We Have Left the Religion!

Vi har lämnat religionen!

That’s Swedish for “We have left the religion!” It’s the Scandinavian version of the motto of the Central Council of Ex-Muslims in Germany, Wir haben abgeschworen!

The Council has now opened an affiliated chapter in Scandinavia. Here is an announcement in Der Humanistische Pressedienst (based on a machine translation):

The Central Council of Ex-Muslims in Germany is pleased to note, “that in so short a time Islam-critical and -damaged immigrants from Arab countries, whose example those from Turkey and Iran now also follow, organize publicly in other parts of the world.” The executive committee of the German ZdE [Zentralrats der Ex-Muslime, the Central Council of Ex-Muslims] regards this development as an encouraging indication of the development of an international Islam-critical reform movement.

This is a large and growing movement against Islam by those who know best the damage and deformation it causes. Thanks to the courage of their founders, the apostates’ organizations can provide some safety in numbers for those who would dare to repudiate Islam. When there are so many, how can they all be killed?

But the West is not uniformly pleased with this trend. Consider this summary from Studio Ett on Swedish Radio (translation by LN):

“We have left the religion!” For the members of the newly-formed Central Council of Ex-Muslims in Scandinavia, there was no other way to escape from living under oppression. Among other things the organization criticizes the media and the politicians that, in their opinion, have carried too much water for the political Islamists. But is such an organization needed in the Nordic Countries? Or does it only contribute to an additional polarization of the debate? [emphasis added]

Ponder for a moment the implications of the last sentence in this quote. For individuals who have been brutalized by a barbaric “religion” to organize and speak up is to “polarize the debate”!

In other words, unless every Muslim is loyal, subservient, content, and without grievance within the religion of his birth, he is doing everyone harm.
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Can you imagine a more patronizing, wrong-headed, stupid, and dangerous attitude towards Islamic barbarism?

Fortunately, the ex-Muslim movement may be too big for even the élite nomenklatura of Sweden to stop. As Wolfgang Bruno has written,

There are approximately one billion nominal Muslims in the world. How many of these are secret ex-Muslims? Ibn Warraq has estimated that 10-15% of the Muslims in the UK are actually apostates. If that percentage reflects the Islamic world as a whole, we are talking about a number of people the equivalent of a country the size of Japan. Even half of this is a country the size of Britain. Although only a (fast-growing) minority of Muslims around the world have access to the Internet, simple mathematics indicate that there are already hundreds of thousands, probably millions or maybe even tens of millions of ex-Muslims in cyberspace. This, as well as additional tens of millions of Muslims who already have at least some doubts, is the soft underbelly of Islam.

One of the reasons for my repeated urging of solicitousness toward the “moderate” Muslim is that “moderation” can be the beginning of a search for the exit. By extending the hand of friendly publicity towards him, we are helping the moderate Muslim find his way out the door.


The hat tip for the links and our thanks for the machine translation go to our redoubtable Swedish correspondent LN.