Islamists Quotes

It's a mistake to assume that Islamists always come from the slums. Indeed, many come from affluent families but for some reason just couldn't manage to integrate into Western society, even though they had good opportunities for advancement. ~ Otto Schily

In the short run, the big windfall winners ... have been the Islamists. ~ Michael McFaul

So the villains aren't gay-hating Islamists or women killing tyrants, but actually us: an American Congress bent on the apocalypse. Don't we understand? Iranians love their children too. ~ Greg Gutfeld

The challenge is to lend conviction even to the voices which advocate views I find personally abhorrent, whether they are political Islamists or officers justifying a coup. ~ Orhan Pamuk

For years, Islamists and other extremists have taken advantage of grievances of Muslims in Britain and have successfully identified ways to integrate them under one 'Islamic' banner. ~ Maajid Nawaz

Extremism frequently turns its champions into angry people, driven by conflicting desires. At first, I pitied my less enlightened parents and siblings. Then I felt superior to them, poor sinners that they were. Then I lost patience with their unwillingness
to see the one true path and resorted to threats, intimidation, and yelling. At night, I was tormented by thoughts of what would happen to all us of when we reached our graves. ~ Manal Al-Sharif

Those Islamists and their apologists who argue for 'religious toleration' are arrogantly dishonest. ~ Newt Gingrich

[On highly politicized Islamists:] In the name of freedom they demand the right to renounce freedom. In the language of tolerance they demand that intolerance be granted a dignified place at the table. ~ Phyllis Chesler

In the 1990s, Islamists in Algeria won elections like the Brotherhood did in Egypt. The Algerian military refused to allow the Islamists to take power. A war erupted, killing between 100,000 to 200,000 people, depending on which estimates are to be believed. ~ Richard Engel

The Muslim Brotherhood is much more hardline than Turkish Islamists. ~ Richard Engel

Both sides in Syria are bad. One side is a brutal dictator, and the other includes Islamists and terrorists who are dangerous already and who would be brutal in power if given the chance. ~ Newt Gingrich

Accusing somebody of racism is a very effective weapon in Germany. Islamists know this: As soon as you accuse someone of demonizing Islam, then the European side backs down. ~ Bassam Tibi

The victims of right-wing violence are typically immigrants, Muslims, and people of color, while the targets of environmental and animal rights activism are among "the most powerful corporations on the planet" - hence the state's relative indifference to the one and obsession with the other.

The broader pattern helps to explain one partial exception to the left/right gap in official scrutiny - namely, the domestic aspects of the "War on Terror." Al Qaeda is clearly a reactionary organization. Like much of the American far right, it is theocratic, anti-Semitic, and patriarchal. Like Timothy McVeigh, the 9/11 hijackers attacked symbols of institutional power, killing a great many innocent people to further their cause. But while the state's bias favors the right over the left, the Islamists were the wrong kind of right-wing fanatic. These right-wing terrorists were foreigners, they were Muslim, and above all they were not white. And so, in retrospect and by comparison, the state's response to the Oklahoma City bombing seems relatively restrained - short-lived, focused, selectively targeting unlawful behavior for prosecution. The government's reaction to the September 11th attacks has been something else entirely - an open-ended war fought at home and abroad, using all variety of legal, illegal, and extra-legal military, police, and intelligence tactics, arbitrarily jailing large numbers of people and spying on entire communities of immigrants, Muslims, and Middle ~ Kristian Williams

A common error of western commentators who seek to interpret Islamism sympathetically is to view it as a form of localised resistance to globalisation. In fact, Islamism is also a universalist political project. Along with Neoliberals and Marxists, Islamists are participants in a dispute about how the world as whole is to be governed. None is ready to entertain the possibility that it should always contain a diversity of regimes. On this point, they differ from non-western traditions of thinking in India, China and Japan, which are much more restrained in making universal claims.

In their unshakeable faith that one way of living is best for all humankind, the chief protagonists in the dispute about political Islam belong to a way of thinking that is quintessentially western. As in Cold War times, we are led to believe we are locked in a clash of civilisations: the West against the rest. In truth, the ideologues of political Islam are western voices, no less than Marx or Hayek. The struggle with radical Islam is yet another western family quarrel. ~ John N. Gray

No one is as murderously 'Islamophobic' as Islamists are. ~ Nick Cohen

De-radicalisation begins by breaking down the logic which once seemed unassailable and rethinking what you are fighting for and why. That is hard to do when Islamists and Islamophobes feed off each other's hateful cliches. ~ Maajid Nawaz

Today, we're no longer just 'Muslim'. We're 'progressives', 'Islamists', 'traditionalists', 'salafis', 'indigenous', and 'immigrants'. And each group has become so alienated from the other, that we've almost forgotten that we share a common creed. ~ Yasmin Mogahed

