Robert Spencer

Why the overblown reaction over a simple typo?

Because it amused me.

And no Pope before John Paul II had apologized for the Inquisition either, as far as I am aware. And Catholics are amongst the most moderate of Christians. But Catholics had stopped burning people for heresy long before any apology came.

Sufis haven't stopped waging violent jihad. Cf. Chechnya. And the fact that Hassan Al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, was strongly influenced by Sufism and prescribed many Sufi exercises for the early Brothers. That is not quite equivalent to a 500-year-old record free of burnings for heresy.

I don't know whether Bektashis have officially condemned specific portions of the Quran which, like you say and I am not trying to deny, do rather explicitly call for the subjugation of non-believers.

They don't have to condemn specific portions of the Qur'an. Given their belief that the Qur'an is the perfect word of God, I would consider it inconceivable that they would ever condemn any portion of the Qur'an.

But I do know that at least their community in Albania and Kosovo, has, through their official leaders, condemned every major act of terrorism I can think of, and that their sect has never had any conflict whatsoever (ideological or military) with Albanian Catholics or Albanian Orthodox Christians. And I know my home country's history very well. By the way, my father is Orthodox Christian and my mother is Jewish. I'd know if we'd lived like dhimmis for generations.

Condemning terrorism is not enough. The Islamic supremacist agenda does not proceed solely through terrorism. CAIR condemns terrorism. See Anti-CAIR for why that is not enough.

Anyway, your family has not lived as dhimmis at least since 1856. Do you know what happened then, and why?

I don't know of a single church or synagogue to condemn passages in the Bible/Torah that call for open genocide or mysogeny either, and there are many such passages.

Actually, none of the allegedly genocidal passages in the Torah actually direct believers on an open-ended basis to go behave this way on an indefinite basis. They are specific directives to specific people in specific times and places. So they are not equivalent to the Qur'anic directives to subjugate unbelievers, which are open-ended. What's more, as you point out below, Jewish and Christian exegetes have for centuries spiritualized these passages -- more on that below. But all that said now, if there were armed groups of Jews and Christians committing acts of violence and justifying them by reference to these passages, then yes, it would be incumbent upon Jewish and Christian groups to reject at least the noxious interpretations of those passages. But there aren't. There are, however, armed Islamic groups all over the world justifying acts of violence by referring to various passages of the Qur'an and Sunnah. Thus it becomes incumbent upon all decent Muslims to reject and refute and fight against those interpretations of the Islamic texts, if they can, or care to do so.

I do not expect them to explicitly condemn anything. What they can do is take those dark passages in the most figurative sense possible, that is, to not attribute them any value. That enough makes the overwhelming majority of Christians and Jews today "moderates".

Quite so. But the mainstream interpretation of those Qur'anic passages in question -- among all Islamic sects and schools -- is that they enjoin a state of war between believers and unbelievers for all time. Not necessarily a hot war, but always a state of war, and an imperative to subjugate the unbelievers under Sharia. Have any Sufi leaders explicitly rejected that imperative? I'm still looking.

I'm nearing the limit here. More to come.