Quotes & Sayings About Islamists

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

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

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

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

I am convinced that if we do not decisively win the struggle over the nature of America, by the time [his grandchildren are] my age they will be in a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists and with no understanding of what it once meant to be an American. — Newt Gingrich

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

Basically, fundamentalism is a modern phenomenon. In the same way that Hitler evoked a mythological religion of German purity and the glory of the past, the Islamists use religion to evoke emotions and passions in people who have been oppressed for a long time in order to reach their purpose. — Azar Nafisi

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

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

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

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

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

In fact all the Islamists, that is the reformists not the Salafis, now they all say that they want a civil state, a civil state with Islamic reference points. They are not talking about an Islamic state, or sharia in the way this was once understood in the fight against the colonisers, or just afterwards in the 70's, 80's and 90's. — Tariq Ramadan

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

And if you look at the experience of Turkey, for example, where the modern Islamists are in power and are doing fine - this is very good. Because democracy is not possible in the Muslim world without bringing in the Islamists or part of the Islamists who hate us now into these governments. — Yaroslav Trofimov

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

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

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

Saudi Arabia was, until just a few years ago, probably one of the most safe countries on earth. And now the paper is daily full of activities and shootouts between Islamists who supported Osama bin Laden and the government there. — Michael Scheuer

Like many muslims I believe that, at its core, Islam calls for justice, mercy and peaceful, compassionate coexistence. It is distressing therefore, to me as a Muslim, to see extremists from within the faith practise brutality and hatred against others. They provide ample material for anti- muslims bigots who then seek to degenerate and dehumanise all Muslims- including those who are working to build bridges in our society and who defending universal human rights. While Islamists terrorist seek out Muslim human rights activist in order to kill them, anti Muslim bigots act as if we do not even exist. For the bigots, all Muslims and Islam are deemed to be the problem. Such an attitude is little to defend and protect the middle ground that Islamist extremism seek to destroy. — Tony McMahon

The underlying reason for this is the Europeans' fear that Islamists could gain power. Many still consider authoritarian Arab regimes to be the lesser evil. — Alvaro De Vasconcelos

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

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

Even what may have seemed, in retrospect, like minor quibbles - over the particular wording of sharia clauses, for example - reflected fundamental divides over the boundaries, limits, and purpose of the nation-state. For liberals, certain rights and freedoms are, by definition, nonnegotiable. They envision the state as a neutral arbiter. Meanwhile, even those Islamists who have little interest in legislating morality see the state as a promoter of a certain set of religious and moral values, through the soft power of the state machinery, the educational system, and the media. For them, these conservative values are not ideologically driven but represent a self-evident popular consensus around the role of religion in public life. The will of the people, particularly when it coincides with the will of God, takes precedence over any presumed international human rights norms. — Shadi Hamid

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

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

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

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

There are those out there who harbor an irrational fear of Islam. Islamophobes and Islamists have this much in common: both groups insist that Islam is a totalitarian political ideology at odds with liberal democracy, and hence both insist that the two will inevitably clash. One extreme calls for the Qur'an to be banned, the other calls to ban everything but the Qur'an. Together, they form the negative and the positive of a bomb fuse. — Maajid Nawaz

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

Harris Very interesting. So when we talk about a phenomenon like honor killing, we're not just worried about Islamists; we're worried about how the average conservative Muslim man will treat his wife or daughter in light of his religious beliefs and cultural values. And yet many of these conservatives may be opponents of Islamism. Nawaz Yes. Conservative Muslims can be very useful as allies against Islamism and jihadism, but they may oppose you on gender rights and equality and, in some cases, honor killings. — Sam Harris

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

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

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

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

After the Soviet withdrawal, many Afghan Communists had rebranded themselves as Islamists and joined the mujahedeen. — Anand Gopal

Again and again, when Westerners are perceived as denigrating Muhammad, the Koran, or Islam, Islamists demonstrate, riot or kill. — Daniel Pipes

I think it's been hard for people to understand how Islam can be a good religion, and yet the Islamists are evil. Those of us who have had experience with Islam understand this, just as we understand the difference between snake handlers and people going to church on Sunday morning. — P. J. O'Rourke

There was an insurgency under President Hosni Mubarak in the 1990s. Egyptian police and soldiers fought weekly battles with Islamists in the sugarcane fields and thick reeds along the Nile in rural southern villages like Minya, Sohag, Enna and Assiout. — Richard Engel

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

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

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

You who call yourselves liberals must understand that it is your way of life that is under threat. Withdraw my right to speak freely, and you jeopardize your own in the future. Ally yourselves with the Islamists at your peril. Tolerate their intolerance at your peril. — Ayaan Hirsi Ali

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

For the sake of the Gospel, it was worth it ... All you have to do is look at any society where there is no Jesus. I'll give you four: Nazis, no Jesus. Look at their record. Uh, Shintos? They started this thing in Pearl Harbor. Any Jesus among them? None. Communists? None. Islamists? Zero. That's eighty years of ideologies that have popped up where no Jesus was allowed among those four groups. Just look at the records as far as murder goes among those four groups. — Phil Robertson

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

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

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

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

As you know, the public conversation about the connection between Islamic ideology and Muslim intolerance and violence has been stifled by political correctness. In the West, there is now a large industry of apology and obfuscation designed, it would seem, to protect Muslims from having to grapple with the kinds of facts we've been talking about. The humanities and social science departments of every university are filled with scholars and pseudo-scholars - deemed to be experts in terrorism, religion, Islamic jurisprudence, anthropology, political science, and other fields - who claim that Muslim extremism is never what it seems. These experts insist that we can never take Islamists and jihadists at their word and that none of their declarations about God, paradise, martyrdom, and the evils of apostasy have anything to do with their real motivations. — Sam Harris

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Islamists will try to spoil everything for everyone. — Christopher Hitchens

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

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

To Arab Sunni Islamists, Iranians are gabrs (Zoroastrians) while Shi'ites, including Arab ones, are rafidis (heretics) who must be "re-converted" or put to death. — Amir Taheri

The truth, however, is that most Muslims appear to be "fundamental-
ist" in the Western sense of the word - in that even "moderate"
approaches to Islam generally consider the Koran to be the literal and
inerrant word of the one true God. The difference between funda-
mentalists and moderates - and certainly the difference between all
"extremists" and moderates - is the degree to which they see political
and military action to be intrinsic to the practice of their faith. In any
case, people who believe that Islam must inform every dimension of
human existence, including politics and law, are now generally called
not "fundamentalists" or "extremists" but, rather, "Islamists. — Sam Harris

According to polls, a majority (around 60+ percent) opposes the radar base. But it's not necessarily the sensible part of the Czech population. The demonstrations against the base are usually organized by communists, Islamists, and "peaceful feminists" (which is fortunately not a numerous group). — Lubos Motl

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

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

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

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

But the threat posed by the radical Islamists represents an unusual conflict, unlike any experienced by our nation before: we face an enemy that is not a state. — Paul Weyrich

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

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

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

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

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

You wonder, how could socialists, true socialists work with Islamists? Because if those Islamists take over, the first thing they're going to do is kill the socialists. — Louie Gohmert

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