According to Dr. Daniel Pipes, Omar Ahmad, the long-serving chairman of CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, reportedly told a crowd of California Muslims in July 1998, “Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. The Koran ... should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on earth.”

In 2005, three Dallas-area brothers were convicted of supporting terrorism by funneling money to a high-ranking official in the militant Palestinian group Hamas. Ghassan and Bayan Elashi and their company were found guilty of all 21 federal counts they faced: conspiracy, money laundering and dealing in property of a terrorist. Ghassan Elashi was the founder of the Texas chapter of CAIR.

One would normally think that an organization that has convicted terrorist supporters among its members and whose leading members have stated a desire to replace the US Constitution with sharia would be shunned by Western media and political representatives. Unfortunately, that’s not the case.

In August 2006, a poll revealed that most Americans favor profiling of people who look “Middle Eastern” for security screening at locations such as airports and train stations. News wire Reuters stated that the “civil rights and advocacy organization” CAIR protested against this. Ibrahim Hooper, communications director for the CAIR, wanted Americans to solve the problem of Islamic terrorism by cooperating with, well, people such as CAIR: “It’s one of those things that makes people think they are doing something to protect themselves when they’re not. They’re in fact producing more insecurity by alienating the very people whose help is necessary in the war on terrorism,” he said.

The Kentucky office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations has been conducting ”sensitivity training” for FBI agents in Lexington, examining “common stereotypes of Islam and Muslims,” and ways in which to improve interactions with the Muslim community.

Meanwhile, a survey revealed that 81% of Detroit Muslims wanted sharia in Muslim countries. Yehudit Barsky, an expert on terrorism at the American Jewish Committee, warned that mainstream US Muslim organizations are heavily influenced by Saudi-funded extremists. These “extremist organizations continue to claim the mantle of leadership” over American Islam. Over 80 percent of the mosques in the United States “have been radicalized by Saudi money and influence,” Barsky said.

The northern Virginia-based Muslim Students’ Association (MSA) might easily be taken for a benign student religious group. At a meeting in Queensborough Community College in New York in March 2003, a guest speaker named Faheed declared, “We reject the U.N., reject America, reject all law and order. Don’t lobby Congress or protest because we don’t recognize Congress. The only relationship you should have with America is to topple it ... Eventually there will be a Muslim in the White House dictating the laws of Shariah.”

So, what happened to the famous “moderate Muslims” in all this? That’s a question writer Robert Spencer asks, too. Imam Siraj Wahaj is in great demand as a speaker. In 1991, he even became the first Muslim to give an invocation to the U.S. Congress.

However, he has also warned that the United States will fall unless it “accepts the Islamic agenda.” He has lamented that “if only Muslims were clever politically, they could take over the United States and replace its constitutional government with a caliphate.” In the early 1990s he sponsored talks by Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman in mosques in New York City and New Jersey; Rahman was later convicted for conspiring to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993, and Wahaj was designated a “potential unindicted co-conspirator.”

Mr. Spencer notes that “The fact that someone who would like to see the [US] Constitution replaced has led a prayer for those sworn to uphold it is just a symptom a larger, ongoing problem: the government and media are avid to find moderate Muslims -- and as their desperation has increased, their standards have lowered.” The situation is complicated by many factors, including, taqiyya and kitman: “These are Islamic doctrines of religious deception. They originated in Shi’ite Islamic defenses against Sunni Islam, but have their roots in the Qur’an (3:28 and 16:106). Many radical Muslims today work hard to deceive unbelievers, in line with Muhammad’s statement, “War is deceit.”

Professor Walid Phares gives an explanation of such religious deception, part and parcel of Jihad while Muslims are in a weaker position: “Al-Taqiya, from the verb Ittaqu, means linguistically ‘dodge the threat’. Politically it means simulate whatever status you need in order to win the war against the enemy.” “According to Al-Taqiya, Muslims were granted the Shar’iya (legitimacy) to infiltrate the Dar el-Harb (war zone), infiltrate the enemy’s cities and forums and plant the seeds of discord and sedition.

“These agents were acting on behalf of the Muslim authority at war, and therefore were not considered as lying or denouncing the tenets of Islam. They were “legitimate” mujahedeen [holy warriors], whose mission was to undermine the enemy’s resistance and level of mobilization. One of their major objectives was to cause a split among the enemy’s camp. In many instances, they convinced their targeted audiences that Jihad is not aimed at them.”

