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The Religion of Peace?
The problem with Islam is . . . Islam. An excellent website called “The Religion of Peace” is tracking the attacks that have been carried out by Islamic terrorists since 9/11.
A piece in Frontpage magazine yesterday points out that much Islamic violence is carried out on fellow Muslims who are “not Muslim enough.”
The Qur’an forbids a Muslim to kill a fellow believer intentionally (4:92), but both sides justify these conflicts by appealing to the Islamic practice of takfir: the declaration that, because of some doctrinal deviation, some group of Muslims are not actually Muslims at all, and their blood can lawfully be shed.
One of the chief characteristics of modern day Salafist movements – that is, movements to restore the purity of Islam – is their frequent use of takfir and subsequent targeting of those whom everyone in the world except they themselves would regard as their fellow Muslims.
This phenomenon is playing out all over the world today, as Wahhabis and other Salafist preachers take an Islamic hardline into areas where a more relaxed cultural Islam has long prevailed. The result is often violent. In fact, the Algerian sociologist Marieme Helie Lucas explains that the controversial term “Islamo-Fascism” was “initially coined by Algerian people struggling for democracy, against armed fundamentalist forces decimating people in our country, then later operating in Europe, where a number of us had taken refuge.”
These pro-democracy Algerians were, of course, Muslims – Muslims who were massacred by jihadists in the 1990s for being insufficiently Islamic. Over 150,000 were killed.
The biggest mistake W has made in his post 9/11 rhetoric is calling Islam a “religion of peace.” It is not.
The biggest mistake that the Left (U2’s Bono included) is making is to think that in some way we can peacefully coexist with Radical Islam. Heck, Muslims who aren’t Muslim enough can’t peacefully coexist with Radical Islam.
Radical Islam must be defeated and Iraq is the central front in this war.
Mike
October 20th, 2007 at 8:07 am
I forget where I read this, but referring to the “Bush lied, people died” crowd somebody replied, “The only time Bush lied was when he called Islam a ‘religion of peace,’ and you guys made him say that!”
The most dangerous thing about the Left’s (and the center’s?) approach to the war on terror is their insistence that we don’t actually have an enemy to fight. The Muslims have no such confusion on their side of the battlefield.