For almost as long as Islamism has reared its ugly head, there have been calls for moderate Muslims to speak out against the likes of al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and the Islamic State. But to the mind of Family Research Council president Tony Perkins, those efforts are a waste of time. After all, in Perkins’ eyes, Islamist groups are the real Muslims.
On Thursday’s edition of his national radio show, “Washington Watch,” Perkins took a call from “Mandy” in Texas, who was concerned about the influx of Muslims in her town. There are a growing number of Muslims in her town, and both they and the mosques, she said, are very intimidating and unwelcoming. Perkins replied that moderate Muslims aren’t really Muslims at all because “they don’t really believe the Quran and practice it as it’s written.” However, Perkins thinks that outfits like ISIS are real Muslims because they are actually practicing their faith. He says that he defends the right of anyone to practice their faith, provided that those practices do not endanger “ordered liberty”–that is, they can’t “tear at the fabric of our society.” According to Perkins, those who practice Islam “in its entirety” aren’t just practicing a religion. It’s a “political system,” an “economic system,” and a “military system.” Therefore, we have to “restrain those things that will harm the whole.”
Listen to the whole show here. Perkins’ exchange with Mandy starts at the 46:30 mark. However, Perkins may have set himself up to make this claim at the top of the broadcast, when he criticized President Obama for declaring that ISIS was not really Islamic in his speech announcing his strategy for combatting it. He doubled down on this in his chat with Mandy, saying that denouncing Islamists as false Muslims is political correctness taken to “a new height of duplicity and deception,” and may amount to being “Orwellian.”
So let’s see if we’ve got this right. We should drop the hammer on Islamists–but at the same time, we should dismiss moderate Muslims from the equation because they aren’t really Muslim? Am I the only one that thinks that policy would be counterproductive? But then again, we’re talking about people who only see things in terms of black and white.
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Darrell Lucus, also known as Christian Dem in NC at Daily Kos, is a radical-lefty Jesus-lover who has been blogging for change for a decade. Follow him on Twitter @DarrellLucus or connect with him on Facebook.
