The Moderate Supermajority
- 02.29.2008 - 6:05 PMMy CONTENTIONS colleague Abe Greenwald takes a gloomy view of a new Gallup survey that shows 93 percent of the world’s Muslims are moderates. “We need to find out from one billion rational human beings why they largely refuse to stand up for humanity and dignity instead of cowering in the face of fascist thugs,” he wrote.
First of all, I’d like to agree with Abe’s point that even this sunny survey suggests we still have a serious problem. If seven percent of the world’s Muslims are radical, we’re talking about 91 million people. That’s 65 times the population of Gaza, and three and a half times the size of Iraq. One Gaza is headache enough, and it only took 19 individuals to destroy the World Trade Center, punch a hole in the Pentagon, and kill 3,000 people.
Some of the 93 percent supermajority support militia parties such as Lebanon’s Hezbollah and the West Bank’s Fatah. So while they may be religious moderates, they certainly aren’t politically moderate.
I’m less inclined than Abe to give the remaining Muslims — aside from secular terror-supporters — too hard a time. I work in the Middle East, and I used to live there. I meet moderate Muslims every day who detest al Qaeda and their non-violent Wahhabi counterparts. I know they’re the overwhelming majority, and a significant number are hardly inert in the face of fascists.
More than one fourth of the population of Lebanon demonstrated in Beirut’s Martyr’s Square on March 14, 2005, and stood against the Syrian-Iranian-Hezbollah axis that has been sabotaging their country for decades. When I lived in a Sunni Muslim neighborhood of Beirut, the overwhelming majority of my neighbors belonged to that movement. The international media gave them lots of exposure, but moderate, liberal, secular, and mainstream conservative Muslims elsewhere rarely get any coverage. They are almost invisible from a distance, but it isn’t their fault.
Journalists tend to ignore moderate Muslims, not because of liberal bias or racism, but because sensationalism sells. At least they think that’s what sells.
And reporters often assume extremists are mainstream and “authentic” when they are not. Somehow, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has been designated the voice of American Muslims. But CAIR is, frankly, an Islamic wingnut organization with a minuscule membership that has declined 90 percent since September 11, 2001. (More people read my medium-sized blog every day than are members of CAIR.)
The coalition of Islamist parties in Pakistan got three percent of the vote in the recent election. Pakistan’s radicals have made a real mess of the place, but they can’t get any more traction at the polls than Ralph Nader can manage in the United States.
Riots in the wake of the publication of Danish cartoons depicting the prophet Mohammad was one of the most pathetic “activist” spectacles I’ve ever seen, but the press coverage blew the whole thing way out of proportion. The same gaggle of the perpetually outraged have been photographed over and over again, like the bussed-in and coerced Saddam Hussein “supporters” at rallies in the old Iraq who vanished the instant television cameras stopped rolling. Take a look at the excellent 2003 film Live from Baghdad
Last July in Slate Christopher Hitchens busted his colleagues. “I have actually seen some of these demonstrations,” he wrote, “most recently in Islamabad, and all I would do if I were a news editor is ask my camera team to take several steps back from the shot. We could then see a few dozen gesticulating men (very few women for some reason), their mustaches writhing as they scatter lighter fluid on a book or a flag or a hastily made effigy. Around them, a two-deep encirclement of camera crews. When the lights are turned off, the little gang disperses. And you may have noticed that the camera is always steady and in close-up on the flames, which it wouldn’t be if there was a big, surging mob involved.”
Hezbollah’s Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah has been quoted in tens of thousands of articles, but hardly any journalists have ever mentioned, let alone profiled, Sayyed Mohammad Ali El Husseini, the liberal Lebanese cleric who outranks Nasrallah in the Shia religious hierarchy and is an implacable foe of both Hezbollah and the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Every suicide and car bomber in Iraq gets at least a passing mention in newspapers all over the world while far fewer reporters have ever told their readers about the extraordinary anti-jihadist convulsion that swept the entire populations of Fallujah and Ramadi last year.
Almost no mention is given to the Kurds of Iraq who are just as Islamic as the Arabs in that country, and who purged Islamists root and branch from every inch of their autonomous region. “We will shoot them or break their bones on sight,” one Kurdish government official told me. More people have been murdered by Islamists in Spain than in their region of Iraq in the last five years. Such people can hardly be thought of as passive.
Let us also not forget the mass demonstrations and street battles with government thugs that have been ongoing all over Iran for several years now.
There is, I suppose, a dim awareness that the world’s newest country – Kosovo – has a Muslim majority. But who knows that the Kosovar Albanians are perhaps the most staunchly pro-American people in all of Europe, that they chose the Catholic Mother Theresa as their national symbol, that there was a cultural-wide protection of Jews during the Holocaust? Their leaders told Wahhabi officials from Saudi Arabia to get stuffed when help was offered during their war with the genocidal Milosovic regime in Belgrade.
