Of Fascist Moderates

Hint: if the LWM calls you a "moderate", you're not:

Three cheers for Monica Crowley of MSNBC’s Connected Coast-to-Coast. Last week, she hosted a debate between Middle East expert Daniel Pipes and one Azzam Tamimi of the Institute of Islamic Political Thought in Britain — an apologist for jihadists masquerading as a moderate Muslim intellectual. In a rare and refreshing media moment, this “moderate’s” inane justifications for attacks on civilians were actually challenged, causing Tamimi to storm off the set in a huff.

Tamimi is one of the many faux moderates who thrive in the West, beneficiaries of a façade of respectability which owes to our obsession not to offend the Islamic world or examine the actual beliefs of our militant enemies. This reluctance enables their pretensions toward moderation as well as the spread of their “America is the root of all evil” drivel through supposedly serious media outlets.

Tamimi, in particular, is a Palestinian extremist who not only has publicly advocated suicide bombing ("For us Moslems martyrdom is not the end of things but the beginning of the most wonderful of things") but has also declared his personal willingness to commit a suicide bombing (“If I have the opportunity I would do it.... If I can go to Palestine and sacrifice myself I would do it. Why not?”).

He is, moreover, a rabid detractor of the United States who has publicly praised the “courageous” Taliban, observed that "[i]n the Arab and Muslim countries, everyone jumped for joy” upon seeing the Twin Towers felled by al Qaeda suicide hijackers, and labeled the U.S. the “imperialist master” of Iraq (while comparing the American military’s suppression of ruthless terrorists in Fallujah to Syrian strongman Hafez Assad’s mass murder of his own people in Hama in the 1980s and to Saddam’s atrocities against the Kurds in the 1990s). As if that were not enough, Tamimi also openly supports Hamas’s campaign to destroy Israel ("The Israelis stole our houses, which are today occupied by Jews from Poland, Russia, Ukraine, Morocco, Ethiopia, Brooklyn. They should return to their homes, and give ours back to us!... That's non-negotiable. Therefore I support Hamas.")

You’ll be shocked to learn that all this has resulted in … Tamimi’s being packaged by fawning academic, media, and even U.S. foreign-service circles as a respectable intellectual spokesman for Islamic causes. As the invaluable Martin Kramer has explained, Tamimi’s air of dignified scholarship is indebted to Professor John Esposito, director of Georgetown University's Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, who has sat on Tamimi’s board at the Institute of Islamic Political Thought in London, and coedited a book with him. Naturally, Tamimi has also been feted by the State Department — invited in 2002 by the U.S. ambassador to the Court of St. James to the Iftar dinner State now hosts at the conclusion of Ramadan.

You'd think more professional journalists might be interested in this sort of digging. Public's right to know and all that.

Not that they're biased or anything.