A slightly expanded version of my criticism of Nicholas Kristof’s appalling equation of Christian Fundamentalists with Islamic jihadists appears today in the Dallas Morning News:
Mr. Kristof either has no clue or doesn’t care that Christianity does not have and never has had a doctrine mandating warfare against non-Christians. Islam, on the other hand, has now and has always had a doctrine mandating warfare against non-Muslims.
See, just to cite a few references, Quran 9:29 (“Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day … (even if they are) of the People of the Book [Jews and Christians], until they pay the Jizya [the special tax on non-Muslims] with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued”) and hundreds of other verses; Sahih Muslim 4294 (Muhammad says: “Fight against those who disbelieve in Allah. Make a holy war”); a legal manual endorsed by the closest thing to a Vatican that Sunni Islam has, Al-Azhar University: “Umdat al-Salik o.9.8 (“[make] war upon Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians … until they become Muslim or pay the non-Muslim poll tax”); plus the writings of all the major Islamic jurists….
This is, of course, the one thing that people like Nicholas Kristof can never and will never admit, because it would explode the foggy multiculturalism and relativism that passes for a worldview in their minds. But it is simply a fact. Prove me wrong.
For Mr. Kristof to term this set of novels “militant Christianity,” which is somehow equivalent or becoming equivalent to militant Islam, shows that he has not the remotest idea of what the jihadists are really saying, why they are saying it, and how it differs from what Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell are saying. This kind of theological equivalence is the idiot stepchild of the moral equivalence that the learned pundits used to preach regarding the U.S. and the Soviet Union.
And just as moral equivalence played into the bloody hands of the Communists, so theological equivalence plays into the hands of the jihadists, attempting as it does to blunt the force of the moral argument against them. Yeah, sure, they preach murder, but, hey, look at these novels!