On Orlando today

We’re all horrified by today’s mass murder in Orlando.

Although I’m about to board an airplane, I feel that I need to make at least a brief comment.

As I write, it seems overwhelmingly likely that this was yet another example of Islamist violence.

This is simply a redundant manifestation of the cancer growing out of Islam.  I use the term cancer quite deliberately.  It simply will not do for Muslims or sympathetic outsiders to pretend that Islamist terrorism is something utterly foreign or extraneous to Islam.  It isn’t.  Just as cancer grows out of the body of the cancer victim, out of his or her own cells, extremist Islam has emerged from the body of Islam and is feeding upon Islam itself.  Cancer isn’t contagious.  It’s “indigenous,” “homegrown.”

Muslims need to face that, and to deal with it.  Just as a cancer victim’s own body must reject cancer, even if outsiders (medical specialists) can perhaps help, only Muslims themselves can ultimately deal with this cancer.

I oppose what’s been sloppily called “Islamophobia.”  I’ve written against it, over and over again.  I continue to oppose it, and to regard it as a serious and dangerous error.  But it, too, doesn’t grow out of nothing.  Those who fear Islam and Muslims have grounds for their fear.  And, in many ways, increasingly so.

Muslims need to be less vocal about Islamophobia and much more vocal and active in opposing Islamic extremism.  In the longterm, that will be the best cure for Islamophobia, as well.

For those tempted by Islamophobia, though, I would like to remind them that a person’s cancer isn’t that person.  We aren’t our diseases.  Violent Islamist extremism isn’t identical with Islam.

But radical surgery is urgently necessary to separate the two.

And now I’ve got a plane to catch.