This deception “has a civilizational, global dimension versus the narrow state interest of the regular Western subversive methods.” “The uniqueness of today’s Taqiya is its success within advanced and sophisticated societies. Taqiya is winning massively because of the immense lack of knowledge among Western elites, both Jewish and Christian.”

Youssef Mohamed E., a 22-year-old Lebanese man, is one of two persons suspected of trying to carry out bomb attacks on regional trains from Cologne, Germany, in July 2006. His fellow students were stunned. They couldn’t imagine how one of their fellow students could be a terrorist, a train bomber. He was a “completely normal guy” said one of them. “He was friendly, polite, inconspicuous,” and he never spoke ill of anyone. The publication of caricatures depicting the Prophet Mohammed was interpreted by Youssef as an insult to Islam by the Western world, and triggered the attempted terror attack.

Muhammad Atta was named by the FBI as the pilot of American Airlines Flight 11, the first plane to crash into the World Trade Center during the September 11, 2001 attacks. He was also a student in Germany, where he was described as quiet, polite and inconspicuous. This strategy of using religious deception, smiling to the infidels while plotting to kill them, has become a common feature of many would-be Jihadists in the West.

According to Robert Spencer, secular clothing is actually in accord with instructions in a captured Al-Qaeda manual to appear to be a secular, assimilated Muslim with no interest in religion. In renting an apartment, “It is preferable to rent these apartments using false names, appropriate cover, and non-Moslem appearance.” And in general: “Have a general appearance that does not indicate Islamic orientation (beard, toothpick, book, [long] shirt, small Koran)....Be careful not to mention the brothers’ common expressions or show their behaviors (special praying appearance, ‘may Allah reward you’, ‘peace be on you’ while arriving and departing, etc.).”

Ambassadors to the Czech Republic from Arab nations and members of the Czech Muslim community were outraged by a documentary aired on ÄŒTV that used hidden camera footage of conversations in a Prague mosque. The footage showed a reporter pretending to be someone interested in converting to Islam. One of members of the mosque said Islamic law should be implemented in the Czech Republic, including the death penalty for adultery. “The result was alarming, and if not for the hidden camera, I would have never had any of this footage,” the journalist said.

An Arabic-speaking journalist had on several occasions visited a large mosque in Stockholm, and noticed that what the imam said in his speech in Arabic didn’t match the Swedish translation. “America rapes Islam,” imam Hassan Mousa roared in Arabic. Minutes later the Swedish translation was ready. Not a word on how America was raping Islam. Imam Mousa said that many Muslims call him an “American friendly” preacher. The mistranslation was because “Arabic is a much richer language than Swedish. It’s impossible to translate everything.”

Examples such as these leave non-Muslims with a very powerful dilemma: How can we ever trust assurances from self-proclaimed moderate Muslims when deception of non-Muslims is so widespread, and lying to infidels is an accepted and established way of hiding Islamic goals? The answer, with all its difficult implications, is: We can’t.

Does this mean that ALL Muslims are lying about their true agenda, all of the time? No, of course not. Some are quite frank about their intentions.

Norway’s most controversial refugee, Mullah Krekar, has said in public that there’s a war going on between the West and Islam, and that Islam will win. “We’re the ones who will change you,” Krekar told. “Just look at the development within Europe, where the number of Muslims is expanding like mosquitoes.”

“Every Western woman in the EU is producing an average of 1.4 children. Every Muslim woman in the same countries is producing 3.5 children. By 2050, 30 percent of the population in Europe will be Muslim.” He claimed that “our way of thinking... will prove more powerful than yours.” He loosely defined “Western thinking” as formed by the values held by leaders of western or non-Islamic nations. Its “materialism, egoism and wildness” has altered Christianity, Krekar claimed.

In The Force of Reason, Italian journalist and novelist Oriana Fallaci recalls how, in 1972, she interviewed the Palestinian terrorist George Habash, who told her that the Palestinian problem was about far more than Israel. The Arab goal, Habash declared, was to wage war “against Europe and America” and to ensure that henceforth “there would be no peace for the West.” The Arabs, he informed her, would “advance step by step. Millimeter by millimeter. Year after year. Decade after decade. Determined, stubborn, patient. This is our strategy. A strategy that we shall expand throughout the whole planet.”

Fallaci thought he was referring simply to terrorism. Only later did she realize that he “also meant the cultural war, the demographic war, the religious war waged by stealing a country from its citizens — In short, the war waged through immigration, fertility, presumed pluriculturalism.”

