by Shmuel Klatzkin

exploring the murky depths of my laptop this last week, I came upon a provocative pamphlet from about a decade ago, perhaps.

It’s provocative in a very good sense. The author, Dr. Tawfik Hamid, wrote passionately about the topic at hand, a passion that was palpable. Hamid is an Egyptian MD who identifies himself as a moderate Muslim. In the pamphlet, he was making the case that we must see what people mean when they invoke the name of Islam. Hamid found the need to do that, having joined an Egyptian jihadist group in the Eighties, which he then left as the result of the moral awakening that led him to be a Muslim reformer.

Here in the pamphlet, Hamid derides those Western accommodators who act as if morality requires their groveling before the jihadists he repudiates. Hoping only to be liked and affirmed, Hamid says that instead they legitimate the cruelest and most violent expressions of Islam instead of making common cause with those who embrace civilization and religious and cultural freedom.

Hamid’s pamphlet shows a cartoon dialogue between Mr. Tolerance and Osama bin Laden. In one frame, Mr. Tolerance says to Osama: "I think we should begin stoning women to death for committing adultery in order to show respect to your culture and sensitivity to your religious values!" Astonished and pleased, Osama tells his fawning co-dependent the raw details of the agenda of the Islamists, and at each step, Mr. Tolerance strives to out-rationalize Osama in order to get his approval.

Hamid saw early on the cancer of oikophobia, a term Roger Scruton defines as "the repudiation of inheritance and home." Hamid loves his home and will not tolerate it being polluted by horrific doctrines and squalid actions. He challenges us to combat our own timidity and oikophobia, stand tall on the principles of our civilization, and to ask some direct and searching questions of those who have not clarified what they mean when they invoke Islam. He asks us not to be afraid of those who bully the conversation by dismissing even the most fair-minded criticism with the cry of Islamophobia.

Hamid here proposes a list of clarifying questions to help us determine whether the version of Islam being invoked by its proponents is worthy of our support or our opposition. What is at stake is nothing short of our civilization with its aspiration to ordered freedom in which all find strength and inspiration in their religion to build a peaceful and abundant world. We can and must discern which values are in tune with the best that civilization aspires to, and those whose atavism and depravity should be evident and draw condemnation from Muslim, Jew, and Christian — and any civilized person — alike.

Here is the list in Hamid’s own clear and concise words:

Please support peaceful Muslims by asking Islamic organizations, associations, and local mosques to clarify their position in an unambiguous manner in their media outlets in regard to the following violent concepts:

  • Apostates: Killing Apostates
  • Beating women and stoning them until death for having extramarital sex
  • Calling Jews pigs and monkeys
  • Declaring wars to spread Islam
  • Enslavement of female war prisoners to have sex with them "Ma Malakat Aimanikum"
  • Fighting Jews before the end days and killing all of them
  • Gay killing

Our Western civilization has taught us that we cannot let the extreme, the ignorant, and the malevolent set the rules of our conversation. Our work is partnering in creating societies able to be ruled by the consent of the governed. We build a culture in which we internalize a morality that does not rely on force in the first place but in great self-evident principles and models.

Whether in the schools of Athens or in Jerusalem, for thousands of years we have examples of people listening to each other on momentous issues and together making civilization. That listening leads to mutual enrichment, provided that we learn to admit our basic humanity by active and vibrant humility. Unlike the fanatic, we know we only know a piece of the puzzle, just like everyone else. But what I know, others may need to know as well, and what they know, I may well need, too. And how will we know what is needed and what is not if we do not talk to each other, truthfully, wholeheartedly?

This is the hard-learned, distilled lesson of the First Amendment — we cannot force our core certainties on others. They must be self-evident if they are to be accepted without resistance. We put our core certainties off the government’s table — the core, irrefutable truths from Above beckon us with an invitation stronger than any government’s coercion. Our religion bids us to restrict our government’s power to furthering the civil society, and it sanctifies the covenant by which we empower our government to do that.

The years since Hamid wrote this pamphlet, a growing number of Muslims have found it possible to express similar sentiments in the media, in public places and in the halls of power. After years of the Ottoman revival of murderous ethnic and religious hatred to defibrillate their dying empire; after the alliance forged by the founder of Palestinian terrorism, Amin al Husseini, with Adolf Hitler in order to eliminate the Jews in vain pursuit of national redemption; after decades of Nasser’s pan-Arabism, which marginalized and reduced to insignificance the multitude of ethnicities that had been spread quilt-like over the Middle East for centuries; after the half-century of Khomeinism re-igniting the fire of Jew-hatred after it had been stained by Nasser’s humiliating failures in the wars he sought — after all this, a long-hidden spark of Islam is coming to light and seeking to offer a better alternative and end the century-long dominance of hateful resentment and exterminationist aspirations.


There really are people who hate. They will try to paralyze the civilizational conversation they do not seek and will not tolerate. They do so by means they have studied and know are effective: accusing you of being the hater, trying to turn you into a "Mr. Toleration," a flaccid sycophant of anyone who will reassure him of his own goodness, no matter the price.

Some things are worth hating. Because the haters have polluted the discussion, turning concepts upside down, seeking to wear you out like any vexatious litigator, like any psychopath, we need to break through their manipulation and re-establish the life-giving civilizational conversation. Hamid shows us one very good way to do that: ask fair questions that are pointed and focused and share the answers publicly.

There is no substitute for seeking the truth. Every participant in this civilization needs, as best they are able, to amass a basic competence and awareness of the long history of the clash between the religions and the peoples of the Middle East. This clash is now a world clash, striking nations all over the world from within and without. When propaganda chokes the space in which the discussions need to take place, the Hamids of this world are not heard, the progress his views have made is not recognized, and a slothful, self-indulgent media disheartens those who seek the cause of civilization and its necessary great discussion.

I intend to use this space in the coming weeks to offer quality readings that will help. This conflict is not in the least confined to "a faraway place between people of whom we know nothing." It is here in our homeland and in homelands of our civilizational allies.

First in my list is a work by the late British historian, Sir Martin Gilbert, under whom Larry Arnn of Hillsdale College worked in researching and setting down the last six volumes of the authorized biography of Winston Churchill. It is a book of essential history, clear, jargon-free, readable, and fair. It is not meant to be the last word, but for many, it may be the first in welcoming them to a true discussion after years of sloganeering and propaganda.

More anon!