Pat Robertson Persists: Islam 'Extreme and Violent'

“Perhaps the reluctance of Muslim clerics to promote Koranic translations stems from the general commands in the Koran… to impose Koranic religious law on their non-Muslim subjects.”

That sounds characteristic of Arab culture.

“Granted, the Jews were commanded to exterminate the Canaanites in a ruthless manner. However, this was a one time event and reflected God's judgement on a particularly wicked nation. The methods the Jews used to conquer the land God had promised to their forbear, Abraham, were basically the same as those the Angles and Saxons used in Britain, or the whites used in America. The Mosaic law also required the Jews to be just and fair to the foreigners who resided in their nation.”

I’m sure that a Muslim would view your rationalization much in the same way that you would view his. This is an excerpt from this month’s Soldier of Fortune. It is an interview with Aukai Collins. He was a mujahideen who fought in Chechnya and trained in Afghanistan:

“SOF: You have a good definition of jihad in the introduction to My Jihad. “To put it simply, when a Muslim land is being attacked and Muslims are being killed there is the need for jihad. In this case it becomes a duty for all able-bodied Muslims to come to the aid of the people being attacked. But even then jihad has many rules. It is forbidden to kill non-combatants…” According to this definition the 9/11 suicide bombers weren’t carrying out a legitimate act of jihad as it violates the basic tenets of Islamic jihad.

Collins: Oh 100% - There’s no way an Islamic scholar could begin to debate whether it’s correct or not, or permissible. Not only that, but none of these people – the WTC terrorist bombers – none of them were mujahideen. It’s a fact. None of them had any front-line experience in Chechnya, Bosnia, or Afghanistan, or anywhere else. So it’s disturbing how they’re making this connection between jihad and terrorism and mujahideen and terrorists. When, whatever these guys claim their affiliation was, the fact is they were not mujahideen. That speaks for itself right there. I would have serious problems with any mujahid who tried to conduct an operation like this.”

See my prior post for definition of jihad.

“That there are those, such as the Serbians (who, FWIW, are Eastern Orthodox and not Roman Catholic) who tortured and murdered in the name of the Christian faith, is shameful. But the Serbs, in their actions, defied the teachings of Scripture. The Bosnian and Albanian Muslims who inflicted similar death and misery on the Serbs were in conformance with the Koran's teachings.”

You do realize that people on the other side of the argument, who are of Islamic faith, will make the same exact argument that you made, but with the religions reversed, right? Furthermore, they will explain why their religion is the peaceful one, not yours. Why can’t people be content to worship their own religion, rather than demonizing the others?

I see you are a little new here....welcome.....Bush does NOTHING Clinton!! Thank God. He is President of ALL Americans, unlike Clinton who was President of IMMORAL Americans.

[The main difference is their respective levels of zealotry and the amount of power that they hold over their followers. In this country, we are allowed to make up our own minds, and speak for ourselves. This freedom allows me to think for myself and I believe that for the most part Falwell and Robertson are full of it, so I pay little attention to their rhetoric. In the Middle East, their religious leaders are the all and end all. Speak up against them and your dead. They have the power to make people believe their interpretations of religious text and they use it to control their people into commiting these atrocities.]

Yes, there is much difference - but you state our freedoms allows us to think for ourselves and that is the very reason President Bush and Powell should have stayed silent on the issue. It has nothing to do with politics. If, in fact, they were afraid their, and I say their, friends the Muslims would have their feelings hurt, they should have explained to them that they were political and governmental leaders and not religious leaders. That what a religious leader speaks, they have the freedom to do so and political leaders should not get involved. It would have been truth. It would have been the correct thing to do. It also would have given a great civics lessons to all those people they now want to bring into this country so we can 'love' them, 'educate' them, etc.

After Powell's speech explaining how they were bringing more of these people into this country, I think I understand why President Bush was so quick to denouce the religious leaders. He has to keep them quiet if he is going to sell the American people on the most dangerous (in my opinion) idea of allowing more and more of those 'peaceful' people into this country.