The US State Department believes that Washington can contain the Muslim Brotherhood and its ilk through dialogue and should avoid any further clash with them, because this “would only fan hatred and incite more attacks against US interests.” The State Department has asked the US Embassy in Cairo to reach out to the Muslim Brotherhood’s leaders as a preliminary step for an organized dialogue.

At the same time, the new Brotherhood leader Muhammad Mahdi Othman ’Akef said in 2004 to Arab media that America is ‘Satan’ and “will soon collapse.” “I have complete faith that Islam will invade Europe and America, because Islam has logic and a mission.” Western authorities are thus trying to “reach out” to an organization that wants to conquer and subdue them.

Besides, exactly what does “dialogue” mean, anyway? Poul E. Andersen, former dean of the church of Odense, Denmark, warns against false hopes of dialogue with Muslims. During a debate at the University of Aarhus, Ahmad Akkari, one of the Muslim participants, stated: “Islam has waged war where this was necessary and dialogue where this was possible. A dialogue can thus only be viewed as part of a missionary objective.”

When Mr. Andersen raised the issue of dialogue with the Muslim World League in Denmark, the answer was: “To a Muslim, it is artificial to discuss Islam. In fact, you view any discussion as an expression of Western thinking.” Andersen’s conclusion was that for Islamists, any debate about religious issues is impossible as a matter of principle. If Muslims engage in a dialogue or debate on religious subjects, this is for one purpose only: To create more room for Islam.

In Britain’s The Spectator, Patrick Sookhdeo writes about the myth of moderate Islam:

“The peaceable verses of the Koran are almost all earlier, dating from Mohammed’s time in Mecca, while those which advocate war and violence are almost all later, dating from after his flight to Medina. Though jihad has a variety of meanings, including a spiritual struggle against sin, Mohammed’s own example shows clearly that he frequently interpreted jihad as literal warfare and himself ordered massacre, assassination and torture. From these sources the Islamic scholars developed a detailed theology dividing the world into two parts, Dar al-Harb and Dar al-Islam, with Muslims required to change Dar al-Harb into Dar al-Islam either through warfare or da’wa (mission).”

“So the mantra ‘Islam is peace’ is almost 1,400 years out of date. It was only for about 13 years that Islam was peace and nothing but peace. From 622 onwards it became increasingly aggressive, albeit with periods of peaceful co-existence, particularly in the colonial period, when the theology of war was not dominant. For today’s radical Muslims — just as for the mediaeval jurists who developed classical Islam — it would be truer to say ‘Islam is war.’”

What is a moderate Muslim? In 2003, the Associated Press touted as a “moderate” a cleric who told Saudi radio that terrorist attacks in his capital violated “the sanctity of Ramadan.” Leading government cleric Sheikh Saleh Al-Fawzan was a member of the Senior Council of Clerics, Saudi Arabia’s highest religious body. He was also the author of the religious books used to teach 5 million Saudi students, both within the country and in Saudi schools abroad — including those in Washington, D.C. “Slavery is a part of Islam,” he said in one tape, adding: “Slavery is part of jihad, and jihad will remain as long there is Islam.” A moderate Muslim by Saudi standards is thus a person who wants to reinstate slavery in the 21st century.

During his speech at the opening of the 10th Session of the Islamic Summit Conference on Oct 16, 2003, Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad of Malaysia stated that: “We are all Muslims. We are all oppressed. We are all being humiliated.” “1.3 billion Muslims cannot be defeated by a few million Jews. There must be a way.” “Today the Jews rule this world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them.”

“They invented and successfully promoted Socialism, Communism, human rights and democracy so that persecuting them would appear to be wrong, so they may enjoy equal rights with others. With these they have now gained control of the most powerful countries and they, this tiny community, have become a world power.” Mahathir talked about how Muslims could win a “final victory,” and recalled the glory days when “Europeans had to kneel at the feet of Muslim scholars in order to access their own scholastic heritage.”

Farish Noor, a Malaysian scholar who specializes in politics and Islam, says that the idea of a secular state is dead in Malaysia. “An Islamic society is already on the cards. The question is what kind of Islamic society this will be.” There is a creeping Islamization of the country, and Islamic police officers routinely arrest unmarried couples for “close proximity.” Yet despite all of this, Malaysia is considered one of the most moderate Muslim majority countries in the world. What does this tell us?

