Stupid CIA guy

'Like Nazism, Islam is an ideology one chooses to adhere to. Were there "good" or "moderate" Nazis? If not, then no one can claim that there are good or moderate Muslims as they are voluntarily subscribing to an ideology that advocates murder, torture and jihad and does not permit its follower to cherry-pick which parts they believe in. The requirement to accept the Koran as the literal word of God also carries with it the obligation to accept it all. And as you say, the Koran instructs all Muslims to wage war against non-Muslims and all schools of Islamic thought instruct the subjugation of the non-Muslim world through jihad. Therefore, I do not believe it wise to attempt to create artificial distinctions between Muslims that don't really as far as their attitudes towards non-Muslims is concerned.'
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=AF613BFA-8E34-4A07-8DB4-20D89DE3D84B

How is it that after all the time this guy has supposedly spent studying Islam, he is still making elementary errors? Mainstream Shia and Sunni Islam DO have large bodies of rulings which 'interpret' i.e. change what the Koran says. Because many things in the Koran run counter to normal human life, many of its injunctions were 'interpreted' so that Moslems could lead productive, peaceful lives. The radical thing about Wahhabism is it throws away that enormous body of accumulated wisdom, and says that the Koran and only the Koran dictates how a Moslem should live. Everything else is a false idol and is against 'true' Islam. How did this crucial distinction pass Mr Tefft by?

Comparing mainstream Islam with Nazism is dangerous and wrong. The period where Islam sprouted from the Hijaz and stormed the mediterraenean world is in the distant past. The last 'adventures' for Islam were the Ottoman empire-building wars, and the Ottomans were traditional imperialists. They did what they did for secular glory, not on behalf of Islam. To pretend that the masses of Bangladesh, Indonesia, Iraq and Egypt want to take the banner of Islam into Paris and Washington DC is just hokum. The Wahhabists are vanguardists- they don't represent a mass movement at all. They represent the small percentage of young violent men to be found in many societies who believe they are right and that murdering the people who are wrong will end up with their eventual victory. It hasn't happened before (and Wahhabist ideology has been around since ca 1300) and it won't happen this time.

Just from simple common humanity, we in the West should help Islam divest itself of the Wahhabist scourge. We are not doing a very good job at the moment, and we really need to start soon, as the Wahhabists have a state sponsor and vast sums of money, neither of which they ever possessed before at the same time. It makes me sick to see our Royal Family and government welcoming in Abdullah. Saudi Arabia should be a pariah state, no matter how much oil they have. It is their propaganda, their institutions of state, their seminaries and their overtly gigantist mosque building which are adding great heft to the Wahhabist takeover bid.

People like Mr Tefft really annoy me. The first task in any contest is to define your enemy, and not just fight whoever comes into view. The Wahhabists are a small but formidable foe, growing on the margins but still easily defeatable right now as long as we don't tarry and get into a completely unnecessary general war with Islam. I don't happen to like what Islam preaches, but then I don't like what a lot of religions teach. That is neither here nor there. Mr Tefft worries me- is that the calibre of person populating the CIA? Poor America...