Soon those of you who are in denial will realize that President Bush's agenda is not exactly putting America and Americans first. Why do you think this little announcement of importing Muslims wasn't made before the elections?

bush and powell paid for by the enemy

"The level of anti-Muslim rhetoric from commentators, religious leaders, and now elected officials, is getting out of hand and is poisoning the minds of many ordinary Americans. Only a strong statement from President Bush will put these people on notice that anti-Muslim bigotry will not be accepted in our society," said CAIR Board Chairman Omar Ahmad.

http://www.shianews.com/hi/americas/news_id/0000338.php

It's official - America's over six million Muslims should vote for George W. Bush as the country's next president on November 7.

This endorsement was made October 23 by the American Muslim Political Coordinating Council Political Action Committee (AMPCC-PAC).

Not all support Bush One group representing a number of African-American Muslims, the Coalition for Good Government, did not support the endorsement of Bush. As well, a number of Muslim immigrants have expressed support for Gore and Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader in the upcoming election.

http://www.soundvision.com/info/politics/endorsement.asp

["The level of anti-Muslim rhetoric from commentators, religious leaders, and now elected officials, is getting out of hand and is poisoning the minds of many ordinary Americans. Only a strong statement from President Bush will put these people on notice that anti-Muslim bigotry will not be accepted in our society," said CAIR Board Chairman Omar Ahmad. ]

That does explain a lot doesn't it? He no longer needs Americans.

Now I am not as rabid against all Muslims as some people. I truly distrust them and I do not think they should have the President's ear as they do. However, I do get a little amused when I read posts of people who tell how many peaceful muslims friends they have and therefore, we should not be fearful of them. I have known two child molestors in my life. One was a very favorite uncle - I adored him, played with his children all my life, spent much time at their home. The other was an old grandfather figure to my children. I did not find out about the uncle until I was middle aged and did not find about the older man for many years, after he had died. My point, people have a way of showing you what they want you to see and we can all be deceived. So I always take it as a grain of salt when they tell me how peaceful their neighbors, friends and co-workers are.

I also am not impressed by the Muslims who showed up at the FR gathering - it smells.

I admire that post! Well said!

Thank you.

Do you realize how flawed that analogy is? McVeigh was raised a Catholic, but from everything I read, he never went to mass after his confirmation.

Thank you for making this point. I hear this all the time. I saw a poitical cartoon once: A caucasian glancing at an Arab, remarking to himself how "he looks like the guy that blew up the WTC." The Arab glances back, thinking to himself:"That looks like the guy that blew up the Oklahoma City Federal Building."

Huh?

Muslims have a tendancy to blow up things; it seems to be a pattern. When you hear of a plane being hijacked, what do you automatically assume? Blacks, whites, Latinos, Jews, Christians, Atheists and Hindus do not tend to this sort of behavior.

FReegards;

MrJingles

With respect with my comments regarding the reluctance of Muslim clerics to promote the translation of the Koran into non-Arab languages, you state that it is "characteristic of Arab culture." Is secrecy a characteristic of the Arab culture that was essentially forged by Islam? How much this differs from the position of the Christian faith! "For there is nothing hid, which shall not be manifested; neither was any thing kept secret, but that it should come abroad." (Mark 4:22) Christians may talk of mysteries such as the Virgin Birth, but this is not the same as secrecy.

Then there is the issue of moral equivalency of Christianity or Judaism with Islam. You take issue with the Jewish conquest of the Holy Land and the extermination of the Canaanites. Yet this is a unique situation in Scripture; the Jews were not commanded to spread Judaism throughout the world, killing Egyptians, Babylonians, and whatever other infidels were in the way of Jewish world dominion. As for the Canaanites, they were an especially wicked people and the Jews were the instruments of God's justice. If the Bible is the infallible Word of God, then the extermination of the Canaanites was the act of a just God. Justice, in order to be just, is not always gentle.

If you reject the infallibility of Scripture, consider that the Soviets and the Allies imposed great cruelties on the Germans (the Red Army's orgy of murder, rape, and looting in eastern Germany) and the Japanese (U.S. atomic bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima). Yet the Germans and the Japanese started World War II and were guilty of horrible atrocities. It is certainly possible that God may have even used the atheistic Soviets as the instruments of His wrath on Germany.

In any case, as I pointed out, the law code of Biblical Israel called for the fair treatment of foreigners within their nation. The Christian faith regards all those who know Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior as brothers. "But ye (Christians) are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people." (I Peter 2:9) But it is not an exclusive "nation," but one chosen of all peoples of this earth, to whom Christians are to witness by word and example.

