The Headchopping Moderate Muslim

When Muzzammil Hassan founded Bridges TV, he had the perfect story to offer. An employee of major American brand name companies such as Clorox and Proctor and Gamble, with an MBA from Georgetown, founding a Cable network whose mission statement contained lots of liberal buzzwords about fostering diversity, building a dialogue and breaking down cultural barriers.

Bridges TV made every effort to put forward a public multiracial and multicultural face. As did Muzzammil Hassan. Just a good All-American Muslim looking to bridge some gaps and teach the world to sing. Out front Bridges TV put out press releases crediting Hassan's wife with generating the idea of the cable network, and touting programs that would bring Muslims, Christians and Jews together. The reality however was radically different, both in the Hassan marriage and on Bridges TV.

Bridges TV may have issued its press releases and tacked up its mission statements promising to teach everyone to love each other. But the actual cable network's programming featured the same sort of vile ugliness you can see on Al Jazeera and most Muslim networks, redolent of hate for America, Jews and non-Muslim infidels-- and eagerly promoting terrorism.

As Daniel Pipes has extensively documented, Bridges TV like its founder, had a very ugly Islamofascist face behind the smiling multicultural mask.

One religious figure who appeared October 3 said Muslims have a duty to change America and to increase their numbers to 50% of the population from 2%. He recommended that Shariah, or Islamic law, be implemented in American courts. During a roundtable discussion on the Arab-Israeli conflict on October 5, one participant offered a solution: "For the Jews to leave and return to Europe."

Bridges TV aired a speech by the influential Muslim scholar Jamal Badawi on October 4. Mr. Badawi, who teaches Islam throughout North America, gave an interview to the Saudi Gazette on June 24, 2005, in which he raised questions about who was behind the September 11 attacks and suggested that Americans could be behind the car bombings of Iraqi markets.

An anti-Jewish, anti-Christian sermon from October 5 included the call, "May God destroy them!"

The smiling multicultural faces of Bridges TV were in reality a facade, a charade meant to fool Americans. Bridges TV was backed by CAIR and the Muslim American Society, both with extensive terrorist ties. He did his fundraising extensively in Saudi Arabia. Bridges TV was another Islamofascist trojan horse. And like all the others features a smiling face out front in order to relate to ordinary Americans-- and a murderous fanatic's grimace behind it.

That too was the life of Muzzammil Hassan, who finally did what so many Muslim men routinely do to their wives and daughters, when they defy them. Hassan chopped his wife's head when she tried to divorce him. Had he done it in Saudi Arabia or in his native Pakistan, the odds would have been weighed in his favor. Unfortunately for him he did it in a country governed by a legal system based on human equality, rather than the gruesome gender apartheid of Sharia law.

But it is worth noting that a generation from now the outcome of a Muslim man chopping his wife's head may not be nearly that clear cut. For anyone who imagines that this is alarmism, European judges have already dismissed rape cases as cultural misunderstandings. The Sharia premise of two legal systems for one country is already deeply embedded in the legal and political cultures of many European countries. That was Muzzammil Hassan's goal in America. It is a project set to be interrupted by a lengthy prison sentence. But the case of Hassan is a deeply educational one.

Muzzammil Hassan was no Gaza orphan. He was no Basra street thug or Karachi mosque follower. He was smart. He was well educated. He had non-Muslim friends and was quite familiar with the world outside Islam. But beneath it all he was an Islamofascist fanatic. He successfully disguised his true beliefs and personality, just as the 9/11 hijackers did, and just as countless Muslims in America have done. He put a smile on and repeated back the cliches of multiculturalism to gullible Americans. But that was not who Muzzammil Hassan was. That was only the mask he wore.

Hassan is the real face of Islam in the West. One much less obviously threatening than the likes of Rage Boy, but in reality far more dangerous. If America will be defeated it will not be by screaming maniacs in the street, dangerous as they may be in a given incident. It will be by Muslim MBA's in business suits, who know how to talk the talk, who can put the enemy at ease, and keep the long term objective in mind.

In the end Muzzammil Hassan could not maintain his disguise, and showed his true face in a shocking moment of ugliness and brutality that reverted to the real nature of Bridges TV's programming as well. Not merely murder, but beheading. The act that has become the signature crime of Islamofascism in the 21st century, not merely carried out but recorded, and played back over and over again as a way to incite the faithful to mimic the crime.

The mythical moderate Muslim, like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster, haunts the Western imagination. Scholars work hard to search for these 21st century fairies, debating how many moderate Muslims can dance on the head of a grenade pin. But the very idea of a moderate Muslim is a contradiction in terms.

"Allah will instill terror into the hearts of the disbelievers: smite ye above their necks and smite their fingertips off them." Qur'an 8:12

or from the Hadith

Volume 5, Book 59, Number 572:

Narrated 'Ali: O ye who believe! Take not my enemies and your enemies as friends, offering them your love even though they have disbelieved in Allah, Muhammad and the Quran which has come to you. And whosoever of you Muslims does that, then indeed he has gone astray from the Straight Path."

That is a moderate Muslim. Anything less than that is not true to Islam and the legacy of Mohammed.

Muzzammil Hassan was no doubt a moderate Muslim. Unfortunately that means something other than most Westerners think it does. It follows from Mohammed's commandment to kill infidels. It treats women as property. That is the real face of Islam. The headchopping moderate Muslim.

Hassan was a good Muslim and a bad man. The two always go together. One can be a good man or a good Muslim. One cannot be both. Muzzammil Hassan was a good Muslim. Now he is in jail where he belongs.