There has been more than a little of Alice in Wonderland from the administration lately on the issue of
exactly how the religion of Islam is related to the current wave of Middle
Eastern terrorists. The administration’s recent public denial that the Taliban was
a terrorist organization, and President Obama’s recent comments about the
Crusades (which showed, among other things, that he really doesn’t understand
history very well), all seem to reflect the American Left’s real difficulty
coming to terms with what the rest of us can see clearly – Islamic terrorism is
indeed obviously and directly related to the religion of Islam. And just about any terrorist on a grisly YouTube
video can be seen to be emphatically asserting that very fact. Apparently the Left’s
fear of being politically incorrect is so great that they simply cannot bring themselves
to face the facts.
Certainly
the majority of Muslims in the world are content just to go about their business
in peace, and the majority of Muslim clerics do not espouse or preach terror or
violence against unbelievers. Nonetheless, one cannot deny that there is a
virulent cadre of Muslim clerics preaching hate and intolerance and terror in some
of the madrassas (religious schools) of the Middle East, and that they support
these calls with direct references to verses in the Qur’an, nor can one deny
that verses exist in the Qur’an that can be interpreted to support killing of
infidels and unbelievers (for example 2:191-193 "And kill them wherever you find them, and turn
them out from where they have turned you out. And Al-Fitnah (disbelief)]
is worse than killing...but if they desist, then lo! Allah is forgiving and
merciful. And fight them until there is no more Fitnah (disbelief
and worshipping of others along with Allah) and worship is for Allah alone”,
or 8:12 “"I
will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off
their heads and strike off every fingertip of them", or 9:123 "O you who
believe! fight those of the unbelievers who are near to you and let them find
in you hardness.").
It is equally true that the Christian Bible has some verses
that can be used to justify violence, and indeed have been used in the past to
justify things like the Crusades. And when present day Christian extremists
justify violence with those verses we recognize that their extremism is indeed religiously
motivated, however much we may think they have distorted the meaning of the
verses they quote. Just so, Islamic
militants are clearly and obviously driven and motivated and instructed by the
religion of Islam, whether or not we think they have interpreted the religion
correctly.
Several writers recently have wondered whether this blindness
on the Left is because philosophically the Left doesn’t understand religion,
and seriously underestimates religion’s power in the world. It is the liberal Left,
after all, that widely espouses the Enlightenment view that religion is a
vestige of other, less rational times, and that it will inevitably wither away
in the face of the advance of science and rationality. It is a compelling
theory, but the evidence to date doesn’t support it. Religions are alive and
well throughout the world, and have a profound influence on the cultures they
inhabit.
It’s hard to see how we can effectively counter the current
wave of Islamic militancy if we cannot bring ourselves to even see it for what
it really is.
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