Moderate Muslims = Good Germans?

"Much of "Undercover Mosque" was filmed with a hidden camera. The sound is clear, but the footage is often shaky and tentative. Ironically, this is now the predominant style for hip documentary filmmaking, which affects a nervous, frantic style. Here you have the real thing — it's nervous and frantic because it has to be. The preachers shown, including an African-American convert, are jaw-droppingly explicit in their revolutionary plans for Britain and the world.

One, Dr. Ijaz Mian, at the Regents Park Mosque in London, official seat of "moderate" Islam in Britain, talks openly about his desire to see Saudi-style religious police operating in the United Kingdom. He urges Muslims to wait until they are sufficiently numerous to make Britons surrender: "Hands Up!" Another predicts jihad will be waged against all nonbelievers and a British Islamic state established, with the flogging of drunkards, chopping off of thieves' hands, and jihad against non-Muslims all on the menu. "You have to live like a state within a state until you take over," he says. Women are "deficient," and should be marriageable before puberty because Muhammad himself married a nine-year-old. The animus against homosexuals and Jews is particularly virulent, meaning not merely condemnation, but explicit calls for their (eventual) murder. One imam even mimics a throat-cutting." [ I can't find the link right now but this puts me in mind of a bracing line from David Warren to the effect (apologies to David if I have it wrong) that "Hitler rowed his oars through a sea of good Germans". The moderate Muslims there are -- however many that is -- are quite simply too much in fear for their lives and their families to speak up. You don't need very many examples like Rushdie and Ayaan Hirsi Ali before you "get it". As Lee Harris points out (shorter article here), they are in the thrall and intimidation of "ruthless men" with an apocalyptic "fantasy ideology". -ed. ]