After reading several other blogs about the Muslim religion, I have decided to write my own. Many times we are fed a line that most of these people are very peaceful and there are a few “extremists” that give the religion a bad name. While I would agree that many Muslims (particularly ones that do not live in the Middle East) are peaceful, I would disagree that the religion does not allow for violence. And here are just a few reasons why:
THE KORAN
While there are many other verses that could be put in here, I have chosen just two to share on this blog to attempt to keep it as easy to read as possible.
1. [2.191] And kill them wherever you find them, and drive them out from whence they drove you out, and persecution is severer than slaughter, and do not fight with them at the Sacred Mosque until they fight with you in it, but if they do fight you, then slay them; such is the recompense of the unbelievers.
2. [4.89] They desire that you should disbelieve as they have disbelieved, so that you might be (all) alike; therefore take not from among them friends until they fly (their homes) in Allah's way; but if they turn back, then seize them and kill them wherever you find them, and take not from among them a friend or a helper.
Here is another story of a Muslim leader:
BBC NEWS
Muslim cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri preached that killing non-Muslims was justified even for no reason, the jury at the Old Bailey has heard.
"Killing a Kafir [infidel] for any reason you can say it is OK even if there is no reason for it," he was recorded as saying.
Sudan's militant Muslim regime is slaughtering Christians who refuse to convert to Islam, according to the head of an aid group who recently returned from the African nation.
The forced conversions are just one aspect of the Khartoum government's self-declared jihad on the mostly Christian and animist south, Dennis Bennett, executive director of Seattle-based Servant's Heart told WorldNetDaily.
Villagers in several areas of the northeast Upper Nile region say that when women are captured by government forces they are asked: "Are you Christian or Muslim?"
Women who answer "Muslim" are set free, but typically soldiers gang-rape those who answer "Christian" then cut off their breasts and leave them to die as an example for others.
Backed by Muslim clerics, the National Islamic Front regime in the Arab and Muslim north declared a jihad, or holy war, on the south in 1989. Since 1983, an estimated 2 million people have died from war and related famine. About 4.5 million have become refugees.
ATTITUDE TOWARD CHRISTIANS
From the beginning, Islam drew a distinction between Christians and Jews and other non-Muslims. The former were "people of the book." They had to pay special taxes and wear identifying clothing, yet their status reflected a certain respect for what Muslims saw as the earlier but incomplete and corrupted revelation recorded in the Bible.
This next story I’ll give the a short version:
After the Pope made a remark that Islam can be a violent religion. Many in the Islamic community asked that something be done.
AS SHE LAY dying in a Mogadishu hospital, Sister Leonella forgave her killers. She had lived in Africa for almost four decades and could speak fluent Somali, but her last words were murmured in Italian, her mother tongue. ``Perdono, perdono," she whispered. I forgive, I forgive.
She was 65 and had devoted her life to the care of sick mothers and children. She was on her way to meet three other nuns for lunch on Sunday when two gunmen shot her several times in the back. "Her slaying was not a random attack," the Associated Press reported. It "raised concerns" that she was the latest victim of "growing Islamic radicalism in the country."
Raised concerns? Sister Leonella was gunned down less than two days after a prominent Somali cleric had called on Muslims to kill Pope Benedict XVI for his remarks about Islam in a scholarly lecture last week.
In his lecture, Benedict quoted the late Byzantine emperor Manuel II, who had condemned Islam's militancy with these words: "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."
In the ensuing uproar, British Muslims demonstrated outside Westminster Cathedral with signs reading "Pope go to Hell" and "Islam will conquer Rome," while the head of the Society of Muslim Lawyers declared that the pope must be "subject to capital punishment." In Iraq, the radical Mujahideen's Army vowed to "smash the crosses in the house of the dog from Rome" and the Mujahideen Shura Council swore to ``continue our jihad and never stop until God avails us to chop your necks." Arsonists in the West Bank set churches on fire, and a group calling itself ``The Sword of Islam" issued a warning: ``If the pope does not appear on TV and apologize for his comments, we will blow up all of Gaza's churches."
With all this going on many still want to say that the Pope’s actions were wrong and that he prompted the Muslims to react. It is a staggering double standard, and too many in the West seem willing to go along with it. Witness the editorials in US newspapers this week scolding the pope for his speech. Recall the State Department's condemnation of the Danish cartoons last winter.
All of this has led me to feel the need to vent a little about this “peaceful” religion and the tolerance we need to show it. Sorry for the long blog, thanks if you made it this far in reading it.
While I think I tend to lean to the pro side, I do have a hard time thinking of someone being hung, electricuted, or leathaly injected. I have seen the movie the Green Mile, and that is as close as I have ever come to seeing someone executed. I understand and support the rational thought behind the death penalty, but have a hard time thinking too long on the topic.
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