Mood: loud
Now Playing: Accuradio's Flock of '80s
Topic: Islamic Intolerance
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached."
---Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus
Pope Benedict XVI has said something that, thus far, has gone unsaid for too long. What is this, you might ask? Simply a truism: that Islam is the underlying cause for the world’s recent spat of international bloodletting. Now, to be accurate, his address at the University of Regensburg (http://www.ewtn.com/vnews/getstory.asp?number=70993) only tangentially tackled the issue of violence as a component of organized religion; the lecture was primarily concerned with Reason (with a capital “R”) as something that transcends simple, modern empiricism and quantification. However, in those few sentences that are not devoted to the larger issue of reason as a component of theology, the pope’s message is clear: God is inherently rational and logical. Therefore, any religion that embraces a God that is portrayed as being either irrational or capricious is inherently flawed. With this precept in mind, Pope Benedict is clearly implying that Islam’s history of violent, forced conversion of non-Muslims clearly fails this fundamental test of belief in a rational God.
What amazes me is that, despite the deaths of countless thousands of people due to Islamic violence, Pope Benedict is the first official willing to attempt to expose the oft-repeated absurdity that “Islam is a religion of peace.” Conservative or liberal; Muslim or non-Muslim; pundit or politician---all bend over backwards to assure the world that Islam is not the problem but just another victim of “fascists” that have “hijacked a great religion.”
I have often found that the easiest way to disprove a fallacy is with simple research. With that in mind, I set out to find out whether or not Islam has ever demonstrated a propensity towards peace. I was not startled to discover that this idea is demonstrably false, but I was startled at how it took me less than five minutes to do so! All I had to do was enter the search term “crusades” into my 2002 edition of MS Encarta to get the following entry:
"But the greatest threat came from the forces of Islam, militant and victorious in the centuries following the death of their leader, Muhammad, in 632. By the 8th century, Islamic forces had conquered North Africa, the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, and most of Spain. Islamic armies established bases in Italy, greatly reduced the size and power of the Byzantine Empire (the Eastern Roman Empire) and besieged its capital, Constantinople. The Byzantine Empire, which had preserved much of the classical civilization of the Greeks and had defended the eastern Mediterranean from assaults from all sides, was barely able to hold off the enemy. Islam posed the threat of a rival culture and religion, which neither the Vikings nor the Magyars had done."
Now, mind you, this did not come from some “Christian extremist” site (you know, one of those apparently numerous sites Rosie O’Donnell so fears is undermining the American way of life), but from a completely impartial encyclopedia produced by a liberal, Seattle-based corporation.
So what are we to conclude from this selection of text? If, as many claim, Islam had been hijacked by “extremists,” then this process of usurpation must have begun mere moments after its inception. After all, as early as the 8th Century, Islam had already been slashing and burning its way across the non-Muslim world, establishing dominion over lands long under the sway of rival religions. I find this very strange as, if you listen to the apologists for Islam, America and Israel are the cause for the recent phenomenon of Islamic violence. Of course, neither America nor Israel yet existed when the Saracens started their conquest of non-Muslim peoples (nor, for that matter, had the Crusades yet occurred---another popular excuse for the Muslim propensity towards violence).
Speaking of the Crusades, in the light of the above passage, it can easily be seen why Pope Urban II felt the necessity to call the first Crusade---it was not because of a sudden lust for land on the part of the pontiff, but rather a reaction to Islamic conquests. As Pope Urban remarked:
“For your brethren who live in the east are in urgent need of your help, and you must hasten to give them the aid which has often been promised them. For, as the most of you have heard, the Turks and Arabs have attacked them and have conquered the territory of Romania [the Greek empire] as far west as the shore of the Mediterranean and the Hellespont, which is called the Arm of St. George. They have occupied more and more of the lands of those Christians, and have overcome them in seven battles. They have killed and captured many, and have destroyed the churches and devastated the empire. If you permit them to continue thus for awhile with impurity, the faithful of God will be much more widely attacked by them.”
It is also interesting to note that some decades after the last Crusade was called, the bloody march of Islam resumed, terminating (fortunately) with the 1526 defeat of Sultan Suleiman I at the gates of Vienna. Historically speaking, Islam is all about conquest, and not at all about peaceful coexistence with its non-Muslim neighbors---such a record simply does not exist.
With this in mind, I quickly concluded that the problem must reside within the credo of Islam itself. But how could this be? After all, I have seen many Muslim clerics assure the world that the Koran prohibits violence toward non-believers. Hmm…better look into this one, I thought.
