Islamic fanaticism: What's at stake?
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By Chang Se-moon
There is an article on Islamic fanaticism that is widely circulating through personal emails. The title of the article is “A German’s View on Islam.” The article is attributed to Emanuel Tanay (1928-2014), who in 1943 escaped from occupied Poland with his mother and sister to Slovakia and then Hungary. They were liberated in January 1945 in Budapest. He immigrated to the United States after World War II. He was clinical professor of psychiatry at the Wayne State University Medical School in Detroit, Mich. Tanay died on Aug. 5, 2014, following a lengthy battle with prostate cancer.
So far as I can tell, however, the article was written not by Tanay, but by Marek. Some say that Tanay was one of the first people who forwarded the Marek's article to a wide audience. On Feb. 21, 2006, Canadian Paul Marek published on his blog Celestial Junk an article titled "Why the Peaceful Majority is Irrelevant." In the article, Marek warned about the dangers of Islamic fanaticism and dismissed as irrelevant the notion that the overwhelming majority of Muslims are peaceful.
I have no idea of how much of this review is accurate. Neither do I have any idea of how much of the article currently circulating online is actually written by Marek himself. I do have an idea of how much attention the article attracts from people who are deeply worried about radical Islamic terrorism. It is rather remarkable that the article, which was written about 10 years ago, is even more relevant early in 2016. Let me introduce some of the contents.
The article circulating online starts like this: “We are told again and again by 'experts' and 'talking heads' that Islam is the religion of peace and that the vast majority of Muslims just want to live in peace. Although this unqualified assertion may be true, it is entirely irrelevant. It is meaningless fluff, meant to make us feel better, and meant to somehow diminish the specter of fanatics rampaging across the globe in the name of Islam.” Although we all agree that the vast majority of Muslims want to live in peace, you need to continue to read to see what Marek is trying to say.
“The fact is that the fanatics rule Islam at this moment in history. It is the fanatics who march. It is the fanatics who wage any one of 50 shooting wars worldwide. It is the fanatics who systematically slaughter Christian or tribal groups throughout Africa and are gradually taking over the entire continent in an Islamic wave. It is the fanatics who bomb, behead, murder, or honor-kill. It is the fanatics who take over mosque after mosque. It is the fanatics who zealously spread the stoning and hanging of rape victims and homosexuals. It is the fanatics who teach their young to kill and to become suicide bombers.”
The tragedy, according to the article, is to observe that the world is ruled not by the peace-loving majority, but by minority fanatics. Communist Russian fanatics were “responsible for the murder of about 20 million people,” although the majority of Russians wanted peaceful life. Chinese Communists managed to kill millions of people, although the majority of Chinese wanted to live peacefully. “The average Japanese individual, prior to World War II, was not a warmongering sadist. Yet, Japan murdered and slaughtered its way across South East Asia in an orgy of killing” that included the systematic murder of millions of Chinese, “most killed by sword, shovel, and bayonet.”
The historical lesson is that the vast majority of people who love peace became irrelevant by having remained silent. In other words, “We often miss the most basic and uncomplicated of points: peace-loving Muslims have been made irrelevant by their silence. Peace-loving Muslims will become our enemy if they don't speak up, because like my friend from Germany, they will awaken one day and find that the fanatics own them, and the end of their world will have begun.”
In the U.K. and some other European countries, “The Muslim communities refuse to integrate and there are now dozens of ‘no-go’ zones within major cities across the country that the police force dare not intrude upon. Sharia law prevails there, because the Muslim community in those areas refuses to acknowledge British law. As for we who watch it all unfold, we must pay attention to the only group that counts ― the fanatics who threaten our way of life.”
What I personally want to see is for Muslim nations to break the silence and join the forces to eliminate Muslim fanatics, perhaps, for the sake of their own survival. I might add that the January 2016 issue of the Islamic State's online magazine, Dabiq, “targets the terror group's fellow Muslims” and “goes to great lengths to give a theological basis for killing members of the minority Muslim sect that controls Iran and Iraq,” according to the Jan. 21, 2016 version of Foxnews.com.
Chang Se-moon is the director of the Gulf Coast Center for Impact Studies. He can be reached at changsemoon@yahoo.com.