PrintSeptember 9, 2010
Time for an Islamaphobia Beer Summit
With 70% of Americans standing in hardened opposition to a victory mosque being built on our national graveyard at Ground Zero, it would take a complete elitist ninny to sum this up as "Islamaphobia." But since our elitists are indeed calling the 70% of us irrational, phobic nutcases, it would seem an awfully good time to have an Islamaphobia beer summit.
Forget the beer; we need sober heads. Forget the president; he's out to lunch.
We'll just have a dry summit among ourselves.
For starters, what is a "phobia"? I'm darned well sure that at least 98% of the overwhelming 70% already know that a phobia is an irrational fear or loathing of some quantifiable thing or idea. The key word here, of course, is irrational.
One ought never confuse reasoned repugnance with irrational fear.
In this case, 70% of Americans oppose Imam Rauf's plan to build a "bridge" mosque so close to the site where his fellow Muslims murdered three thousand of our fellow citizens in the name of Islam just nine years ago. And I daresay there is nothing whatsoever irrational in this opposition. A monument erected to the killers over the graves of their victims is a bridge too far for truly rational people. And it is doubtful that any rational American president would have ever lent his support to such an arrogantly vulgar idea in the first place. This is both stupidity and appeasement on steroids, which no reasonable person with even a smidgen of real knowledge about Islam could possibly support.
In light of the now-countless acts of worldwide jihad committed since Jimmy Carter let the worldwide Islamic terror genie out of its bottle in 1979, it would verily take a nitwit of ostrich-level denial skill not to see Islam as anything but a "religion of peace." If one wanted to be really thorough, though, all one would need would be a curious glance at the post-WWII history of Israel. Now that we ourselves have tasted the bitter fruits of Islamic jihad, we have a much better sense of how it's felt to be an Israeli since day one.
The big question of our era is: Can Islam become a religion of peace?
For the record, anyone who has read the Koran understands well that political tyranny is inextricably woven into Islam's religious fiber. State-enabled terror is part and parcel of the religion of submission. The word "Islam" itself means "submission," and within every tenet of true Islam is the vociferous command to force this submission upon everyone. Even in the so-called enlightened, tolerant Ottoman Empire, all infidels were so buried under the dictates of submission that they were living as slaves to a capricious state caliphate, just as the few remaining Jews and Christians who now live under Islamic governments all over the Muslim world.
Just as communists and fascists promoted the perverted idea that peace was defined as the day all resistance to their tyrannies stopped, so do Islamists. The idea that the Muslim god, Allah, demands worldwide submission by all, whether voluntarily or at the point of a sword, is at the very heart of the Koran.
At present, there is a philosophical war going on within Islam. Millions of good-at-heart Muslims want to separate the political aspects of Islam from its purely religious tenets. This philosophical war within Islam has been falsely defined by both Muslim apologists and Western liberals as a fight between moderate Muslims and radical Muslims. It is no such thing. And anyone -- even a Christian layperson, such as myself -- who has bothered to actually read the Koran and any non-apologetic biography of Mohamed knows this full well.
Herein lies the root of the problem for Islam.
Earnest Muslims, who wish to modernize their faith and truly make it a "religion of peace," must virtually erase their Prophet to do so.
Mohamed is the model for Islamic terrorism, both in modern times and for the past fourteen centuries, wherever Islam has escaped the bottle of political restraint. Mohamed was never a prophet of peace; he was a warlord. Nor was he a dedicated monk, priest, or rabbi who eschewed the rewards of political power. Mohamed verily relished his every violent victory and enslaved those whom he defeated. Rape, pillage, and plunder followed in Mohamed's warring wake.
Mohamed was the model for polygamy and child marriage, practicing both himself. Mohamed was the commander of the stoning and the lopping off of hands and feet, the master of the lashings and canings so prominent in every Muslim-dominated country today. It is utterly impossible for modern Muslims to clean up their religion without first erasing the example of their own prophet.
When 4th-century Christians decided to merge the church with the state, they were going against the Bible and every true tenet of orthodox Christianity. Nowhere in Jesus' life or teachings was there to be found any injunction to merge worldly power with true faith in God. Nowhere. Nada. Zilch. Jesus, we know, made a very big deal out of giving worldly power (Caesar) its own domain while reserving one's soul for God alone. Jesus was so bent on peace that even when he was being arrested in the Garden of Gethsemane, he told his disciples to put away their swords. Jesus did not, during his own scourging, command his followers to mount an armed rebellion to try to free him. Instead, he went peacefully to the Cross of salvation.
So when Christians mounted opposition to the joining of church with tyrannical state power, they were standing upon firm religious footing. The Protestant reformers didn't need to kill off Jesus to support their desire for keeping matters of the soul separate from matters of political power. Instead, Christians needed only remind -- yes, quite forcefully remind -- their befouled church and state institutions that they were going against Jesus in their greedy pursuit of worldly goods and power. Standing upon the authority of the Bible itself and Jesus' own example gave Christian reformers what they needed.
Not so with Islamists. In order to reform a religion which is purely hell-bent on violence to obtain submission, the Islamists must figure out a way to explain that perhaps their prophet was either a bit off in the head or that his words and actions were intended for only a more brutal era. But this itself proves nearly impossible, too.
For in Islam, the Koran is presumed to be an actual dictation -- word-for-word -- of conversations between Mohammed and Allah, using the intermediary, "Gabriel," the angel of wide Judeo-Christian prominence. Whereas both Jews and Christians believe that the Bible, both old and new testaments, were inspired by God, they do not believe that the Bible is anything nearly approximating a direct dictation from the mouth of God.
So Muslims who truly do want to come into the 21st century, remake their religion into one of peaceful cohabitation with earth's non-Muslim peoples, and practice a smidgen of the tolerance they have so violently demanded from others, find it an overwhelming task. It's hard to argue against terror when terror was your prophet's own M.O.
Perhaps, at the end of the day, someone, somewhere, possessing a few grains of common sense, will ask whether it just might be possible that the Allah, who purportedly spoke to Mohamed, was not at all the God of Abraham, Moses, and Jesus, but some altogether different being with a decidedly anti-Judaic, anti-Christian code of ethics.
Until then, it would take a complete dimwit not to notice that Islam is anything but a "religion of peace." And the sooner we wake up to this reality, the better chance we will have at saving civilization as we have known it.
Kyle-Anne Shiver is a frequent contributor to American Thinker. She welcomes your comments at www.kyleanneshiver.com.