Consider this: you will find mosques in New York, London, and Paris. You will not find churches in Tehran, Baghdad, and Riyadh. Members of all faiths are welcome at Vatican City; Muslims alone are allowed into Mecca and Medina.

Christianity and Islam are not morally equivalent, and to claim otherwise is to deny the theological and historical facts.

BUMP

"Is secrecy a characteristic of the Arab culture that was essentially forged by Islam?"

I do believe that it has been misused as an instrument, since the Koran was written, but I believe it has its roots in Arab culture from well before the time of Muhammed. For example, so-called Koranic law is used to justify the suppression of women, which was a characteristic of Arab culture well before Muhammed. It interprets the Koran's position that women should dress conservatively as women being required to be covered head-to-toe. This varies from country to country, because this is an interpretation and different scholars in different countries interpret this differently, according to their mix of religous and political views. Clerics in the Middle East have tremendous authority. Authority, like power, corrupts.

Although any Muslim is able to read the Koran, so long as they are literate, which is not always the case, they rely upon the clerics to interpret for them and that interpretation is accepted. That is the way of Arab culture. Their culture is inferior, in my opinion, because it allows itself to be run by non-thinking conformists who justify their power by interpreting the dominant religion to a nation that is too ignorant, illiterate, or ambitious to know any better or care. I have never met people from outside the Arab world who are so willing to supplicate themselves to others, except for children; but even they are not so discipined.

I believe that you will see a change in this with the democratization of information that results with the spread of the internet and increased literacy through economic growth and discontinuation of the suppression of women. This will occur, in my opinion, once we trample Hussein's current regime, once the youth of Iran make more progress with their attempts at cultural change, once the economy of Afghanistan is rejuvinated, and if the Saudi Arabians finally exert enough pressure upon their government, like the Iranians are attempting.

"You take issue with the Jewish conquest of the Holy Land and the extermination of the Canaanites."

I don't take issue with it. You brought it up and I merely pointed out that your rationalization for it is similar to the rationalization that a Muslim would make about his own religion.

"If you reject the infallibility of Scripture..."

I have serious doubts about the infallibility of Scripture, whether it be from the Bible or Koran. That is not relelvant. My point throughout this thread is that the bickering about whose religion is violent and whose religion is peaceful is absurd. Christians such as Pat Robertson speak about the Islamic religion. Islamic clerics and strong adherents to Islam will contradict him. Does he know more than them? Should I believe him, rather than the Muslims?

"Consider this: you will find mosques in New York, London, and Paris. You will not find churches in Tehran, Baghdad, and Riyadh. Members of all faiths are welcome at Vatican City; Muslims alone are allowed into Mecca and Medina."

Members of all faiths are welcome at Mosques in Bosnia, because it's a different culture.

That is culture, not religion. Arab culture is violent, oppressive, and exclusionary. You don't need a book to judge a culture, since it is defined much more loosely than a religion. It is judged by its actions and it is simple to see who belongs to the culture. Religion is different, because you can have morons such as the 9/11 hijackers, the Christian and Muslim rapists and murderers in Bosnia, abortion clinic bombers in the US, child-molesting Priests. Are those people living their lives in accordance with the Koran or the Bible?

"Christianity and Islam are not morally equivalent, and to claim otherwise is to deny the theological and historical facts."

That may very well be true. When the Pope and some Islamic scholar team up and come to this conclusion, that claim will have some credibility.

They are all guilty of intolerance. What would the likes of Falwell and Robertson have us do concerning Muslims? So much for the First Ammendment.

I see you are a little new here....welcome.....Bush does NOTHING Clinton!! Thank God. He is President of ALL Americans, unlike Clinton who was President of IMMORAL Americansemotions are nice, but they really fare poorly against facts....bush grew the fed govt. at a rate higher than klinton did. Interestingly, for someone who likes to point out a sign up date as a sign of status, it actually only serves to underscore the fact that you have no objectivity, and are as polarized as jimbo carville. You are now in the process of losing rights you will NEVER recover, and the so called security act will be abused by statists on both sides for decades. Just wait till an "evil" liberal does something like this, and grows the fed govt..... We all heard you cry about it with klinton, and now we hear you defend it from bush. what a joke.

