The New York Times would never publish such a glowing endorsement of any other religion, as in this puff piece about a pair of “moderate Muslims:” U.S. Muslim Clerics Seek a Modern Middle Ground. (Hat tip: LGF readers.)

As with any article by the Times promoting Islam, you need to read every word carefully to find the places where the real agenda peeks through the BS.

Mr. Yusuf dazzles his audiences by weaving into one of his typical half-hour talks quotations from St. Augustine, Patton, Eric Erikson, Jung, Solzhenitsyn, Auden, Robert Bly, Gen. William C. Westmoreland and the Bible. He is the host of a TV reality show that is popular in the Middle East, in which he takes a vanload of Arabs on a road trip across the United States to visit people who might challenge Arab stereotypes about Americans, like the antiwar protesters demonstrating outside the Republican National Convention.

So he’s appealing to Arabs by showing them the whacked-out far-left moonbats who threw tantrums at the Republican National Convention, like Code Pink and International ANSWER. Nice.

And here’s a lovely bit of “moderate” moral equivalence between the head-chopping mujahideen and the US military:

Mr. Yusuf told the audience in Houston to beware of “fanatics” who pluck Islamic scripture out of context and say, “We’re going to tell you what God says on every single issue.”

“That’s not Islam,” Mr. Yusuf said. “That’s psychopathy.”

He asked the audience to pray for the victims of kidnappers in Iraq, saying that kidnapping is just as bad as American bombings in which the military dismisses the civilians killed as “collateral damage.”

“They’re both sinister, as far as I’m concerned,” he said. “One is efficient, the other is pathetic.”

But the most amazing statement is saved for the final two paragraphs, in which “moderate” Imam Zaid Shakir admits he wants the United States to become a Muslim country, ruled by shari’a law. He says he doesn’t want it to happen “by violent means.” I guess that’s how he keeps his “moderate” status.

And he says every honest Muslim feels the same.

He said he still hoped that one day the United States would be a Muslim country ruled by Islamic law, “not by violent means, but by persuasion.”

“Every Muslim who is honest would say, I would like to see America become a Muslim country,” he said. “I think it would help people, and if I didn’t believe that, I wouldn’t be a Muslim. Because Islam helped me as a person, and it’s helped a lot of people in my community.”