[RC] The delusion that Islam is 'just like' other religions -it is the exact opposite

[BILROJ via Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community]

Front Page Magazine
 
When Will We Wake Up?
January 8, 2015 by _Bruce  Thornton_ 
(http://www.frontpagemag.com/author/bruce-thornton/)   
(http://www.frontpagemag.com/2015/bruce-thornton/when-will-we-wake-up/#disqus_thread)
 

 
The three Muslim gunmen who killed 12 journalists in Paris targeted not  
just those people and their satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, but a core  
ideal and human right of the West––the right to free speech in the public 
square  defined by tolerance for different opinions. That’s why the killers, 
after they  had called out the names of their individual victims before they 
shot them,  bragged as they made their escape that they had “killed” Charlie  
Hebdo. That’s why they also cried, “The Prophet has been avenged,”  since 
the magazine had frequently spoofed Mohammed, most famously in its  
reprinting in 2006 of cartoons parodying Mohammed. Apparently President Obama  
was 
prescient, at least in the case of the twelve dead Parisians, when he warned  
in 2012, “The future must not belong to those who slander the Prophet of 
Islam.”   
Our leaders regularly scoff at the notion of a “clash of civilizations”  
between the West and Islam, as Secretary of State John Kerry did when he said 
 the attacks were “part of a larger confrontation, not between  
civilizations, no, but between civilization itself and those who are opposed to 
 a 
civilized world.” The jihadists know better, and like all enemies, they get a  
vote. They don’t just want to brutally kill people in order to terrorize us 
into  appeasement of their demands. They want to kill our fundamental  
principles.
 
And central to the political order of Western liberal democracies is 
freedom  of speech. If the citizen masses are to have the right to participate 
in 
the  political process, they must be assured that their opinions can be 
expressed  freely without fear of retaliation. And given the great diversity of 
opinions,  beliefs, and characters to be found among the people, this 
expression will often  be indecorous, rancorous, and hurtful to those who 
disagree. But hurt feelings  or wounded amour propre cannot function as a veto 
on 
public expression, which is  the foundation stone of political freedom. As 
Sophocles said, “Free men have  free tongues.” 
Yet we in the West, with our “hate speech” legislation and rules that  
demonize “Islamophobia,” and our universities that disinvite critics of Islam  
like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, have given such a veto to the jihadists, and in 
effect  validated Islamic blasphemy laws as superior to our right to free 
speech. 
After  all, for Muslims who aspire to be “slaves of Allah,” free speech 
cannot trump  traditional Islamic notions of blasphemy, a crime punishable by 
death according  to the Koran. That’s why the Organization of the Islamic 
Conference, a group of  56 Muslim nations, has actively been trying to make 
blasphemy a crime in  international law. That’s why it’s a Muslim majority 
state, NATO member Turkey,  that has jailed more journalists than any other 
country. And that’s why anything  Muslims perceive to be blasphemous––whether 
Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic  Verses, the Jyllands-Posten cartoons making 
fun of Mohammed, or Pope  Benedict’s Regensburg speech––is met by riots and 
murder on the part not just of  jihadist groups, but also ordinary Muslims. 
The truth is, many Muslims see the whole Western political order as 
radically  different from––and in their view, inferior to––that of Islam. The 
cultural  cargo of human rights, tolerance of confessional diversity, 
individual autonomy  and self-determination, and political freedom is 
incompatible 
with the  traditional Islamic doctrine that a divinely bestowed shari’a law is 
the only  legitimate social-political order that can create the best life 
in this world,  and ensure the enjoyment of paradise in the next. 
But this truth about Islam’s conflict with liberal democracy––a truth  
documented in 14 centuries of Islamic history and doctrine, and supported by  
majorities of Muslims worldwide–– is repeatedly denied by Western 
governments  and intellectuals. White House spokesman Josh Earnest repeated 
this false 
 knowledge, saying after the killings that Islam is “a peaceful religion 
and it’s  terrible that we are seeing some radical extremists attempt to use 
some of the  values to [sic] that religion and distort them greatly and 
inspire people to  commit terrible acts of violence.” Thus the illiberal, 
totalitarian nature  of Shari’a evident in sex apartheid, honor killings, 
enslavement of girls,  persecution and murder of religious minorities, 
destruction of 
churches and  synagogues, and chronic jihadist violence is attributed to 
anything and  everything other than the role of sacralized violence in Muslim 
history and  theology, a patent fact dismissed as Islamophobic slander.  
Meanwhile, jihadist slaughter continues worldwide, with almost 800 killed  and 
wounded just in the last week of 2014. 
Yet the greater irony of the reactions to the attack is that it took place 
a  few days after Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s New Year’s Day 
address,  _reported_ 
(http://www.raymondibrahim.com/from-the-arab-world/egypts-sisi-islamic-thinking-is-antagonizing-the-entire-world/)
  by Shillman 
Fellow Raymond  Ibrahim. The mainstream media ignored this important and 
astonishing  speech, but we need to ponder these words now, while our leaders 
continue  to deny the Islamic roots of the latest jihadist murder: 
It’s inconceivable that the thinking that we hold  most sacred should cause 
the entire umma [Islamic world] to be a source of  anxiety, danger, killing 
and destruction for the rest of the world.  Impossible! That thinking—I am 
not saying “religion” but  “thinking”—that corpus of texts and ideas that 
we have sacralized over the  centuries, to the point that departing from 
them has become almost impossible,  is antagonizing the entire world.  It’s 
antagonizing the entire  world! 
Is it possible that 1.6 billion people [Muslims]  should want to kill the 
rest of the world’s inhabitants—that is 7 billion—so  that they themselves 
may live? Impossible! I am saying these words here  at Al Azhar, before this 
assembly of scholars and ulema—Allah Almighty be  witness to your truth on 
Judgment Day concerning that which I’m talking about  now. All this that I am 
telling you, you cannot feel it if you remain  trapped within this mindset. 
You need to step outside of yourselves to be able  to observe it and 
reflect on it from a more enlightened perspective. 
I say and repeat again that we are in need of a  religious revolution. You, 
imams, are responsible before Allah. The entire  world, I say it again, the 
entire world is waiting for your next move …  because this umma is being 
torn, it is being destroyed, it is being lost—and  it is being lost by our own 
hands.

 
So the leader of the Middle East’s largest Muslim  country admits the link 
between “the corpus of texts and ideas that we have  sacralized over the 
centuries” and jihadist aggression. No mention of Israel and  the worldwide 
Zionist conspiracy, no mention of imperialism, colonialism,  poverty, 
Islamophobia, or any of the other specious excuses Western apologists  trot out 
to 
rationalize jihadist violence. No, the community of believers is  “being lost 
by our own hands.” Nor is the solution a Palestinian state, or more  “
respect” for Islam, or more appeasement and concessions from self-loathing  
Westerners. No, Muslim theologians and scholars must start a “religious  
revolution,” and figure out how to reconcile their faith to modernity. 
But that revolution is the business of Muslims,  particularly all those “
moderate” Muslim masses we keep hearing about but who  are oddly silent about 
these serial jihadist “distortions” of their faith. This  country’s 
responsibility is to protect our citizens and interests, and to do  that we 
must 
awake from our delusional slumbers. We must stop apologizing for  our alleged 
historical crimes, stop the self-censorship and agonizing over the  hurt 
feelings of those trying to kill us, stop peddling “religion of peace”  
fairytales, and stop indulging the “profiling” angst and Islamophobia canard.  
Most important, we must start basing our policies on truth and common sense, 
and  start taking action to defend our political principles like freedom, 
individual  rights, and tolerance, rather than just talking about  them.

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