Magical Thinking About Islam's Reformation

There's a very simple way to know when someone has officially become an A-list celebrity: when their opinions are listened to on matters that have nothing whatsoever to do with anything they have actual competence in or knowledge of.  This famously happens in Congressional hearings when celebrities are called to testify on matters relating to parts they played in movies or charities which they support, but for which they have no more expertise than you or I, and sometimes less.

Alas, this is a problem elsewhere in the world also.  The Guardian reports, via another far-left website:

JK Rowling, author of the Harry Potter books, has condemned and mocked the tweet from Rupert Murdoch which insisted that even peaceful Muslims must bear responsibilities for jihadi attacks.

“I was born Christian. If that makes Rupert Murdoch my responsibility, I’ll auto-excommunicate,” she tweeted on Sunday.

JK Rowling is probably the most successful living writer of children's literature; she has every right to lecture and be listened to on that subject.  It might also make sense to listen to her thoughts on how to move from welfare poverty to wealth since she is also the greatest living exemplar of this laudable change.  Who else has gone from being on welfare to being literally richer than the Queen of England?

She has nothing credible to say about Islam, however, any more than any other layman on the street.  This is in contrast to Rupert Murdoch, who as the owner of NewsCorp has to be intimately familiar with the world events that his many TV stations and print publications are reporting every day.

Thus it comes as no surprise that Rowling is not only flatly wrong on the facts, her argument violates all logic and history too.

Whoever Can Cause Change Is Responsible For Doing It

If you are a religious person, think for a moment: Suppose someone from a totally alien religion - a Buddhist if you're Catholic, say, or a Hindu if you're Jewish - came to your church and started preaching to you about what your religion was doing wrong.  Would you respectfully listen, and change your ways accordingly?

Well, you might respectfully listen out of curiosity or sheer admiration for their chutzpah.  It's pretty unlikely, however, that you're going to come out of there saying, "Wow, he's right - I'm going to shave my head immediately and start wearing saffron robes."

What a contrast to what would happen if someone from your own religion came to issue corrective advice!  Catholics listen to the Pope and heed what he says.  Although they don't always obey him, of course, they're supposed to at least try.  Jews listen to Rabbis, Baptists listen to their pastors and evangelists, and so on down the line.

That's why we have popes, pastors, and rabbis - the idea is that they know more about your religion than you do and can help you do it better which should help you become a better person.

If you're not a religious person, you can still participate in this thought exercise: just remember your response to the last Jehovah's Witness or Mormon that knocked on your door.  Eh, not too life-changing, now was it?

We have all heard, ad nauseum, about the horrible evils done by Christians in the name of religion.  We know about the massacre at Jerusalem by the Crusaders, the innumerable pogroms against Jews by devout Catholics, and of course, the Spanish Inquisition.

None of those things happen anymore!  Indeed, this past weekend brought a massive demonstration by Frenchmen, mostly Catholic or atheist, protesting against Islamic violence against free speech and against Jews.

To America's shame and disgrace, every other significant country in the world sent their leaders to march in this protest against terrorism - there were forty (40!) heads of state in attendance - but our country sent nobody of any significance whatsoever.  We can be bipartisan in our condemnation: neither John Boehner, nor Mitch McConnell, nor even a single one of the many people running for the Republican presidential nomination bothered to turn up.

When The Simpsons are more dignified and humane than you are, it's time to resign from any public notice whatsoever.  For shame!  For shame!

The point remains - people from every religion with one exception assembled to demonstrate against anti-Semitic Islamism and censorship.

The French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo made its name publishing sacrilegeous, offensive filth demeaning anything to do with religion, from the Virgin Mary to the Pope to Jesus Christ.  They never had any problems until, to their credit, they gave equal treatment to Mohammed.

Then they got firebombed, and last week half the staff got machine-gunned, which seems to have led to a great awakening of Europeans as to the danger they are in.  Maybe the peoples of Europe really are still willing to fight for their own freedom - and Christianity is fully in support, even though Christian icons were so constantly pilloried by Charlie Hebdo.

So how is it that Catholicism moved from Torquemada to today's Pope Francis who defends Charlie Hebdo which depicts him wearing a condom, which by his beliefs is a mortal sin?  Easy: Christians demanded that religious violence stop, on any pretext whatsoever.

It wasn't the forces of Islam that ended the Inquisition.  It wasn't the arguments of the Pope that ended the English Civil War.  It wasn't Buddhists that convinced the princes of Europe to stop slaughtering each other's coreligionists during the Hundred Year's War.

No, it was people who shared the same religion that persuaded the violent monsters to stop it, or more accurately, persuaded everybody else to take power away from the violent monsters.  It took several hundred years, but it worked.

That is why we stand with Rupert Murdoch when he, accurately and logically, points out that it is the job of supposedly moderate Muslims to shut down the murderous Islamist monsters in their midst:

Maybe most Moslems are peaceful, but until they recognize and destroy their growing jihadist cancer they must be held responsible.

 To the extent that peaceful Muslims don't hold their violent co-religionists to account, they are complicit in their crimes, and we are perfectly justified in not allowing Islam of any sort to contaminate free Western society.

It's Not Our Job, It's Theirs

Have some Muslims condemned violence?  Sure, but usually sotto voce and with an exculpatory, "Really it's all America's fault anyway."  Garbage!

A devoted jihadist is not going to listen to the Pope.  He isn't going to listen to a preacher, or a monk, or a guru, or Richard Dawkins, or even JK Rowling.

But he might listen to an imam who knows his own holy book cover to cover and who persuades him from the Koran that killing the infidel isn't what Allah wants today's Muslims to be doing.

Can this be done?  It's hard to say: the Koran is pretty blunt about the harsh treatment fiathful Muslims are supposed to inflict on anyone who isn't Muslim, and laundering out that filth will take some doing.  This job may take hundreds of years; it took hundreds of years to excise violence from Christianity, which was never nearly as inherently violent as Islam in the first place.

All the more reason for us to demand that any Muslims we tolerate in Western countries must start working at it immediately, full force!

In the world of Harry Potter, it's possible for a skilled wizard to rebuild someone else's mind and memories to make them into a totally different person.  Wouldn't it be great if we could give all our Special Forces wands and send them out to reform the minds of Muslims everywhere, or at least the ones we capture?

Unfortunately, JK Rowling has apparently forgotten that the wizarding world she created is not real.  Reforming a religion cannot be done by waving a wand; it takes years and years of hard work by people that are members of it.

If Muslims are not up to the task, then they're perfectly welcome to return to the hellholes they crawled out of, and we have every reason to send them packing in that direction without delay.  The blood of countless thousands of victims of Muslim violence cries out for an immediate and profound change in our tolerance of the intolerable.

As Obama's nauseating nonresponse demonstrates, our ruling elites are going to have a very hard time with this.  They're so deeply enmeshed in their religion of tolerance, of tolerating anything at all, that it will be extremely difficult for them to admit that it simply isn't possible to tolerate Islam as expressed by evildoers toting machine guns and rocket launchers in the middle of the City of Light.

Unless they admit that national survival demands that they discriminate vigorously and effectively against certain forms of religious expression, however, they'll be replaced by leaders from all those xenophobic political parties who gain more and more strength throughout Europe with every passing atrocity.