To anyone who can see this post beyond Google's firewall. Isn't it interesting that Google does not want you to have access to this image or this content?
Islam and Terror
Islam is different from all other
world faiths
A note for the reader: I'm from New
Jersey, and I've lived in Africa and Asia. Thanks to my background, I've lived
among Muslims my entire life. In Paterson, NJ, the call to prayer reaches
inside my apartment. In the Central African Republic, I lived mere steps away
from a madrassa. I witnessed tensions between Muslims and non-Muslims,
including Christian and Animist Africans. Those tensions eventually burst,
after I left the CAR, into a potential "genocidal" conflict.
I've had Muslim friends, students,
co-workers, health care professionals, and bosses. We can love our Muslim
friends and neighbors, and still criticize concepts like jihad, gender
apartheid, and dhimmitude.
Twenty-five years ago, after 9/11, I
thought to myself, "One good thing will come of this. Americans will
finally talk frankly about Islam." But that didn't happen. Powerful voices
in media, in pulpits, and in classrooms blamed 9/11 on American foreign policy.
Any honest critique of Islam – the exact kind of searching inquiry we devote to
Christianity, democracy, capitalism or Marxism – was denounced as
"Islamophobic," "racist," and beyond the pale of decent
discourse. Cultural relativism was deployed to silence critique of Islam.
"Christians do bad things! What about the Inquisition!" Those who
used this tactic inevitably revealed themselves to be woefully ignorant of
recent scholarship on the Inquisition, and also completely uninformed about any
aspect of Islam.
In frustration, I wrote the essay,
below. The Answering Islam website ran it, and Front Page reruns it today,
because, unfortunately, the public conversation about Islam has not changed
from twenty-five years ago. Cultural relativism, claims of "racism!"
combined with tragic ignorance still inform our public discourse.
