Dr. Majid Rafizadeh is a board member of Harvard International Review and president of the International American Council on the Middle East; he is also the author of the extraordinary book A God Who Hates Women: A woman’s journey through oppression and another, Peaceful Reformation in Iran’s Islam: A life story of struggle and poverty, which is just as riveting.
In this extraordinary Gatestone Institute article, he buttresses what I have noted for years, that most of today’s prominent “moderate” Muslim spokesmen are primarily interested in making sure that no one thinks that jihad terror and Sharia oppression have anything to do with Islam, and thus do more harm than good to the effort of trying to inform the public of the true nature and magnitude of the threat we face. Also, they mislead the uninformed public into thinking that the vast majority of Muslims think just as they do, when if they renounce jihad and Sharia they’re actually quite non-traditional Muslims, and so even at best, they mislead people into complacency.
The “moderate” Muslim picture of Islamic theology and history is generally enormously inaccurate. Click here to preorder my forthcoming book The History of Jihad From Muhammad to ISIS to see how prominent “moderate Islam” has been in the history of the religion.
“The ‘Moderate’ Muslim Scholar Industry,” by Majid Rafizadeh, Gatestone Institute, April 3, 2018:
…There is a huge industry of so-called “moderate” Muslim scholars, who are actually apologists for Islam. This industry began to grow after the catastrophe of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and from there, expanded….The West, unfortunately, encourages these “moderate” Muslim apologists to keep on advancing these false views: that one must not blame extremists, that nothing is the fault of the Islamic teachings, that all of these radical and that Islamist terrorist attacks “have nothing to do with Islam.” More doors and opportunities keep opening for these apologists to get cash. The Muslim apologists are handed megaphones, invited to international forums, handed book deals, given scholarships, and offered jobs with elite but false titles such as “Islam and Counter-Terrorism Expert.” With such incentives, why would anyone ever stop?
Meanwhile the real scholars of Islam, such as Robert Spencer, who are trying to warn the public about these apologists, are called “Islamophobes,” poisoned, often fired from work, censored on social media and barred from entering democratic countries such as Great Britain….
Read the whole thing here.