The Koran does state "There is no compulsion in religion..." (Surah 2:256) However, that was written at a time when Muhammad was the one being prosecuted by non-believers. Once the tide had turned in his favor, the tone of the Koran became much more intolerant:
“Those who deny Allah and His Messengers, ... strike at their necks; at length, when you have thoroughly subdued them….( Surah 4:150-152)
And
"Tell the unbelievers that if they abandon their ways He will forgive them what is past, but, if they return, that was indeed the way of their forefathers who have passed away. Fight them until persecution is no more and the Religion of Allah reigns supreme." (Surah 8:39-40)
And
"...O Prophet, urge the believers to fight. If there are twenty patient men among you, you shall overcome two hundred, and if there are a hundred, they shall overcome a thousand, for they are a nation who do not understand." (Surah 8:65)
And
"Fight those who neither believe in Allah nor the Last Day, who do not forbid what Allah and His Messenger have forbidden, and do not embrace the religion of the truth, being among those who have been given the Book (Bible and the Torah), until they pay tribute out of hand and have been humiliated." (Surah 9:29)
That does not sound very tolerant and peaceful, does it? Now, now, I know some of you are probably protesting that while the Koran does include such inflammatory declarations, no Muslim of the modern age actually adheres to such a strict interpretation. Really? Why do you think we are currently engaged in a War on Terror (a term which belies this nation’s continued reluctance to name the enemy)? Why do you think 9-11 occurred? The 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center? The bombing of USS Cole? The Marine barracks in Beirut? The Middle East obsession with the destruction of Israel (the Arab press often refers to Israel as a “crusader state”)? You have better believe that Islam is still at war with the non-Muslim world. But don’t take my word for it, take the world of Syrian-born Muslim cleric Omar Bakri Mohammed:
"We don't make a distinction between civilians and non-civilians, innocents and non-innocents. Only between Muslims and unbelievers. And the life of an unbeliever has no value. It has no sanctity. We will use your democracy to destroy your democracy."
I could go on and on with this topic---indeed there are many fine websites out there that do just that (see Jihadwatch.org). But I think my point is manifestly clear: Islam and intolerance goes hand and hand; it is this very nature that has caused so much bloodshed. And, instead of learning from its unfortunate past, such intolerance continues---sometimes expressed in bizarre ways. For example, shortly after Pope Benedict’s recent address (see above), Muslim leaders denounced his comments as creating an unfair depiction of Islam as a violent and intolerant religion. To prove their point, Muslims around the world rioted and firebombed Christian churches throughout the Middle East, with one Somali cleric demanding the death of the pope(!). You can’t make this stuff up….
In response to ever more Muslim outrage, Father Raymond J. de Souza wrote the following:
"In response to this historical excursus in an academic lecture by one of the world's most erudite theologians, we are witnessing a wave of madness and malice, no doubt an embarrassment to millions of Muslims....
It is not only the obscenity of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist terrorist band suppressed in several Muslim states, demanding an apology from anyone, let alone the Holy Father.
It is not only the grandstanding Pakistani politicians passing resolutions condemning a papal speech few read, and even fewer understood. It is not only the extraneous charges about the Holocaust and Hitler by the agitated and excited.
It is that we have seen this before.
When Pope John Paul II made his epic pilgrimage to the Holy Land, Palestinian Muslim representatives jostled him on the Temple Mount, shouted at him, and, in one episode of maximum rudeness, abandoned him on stage during an interfaith meeting. Bashir Assad, the Syrian President, treated him to an anti-Semitic rant when the late pope visited Syria.
And it is well past time that the maltreatment of history ceased too.
Catholics have for quite some time now confessed the sinful and wicked shadows that marked the Crusades, but any suggestion the whole affair was about rapacious Christians setting upon irenic Muslims must be rejected.
After all, the formerly Christian lands of North Africa, the Middle East and Asia Minor were not converted to Islam by Muslim missionary martyrs. Those lands were conquered by the sword.
In most countries with Muslim majorities, Christians do not have the full freedom to practise their faith without fear.
Whether private harassment or state-sanctioned torture, Christians the world over know all too well that the sword of Islam has not been sheathed. No doubt the extreme reaction to Benedict's address will serve the purpose of keeping local Christians in their place throughout the Islamic world."
Let us hope that this is the straw which broke the camel’s back. Let us hope that the world is, at long last, prepared to honestly face the Islamic menace that has, yet again, reared its ugly, intolerant, and violent head from the pages of history. I’ll leave you with the words of G. K. Chesterton summing up the difference between Christian West and Islamic East:
"Now a man preaching what he thinks is a platitude is far more intolerant than a man preaching what he admits is a paradox. It was exactly because it seemed self-evident, to Moslems as to Bolshevists, that their simple creed was suited to everybody, that they wished in that particular sweeping fashion to impose it on everybody. It was because Islam was broad that Moslems were narrow. And because it was not a hard religion it was a heavy rule. Because it was without a self-correcting complexity, it allowed of those simple and masculine but mostly rather dangerous appetites that show themselves in a chieftain or a lord. As it had the simplest sort of religion, monotheism, so it had the simplest sort of government, monarchy. There was exactly the same direct spirit in its despotism as in its deism. The Code, the Common Law, the give and take of charters and chivalric vows, did not grow in that golden desert. The great sun was in the sky and the great Saladin was in his tent, and he must be obeyed unless he were assassinated. Those who complain of our creeds as elaborate often forget that the elaborate Western creeds have produced the elaborate Western constitutions; and that they are elaborate because they are emancipated."