Uzay Bulut
The political violence of the
Koran is eternal and universal. The political violence of the Bible was for
that particular historical time and place. This is the vast difference between
Islam and other ideologies." — Bill Warner, Director, Center for the Study
of Political Islam.
The word has turned into a
place where free speech is confused with hate speech, and people in positions
of responsibility, who take that responsibility seriously, such as the Dutch
parliamentarian Geert Wilders, are bullied, marginalized and brought to trial.
So, to a degree are we all
mentally ill, but not all mental illnesses are socially acceptable and not
every mentally ill person channels his mental illness through a prism of religion
that glorifies homicide.
Every time Islamic terrorism
is discussed, those who bring up the "Christian terrorism" of the Ku
Klux Klan or anti-abortion violence simply block free speech, as if
deliberately trying to scramble the main topic. They seem to be saying,
"Whether the Islamic State is Islamic or not is irrelevant; there are
Christian terrorists as well, so do not talk about Islamic terrorists."
When violence and domination
in a religion are so deeply rooted -- and sanctioned with promises of rewards
-- fundamentalists will always find people to excite and people to persecute.
It is a magnificent ready-made outlet for people who wish to be violent and
dominate, or identify with a cause bigger than themselves.
That is why Islamic theology,
ideology and goals desperately need to be discussed. They deeply affect the
life choices most Muslims make.
Shhhh! We can talk today of
all religions but one. We can question all religions but one today. We know
that any question of Islam can be taken as a criticism, and put our lives at
risk, as seen most recently in Paris with the murders of the staff of Charlie
Hebdo magazine. It is the only religion that people -- including the
apologists for "Islamophobia" -- have to think ten times before
discussing. At the same time, it is the same religion that is perpetually
associated with "peace."
Why should anyone be afraid of
a "religion of peace"? Because some of its supporters threaten to
kill you, and often do.
Is there even one critic of
Islam who has not received a threat, or been able to live freely without
worrying about his or her safety? We are now living in a world where, if a
prominent critic of Islam stays alive, or out of a court of law, it is
considered almost a miracle -- in both the Muslim world and the West.
We are living in a world
where, in Britain, Muslim rape gangs and sharia law courts abound, but where defenders of liberty, such as Geert Wilders,
Robert Spencer, Susanne Winter, Lars Hedegaard or Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff
are variously banned,
sued or threatened with jail -- if they are not first murdered, as was Theo van
Gogh or the cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo, by the people or groups
that they were trying to warn us about. Worse yet, in a blame-the-victim
inversion that could be out of Orwell, if you do speak up and
are harmed, it is all too often considered your fault: if you had just kept
quiet, so the thinking goes, nothing would have happened to you. Just try
telling that to the aid workers beheaded in their orange jump suits, or, among
many others, the victims of Britain's 7/7, America's 9/11, Spain's train
bombings, Toulouse, the Jewish museum in Belgium, the Canadian Parliament, a
massacre in Boston or Fort Hood, in Australia or a Parisian supermarket.
The world has turned into a
place where free speech is confused with hate speech; and where people in
positions of responsibility, who take that responsibility seriously, such as
Dutch Parliamentarian Geert Wilders, are bullied, marginalized and brought to trial.
The apologists for
Islamophobia have many tales to tell to hinder free speech. Every time Islam is
brought up, they bring up the issue of violence committed against individuals
who provide abortions. But anti-abortion violence is not "Christian terrorism,"
and nowhere in the New Testament does a single teaching command that people who
either have or provide abortions must be murdered or assaulted.
Verses of violence in any
scripture that are open-ended commands to kill should, instead, like the
violent verses in the Old Testament, be stories that relate to history,
restricted by their historical context, not interpreted as requirements for
piety. Christians no longer engage in the Inquisition.
Every time the Quran is
discussed, apologists for Islam say "Oh, what about the violent verses in
the Old Testament?" But there are qualitative and quantitative differences
between the Hebrew Bible and the Quran, even if they do not want to see that.
The Director of the Center for
the Study of Political Islam, Bill Warner, compares Islamic doctrine to other religions quantitatively and qualitatively.
Islamic books are neither peaceful nor are their violent verses restricted by
their historical context.
"The real problem goes
far beyond the quantitative measurement of ten times as much violent material
[as in the Hebrew Bible]; there is also the qualitative measurement. The
political violence of the Koran is eternal and universal. The political
violence of the Bible was for that particular historical time and place. This
is the vast difference between Islam and other ideologies. The violence remains
a constant threat to all non-Islamic cultures, now and into the future. Islam
is not analogous to Christianity and Judaism in any practical way. Beyond the
one-god doctrine, Islam is unique unto itself."[1]
He notes that, "There is
no admonition towards political violence in the New Testament." He might
also have added that the violence in Islam remains a threat also to many
Islamic sects: Sunni, Shi'a, Sufi, Ahmadiyya, Alawite.
