killing the Jews “down to the very last one“?

Earlier today I was sent a couple of links to two much more sobering analyses of Qaradawi.

From a discussion of his philosophy and background:

Many consider Yusuf al-Qaradawi to be the most influential living Islamic scholar. He is viewed as the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood and, as Gilles Kepel, a recognized expert on Islamic movements, asserts, he “sets the tone for Arabic language Sunni sermons across the world.”[1] He is a highly controversial Islamist and has attracted considerable media attention for his support for suicide bombings, his sometimes draconian views on women’s issues, such as recommending female circumcision, and his approval of executing homosexuals. Paradoxically he is also known for his moderate views on certain key issues including: allowing men and women to study together, endorsing Muslim participation in Western democracies, and condemning al-Qaeda style attacks such as 9/11.

That’s moderate?

Bear in mind that Qaradawi didn’t think Bin Laden had been proven guilty, and that in any event, Bush was just as guilty! And for all we know, it was those Jew Neocons who did it!

His moderation has to be seen in context.

And I guess once women have their genitals removed and gays are executed, it becomes a moderate position to allow men and women to study together.

Perhaps the moderation of Qaradawi was what prompted Andrew Sullivan to label Glenn Reynolds “hard right” for linking Prof Jacobson’s criticism of him.

At the time I snarked,

Great. So it’s now “hard right” to object to (or even link objections to) a million anti-Semites rabidly yelling in the street.

If objecting to mob anti-Semitism is “hard right,” then what, pray tell, would “hard left” be? Breaking into chants of “DEATH TO THE JEWS”?

How am I supposed to make sense of this? Should I just get with Andy’s plan, and stop calling Glenn a libertarian?

Now I don’t know what to think. Maybe I wasn’t snarky enough. If guys like Yasir Qadhi and Yusuf Qaradawi are “moderate,” while libertarians like Glenn are “hard right,” what am I to call myself? A small-l-libertarian-hard-rightist against gay-killing, female-genital-mutilating, Holocaust-endorsing moderates? 

These things are baffling.

And Qaradawi is troubling. In painting him as a moderate, the mainstream media — both here and in Egypt — are not only whitewashing his vicious bigotry and extreme anti-Semitism, but they are also going out of their way to ignore the similarities between him and the Ayatollah Khomeini:

His February 18 sermon was a hybrid of religious vision and nationalist concerns. [1] He began by altering a formulaic element of the opening of the Friday sermon by addressing both Muslims and Christians. He then proceeded to analyze the failures of the Mubarak regime and called for a civil state (dawla madaniyya) [2], the lifting of the Emergency law (in effect since Anwar al-Sadat’s 1981 assassination), and the freeing of political prisoners. Yet, his sermon was also deeply inflected by specifically Islamic religious language and imagery. He declared that “Tahrir square should be renamed the Square of the Martyrs of January 25th” and that the revolution was not just a “victory over Mubarak…but [also a victory] over oppression (dhulm), falsehood (batil), [and] thieves (sarika)….” While the frames of martyrdom, oppression and falsehood are not uniquely Islamic, their political usage comes out of the struggle of Egypt’s Islamist opposition, both violent and non-violent. They paint a binary between freedom, truth and ethics on the one hand and oppression, tyranny and theft on the other. Three days later, Qaradawi’s opposition to oppression and falsehood was put into practice. He argued that Gaddafi’s despotism was a sin against God, and that, because there is “no obedience to the created one [i.e. man] in sinning against the Creator,” Gaddafi’s blood was licit. He then, quite animatedly, called on any Libyan soldier “to neither listen nor obey” (aleh yasma’u wa le yuti’u) and stated: “I issue a fatwa (ufti) to the officers and troops who are able to kill Mu’mar al-Qadaffi….to do so.” [3]

The parallels between Khomeini and Qaradawi are striking. Both returned from exile to galvanize a revolution through powerful religious imagery and tropes that depict the former regime as an affront to God. Both were successful in animating the masses, In addition, Qaradawi, like Khomeini before him, appeared to be angling for a leadership role within the revolution. Finally, no transnational “death Fatwa” has been issued by a prominent Islamic scholar since 1989 when Khomeini declared British novelist Salman Rushdie’s blood licit for his book, Satanic Verses. Yet, notwithstanding these similarities, the parallels are not exact. Qaradawi has never articulated a vision of Islamic leadership that is theocratic, whereas Khomeini’s Vilayet al-Faqih (Guardianship of the Jurists) was fundamentally theocratic. Moreover, Qaradawi, unlike Khomeini, is not considered a candidate for political office.

Nonetheless, al-Masri al-Yom seemingly ignored the parallels that do exist between Khomeini and Qaradawi. The newspaper praised Qaradawi in a February 19 editorial titled, “Al-Qaradawi, in one of the Greatest Speeches of the Modern Age, Asserts the Continuation of the Revolution.” The editorial proceeded to compare this speech to famous orations by such figures as Martin Luther King, Mahatma Ghandi and Nelson Mandela. [4] It declared that Qaradawi’s sermon was “not just to the millions in Tahrir square, but also to all Egyptians, Arabs, Muslims and the world, so that it will know what true Islam is.” It declared that any parallels with Khomeini were absurd because “Khomeini returned to rule and erect a religious state, whereas al-Qaradawi returned to express the revolution of the Egyptian people, Muslim and Christian, for the sake of the building of a civil state…” Following Qaradawi’s February 21 fatwa, the paper’s editorial page–known for its diversity–overlooked the parallel between Khomeini and Qaradawi in their “death Fatwas.” Indeed, the only response in the paper to this fatwa was an approving cartoon by Jamal al-Sharbini in which Qaradawi says “We permit the spilling of al-Qadaffi’s blood in response to the killing of protestors” and a questioner asks, “But what about Mubarak and the blood of the martyrs of January 25th 2011?” [5]

How should we understand this “non-reaction” to the parallels between Qaradawi and Khomeini?

Excellent question, and I don’t have the answer. But I do smell a coverup. Perhaps the idea is to moderate him by emphasizing his “good” points while covering up his bad points, while comparing him to Ghandi, King, and Mandela.

Who knows? Maybe he’ll get the Nobel prize like Yasser Arafat, and he can join his fellow luminaries like Obama and Gore in a chorus of “Kumbaya.”

And what about his Fatwa against Gaddafi? Would he seem to loooove us if we helped carry it out? Would that make him more moderate? I realize that sometimes the principle of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” has to be applied, but that does that have to mean that the enemy of my enemy has to become a moderate?

I keep thinking back to our wartime alliance with Stalin against Hitler. It might have been necessary, but did he have to be whitewashed into kindly old “Uncle Joe”? (The NYT was involved with that too. Surprise.)

Not that I am against finding a little moderation when actual moderation is present. But to go looking for moderation in evil and finding it when it isn’t creates problems.

You know, a little moderation here, and a little moderation there, and pretty soon you’re talking real moderation.

In evil.