While NATO soldiers are risking their lives to establish a “democratic and moderate” regime in Afghanistan, a former regional governor who oversaw the destruction of two massive 1,500-year-old Buddha statues during the Taliban’s reign was elected to the Afghan parliament. Mawlawi Mohammed Islam Mohammadi was the Taliban’s governor of Bamiyan province when the fifth-century Buddha statues were blown up with dynamite and artillery in March 2001.

In the same, Western-supported, moderate Afghanistan, the police arrested six people for stoning to death an Afghan women accused of adultery. The arrests were made after the interior ministry sent a delegation to a remote village in north-eastern Badakhshan province following reports that the woman was stoned to death. Were they arrested because stoning was barbaric? No. They were arrested because they were carrying out an unauthorized stoning: The mullah who authorized the killing was not a judge.

Ashram Choudhary, Muslim MP in New Zealand, will not condemn the traditional Koran punishment of stoning to death some homosexuals and people who have extra-marital affairs. But the Labour MP - who has struggled with his “role” as the sole parliamentary representative of the local Muslim community — assures that he is not advocating the practice in the West. The question is not just of academic interest. A 23-year-old Tunisian woman was stoned to death near Marseilles, France, in 2004.

Centre Democrat Ben Haddou, a member of Copenhagen’s City Council, has stated: “It’s impossible to condemn sharia. And any secular Muslim who claims he can is lying. Sharia also encompasses lifestyle, inheritance law, fasting and bathing. Demanding that Muslims swear off sharia is a form of warfare against them.”

Read that statement again, and read it carefully. Muslims in the West consider it “a form of warfare against them” if they have to live by our secular laws, not their religious laws. Will they then also react in violent ways to this “warfare” if they don’t get their will? Moreover, since sharia laws ultimately require the subjugation of non-Muslims, doesn’t “freedom of religion” for Muslims essentially entail the freedom to make non-Muslims second-rate citizens in their own countries?

Federal Treasurer Peter Costello said Australian Muslim leaders need to stand up and publicly denounce terrorism in all its forms. Mr. Costello has also backed calls by Prime Minister John Howard for Islamic migrants to adopt Australian values. Mr. Howard caused outrage in Australia’s Islamic community when he said Muslims needed to speak English and show respect to women.

Hammasa Kohistani, the first Muslim to be crowned Miss England, warned that “stereotyping” members of her community was leading some towards extremism. “Even moderate Muslims are turning to terrorism to prove themselves. They think they might as well support it because they are stereotyped anyway. It will take a long time for communities to start mixing in more.”

So, if radical Muslims stage mass-murder attacks against non-Muslims, the non-Muslims must not show any anger because of this, otherwise the moderate Muslims may get insulted and become terrorists, too. Gee, isn’t it comforting to know that there is such a sharp dividing line between moderates and radicals, and that moderate Muslims have such an aptitude for self-criticism?

Unfortunately, Jihad-supporters are allowed to stifle Western defense capabilities by feeding them Politically Correct propaganda. U.K. police officers were given ”diversity training” at an Islamic school southeast of London, the private Jameah Islameah school in East Sussex, that later became the center of a terrorism investigation. The county’s police officers visited the school as many as 15 times for training to improve their awareness of Muslim culture and for advanced training so they could themselves become diversity trainers.

In August 2006, following the unveiling of a plot to blow up several airliners between Britain and the USA, Muslim leaders summoned to talks with the Government on tackling extremism made a series of demands, which included the introduction of sharia law for family matters. Dr Syed Aziz Pasha, secretary general of the Union of Muslim Organisations of the UK and Ireland, said: ‘We told her [the minister] if you give us religious rights, we will be in a better position to convince young people that they are being treated equally along with other citizens.’

As Charles Johnson of blog Little Green Footballs dryly commented, this is an interesting viewpoint: Only by receiving special treatment and instituting a medieval religious legal code can Muslims be treated “equally.”

After the plot against the airliners was uncovered, a large number of UK Muslim groups sent a letter with veiled threats to PM Tony Blair, stating that “It is our view that current British government policy risks putting civilians at increased risk both in the UK and abroad,” and that the British should “change our foreign policy,” in addition to allowing Muslims more sharia. The same thing happened after the bombs in London in 2005.

If we watch closely, we will notice that Muslims are highly organized and have prepared long lists of demands. Every act of terrorism, or Jihad as it really is, is seen as an opportunity to push even greater demands. Radical Muslims and moderate Muslims are allies, not adversaries. The radicals bomb, and the moderates issue veiled threats that “unless we get our will, more such attacks will ensue.” It’s a good cop, bad cop game.

