Tashbih Sayyed: Why I am still a Muslim

Many Western conservatives, having become familiar over the past few years with some unappealing aspects of Islam and its core texts, have grown suspicious of "moderate Muslims" who laud many Western values while retaining their allegiance to a religion which seems to contradict those values. If they are serious about Western values, why don't they leave Islam? Islamic dissident Tashbih Sayyed (whose website is here) provided one thought-provoking answer in an interview with Tovia Singer on the unofficial internet radio station Israel National Radio (direct link to mp3 here). Tashbih Sayyed expressed attitudes which were so pro-Jewish that they seemed to leave Singer nonplussed. Singer did, however, manage to ask why Tashbih Sayyed did not therefore simply convert to Judaism. Here is his response (as near as I can make it out from the rather poor-quality out-of-studio component of the audio recording):

[Laughs] If I become a Jew, I will give a weapon in the hands of radical Islamists, that he is criticizing us because he is a Jew . . . I believe in my Islam. I want to fight the radical Islam by remaining a Muslim, because I don't trust people who leave their faith. Everyone has to clean his own house. He cannot leave a dirty house and join a cleaner house, because the dirt will follow him. The dirt will corrupt the house that he joins.