Radical Islamists are more densely found in parts of the Arab world than most other places, but Arab countries as diverse as Tunisia and the United Arab Emirates are nearly Islamist-free. “Nothing Exploded in Tunis or Dubai Today” isn’t a headline, but I think it’s safe to infer from the utter dearth of sensationalist stories from such places that radical Islamism there isn’t much of a problem. It isn’t exactly clear to me what more the people in those countries ought to be doing. I have met hundreds of brave Iraqis who joined the police force and the army so they can pick up rifles and face the Islamists, but the moderate Muslims of countries such as Turkey, Kazakhstan, Mali, and Oman have few resident radicals to stand up against.
There certainly were radicals in Algeria. 150,000 people were killed there during the Salafist insurgency during the 1990s, and the government, military, police, and civilian watch groups have since all but annihilated the jihadists.
The world could use more moderate Muslims who push back hard against the Islamists, but huge numbers already do wherever it is necessary and possible. So far with the exception of Gaza, mainstream Muslims everywhere in the world risk arrest, torture, and death while resisting Islamist governments and insurgencies whenever they arise.
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February 29th, 2008 at 6:52 PM
The MSM probably ignore the moderate Muslims for the same reason they ignore moderate minorities within the United States. They consider them as “inauthentic” and sell outs. A “real” Muslim should hate America and Western values.
February 29th, 2008 at 6:59 PM
David Thompson: They consider them as “inauthentic” and sell outs.
Yep. I know as a fact that’s true for some journalists because they say so. It’s also because many think there’s no “story” there in their narrow journalism school definition of “story.” Moderates don’t bleed unless they are victims, so they do not lead.
February 29th, 2008 at 7:08 PM
The Hindustan Times had a series to try and ‘highlight the silent moderate majority’ of Muslims.
http://hindustantimes.com/news/specials/thenewmuslim/index.shtml
They haven’t followed up on it, but it was pretty interesting and got a lot of attention.
February 29th, 2008 at 7:15 PM
Michael has a problem understanding the difference between anecdotal information from the personal experience of a journalist and systematic information from which sound generalizations can be implied.
He says “I meet moderate Muslims every day who detest al Qaeda and their non-violent Wahhabi counterparts. I know they’re the overwhelming majority, and a significant number are hardly inert in the face of fascists.”
There are several problems with these 2 statements:
1. There is no way to assert that what he meets is representative. In fact, as a foreign journalist, no matter how widely he travels, he is unlikely to have access to a truly representative sample of the 93%. And he did not travel to countries with the highest numbers of muslims.
2. Asserting “I know” based on this, that they are a majority is not a serious statement.
3. Totten may not be aware of demopathy — telling western people, particularly journalists — what they wanna hear. There is lots of gullibility, because westerners project from themselves to others. That’s a widespread phenomenon, coming from both moderates, and from the islamists as taqqiyah.
4. I also happen to know from previous exchanges with Totten that he includes in what he calls moderates nominal muslims — seculars who were born to muslim parents. To project from them to those who are NOT secular is yet another source of bias in his arguments.
I am willing to accept that large portions of muslims are moderate and peaceful if left to their own devices. The problem is they are not left so. Imams and mosques will radicalize them. And they are susceptible. Just watch what will happen to the Albanian version of Islam in Kosovo. There is much more inertness than action because it is often due to their own recognition that they would be on weak religious grounds if they rose against jihad.
February 29th, 2008 at 7:19 PM
George Orwell, on why people on the left, especially in the media, chose in the 1930’s and 1940’s to support opponents of Britain and the US:
The English intelligentsia, on the whole, were more defeatist than the mass of the people — and some of them went on being defeatist at a time when the war was quite plainly won — partly because they were better able to visualise the dreary years of warfare that lay ahead. Their morale was worse because their imaginations were stronger. The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it, and if one finds the prospect of a long war intolerable, it is natural to disbelieve in the possibility of victory.
But there was more to it than that. There was also the disaffection of large numbers of intellectuals, which made it difficult for them not to side with any country hostile to Britain.
And deepest of all, there was admiration — though only in a very few cases conscious admiration — for the power, energy, and cruelty of the Nazi régime.
…if one studied the reactions of the English intelligentsia towards the USSR, there, too, one would find genuinely progressive impulses mixed up with admiration for power and cruelty. It would be grossly unfair to suggest that power worship is the only motive for russophile feeling, but it is one motive, and among intellectuals it is probably the strongest one.
…If one examines the people who, having some idea of what the Russian régime is like, are strongly russophile, one finds that, on the whole, they belong to the ‘managerial’ class of which Burnham writes. That is, they are not managers in the narrow sense, but scientists, technicians, teachers, journalists, broadcasters, bureaucrats, professional politicians: in general, middling people who feel themselves cramped by a system that is still partly aristocratic, and are hungry for more power and more prestige.
These people look towards the USSR and see in it, or think they see, a system which eliminates the upper class, keeps the working class in its place, and hands unlimited power to people very similar to themselves. It was only after the Soviet régime became unmistakably totalitarian that English intellectuals, in large numbers, began to show an interest in it.