On some occasions the only people making accurate claims about the motivations of Islamists and jihadists are themselves dangerous bigots. That's terrifying. ~ Sam Harris

The sweetest sound I know is the Muslim call to prayer. ~ Barack Obama

To militant Islamists, the expulsion of the Soviets was just the prelude to purging the entire Islamic world of infidels. ~ Gilles Kepel

What's important to do is we must deal frontally with this threat of radical Islamists, especially from ISIS. This is the most sophisticated terror group that has ever threatened the world or the United States of America. ~ Marco Rubio

One thing that I don't know if people have come to grips with yet is just how serious ISIS is, just how serious militant Islamists are about Sharia. There is no compromise. There is no halfway. There is no mutual cohabitation plan. ~ Rush Limbaugh

I am the Counselor at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. ~ Dennis Ross

It is my Middle Eastern hat and my attachment to Israel that ultimately inspires my support for Obama. I know he understands that neither Israel nor America can afford four more years of Iran and the radical Islamists gaining strategic leverage in the Middle East. ~ Dennis Ross

If you create enough space in Egypt, civil society will revive itself, and then will you have all of these secular forces, liberals, nationalists and others, compete with the Islamists. And then you will see the Islamists reduced to their size. ~ Hisham Melhem

Young people in particular need real options to find a decent job and to lift their lives. I'm not sure the new Islamist governments will be the best to promote prosperity and growth. ~ Jose Maria Aznar

The pope also knows that wherever radical Islamists become a majority they oppress other faiths. In Muslim countries there is no equal competition for souls, hearts, and minds, because atheists and missionaries and communities of Christians are forced to operate in an atmosphere of physical menace. And
although there are plenty of mosques in Rome, not a single church is permitted in Riyadh. ~ Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Needless to say, this would be an unthinkable crime - as it would kill tens of millions of innocent civilians in a single day - but it may be the only course of action available to us, given what Islamists believe ~ Sam Harris

Give the citizens of our fair seaport a real vote and they will do one of three things: vote for their own tribe, vote for the Islamists, or vote for whoever paid them the most money. ~ G. Willow Wilson

This administration has forbidden us to describe our enemies properly and clearly: they are Radical Islamists. They are not alone, and are allied with countries and groups who, though not religious fanatics, share their hatred of the West, particularly the United States and Israel. ~ Michael T. Flynn

By 1986 the CIA was spending 70 per cent of its entire operations budget funding a Muslim jihad to kill Russians. The whole campaign was managed by a bunch of Islamists who were giving the lion's share of the US money and weapons to people who wanted to kill Americans. The US was happy to use Islam as a rallying cry. The CIA funded the printing of Korans to be distributed throughout the region, and the University of Nebraska produced primary-school textbooks, known as 'the ABC of Jihad', which taught children the alphabet and to count with Kalashnikovs and swords instead of apples and oranges, and were filled with images of Islamic warriors. Alphabet ~ Christina Lamb

Sarah Palin has already had an effect on foreign relations ... The new president of Pakistan, Ali Zardari, is in hot water, because last week, Sarah was on a class trip to New York, where she met foreign leaders ... And one of the leaders she met was Zardari, and he was gushing over her. He said, oh, you're more gorgeous in person than you are on TV. And so the people in his home country of Pakistan, the Islamists, they issued a fatwa on him, for being too 'flirty.' And when Sarah today was told that Zardari had gotten a fatwa because of her, she said, 'I know, I felt it when he hugged me.' ~ Bill Maher

And while it's nice of you to want to call us 'modern' or 'moderate,' we'll do without the redundancy. Islam is by definition moderate, so the more strictly we adhere to its fundamentals - the more moderate we'll be. And Islam is by nature timeless and universal, so if we're truly Islamic - we'll always be modern.
We're not 'Progressives'; we're not 'Conservatives'. We're not 'neo-Salafi'; we're not 'Islamists'. We're not 'Traditionalists'; we're not 'Wahabis'. We're not 'Immigrants' and we're not 'Indigenous'. Thanks, but we'll do without your prefix.
We're just Muslim. ~ Yasmin Mogahed

So is he a radical?" non-Muslims often asked when I told them about the Sheikh. "Not at all," I'd say, assuming we were all speaking in post-9/11 code. "Of course not."

And I'd meant it. He is not a radical. Or rather, not their kind of radical.

