We have reported on this statement by Taheri-azar before, but this report goes into more detail. It seems that the Tarheel mujahid “read the Quran’s 114 chapters 15 times and found that the Muslim holy book justified the attack.” And he did not try to murder UNC students “out of hatred for Americans, but out of love for Allah instead.”
Now, I know where in the Qur’an he could have gotten this idea. If you have read any of my books or have been reading this site for awhile, you know where in the Qur’an he could have gotten this idea. But still we have the President of the United States and the Secretary of State blandly insisting that Islam is a religion of peace. We have the leading American Muslim spokesmen insisting that, in effect, Taheri-azar was completely misreading what is a book of peace and benevolence and tolerance.
There are just too many misunderstanders of Islam, as I have referred to them many times here, all over the world for this position to be maintained. Yet three and a half years after Muhammad Atta and his crew flew a plane into the World Trade Center out of love for Allah, we still don’t see any sustained or concerted effort by Muslims here or anywhere else to disabuse their coreligionists of the jihad ideology.
Also, analysts keep focusing on the question of whether or not Taheri-azar was a “terrorist.” I don’t care if you call him a canteloupe. The real problem here is that anyone anywhere at any time can read the Qur’an and come to the same conclusion that he did. If American officials were really serious about preventing a future attack, they would address that. If American Muslim advocacy groups were really serious about being loyal, patriotic Americans, they would address that.
Am I saying that the Qur’an should be outlawed, as was attempted long ago in Calcutta and about which there have been some rumblings recently in Germany?
No, I would prefer to deal more in the realm of what is realistically possible. I’d like to see an honest public discussion of the elements of the Qur’an and Sunnah that give impetus to violence and fanaticism. I’d like to see American Muslim spokesmen explain how they will specifically address these elements, and teach Muslims to reject them in favor of the principles of the equality of dignity and rights of all people, women as well as men, non-Muslims as well as Muslims. And I’d like to see them follow through on these explanations with real action.
Only then might we be getting somewhere against this phenomenon. I am not holding my breath.
From AP, with thanks to JE:
RALEIGH, N.C. — The man who hit nine people with a sport utility vehicle on the University of North Carolina’s Chapel Hill campus wrote a letter to a television reporter saying he read the Quran’s 114 chapters 15 times and found that the Muslim holy book justified the attack.
”I did not act out of hatred for Americans, but out of love for Allah instead,” Mohammed Taheri-azar, 22, wrote in a letter to Amber Rupinta dated March 10 posted on WTVD’s Web site….
Taheri-azar wrote that he began his readings of the Quran in June 2003. He called the book ”a scientific and mathematical miracle, so there can be no doubt that it is from a supernatural source.”