You stated that my discussion of the Jewish conquest of the Holy Land and the extermination of the Canaanites was a rationalization. Merriam-Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary defines “rationalization” as follows: “to bring into accord with reason or cause something to seem reasonable: as a: to substitute a natural for a supernatural explanation of b: to attribute (one's actions) to rational and creditable motives without analysis of true and especially unconscious motives .”

One could argue that white Americans conquering the territory of the present United States and exterminating the Indian tribes was reasonable because the American nation, consisting mainly of European immigrants, could not co-exist with the Indian nations because of different governments, concepts of land ownership, religious beliefs, etc. In order to ensure the survival and growth of the American nation, the original nations had to be expelled, through murder, forcible expulsion, or mutual agreement. Yet the acts of the American nation and of white Americans constituted theft and murder, even if the Indian tribes did not have a concept of individual ownership of land and natural resources and even if a tribe that white men encountered, for instance the Comanches in Texas, had conquered the previous inhabitants of the area and killed or dispossessed them prior to the arrival of the Spaniards and the Anglo-Americans. Most of the whites considered themselves Christians; American common law derived from its English ancestor, which in turn was partially rooted in Biblical precepts. Theft and murder are violations of the Fifth and Sixth Commandments, respectively. The actions of the white Americans and the colonial, Federal, and State governments were reasonable, as they ensured the nation’s survival, but they were also immoral.

By what standard would the actions of the Jews with respect to their conquest of Canaan have been reasonable? As with the white American vs. Indian conflict, the Jewish nation could not co-exist on the same territory with the Canaanites. The Ten Commandments had already been given to Moses at the time the Jews arrived in what is now modern Israel. Yet the same Lawgiver who gave them the Decalogue and the Law also commissioned them to do these acts. Is this a contradiction? A Christian assumes that God is perfect, and He must therefore be free of contradiction.

The Christian also assumes that God’s power is infinite. The Westminster Confession of Faith discusses the sovereignty of God in Chapter III, Article 1. "God from all eternity did, by the most wise and holy counsel of His own will, freely and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass: yet so, as thereby neither is God the author of sin, nor is violence offered to the will of the creatures, nor is the liberty or contingency of second causes [i.e., man’s responsibility] taken away, but rather established." Not only is God perfectly just, He is entirely sovereign, in a sense no earthly king or state is, with perfect foreknowledge and the power to foreordain events. In other words, if the conquest of Canaan occurred, it was because God wanted it to happen.

Let’s deal with the issue of God’s provision for justice. If God is perfect, then His justice must be perfect. The enforcement of justice is not pleasant upon the criminal, or at least should not be. The death penalty or long prison terms are harsh, yet are means of justice. Of what crimes were the Canaanites guilty? Genesis 18:16-19:29 tells the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, two cities in Canaan where gangs and swarms attacked people for fun. (Please note that God destroyed those cities for their wickedness.) Canaanite religion involved child sacrifice. It was a practice that increased the more their cities expanded. Unlike other ancient civilizations where such practices died out, the Canaanites perpetuated it, as evidenced by archeology. If the atheistic Communists were used as God’s instruments of justice on the neo-pagan Nazis in 1945, there is no reason to think that God would not have done so with the Jews and the Canaanites circa 1300 B.C. Imperfect, sinful men, Communists and Jews, are used to punish wicked men, Nazis and Canaanites, deserving of God’s wrath.

Beyond the issue of the motives of the Jews, we must ask what God’s motives were. If God is perfect, He must then have infinite power and moral perfection. If He had less than perfect attributes, then there could be another being that is greater than God, even if we do not know that being, just as the baseball accomplishments of Babe Ruth were surpassed by Hank Aaron, Roger Maris, Mark McGwire, etc., even if Aaron, Maris, and McGwire did not exist when Ruth was at the height of his career. If God is imperfect in either His character or His power, He cannot be God as the Christian conceives Him. Thus, we must view the actions and commands of God as being consistent with His perfect nature. The Bible attests to the perfection and infinite power of God in numerous passages. God therefore could not have been and were unreasonable in His command to the Israelites to take possession of Canaan and kill and dispossess the Canaanites.

One could argue that this position regarding the nature and character of God is dogmatic. Yet any philosophical system is based on some sort of axiom, including empiricism. As Gordon Clark, a 20th Century Calvinist philosopher put it: “To say that statements are nonsense unless verifiable by sensation, is itself a statement that cannot be verified by sensation. Observation can never prove the reliability of observation. Since, therefore, every philosophy must have its first indemonstrable axiom, the secularists cannot deny the right of Christianity to choose its own axiom.” (“How Does Man Know God,” by Gordon Clark, available on The Trinity Foundation’s Web site, www.trinityfoundation.org). Christians rely on first principles, but so do all others.

