Dysfunctional Islam

This week, a religious leader made a declaration that was offensive to many of other faiths and even to some of no faith. His was the kind of statement that was inflammatory, hateful, and indicative to many of a 'Crusading' state of mind. He cited older sayings of his own religious tradition as justification for his words. Those inflammatory words were greeted with enthusiasm by his own adherents yet barely noticed by the Fourth Estate.

The statement was made by the leader of Israeli Arab Muslims, Sheikh Raad Salah, who openly promised a gathering of 50,000 Israeli Arabs last Friday that “very shortly the Israeli occupation of Jerusalem would be eclipsed and the city will become the capital of the world Islamic caliphate.

His audience eagerly thundered: “With fire and blood we will liberate al Aqsa!”

Understand, please, that Israeli Arabs are free in Israel's democracy to worship in their mosques. They pay no 'poll tax' to be exempted from the military; they collect the same social and medical benefits that Jewish Israelis receive; they are free to come to Jerusalem and worship at Al Aksa Mosque, something they were never permitted to do curing the iron-clad Occupation of Jerusalem by the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan for 19 years (1948-1967).

Israeli Arabs are even free to gather in seditious crowds of 50,000 and scream for the destruction of the state.

No one demanded that the sheik apologize despite his hate-filled triumphalist call for Holy War against the West and the Jews, the conquest of Israel and the theft of Judaism's holiest city, Jerusalem -- to be seized by force and used as the capital of a new world-wide Caliphate wherein Islam will be the state religion and Moslems firmly in control of the world.

And Moslems rioted over the Pope's remarks?!

Since 1973, Islam, a religion ignored by much of the civilized world and relegated to the category of "Third World religion" has embarked on the colonization of the West: we have witnessed the murder and threat of murder through fatwa of its dissidents and freethinkers (and Jews), the intimidation of too-politically-correct western leadership, the censorship-through-threat of the western press, the rape of western women in places as disparate as Australia and Norway by Moslem men determined to force western women into Islamic standards of dress. We have stood by haplessly as Moslem colonizers have infiltrated western society and glorified mass murder, justified the butchery of crippled old men like Leon Klinghofer, or unarmed young men like Robert Dean Stethem, hailing these butchers of the helpless as 'heroes' of Islam.

We have listened to Moslem clerics and lay leadership justify the 'honor killings' of their women and the mass murder of not just Israeli children, but now any child who happens to be on the same street as a car bomb in Iraq or attending a wedding in Amman.

We have listened to Moslem clerics and lay leadership talking out of both sides of their mouths for three generations: telling Moslems in Arabic to keep killing because their cause is just and they will triumph in an orgy of bloodletting that will transport them to world domination, all the while making soothing placating politically correct noises to western leaders who don't understand Arabic and won't read the translations provided them.

Islamic terrorists kill and kidnap, then justify their actions by citing aging "wrongs" that any reasonable examination will show flow from their own short-sighted, willful decisions to repudiate peaceful means of resolving differences (I like to remind the Politically Correct of my acquaintance that while the Palestinians scream about UN Resolution 242, they fail to ever mention that the Palestinians themselves refuse to adopt the UN Resolution creating the states of Israel and Palestine in the first place).

Now, after decades of Moslem colonization, intimidation, coercion, kidnapping, terror and murder, Moslems laughably claim 'victim' status and make more demands on the West for its adherence to the Moslem Agenda.

I say the Pope got it right. Go read the remarks--hit the link above in the title. Or continue below with the salient portion:

"Here I would like to discuss only one point - itself rather marginal to the dialogue as a whole - which, in the context of the issue of "faith and reason", I found interesting and which can serve as the starting-point for my reflections on this issue.

In the seventh conversation (διάλεξις - controversy) edited by Professor Khoury, the emperor touches on the theme of the holy war. The emperor must have known that surah 2, 256 reads: "There is no compulsion in religion".

According to the experts, this is one of the suras of the early period, when Mohammed was still powerless and under threat. But naturally the emperor also knew the instructions, developed later and recorded in the Qur'an, concerning holy war.

Without descending to details, such as the difference in treatment accorded to those who have the "Book" and the "infidels", he addresses his interlocutor with a startling brusqueness, a brusqueness which leaves us astounded, on the central question about the relationship between religion and violence in generalsaying: "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".

The emperor, after having expressed himself so forcefully, goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable.

Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul. "God", he says, "is not pleased by blood - and not acting reasonably (σὺν λόγω) is contrary to God's nature. Faith is born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats... To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death...".

This statement, a statement that violence is not compatible with faith, God and the souls of mankind, and that the faiths of the world should enter dialogues based on theology rather than secular constructs which ignore the Divine, is what prompted an outburst of murderous violence throughout the Moslem world. The Pope talks about the encounter between Faith and Reason -- and the Moslem world responds with an orgy of church-burning, threats and murder.

Islam proved once again it is a dysfunctional religion peopled by Third World fanatics intent on dragging the rest of the world into a 7th Century religious dictatorship. Moslem behavior has only proved that Islam is not a 'religion of peace' but a cult of death.