Did Islam Have Anything to Do With It?
There may be non-violent Muslims - that is individuals who practice the religion of Islam. However, Islam itself is an integrated religious, cultural, and political system.
Islamics who commit acts of terrorism reckognize the directives of the Koram and Hadith to wage jihad against infidels. Yet many Westerners still fail to acknowledge the fact that Islamics are doing what their religious / political system dictates.
In the May 11, 2019 American Spectator article, ‘Did Islam Have Anything to Do With It?’ - I visited 13 sites of Islamic terrorist attacks and asked witnesses that one question, Larry Alex Taunton explains:
On April 7, 2017, in Stockholm, Sweden, Rakhmat Akilov, a Muslim immigrant and asylum-seeker, stole a beer truck in the heart of the city’s shopping district. Did he have a keg party in mind? No. Alcohol is forbidden in Islam. The killing of “infidels,” however, is not, and that is precisely what Akilov had in mind. Circling the block, he careened down a fashionable pedestrian lane. Before the rampage ended, five people were dead and 14 others injured....
I walked the length of the street from where the carnage began...
“People can be so evil,” she [a shopkeeper] observed thoughtfully. “The man [who did it] was married and had children, yet he targeted women and children. Why would he do that?”
The answer seemed obvious to me. I offered a clue: “Do you think his religion had anything to do with the attack, Lily?”...
... why the inability to make the connection between terrorism and Islam?...
In post-Christian Europe, where Rousseau’s view of human nature (i.e., we are born good) has replaced the biblical view (i.e., we are born corrupt); evil is understood to be merely a religious construct; and secularism is not only the de facto paradigm but an entrenched ideology, few Europeans have the intellectual framework to understand an absolutist religion like Islam. In the secular mindset this life is all you get, and almost nothing is worth dying for, certainly not religion. Consequently, those answering my question either responded with puzzled looks as if the question itself had no meaning, or they dismissed the attacks as the irrational acts of the mentally disturbed. That they might have been inspired by an ideology deeply at odds with traditional Western ideals and rooted in a belief in eternity simply didn’t enter into the discussion. The terrorists just had to be crazy or poor or disenfranchised. The things they did were somehow our fault, provoked by our racism or imperialism or failure to assimilate them. Better dialogue and mutual understanding will overcome.
It won’t.
Some will object that I am demonizing all Muslims. I am not. My point is not that all Muslims are terrorists or would-be terrorists. It is, rather, that their religion has a disproportionate number of adherents who believe the words of Surah 8:39 are absolute truth and their duty to fulfill, violently and at the cost of their lives if need be:
“And fight them until there is no fitnah [i.e., worship in anything other than Allah] and until the religion, all of it, is for Allah.”...
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