It's nice to see a sign of some internal criticism of FrontPage on this issue. I have long been concerned about the undue hope placed in the "moderate" or "reformist" Muslim at FrontPage.
Raheel Raza is not the only one of concern. The same problems that Carl Goldberg raises about her in the above-linked FrontPage article apply equally to the other poster boys and girls of "moderate Islam" listed on the lower left hand side of the front page of FrontPage under the immoderately hopeful rubric of "Islamic Reformation": Raheel Raza, Hasan Mahmud, Tarek Fatah, Linda Ahmed, Edip Yuksel, Thomas Haidon, Khalim Massoud.
All of these Muslims are a strange breed. While it is meet to say, along with Hugh Fitzgerald of Jihad Watch, that the Ex-Muslim represents the best and the brightest of the Muslim world -- but, alas, all too rare a bird -- the "reformist" Muslim represents an altogether different, and strangely paradoxical species. The screamingly obvious and apposite questions posed by Carl Goldberg in this article could be amplified by hundreds of other verses from the Hadiths and Koran, as well as most of the Sira (biography of Mohammed). Given the essence of Islam in all of its texts and laws, and given the historical character of Islam and of Muslims throughout the ages into our own increasingly bloody and hateful present, these "reformist" Muslims touted by FrontPage who continue to follow Islam are either 1) unusually mentally damaged; or 2) lying and practicing taqiyya. There is no third alternative.
Their strange mental impairment is seen chiefly in what Goldberg has noted -- the monumental cognitive dissonance between their persistent idealization of Islam and the grotesquely ghoulish and ethically depraved nature of Islam from its roots to its fruits and right down to its very heart.
See my essay on my blog about some of these issues: A chewy, sweet, nougaty center to Islam? --
http://hesperado.blogspot.com/2008/11/chewy-sweet-nougaty-center-to-islam.html
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