Uncle Joe Redux

I’ve been in a surprising place for the last few days, taking a lot of flak from other branches of the Counterjihad. A reader wrote this morning in an email that he was “shocked to see how many people there are getting on your butt… for not being Islamophobic enough.”

It is hard to get used to, especially when I’ve been the Islamophobe-in-Chief for so long.

My heresy has been to point out the strategic utility of forging alliances with Muslim groups that are demonstrably non-violent and tolerant of other religions. This position violates the pure ideology of confrontation with Islam, which must be opposed in all its manifestations, radical or “moderate”, observant or secular.

Mind you, I’m not arguing the case that Islam is not evil. I’m not saying that innumerable passages in the Koran don’t command violence against all infidels.

Those issues are, for my purposes here, simply not useful to consider.

I am only arguing for the strategic necessity of working with truly dissident Muslim groups, in order to divide and conquer. Some of these groups may be repugnant in many ways, and some may be very temporary allies, but that does not argue against an alliance with them per se.

If you want a parallel, consider our nation’s alliance with Josef Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, also known as Stalin, or — from 1941 to 1945 — “Uncle Joe”.

Stalin was as repugnant as a human being can get, and reigned as the supreme autocrat in what proved to be the most loathsome, tyrannical, brutal, and murderous regime in history. Yet the United States and Britain found it prudent to ally with him against Hitler, and chose to overlook the nature of his rule during the course of the war.
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After the war we had to deal with the Soviets, and spent another forty-five years coping with the aftermath of our alliance with Stalin. But in 1942 and 1943 Churchill and Roosevelt considered it absolutely necessary to maintain an alliance with the Soviet Union.

There were purists on the Right who argued against any kind of alliance with the communists, under any circumstances. But can you imagine what would have happened to Britain if there had been no Eastern Front? Would life under a Nazi occupation have been preferable to the abandonment of ideological purity? Some may have welcomed such an outcome, but the average Briton did not.

In a similar vein, the purists on the Left wanted no truck with any right-wing dictatorship whatsoever during the struggle against Communism in the Cold War. Pinochet and Franco were out of the question, and there were many on the Left who would have been content to see Communism triumph across the globe rather than abandon the righteousness of their position.

People who argue for these ideologically pure stances are refusing to take practical strategy into consideration. During the course of a long war, their purity of resolve can translate into hundreds of thousands of additional dead Americans, whether among the best and the brightest from our military, or ordinary civilians who happen to be downtown when the next Mohammed Atta gets past Homeland Security to do his dirty work against us.

To make the matter more compelling, our potential allies in this war are much more palatable than ol’ Uncle Joe. Daniel Pipes, who is no apologist for the Great Jihad, has this to say:

Of particular note are the American Muslims who reject CAIR’s claim to speak on their behalf. The late Seifeldin Ashmawy, publisher of the New Jersey-based Voice of Peace, called CAIR the champion of “extremists whose views do not represent Islam.”Jamal Hasan of the Council for Democracy and Tolerance explains that CAIR’s goal is to spread “Islamic hegemony the world over by hook or by crook.” Kamal Nawash, head of Free Muslims Against Terrorism, finds that CAIR and similar groups condemn terrorism on the surface while endorsing an ideology that helps foster extremism, adding that “almost all of their members are theocratic Muslims who reject secularism and want to establish Islamic states.”Tashbih Sayyed of the Council for Democracy and Tolerance calls CAIR “the most accomplished fifth column” in the United States. And Stephen Schwartz of the Center on Islamic Pluralism writes that “CAIR should be considered a foreign-based subversive organization, comparable in the Islamist field to the Soviet-controlled Communist Party, USA.”

You don’t hear about these people from the MSM — they don’t fit the preferred storyline — but they are going on the record against the violent radicals, and risking their lives by doing so.

And then there’s this one:

A collective statement by Muslim bloggers to the Iranian regime about its Holocaust denial conference

We the following Muslim bloggers hereby affirm that the Holocaust did happen because, not only are we quite capable of understanding overwhelming historical evidence, we also refuse to allow Muslim leaders to twist history for cruel, personal and selfish gains — thereby reflecting negatively upon us and the message of Islam — without confronting their actions with the hammer of righteous indignation. For religious, moral, and historical reasons, we repudiate and spit upon the Holocaust deniers conference now taking place in Iran, and stand in solidarity with student, and other, anti-fascists in that great nation, along with the victims of the Holocaust itself.

We further castigate Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as an egomaniacal sociopath and incompetent world leader who has embarrassed the reputation and spiritual world of Islam with his political falsifications and distortions. His attempts to infiltrate the realm of Holocaust studies in order to focus on changing the situations of foreign nations while many of his people go hungry and are unemployed, is obviously a deranged policy.

They’ve got a petition for people to sign.

It’s not for us to figure out how the Koran can be reconciled with non-violence and religious tolerance. If the Free Muslims can manage to square that particular circle, then more power to them.

These good people may be in a tiny minority among Muslims, and they may be doomed in any case. But it’s important for us to support them, because what they stand for is what we stand for.

Besides that, we need them.

They’re going to open up an Eastern Front.