Granted, many of the attributes Christians see in God resemble those Muslims see in Allah. Evangelical Christians and traditional Muslims have a similar epistemology: reliance on a holy book inspired or written by God as foundational in understanding the nature of man and the universe. However, this similarity in epistemology does not mean similarity in worldview. The Marxists and the Objectivists also share a common epistemology of naturalism. Yet Marxists and Objectivists have worldviews that are quite opposite to one another. A similar argument could be made for Nazis and New Age adherents, both of which are rooted in polytheism and monism. Reliance on a holy book does not make the worldview of the evangelical Christian similar to that of the traditional Muslim, even if the mainstream media and culture lump both together as “fundamentalism.”

I agree that one should not judge either the Christian or the Muslim faith by the excesses of those who call themselves adherents. Yet we cannot isolate a nation’s culture from the worldview of the leadership and citizens of that nation. If the Islamic faith in former Yugoslavia was more tolerant than elsewhere, it is because they were influenced not only by Islam, but by the Christian faith of the region and their ancestors. (Bosnians and Albanians were members of one Christian sect or other prior to the Turkish conquest of southeastern Europe in the 15th Century. The Slavic and Albanian Muslims still celebrate some church-related feasts and drank wine, brandy, etc.) On the other hand, the Arabian Peninsula received little Christian influence, and the Muslim conquerors in the 7th and 8th Centuries ruthlessly wiped out the churches and Christian believers throughout the Middle East and North Africa. Thus, the sole significant influence in the Arab world is Islam. What are its results? As you stated, “Arab culture is violent, oppressive, and exclusionary.” My argument is that you cannot isolate a civilization from its philosophical moorings. There are individual deviants, like a John Muhammad, the man accused of the sniper deaths in the D.C. area or like a Paul Hill, the defrocked Presbyterian minister convicted of killing an abortionist. These deviants are not the measure by which you measure the effect of a religion on a society. Rather, it is that society itself.

"If the Islamic faith in former Yugoslavia was more tolerant than elsewhere, it is because they were influenced not only by Islam, but by the Christian faith of the region and their ancestors."

On what do you base this causal relationship?

I believe that Muslims in Bosnia are more tolerant of other religions, because their clergy and their politicians are separate.

In the Arab world, the culture is largely illiterate, conformist, and preoccupied with family honor. The family honor is largely tied to the virginity of the women and the number of men in the family. Women are stoned or imprisoned for accusations of impropriety. When not being stoned to death, beaten, or imprisoned, the women are often required to be covered head-to-toe and chaperoned by family members. This is an example of how the people are able to be led to believe that they are abiding by Koranic law. Whatever the Koranic scholars deem to be Koranic law, the people will believe, because they are conformists and their claims go unchecked by the illiterate people.

In Bosnia, there is no Koranic law. There is only that law created through legislation, by people who are elected in a democratic fashion. Prior to this, they were ruled by a dictatorship that was not Muslim. The legislators and other government officials of Bosnia cannot brow-beat their people into submission by declaring authoritative power over an illiterate society, by claiming to be acting on God's will. They must be responsive to the people, because they do not rule by way of claiming divine right or to be acting on behalf of divine will.

The Koranic scholars can appeal to authority, to impose their beliefs upon their people, in the Arab world. The secular government of Bosnia, though populated by many Muslims, must rely on the consent of the governed.

In Bosnia, Muslim women do not cover themselves head-to-toe, unless they want to, which I have never seen. They travel without chaperones. They live lives with as many of their rights recognized as the men. They hold positions in the government, work as police officers, etc. They are Muslims, but they are not ruled over by some Koranic scholar who declares his personal desires to be Koranic law, which he alone is able to interpret. They read their own Koran and do not allow themselves to be supplicated to the whims of a tyrant who claims to adhere to Islam. It is the same Koran, but the two different cultures use it differently. The Arabs use it as a tool to oppress the people into conformity with a backwards value system fueled by their backwards culture. The Muslims use it in the same way that Christians (and Muslims and Jews) in this country use their own holy scripture.