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MODERN TIMES Art Hobson [email protected] NWA Times 6 December 2008 What's Wrong With Islam? Religion is the prime mover behind much of American politics, and the cause of lots of the mayhem around the world. It needs more discussion and less political correctness. Jared Diamond, in his epic study "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed," shows that the deaths of past societies stemmed from their inability to change their cultural beliefs even when those beliefs were obviously leading them to oblivion. Today, fundamentalist religion, primarily Christian, Jewish, and Islamic, are leading us down that same doomsday path. Recently there's been a spate of serious discussion of this problem by authors such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchins, and religious critiques have shown up in films such as Bill Maher's satirical "Religulous." We need to keep this discussion going. Most religions are full of irrational nonsense, but Islamic nonsense is especially deadly. Once again, we were treated ten days ago to the spectacle of a Muslim suicide attack that killed 178 in Mumbai--India's New York City. The attack was apparently carried out by the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba ("the army of the righteous") militant Muslim group, and was probably related to the Indian-Pakistani struggle over Kashmir. The group's main objective is to Islamicise South Asia. We all need to inquire into the motivations of these people who regard it as their duty to murder civilians in the name of proselytizing for their supposed God. We need to ask, for example, why nearly every recent terrorist attack comes from Muslims, far fewer come from Christians and Jews, and fewer still come from other religious sects. What is it that causes a young man of respectable means (contrary to common belief, most suicide bombers are not poor) to pack his clothing with explosives and shards of metal and decimate himself along with scores of innocent bystanders, and his mother to be promptly congratulated by hundreds of her townspeople? It's a scene that's become part of the background noise of our time: Ho-hum, another suicide bombing in some distant land. But as we learned on September 11, the land is not always so distant. You needn't seek far to find the cause of the young man's suicide. Listen to the Prophet Muhammed, from the "hadith" (the literature of Muhammed's words): "A single endeavor of fighting in Allah's Cause in the forenoon or in the afternoon is better than the world and whatever is in it." "Paradise is in the shadow of swords." Or listen to the Koran: "God's curse be upon the infidels." "God is the enemy of the unbelievers." "We shall let them live awhile, and then shall drag them to the scourge of the Fire. Evil shall be their fate." "Slay them wherever you find them. Drive them out of the places from which they drove you. Idolatry is worse than carnage." And so forth. Islamic "holy" books are not the only place you'll find this kind of bloodthirsty babble; there's plenty of it in Christianity and Judaism, for example in the story of Abraham and Isaac. But the Koran is filled from end to end with this stuff. On almost every page, this book exhorts its readers to despise non-believers, and prepares the ground for religious conflict. Fundamentalist (those who believe in the literal truth of their traditional books) Muslims, being exposed to this violent text every day, are not likely to remain peaceful for long. Sam Harris, in his book "The End of Faith," puts it this way: "Islam, more than any other religion human beings have devised, has all the makings of a thoroughgoing cult of death." The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press organized a survey titled "What the World Thinks in 2002" in which over 38,000 people around the world were questioned. One question, posed only to Muslims, asked whether suicide bombings against civilian targets are justified to defend Islam, or if on the other hand they are never justified. Most of you would, I hope, answer "they are never justified." But not so for Muslims in Lebanon, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Jordan, Bangladesh, Mali, Senegal, Ghana, Indonesia, Uganda, and Pakistan, where majorities or strong minorities of between 82 and 38 percent answered that such bombings are sometimes justified. Even in supposedly moderate Turkey, 20 percent vowed that the intentional mass murder of random civilians was justified "to defend Islam." And this poll didn't even include the more devout Muslim nations: Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Egypt, Iran, Sudan, Iraq, Iran, and the Palestinian territories. Most despised of all by devout Muslims is the heretic. On this score, there seem to be few moderate--in other words non-fundamentalist--Muslims anywhere on the planet. Where, for instance, were the moderate Muslims when the Ayatollah Khomeini condemned author Salman Rushdie to death for his supposedly irreverent portrayal of Muhammed? Why didn't millions of Muslims publicly denounce this decree? Instead, the book sparked violence around the world, bookstores were bombed, Muslim communities in Western nations held book burnings, several people associated with the book were attacked, seriously injured, and even killed, and many more died in riots in Third World countries. The answer can be found in the Koran. Muslims were simply following the literal word of their sacred script. This fundamentalist insanity is exactly what Jared Diamond is talking about in his conclusion that cultures cause their own downfall by their inability to change those beliefs that are obviously leading them to oblivion.