Burnham, although the English russophile intelligentsia would repudiate him, is really voicing their secret wish: the wish to destroy the old, equalitarian version of Socialism and usher in a hierarchical society where the intellectual can at last get his hands on the whip… There is no strong reason for thinking that it tells us anything about the future, except perhaps the immediate future. It merely tells us what kind of world the ‘managerial’ class themselves, or at least the more conscious and ambitious members of the class, would like to live in.
‘Second Thoughts on James Burnham’ (1946)
February 29th, 2008 at 7:26 PM
“because they say so”
The real dangerous ones may be those who are not even consciously aware that they hold this viewpoint. It is something simply taken for granted. Edward Said’s “Orientalism” nonsense pervades the halls of many universities and other leftist establishments.
I am also convinced that the Democratic Party mainstream and Ron Paul Republicans inherently cannot accept victory in Iraq because they believe the United States deserves to fail. After all, we are supposedly disgusting Westerners—and real Muslim Iraqis should never be anything but contemptuous toward our country.
February 29th, 2008 at 7:57 PM
“….If seven percent of the world’s Muslims are radical, we’re talking about 91 million people. ….”
If only 2% were radical, that would be more than all the Jews in the world, period. Just FYI.
What I get from this post is that the moderates have to be more energetic and assertive in getting their viewpoint in front of Western media. Yes, it’s hard; this blog and Michael’s work are examples of trying to find a way around the “MSM” to get news it wants to ignore. Bob Geldof wrote a great “travels with Bush in Africa” diary in Time this week where he castigates Bush for not pushing hard enough to get the story out and the media for not finding it newsworthy enough. That’s the problem, and the solution is to find alternate channels and push push push.
If there are that many moderate Muslims and the radicals still get all the attention. the moderates, all 9,000,000 of them (or whatever 93% is), have to get off their collective tuches and do something about it. They have to not only take responsibility for cleaning up the terrorist nests in their communities and imposing their standards over Islam in general, they have to get around the Western media which romanticizes the radicals.
That’s their job. If they don’t do it, they are responsible for the consequences. In the 30s, good Germans kept their heads down and allowed the nazi regime to develop and enact its horrible policies. We call them complicit and castigate them for it. Moderate Muslims are the “good Germans” today. If bloggers can bring down Dan Rather, a billion Muslims can clean up their mess. We need to stop figuring what percent they are and bemoaning their inadequacy and letting them off the hook. That is the same condescending Third-Worldism that excuses the terrorists in the first place.
February 29th, 2008 at 8:22 PM
oao: Michael has a problem understanding the difference between anecdotal information from the personal experience of a journalist and systematic information from which sound generalizations can be implied.
No, I don’t.
What happened in Fallujah, Ramadi, and Algeria aren’t anecdotes.
3 percent of votes going to Islamists in Pakistan isn’t an anecdote. It’s a data point.
Coffee with my nice Beirut neighbors is an anecdote.
There is no way to assert that what he meets is representative.
Of course. The point is that any person who travels to the Middle East will encounter more moderate Muslims in one day than he or she will encounter in the mainstream media in a year. There is no such thing as a globally “representative” Muslim anyway. The anecdotal experience I have, in addition to the shelves of books I’ve read, matches the data. The data does not, however, match newspaper reports. Not even close.
Totten may not be aware of demopathy — telling western people, particularly journalists — what they wanna hear.
I’ve written about it. Sorry you missed it.
I also happen to know from previous exchanges with Totten that he includes in what he calls moderates nominal muslims — seculars who were born to muslim parents.
Sometimes I do, and sometimes I don’t. It depends on the context. “Islam” is both a religion and a civilization. See Bernard Lewis.
Imams and mosques will radicalize them.
Except when they don’t. See Fallujah and Ramadi. Every single last mosque in those cities is now pro-American and anti-jihad. This is not an anecdote.
February 29th, 2008 at 8:38 PM
Yehudit: We need to stop figuring what percent they are and bemoaning their inadequacy and letting them off the hook.
My point isn’t to let them off the hook (except in extremist-free countries where I really don’t know what the average person can do), but to point out how when the problem gets really bad locally, the moderate majority, including very average people, often pushes back hard.
This doesn’t really happen among the Palestinians, it’s also a big problem in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and it’s a lesser problem in Lebanon, but there are lots of counter examples.
February 29th, 2008 at 8:40 PM
yehudit,
there are 2 main reasons why they don’t get off their tuchas:
1. The trvial one is that when they do they take their lives in their hands; pretty dangerous.
2. They know they are on weak religious ground. The fact is that the spread of islam via hard or soft jihad IS a muslim’s obligation. They would prefer not to be called to it, but going publicly against it would be too much.
And they would not have serious problem with global sharia imposition and islamic supremacy over the infidels. If some want to bring about it, they’re not gonna stop it.
fp
http://fallofknowledgeandreason.blogspot.com/