Bearing in mind the possibility that almost everything reported so far about the Fort Hood murderer is wrong or misleading, it seems no less rational to “jump to conclusions” than it was when President Obama concluded that a Cambridge police officer had mistreated a Harvard professor or when practically everybody blamed Tea Party histrionics for the bizarre death of a census worker in Kentucky. It may turn out that Nidal Malik Hasan (not being a newspaper, I’m not going to bother with the “alleged” murderer nonsense) was little more than a nominal Moslem, did not believe that killing American soldiers was mandated by his religion and acted from motives that have nothing to do with his view of Islam. If so, I’ll concede that he is a poor illustration of the point that I’m about to make; the point, nonetheless, is based on much more than this singular occurrence.
Most Moslems, like most human beings, are not terrorists. Yet more than a trivial number do kill, or try to kill, Christians, Jews and other non-Moslems, and trumpet that their atrocities stem from devotion to Allah, the Koran and Mohammed. Morever, these evildoers appear to have a considerable following among the Islamic faithful. In other contexts, an ideology invoked to justify persecution and massacre isn’t excused just because only a minority of its adherents do anything especially hideous. Most Nazis killed no Jews; most communists have never thrown anybody into the Gulag.
There’s a stock response to exasperation about the frequency of terrorist acts carried out by savages who just happen to be Moslems: Christians have done terrible things, too, often ostensibly in the name of Christ. Assuming, though, that the facts were comparable, that would simply be an argument against Christianity, not a justification of Islam.
The most charitable view available is that the name “Islam” covers two sharply opposed philosophies, one of them peaceful and benign, the other a death cult that seeks to rule the world by force. Unfortunately, both cite the same scripture and traditions, stem from the same history and display the same outward signs. Outsiders have no way to distinguish one from the other. Isn’t it up to peace loving Moslems to clarify the situation, and couldn’t they do that most readily by purging from the ranks of Islam those who defile their name?
Nobody wants to be unfair to Moslems who are horrified by some of their co-religionists’ addiction to terror, but, until Moslems themselves draw bright lines, the pretense the Islam is “just like any other religion” – and that the Hasans of the world are entitled to the benefit of doubt after doubt – isn’t fair to the rest of us. It certainly wasn’t fair to the dozen dead and three dozen wounded at Fort Hood.
Addendum: It had never occurred to me that American military bases might be “gun-free zones”! When the shooting started, all that the threatened soldiers could do was duck and call the civilian police. The police response was swift and heroic, but deadly minutes passed before Sgt. Kimberly Munley reached the scene, charged the shooter and ended his rampage. Maybe it made sense back in the 50’s to keep soldiers’ arms under lock and key. That the policy wasn’t revised the day after 9/11 is a tragedy and a disgrace.
Further reading: Raymond Ibrahim, “Are Judaism and Christianity as Violent as Islam?”
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