After the Islamic State [IS] started
beheading and raping innocent people wholesale in Iraq and Syria, people were
so shocked that they attempted to find explanations for these vicious acts.
Some of the shocked have accused the lyrics of a former rapper who later joined the IS[2]; some accused the United States[3], and some accused historical British
colonialism[4].
And another popular
explanation is that Muslim terrorists in general, and Islamic State terrorists
in particular, are simply the victims of mental illness [5]. So, to a degree are we all, but not all
mental illnesses are socially acceptable, and not every mentally ill person
channels his mental illness through the prism of a religion that glorifies
homicide.
According to this explanation,
even no matter what terrorists themselves say, anything butIslamic
theology seems to be responsible for Islamic violence. Even if people or
organizations proclaims their Islamic beliefs for their actions, shout Islamic
slogans and carry the flag of Islam, their violence always seems to have
"nothing to with the Islamic ideology."
A photo that compares the Ku
Klux Klan [KKK] to IS, for instance, has been shared on the social media for
weeks. The photo's caption, referring to the Klan, read: "No one thinks
that these people are representative of Christians." Then, referring to IS
terrorists, it asked: "so why do so many think that these people are
representative of Muslims?"
A cartoon referring to IS
read: "This is an Islamic organization... about as much as this [KKK] is a
Christian organization."
Sadly, such photos and
cartoons show how theologically illiterate many people are. They have lost the
ability to analyze or critique what they are observing in the face of a deadly
threat -- in this instance a religion, Islamic ideology. These images, and
messages like them, seem intended to mislead one into concluding that
fundamentalist Islamic ideology contradicts the Islamic State's killings in
Iraq and Syria, and that Islam is not violent. "ISIL is not Islamic,"
U.S. President Barack Obama said.
That conclusion is wrong.
To determine whether a group
is a terrorist organization inspired by a certain religion, what needs to be
looked at is whether there is a parallel between the stated goals of the group
and the teachings of their religion. The stated objective of IS is to establish
an Islamic caliphate under Sharia law [6].
Every time Islamic terrorism
is discussed, those who bring up the "Christian terrorism" of the KKK
or anti-abortion violence, simply block free speech, as if deliberately trying
to scramble the main topic. They seem to be saying, "Whether the Islamic
State is Islamic or not is irrelevant; there are Christian 'terrorists' as well,
so do not talk about Islamic terrorists."
The Quran, however, contains dozens
of verses promoting violence -- at least 109 verses call on Muslims to wage war
with nonbelievers for the sake of Islam. It would be hard to interpret these
verses as a spiritual struggle.
For instance, the Quran
commands: "If the hypocrites, and those in whose hearts is a disease, and
the alarmists in the city do not cease, We verily shall urge thee on against
them, then they will be your neighbors in it but a little while. Accursed, they
will be seized wherever found and slain with a (fierce) slaughter."
(33:60-62)
Such teachings in Islam
sanction slaughter against three groups:
§ Muslims
who refuse to "fight in the way of Allah" are hypocrites and they are
to be massacred (3:167).
§ People
with "diseased hearts" -- including Jews and Christians (5:51-52;
33:61-62).
§ "Alarmists,"
those who speak out against Islam, should also be slain. (33:62).
When violence and domination
in a religion are so deeply rooted -- and sanctioned with promises of rewards
-- fundamentalists will always find people to excite and people to persecute.
It is a magnificent ready-made outlet for people who desire to be violent and
dominate, or identify with a cause bigger than themselves.
Worse yet, Muslims who do not
join the fight are called "hypocrites" (Quran: 3:167) and warned that
if they do not join the violence, they will be sent to a Hell of eternal fire.
It is an order apparently intended to neutralize one's conscience, encourage
and sanction human aggression, and promote murder -- seemingly why it has
worked so well for so long. As the leading Sunni cleric Sheikh Yusuf
al-Qaradawi admitted, "If they [Muslims] had gotten rid of the punishment for
apostasy, Islam would not exist today."
Part of the appeal of the
Islamic State to many of its young recruits seems to be this appetite for
blood. It starts with videos of beheading men in orange jumpsuits, and now
reasons for murder have spread to killing people for wanting to leave the IS -- not Islam, just the IS -- and, in the instance of
women and girls, for refusing to marry jihadists.