It is true that Jihad is not exclusively about violence, but it is very much about the constant threat of violence. Just like you don’t need to beat a donkey all the time to make it go where you want it to, Muslims don’t have to hit non-Muslims continuously. They bomb or kill every now and then, to make sure that the infidels are always properly submissive and know who’s boss.

Sadly, they frequently tend to get their will, and the donkey, or as in this case, the British, do what the Muslims want. A hospital in northwest England has introduced a new surgical gown modelled on the burka, allowing female Muslim patients to cover themselves completely. The blue “Inter-Faith Gown” is the first of its type in Britain and has being tried out at the Royal Preston Hospital.

Professor Moshe Sharon teaches Islamic History at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. He gives this description of how a temporary truce, a hudna, is used as an Islamic strategy against infidels:

“Peace in Islam can exist only within the Islamic world; peace can only be between Moslem and Moslem.” “With the non-Moslem world or non-Moslem opponents, there can be only one solution - a cease fire until Moslems can gain more power. It is an eternal war until the end of days. Peace can only come if the Islamic side wins. The two civilizations can only have periods of cease-fires.”

“A few weeks after the Oslo agreement was signed, [Palestinian leader] Arafat went to Johannesburg, and in a mosque there he made a speech in which he apologized, saying, “Do you think I signed something with the Jews which is contrary to the rules of Islam?” Arafat continued, “That’s not so. I’m doing exactly what the prophet Mohammed did.” “What Arafat was saying was, “Remember the story of Hodaybiya.” The prophet had made an agreement there with the tribe of Kuraish for 10 years. But then he trained 10,000 soldiers and within two years marched on their city of Mecca. He, of course, found some kind of pretext.”

I have earlier quoted how even Norwegian diplomat and United Nation’s envoy Terje Röd-Larsen, a key player during the Oslo Peace Process in the 1990s, later admitted that “Arafat lied all the time.”

The Arabs never wanted a peace with Israel. They wanted to buy time until they were strong enough to win. The peace overtures by the Israelis were interpreted as a sign of weakness. The so-called Treaty of Hudaybiyya, signed while Muhammad and his supporters were not yet strong enough to conquer Mecca, has become a standard for Islamic relations with non-Muslims ever since.

Sharon states that “Thus, in Islamic jurisdiction, it became a legal precedent which states that you are only allowed to make peace for a maximum of 10 years. Secondly, at the first instance that you are able, you must renew the jihad [thus breaking the “peace” agreement].” “What makes Islam accept cease-fire? Only one thing - when the enemy is too strong. It is a tactical choice.”

Furthermore, the Islamic world has not only the attitude of open war. There’s also war by infiltration, as we can see in Western countries now. Is there a possibility to end this dance of war? According to Moshe Sharon, the answer is, “No. Not in the foreseeable future. What we can do is reach a situation where for a few years we may have relative quiet.”

As Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald says of moderate Muslims: “They are still people who call themselves Muslims, and we, the Infidels, have no idea what this will cause them, or could cause them, to do in the future. We likewise have no idea what their children, or their grandchildren will see as their responsibility as Muslims. The “moderate” Muslim today may be transformed into an “immoderate” Muslim, or his descendants could be if he does not make a complete break and become an apostate. All over the West now we see the phenomenon of Muslim children who are more devout and observant than their parents.”

This is, unfortunately, very true. In November 2005, an intelligence study obtained by Canada’s National Post said that a “high percentage” of the Canadian Muslims involved in extremist activities were home-grown and born in Canada, a marked shift from the past when they were mostly refugees and immigrants: “There does not appear to be a single process that leads to extremism; the transformation is highly individual. Once this change has taken place, such individuals move on to a series of activities, ranging from propaganda and recruiting, to terrorist training and participation in extremist operations.”

Hugh Fitzgerald wonders how many of our Muslim immigrants will be truly moderate. How many of them “will turn out to be like Ayaan Hirsi Ali? One out of 20? One out of 100? One out of 1,000? One out of 100,000? How many of the men will turn out to be like Magdi Allam in Italy, or like Bassam Tibi in Germany? How many Ibn Warraqs and Ali Sinas, or converts to Christianity such as Walid Shoebat, are there likely to be in any population of, say, 1000 Muslim immigrants? Should the Western world admit a million immigrants, or permit them to remain, because a few of them see the light?”

