Solsticewitch13's BOS: Muslim: Orlando Killer's Attitudes Can Be Found in My Own Mosque

Thursday, June 23, 2016

Muslim: Orlando Killer's Attitudes Can Be Found in My Own Mosque

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/263265/muslim-orlando-killers-attitudes-can-be-found-my-daniel-greenfield

June 22, 2016

Parvez Sharman is an interesting figure in that he's a gay Muslim activist. The two identities, gay activist and Muslim, don't go together two well. His DB piece is interesting in that it's a standard liberal critique, except liberals don't tend to critique Islam. And certainly not from the inside. There's plenty to disagree with here. But also plenty of basic common sense.

So I'm going to excerpt some parts of it.

“What’s his name?” I asked my husband as he woke me to tell me of the carnage in Orlando. “It’s going to be a Muslim name.”
I just knew it. I had never been one to racially profile my own community. But this time my premonition was right.
...
As a devout gay Muslim I am not going to make a claim that “Islam is a religion of peace.”
...
Growing up in a small Indian town with a large Muslim population, I heard young men talking about jihad in Kashmir and Palestine. I have even heard such matters discussed in hushed whispers at Manhattan’s 96th St. mosque, where I sometimes go and pray on Fridays and where subjugation of women is discussed in the open without the blink of an eye. The mosque was built largely with Saudi money, and its Imams often come equipped with the perversions of Wahhabi ideology.
...
A few weeks after September 11th, its Imam at the time, Sheik Muhammad Gemeaha resigned and left hastily for his native Egypt. He was quoted in The New York Times as having said amongst much else including the familiar deriding of “homosexuality” “‘only the Jews’ were capable of destroying the World Trade Center” and added that ‘'if it became known to the American people, they would have done to Jews what Hitler did.”
Calling Islam a religion of peace is dangerous and reductive. Like the other two monotheisms that precede it, it has blood on its hands. It’s time we Muslims start looking inward at our own communities so that the bloodshed can stop. I’m convinced that Mateen’s attitude is not fringe. It can be found everywhere from Mecca to my own mosque in New York City.

There's really little doubt of that. I disagree with Sharman on plenty of issues and ideas, but it's a reasonably honest critique of Islam from the inside. And that is a thing which simply is not allowed to exist for the most part. And that is a symptom of the problem.