His radicalism is of entirely another caliber. He's an extremist quietist, calling on Muslims to turn away from politics and to leave behind the frameworks of thought popularised by Islamists in recent centuries. Akram's call for an apolitical Islam unpicked the conditioning of a generation of Muslims, raised on the works of Abu l'Ala Maududi and Sayyid Qutb and their nineteenth-century forerunners. These ideologues aimed to make Islam relevant to the sociopolitical struggles facings Muslims coping with modernity. Their works helped inspire revolutions, coups, and constitutions. But while these thinkers equated faith with political action, the Sheikh believed that politics was puny. He was powered by a certainty that we are just passing through this earth and that mundane quests for land or power miss Islam's point. Compared with the men fighting for worldly turf, Akram was far more uncompromising: turn away from quests for nation-states or parliamentary seats and toward God. "Allah doesn't want people to complain to other people," he said. "People must complain to Allah, not to anyone else."

All the time spent fulminating, organising, protesting? It could be saved for prayer. So unjust governments run ~ Carla Power

Launching more drone strikes than Bush ever did and compiling a secret "kill list," President Obama's administration took the view that al-Qaeda was like an organized crime gang - disrupt the hierarchy, destroy the gang. Theirs was a concerted and dogmatic attempt at pretending that al-Qaeda was nothing but a fringe criminal group, and not a concrete realization of an ideological phenomenon with grassroots sympathy. They took this view in part because of how successful Islamist "fellow-traveler" lobbies had been in influencing Obama's campaign after the mistakes of the Bush years. For Islamists and their allies, the problem was "al-Qaeda inspired extremism," and not the extremism that had inspired al-Qaeda. ~ Sam Harris

In Egypt, a civil state means a modern nationalist state that is compatible with Islamist provisions. ~ Ali Gomaa

Islam has always been part of America ~ Barack Obama

The greatest evils since World War II have been Communism and, since the demise of Communism in the Soviet Union and most other Communist countries, violent Islam - or, as it often called, Islamism. Islamism is the belief that Sharia (Islamic law) must be imposed wherever possible on a society, beginning, of course, with Muslim-majority countries. These Islamists are, as the British historian Andrew Roberts has noted, the fourth incarnation of fascism - first there was fascism, then Nazism, then communism, and now Islamism. ~ Dennis Prager

However, the religious extremists, especially the pro-Taliban organizations, they mobilized and instigated the Islamists to come on the streets and put pressure on the government to stop any reform on the blasphemy law. ~ Shahbaz Bhatti

We have to be very cautious not to accept the scam of polarization we see in the media. It is not in fact between secularists and Islamists, it is a battle within the Islamic reference. ~ Tariq Ramadan

I really don't want to portray the Islamists as simply evil, the way it's often done in the west. ~ Orhan Pamuk

The problem is that the constitution should have been and was an opportunity, exactly as Moncef Marzouki tried to do, to bring together the secularists and Islamists. ~ Tariq Ramadan

I had known Mubarak and his wife, Suzanne, for nearly twenty years. He was a career Air Force officer who had risen through the ranks to become Vice President under Anwar Sadat, the Egyptian ruler who fought the Yom Kippur War with Israel in 1973 and later signed the Camp David Accords. Mubarak was injured in the extremist attack that assassinated Sadat in 1981, but he survived, became President, and cracked down hard on Islamists and other dissidents. He ruled Egypt like a pharaoh with nearly absolute power for the next three decades. ~ Hillary Rodham Clinton

The time for double standards that allow Islamists to behave aggressively toward us while they demand our weakness and submission is over. ~ Newt Gingrich

What I see now is that even with the Islamists, who have been portraying themselves as the alternative to corruption and dictatorship and in defence of more transparency, there is one respect in which they have now changed completely. Since the beginning of the 1920's, Islamism was very close in positioning in some respects to 'liberation theology'. But that is no longer the case. ~ Tariq Ramadan

In an odd way, we have really destroyed two of our strongest allies against the Islamists. Saddam Hussein, and we've probably fatally undermined Bashir al Assad in Syria. ~ Michael Scheuer

I think that anyone who moves to establish a Palestinian state and evacuate territory gives territory away to radical Islamist attacks against Israel. ~ Benjamin Netanyahu

Radical Islamists are serious about killing in pursuit of their extreme objectives. Releasing their soldiers can only embolden them to take more Americans hostage. The deal for Sgt. Bergdahl may well turn out to have been a bargain with the devil. ~ Cal Thomas

Remember, the Islamist view of democracy is: one man, one vote, one election, and that's it. ~ John Fund

We often hear Islamists declare, 'We love death as much as you people in the west love life.' Well, if we're going to now celebrate and jubilate in the death of Bin Laden, I have to say, I think that comes eerily close to mimicking the likes of the Islamists. And that gives me the creeps. ~ Irshad Manji

Antisemitism is unique among religious hatreds. It is a racist conspiracy theory fashioned for the needs of messianic and brutal rulers, as dictators from the Tsars to the Islamists via the Nazis have shown. Many other alleged religious 'hatreds' are not hatreds in the true sense. If I criticise Islamic, Orthodox Jewish or Catholic attitudes towards women, for instance, and I'm accused of being a bigot, I shrug and say it is not bigoted to oppose bigotry. ~ Nick Cohen

