The stream of bailouts reintroduced us to the phrase, "Too big to fail", an excuse meaning that America must deny the essential logic of the free market in favor of spending taxpayer money to bail out companies, whose failure is "unacceptable".
However what the phrase "Too big to fail" really meant, was that even politicians who believed in the free market, were unable to risk testing their beliefs when the stakes were too big.
If some major companies have been too big to fail, Islam has been considered the enemy that is too big to fight. That was the point George W. Bush made to some Conservative Christian broadcasters who pressed him over the war on terror. It's the same message I receive from some of my readers from time to time, when I talk about the myth that Islam is generally moderate and state that terrorists represent the true face of Islam. Their argument is the same, "Why alienate all Muslims when all of Islam is too big to fight?"
This essentially presumes that speaking clearly against Islam risks alienating a moderate Muslim demographic. That position is itself Dhimmist or Neo-Dhimmist at best, because it believes that not offending Muslims can win their tolerance or cooperation. Aside from the indignity of tiptoeing around Muslim sensitivities, it equates to ceding your key point in exchange for nothing at all.
Europe currently serves as an ongoing laboratory that is doing its best to test out this position. Like scientists racing against time to find a cure for tuberculosis using bacterial slides, European states have been staring through microscopes desperately trying to cultivate a species of Islam that will co-exist with them. All they have done is define moderate Islam down, until a Muslim Brotherhood spawn like Tariq Ramadan, who is willing to concede that perhaps the timing is bad for stoning women in public, is thought to embody the best of reformist moderate Islam in Europe.
The sad truth of the matter is that there a distinct shortage of moderate Muslims, and that what we generally consider to be moderate Muslims, are actually Muslims who have become secularized. Which is not at all the same thing.
Before the rise of Islamofascism in the 20th and 21st centuries in their mutual lands, Persia and Turkey had wealthy urbanized secular classes who had fairly open worldviews, and did their best to live like Europeans. But of course the same was true for Cairo, and other parts of the Middle East as well, that today are nothing more than breeding grounds for Jihadists and mad muezzins shrieking hate from their towers on a daily basis.
These were not moderate Muslims, so much as they were secularized Muslims who mixed casually with Jews and Christians, and took very little of Islam seriously. They were post-Islamic, in the same way that the occasional misidentified moderate Muslim in Europe and the US tends to be. They were post-Islamic in the same way that the new generation of student activists in Tehran or the teenage girl in Dallas murdered for wearing makeup is.
Post-Islamic is not moderate Islam because it is not a theological revision of Islam, it is a de-emphasis of Islam to accommodate a more Westernized lifestyle, just as modern Communist China has deemphasized Communism in favor of capitalism. While this is a positive step, it does not demonstrate that there is a form of Islam that can co-exist with civilized countries. What it demonstrates is that only diminishing the hold that Islam has over the minds and priorities of its followers, allows us to co-exist with people from the Muslim world.
And this also demonstrates why going soft on Islam is the wrong approach. Constantly repeating the Dhimmist lie that Islam is perfectly fine, but that it has been hijacked by a few guys named Ahmed from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, conveys the message that Islam is fine, that its adherents are fine, and that we are the ones is the wrong for overreacting by bombing entire countries in response to the actions of a few individuals.
America, Europe and Israel have spent far too long repeating, "The fault is not in Islam, but in ourselves" that many of us believe it now. But the fault is not in us, the fault is in Islam. Stating that openly and unambiguously will infuriate some Muslims, but it will also make them think. And it will stop the endless cycle of cringing apologies to Muslims for classing them all with the terrorists.
Not all Muslims are terrorists. Not all Communists were dedicated to the destruction and enslavement of the free world. But Communism and Islam are both evil ideologies that call for the destruction and enslavement of the free world. And while not all of their adherents might be equally willing to participate in such projects, most did and do, whether actively or with various degrees of passivity, that can be as small as lending their names to the voting projects of Islamist organizations such as CAIR or ISNA.
Stating that Islam is an ideology dedicated to war, conquest and murder; and that there is nothing moderate about mainstream Sunni or Shia beliefs does not mean that we must now fight every single Muslim on earth. This is a panicked Dhimmi reflex that assumes that we dare not offend Muslims for fear that they'll come down on us all at the same time in a great murderous horde. In fact offending Muslims is our best hope for showcasing just how immoderate Islam really is, while rallying our side for the larger struggle to come.
Knowing who your enemy is, is key to any struggle. If you can't openly state who or what the enemy is, then you've already lost. We do not have to fight 1 Billion plus Muslims to do that. No more than we had to fight 1 Billion plus Communists. It means drawing a line that defines what is true and what is false, what is right and what is wrong, and what we will accept and what we will not accept. And if we can't do that, then all hope really is lost. Because there is no such thing as an evil too big to stop, only an evil too big in the minds of men to be stopped.
