Mr. Doodslag,
You have visited my pieces before on PJM with this tripe and it makes me wonder if you feel some compelling need to sully up my work by attaching to it your unsupportable, ignorant and bigoted diatribes against Islam. One may–and indeed SHOULD–call superstition in any guise, Islamic or otherwise, the enemy. And one may call Islamism the enemy. But calling Islam the enemy is muddy-headed nonsense. When folks like you do this, you are as wrong as the Muslims who take offense when Islamism is denigrated for the repulsive ideology it is.
Do you really mean to mount an unqualified attack on the religion of the noble men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan who fight on our side for peace and justice against the fascists who oppress them? Islam is a motivating force for them as well and they interpret its warlike suras, as the original Afghan mujahideen did, as calls to fight against tyrants. Calls to war shouldn’t really be problematic unless one is a pacifist or ashamed of our revolutionary history.
Plenty of American soldiers pray to a God with the name name as the drooling Serbian mobs do. The sole difference is that Americans think that God means by his own warlike injunctions, that people like Osama bin-Laden should be vanquished and shouldn’t be allowed to ruin the lives of peace-loving Muslims any longer. The Serbs believe that He means for them to exterminate innocents and burn embassies in the name of their mythological and divinely blessed “history.”
Muslim scholars centuries before the European enlightenment had inventively interpreted the Qu’ran as a book that suggested that the afterlife–a highly superstitious idea–referred instead to the passage from ignorance into Enlightenment. History unfortunately didn’t shine well on those men, and they lost their battle of ideas. But they were Muslim nonetheless and their culture and ideas distinctly Islamic, if inspired in part by Greek philosophers. To imagine that the crusade to stamp out ignorance and superstition couldn’t be or has never been a cause of Islam is to ignore the historical record.
