My latest reply to Mustafa Akyol, who argues that Islamic terrorists are hijacking the religion of peace, posted here Friday, appears today in slightly altered form in FrontPage magazine. Why would I care to argue that terrorists are not hijacking the religion of peace? Because as long as Muslims and non-Muslims continue to refuse to face the roots and sources of this violence, it will continue.
I hope to be bringing you more exchanges with Mr. Akyol in the near future.
This man has caught the same disease that millions of muslims and many liberals suffer from:
Denial
Disingenuous Muslim apologetics are notorious in the Toronto Globe and Mail too. Sheema Khan, of CAIR-Canada, is frequently granted op-ed space to reassure us of the peaceful nature of Islam. A year or two ago, she pennned the obligatory jihad = inner personal struggle argument, to which one can only reply, as you did, "perhaps you could do us all a favour and explain to these people that they've been killing over a semantic misunderstanding."
One nit I'd pick with your article is the atheist angle. I'm not so sure Stalin's, Mao's or Pol Pot's brutality stemmed from any rebellion against Christianity; perhaps a believing Christian would be incapable of such mass murder. (Although, Hitler's Christianity, admittedly perverted by paganism, didn't stop him.) Communist ideology seems to me to be almost religious itself, in its preference for belief over evidence. The difference I think is that communism, and Islam, are totalitarian, and Christianity is not.
That's why this atheist has few quarrels with Christianity. Christians may try to persuade but their techniques of persuasion never include murder.
Surly I agree with your complaint, in which Christians constantly equate Communism, Pol Pot etc with a rebellion against Christianity.
This is a tiresome arguement, but it is an argument that Islamosaurs constantly use.
On another forum I had a huge argument, still do, with an Islamic in which he claimed that atheists were responsible for the death of millions, including Muslims.
I guess everyone needs a scapegoat, but it is at times like this, when Christians climb on their self righteous bandwagon, that they resemble Islamics.
Islam is an Ideology (in fact google that phrase and it will take you to an Islamic site), but so again is any religion. Communism is just one more ideology, whose tenets were economic, and whose saviour was Marx, instead of Jesus.
Maybe the problem in the world is ideologies (religion is an ideology), ideologies are mutually exclusive, each ideology lays claim to being The Truth, and The Truth is absolute and mutually exclusive, those it perceives the competition as "evil", and thus are at war with the competition.
It seems that the concept of Dar al Islam v Dar al Harb is not only Manichean, but not limited to Islamics either.
It would be more fruitful if Mr Spencer and others
were to expand the tent, make room for those who share their knowledge and concerns, who know the face of intolerance and are willing to join the fight to preserve sanity in the world.
But that means realizing also that one's own belief system and self image is also self righteous, fearful and intolerant.
Here is a guiding maxim. "That which others condone, approve, propose or prohibit others, will be done to or prohibited to them."
Why that's a version of the golden rule.
Those who would deny civil rights, liberties, speech to others, will have those denied to them in return.
Christians and Islamics are great at finding excuses to deny rights to others, aren't they?
So are Orthodox Jews.
Its not only Moslems and liberals that mouth about the "religion of peace and compassion." That phrase and the "hijacking of a great religion" are platitudes repeated by people in the US administration that should know better unless they are trying to protect the Moslems in this country or owe a debt to the Saudis.
The peace and compassion may be there for those that strictly follow Islamic ideology such as the beheaders and other murderers of "non-believers." As for Islam being one of the great religions or even an "Abrahamic religion," that is so much bunk. It is an ideology disguised as a religion. The Biblical Abraham had nothing to do with Mohammedanism, except that its founder purloined monotheism and grafted it onto an Arabic idol made invisible (invisibility being another concept not original with Islam).
The idea that Abraham cavorted about with Ishmael and that Mohammed and the Arabs are descended from the patriarch's and the Egyptian handmaiden's son was fabricated to give legitimacy to this ideology that wants to predate and replace Judaism and Christianity by stealing from the former and incorporating bits of the latter.
http://www.bible.ca/islam/islam-myths-arabs-descendants-of-ishmael.htm