« Headline Verses Reality At BBC News On Iraq | Main | Accepting The Realities Of "Islam's" Jihadists »
July 12, 2007
Murder And Suicide By Any Other Name Is Still ....
As John Hood at The Corner puts it, "More of this, please."
From Javeed Akhter, a physician and a founding member of the International Strategy and Policy Institute, a Chicago-based Muslim-American think tank, writing in the Baltimore Sun:
The enormity of what happened in London and Glasgow, Scotland, dawned upon me slowly. First there were the two high-end cars filled with explosive materials, parked in the middle of London, that mercifully did not explode. Next, the bizarre report of two people in a burning SUV trying to crash into the main terminal of the Glasgow airport, filled with travelers. Again, fortunately, no one, except the driver, was hurt. Next came the utterly devastating news that one of the people in the SUV was a doctor and both were Muslims. The passenger, Bilal Abdulla, was born in Britain but went to medical school in Iraq. Five other doctors or medical students and one spouse of a physician are being held.Continue reading: Terror plot violated profession, religion.How could those trained in the healing arts plan and carry out such an atrocity? Physicians see illness and pain often and witness the anguish of families at the finality of death. They are programmed to save lives. They take an oath to do so.
... Similarly, a correct understanding of Islam should have been a deterrent. Even those who have a cursory knowledge of Islam would have heard the verse, "If you save one life, it is as if you have saved all mankind." This is a universal value shared by all faiths and traditions.
[...] clerics pick and choose verses from the Quran to support their rhetoric. Most Islamic scholars have called this a lethal misinterpretation of the verses. Nevertheless, this tiny but loud fraction of clerics appears to be most influential among young Muslims. But killing innocent civilians is never warranted.
It is tempting to disown them, and others who may yet be indicted in the plot, by proclaiming they are not real Muslims. But that would be a cop-out; they read the same scripture and listen to the same prophetic traditions as I and all Muslims do. But they appear to have unpacked a radically different meaning from them.
Suicide bombing has gained a cult status among some groups.
[...] Those who practice or sanction suicide bombing consider it a form of martyrdom. But suicide by any name is still suicide and is explicitly prohibited in Islam. Injunctions of the Quran and traditions of the Prophet Muhammad prohibit it in unequivocal terms. Similarly, killing of innocents is expressly prohibited. It is not collateral damage but callous murder.
"Suicide bombing has gained a cult status among some groups" and "... killing of innocents is expressly prohibited. It is not collateral damage but callous murder." And as a 2006 post at DanielPipes.org put it, "Islamic Fascism? Islamic Totalitarianism? "A Rose By Any Other Name....."".
Whether we call it Islamic Fascism or Islamic Totalitarianism or whatever, the goals of the Islamic Fascists/Totalitarianists/Caliphate Re-Establishers/Terrorists or whatever we want to call them are still the same. There is no doubt that they ultimately seek to conquer the West and bring it under the control of a sharia based fundamentalist Islamic/Islamicist regime:
In Shakespeare's phrase, "a rose by any other name would still smell as sweet." To paraphrase the Bard, the Islamists' goals are still the same no matter what we choose to call the Islamists. Fascists? Totalitarianists? Who cares! Both words express the ultimate goal these people seek and the methods they will use, and have repeatedly proved themselves willing to use, to pursue that goal. Both of these words can also serve to rally those of us who oppose their stated goals.As Susan MacAllen points out at Family Security Matters, "Westerners can't conceive of a "religion" that demands mass murder of non-believers as a foundational pillar, so we tend to deny its reality. As an example she points to British Prime Minister Gordon Brown's counterintuitive reaction to the failed car bombings as an example of cognitive dissonance in the extreme.
Those of us unwilling to accept the forcible imposition of a sharia based fundamentalist Islamic/Islamicist regime should just agree on one of these terms, adopt it and get on with fighting this Islamic or Islamicist creed, whatever we choose to call it, instead of wasting effort and energy bickering over terminology.
G.K. Chesterton once said that every creed promises a Paradise which would be uninhabitable for anyone of civilized taste. His comment certainly applies here. The Paradise promised us by these Islamic Fascists/Totalitarianists/Caliphate Re-Establishers/Terrorists, or whatever we want to call them, would be totally uninhabitable for anyone accustomed to Western Judeao-Christian civilization. Let's just accept that we need to spend our energy combatting this creed which seeks to conquer and subjugate us, and get on with the long and difficult , but seemingly unavoidable, battle ahead.
...if we don't call the spade a spade, it magically can be...what...a spoon? All the semantic molding in the world won't erase the fact that witnesses to the Jeep crash saw one of the passengers get out, light himself on fire and scream in Arabic, "Allah! Allah!", over and over again. Inflammatory in itself, how is this not related - indeed central to - Islam, Jihad, and fundamentalism?Continue reading, A Terrorist by Any Other Name . . . Still Kills ...
Cross posted from Hyscience
Posted by Richard at July 12, 2007 10:07 AM