On December 18, 2014, the
Hindu Human Rights Group [HHR] reported that,
"Text books in Pakistani
schools foster prejudice and intolerance of Hindus and other religious
minorities, while most teachers view non-Muslims as 'enemies of Islam,' according
to a study by a US government commission released on Wednesday."
...
"The findings indicate
how deeply ingrained hard-line Islam is in Pakistan and help explain why
militancy is often supported, tolerated or excused in the country.... The
textbooks make very little reference to the role played by Hindus, Sikhs and
Christians in the cultural, military and civic life of Pakistan, meaning 'a
young minority student will thus not find many examples of educated religious
minorities in their own textbooks.'"
As seen easily in the history
of Islamic militancy in Pakistan, if the extremist fundamentalists of this
religion can find any Jews, Christians, Hindus, atheists or other non-Muslims,
who are referred to in the Quran in less than favorable terms, the extremists
target them[7]. Sometimes the extremists kill them, and
sometimes they only forcibly convert them. If they cannot find non-Muslims,
they attack the believers of other sects of Islam -- as in the battles between
Sunnis and Shias. If people from those sects cannot be found to dehumanize and
attack, then the extremists target their own members. If supremacy, conquest,
violence and forced conversion are commanded and sanctioned in a religion to
such a great extent, the number of victims of that religion will naturally
continue to grow.
Fortunately, of course, most
Muslims do not engage in fundamentalist Islam, jihad or violence, but this
still does not mean that those teachings are not commanded by fundamentalist
Islamic theology. Of course, that ideology should never be confused with
individuals. Muslims should never be stereotyped, mistreated, or discriminated
against just because of their Muslim identity. Islam needs to be analyzed on
the basis of its teachings -- not on the basis of Muslims.
But that is why Islamic
theology, ideology and goals desperately need to be discussed. They deeply
affect the life choices most Muslims make.
Uzay Bulut, Gatestone Institute, January 26, 2015
[1] "It turns out," he writes,
"that jihad occurs in large proportion in all three texts (Koran, Sira,
and Hadith, or the Islamic Trilogy). It is very significant that the Sira (life
of Muhammad) devotes 67% of its text to jihad.... Now let's go to the Hebrew Bible.
When we count all the political violence, we find that 5.6% of the text is
devoted to it. ... When we count the magnitude of words devoted to political
violence, we have 327,547 words in the Trilogy (Koran, Sira, and Hadith) and
34,039 words in the Hebrew Bible. The Trilogy has 9.6 times as much wordage
devoted to political violence as the Hebrew Bible."
[2] Hisham Aidi, for instance, a lecturer
at the School of International and Public Affairs and the Institute of African
Affairs at Columbia University, argues whether extremist hip hop is helping the
Islamic State. Instead, he should be asking, "are some certain Islamic
teachings helping IS or why do the lyrics of extremist Muslim hip hop promote
so much violence?
[3] Various students who were interviewed on
the quad by Campus Reform said that they believe America, not the Muslim
fanatics who behead innocent people, is the biggest threat to world peace.
[4] For example, David L. Phillips,
Director of the Program on Peace-building and Human Rights at Columbia
University's Institute for the Study of Human Rights, wrote that "ISIS has a
legitimate grievance against Western countries that carved up the Middle East,
with blatant disregard for tribal and sectarian affiliations of the local
population.
[5] For instance: Psychiatrists Dr.
Paul-André Lafleur, and Dr. Hubert Van Gijseghem say that
the homegrown radicalization of the two men -- Martin Couture Rouleau, who
rammed his vehicle into two Canadian soldiers, killing one, and Michael Zehaf
Bibeau, who shot dead a soldier guarding the National War Memorial in October
-- stems from acute psychiatric problems of paranoia, personal identity crisis
and possible psychosis. Rouleau, however, had called 911 during the chase to say that he carried out his acts in the
name of Allah. Similarly, Zehaf-Bibeau had made a video prior to the attack in
which he expressed his
motives as being related "to Canada's foreign policy and in respect of his
religious beliefs", according to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
[6] On 29 June 2014, the Islamic State
proclaimed a new caliphate and appointed al-Baghdadi as its caliph. Laith
Kubba, the director for the Middle East and North Africa at the National
Endowment of Democracy, explained:
"Baghdadi declared a caliphate, and anyone who knows theology and the
background would realize that this declaration, according to traditional fiqh,
puts an obligation of anyone who is religiously observant to declare
allegiance." When the caliphate was announced, IS stated:
"The legality of all emirates, groups, states and organizations becomes
null by the expansion of the khilafah's [caliphate's] authority and arrival of
its troops to their areas."
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