The Nazis believed in a master race. The militant Islamists believe in a master faith. ~ Benjamin Netanyahu

Besides, many Islamic movements will change as soon as they gain political responsibility. I'm not at all pessimistic in this regard. Just think of Turkey, where the Islamists are now behaving like a sort of Christian Democratic party in Europe. ~ Zalmay Khalilzad

We have to render Islamist extremism as unattractive as communism has become today. ~ Maajid Nawaz

The Islamists had control over territory that was about half the size of the Federal Republic of Germany. For years, we have been putting the lives of our troops on the line, we have taken huge losses and the Europeans cut the budget? If money is more important than the lives of our children, what else is this than the usual arrogance and superficiality? And where is all this terror coming from? It is a result of mistakes the West committed in Pakistan and Afghanistan in the 1980s, when they armed the Islamic rebels against the Soviet troops. ~ Yoweri Museveni

What we're seeing at the moment is people being radicalised or adopting Islamist, murderous Islamist ideology very, very quickly so that you have people that are not on the counterterrorism radar screen who then often, as a result of mental illness, will then attach themselves to this murderous ideology and then act very quickly. ~ Malcolm Turnbull

When trying to explain the violent path of some Islamists, Western commentators sometimes blame harsh economic conditions, dysfunctional family circumstances, confused identity, the generic alienation of young males, a failure to integrate into the larger society, mental illness, and so on. Some on the Left insist that the real fault lies with the mistakes of American foreign policy.
None of this is convincing. Jihad in the twenty-first century is not a problem of poverty, insufficient education, or any other social precondition. (Michael Zehaf-Bibeau was earning more than $90,000 a year working for a drilling company in British Columbia, where he also reportedly proclaimed his support of the Taliban and joked about suicide bombing vests, with no repercussions.) We must move beyond such facile explanations. The imperative for jihad is embedded in Islam itself. It is a religious obligation. ~ Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Aside from rabid Islamists, no one who wishes to be taken seriously can publicly say anything bad about the old Jews of Europe without sounding like reactionary troglodytes. ~ Jack Schwartz

Ms. Clinton, like the Obama administration more broadly, believes that appeasing Islamists ... promotes peace and stability. ~ Louie Gohmert

The greatest threat facing humanity is a radical Islamist regime meeting up with nuclear weapons. ~ Benjamin Netanyahu

The secular elites are so terrified of telling the truth about radical Islam. When you talk about the radical Islamists, we have got to get straight and get serious and talk about it in the right way. ~ Newt Gingrich

Neoconservatism had the philosophy that you go in with a supply-led approach to impose democratic values from the top down. Whereas Islamists and far-right organizations, for decades, have been building demand for their ideology on the grassroots. ~ Maajid Nawaz

The folks who want to build this mosque, who are really radical Islamists, who want to triumphfully prove they can build a mosque next to a place where 3,000 Americans were killed by radical Islamists. Those folks don't have any interest in reaching out to the community. They're trying to make a case about supremacy ... This happens all the time in America. Nazis don't have the right to put up a sign next to the Holocaust Museum in Washington. We would never accept the Japanese putting up a site next to Pearl Harbor. ~ Newt Gingrich

So, this is my plea to all Western editors and producers: Display the Muhammad cartoon daily, until the Islamists become accustomed to the fact that we turn sacred cows into hamburger. ~ Daniel Pipes

We will have a reckoning with our culture and religion, with military rulers and Islamists - two sides of one coin. Such a reckoning is essentially a feminist one. And it is what will eventually free us. Women - our rage, our tenacity, our daring and audacity - will free our countries. ~ Mona Eltahawy

In many parts of the Islamic world, secular forces, where they exist, tend to be so unsure of themselves, so lacking in self-confidence, that in many cases they line themselves up fairly squarely behind the imperial project and that then creates a big vacuum in which the Islamists become the dominant power because they are the only ones then who are seen as resisting. ~ Tariq Ali

But this experience taught me that our civilization cannot survive if we continue to appease the Islamists. ~ Roger Scruton

Saddam Hussein was not an Islamist. He's not a radical jihadist. He's not a radical Muslim. I mean, he was a - he was a Baathist. He was a secular - even though he professed to be a good and devout Muslim. ~ Rick Santorum

Progressives and Islamists are indeed on the same side. Their common disdain for Christianity explains why left-wing judges in America find any inkling of Christianity in the public square unconstitutional, while Islamist judges in the Middle East deem it executable. Their common view that life is expendable explains the left's embrace abortion-on-demand and why the Islamists don't hesitate to deploy their own children for homicide bombings. ~ Gary Bauer