“Let Muslims remain within Dar al-Islam. Let the Infidels do everything they can to first learn themselves, and then to show Muslims that they understand (so that Muslims will then have to begin to recognize) that the political, economic, social, intellectual, and moral failures of Islamic societies, both within Dar al-Islam and in Dar al-Harb, are directly related to, and arise out of, Islam itself.”

Youssef Ibrahim of the New York Sun is tired of the silence from the Muslim majority: “Hardly any Muslim groups, moderate or otherwise, voiced public disapproval of [Dutch Islamic critic Theo] van Gogh’s murder except in the most formulaic way.” “In Islam, “silence is a sign of acceptance,” as the Arabic Koranic saying goes.” “The question that hangs in the air so spectacularly now — particularly as England has been confronted once again by British Muslims plotting to kill hundreds — is this: What exactly are the Europeans waiting for before they round up all those Muslim warriors and their families and send them back to where they came from?”

A just question, which increasing numbers of Europeans are asking, too. A big part of the answer lies in the elaborate Eurabian, pro-Islamic networks that have been built up by stealth over decades, and hardly ever debated by European media. Besides, it’s embarrassing for Western political leaders, who have championed Multiculturalism for a long time, to admit that they have made a terrible mistake that is now threatening the very survival of their countries.

It is possible that those Western countries where the infidels are strong enough will copy the Benes Decrees from Czechoslovakia in 1946, when most of the so-called Sudeten Germans, some 3.5 million people, had shown themselves to be a dangerous fifth column without any loyalty to the state. The Czech government thus expelled them from its land. As Hugh Fitzgerald of Jihad Watch has demonstrated, there is a much better case for a Benes Decree for parts of the Muslim population in the West now than there ever was for the Sudeten Germans.

The most civilized thing we can do in order to save ourselves as a civilization, but also to limit the loss of life among both Muslims and non-Muslims in what increasingly looks like a world war, is for Westerners and indeed non-Muslims in general to implement a policy of containment of the Islamic world, as suggested by Mr. Fitzgerald. This includes completely stopping Muslim immigration, but also by making our countries Islam-unfriendly, thus presenting the Muslims already here between the options of adapting to our societies or leaving if they desire sharia law. Even whispering about Jihad should be grounds for expulsion and revoking citizenship.

I have compared Islam to the movie “The Matrix,” where people are turned into slaves by living in a make-believe reality designed to keep them in chains. In the movie, everybody who hasn’t been completely unplugged from this artificial reality is potentially an agent for the system. I have gradually come to the conclusion that this is the sanest way to view Muslims, too.

Some would argue that it is a crime and a betrayal of our own values to argue for excluding Muslims from our countries or even expelling some of the ones who are already here. I disagree. The relatively small number of Muslims we have in the West now has already caused enormous damage to our economy, to our culture and not the least to our freedoms. The real crime, and the real betrayal, would be to sacrifice centuries of advances in human freedom as well as the future of our children and grandchildren to appease Muslims who contribute virtually nothing to our societies and are hostile to their very foundations.

As I have demonstrated above, it is perfectly accepted, and widely practiced, by Jihadist Muslims to lie to non-Muslims about their true agenda. I have also demonstrated that the relationship between radicals and so-called moderates is a lot closer than we would like to think. At best, they share the goals of establishing sharia around the world, and differ only over the means to achieve this goal. At worst, they are allies in a good cop, bad cop game to extort concession after concession from the infidels. Moreover, even those who genuinely are moderate and secular in their approach may later change, or their children may change. This can be triggered by almost anything, either something in the news or a crisis in their personal lives, which will create a desire to become a better, more pious Muslim. The few remaining moderates can easily be silenced by violence from their more ruthless, radical counterparts.

At the end of the day, what counts isn’t the difference, if any, between moderate Muslims and radical Muslims, but between Muslims and non-Muslims, and between Muslims and ex-Muslims. Ibn Warraq says that there may be moderate Muslims, but Islam itself is not moderate. He is probably right. As he writes in the book Leaving Islam — Apostates Speak Out, a unique collection of testimonials by former Muslims, ex-Muslims are the only ones who know what it’s all about, and we would do well to listen to their Cassandra cries.

Fjordman is based in Norway. He contributes in Brussels Journal, Gates of Vienna and Faith Freedom International amongst other Websites. His personal blog (currently inactive): www.fjordman.blogspot.com