Politicians insisting that the latest Islamic jihad attack has nothing to do with Islam have become a familiar feature of the mainstream media landscape, but last Saturday, Boston Police Commissioner William B. Evans went them all one better.
Speaking at the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center, Evans declared:
We’re all Muslims deep down. We all yearn for peace.
Evans thus went farther than Barack Obama, John Kerry, David Cameron, and all the other Western politicians who insist that Islam is a religion of peace. For Evans, Islam is not just a religion of peace, but the religion of peace: to be a Jew, a Christian, a Hindu, a Buddhist, or an atheist would not make one yearn for peace.
This is taking pandering to dizzying new heights, and that wasn’t all: this wasn’t the police commissioner’s first visit to the Islamic Society of Boston. He went there last December — right after two Muslims murdered fourteen people at a Christmas party in San Bernardino. He made that visit in order to make sure that the local Muslims weren’t jittery after that attack:
I don’t think we can tolerate bigotry toward the Muslim population. They’re an important part of our city. I just want to reassure them that we’re here for them.
Muslims acting avowedly in the name of Islam and jihad committed mass murder of non-Muslims, and in the wake of that attack, the Boston police commissioner took it upon himself to reassure … Muslims. However he went about doing this reassuring, it is certain that he never asked members of the Islamic Society of Boston why so many Muslims don’t yearn for peace at all, but seem instead to relish war.
Nor is he likely to have asked Islamic Society of Boston members what they were doing about that, and why they had no program designed to teach young Muslims why they should reject the understanding of Islam held by the Islamic State, al-Qaeda, and other jihad groups.
And there is clear need for such a program at the Islamic Society of Boston. Worshippers there have included:
— The Boston Marathon jihad murderers, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev
— Aafia Siddiqui, who is serving an 86-year sentence for trying to kill American soldiers
— Tarek Mehanna, who is serving seventeen years for aiding al-Qaeda
— Ahmad Abousamra, who before he was killed in an American airstrike was thought to be a principal architect of the Islamic State’s social media presence
— The Islamic Society of Boston’s founder, Abdurrahman Alamoudi, was once a major player in Washington and the nation’s most prominent moderate Muslim. Now he is serving a twenty-three year sentence for charges including fundraising for al-Qaeda.
ISB leaders insist, of course, that the Islam they teach there is as peaceful and benign as William Evans imagines it to be, and that the Tsarnaevs and Siddiqui and Mehanna and Abousamra misunderstood these soft and cuddly teachings and fell victim to “extremists” who “radicalized” them on the Internet.
Were Evans to have the wit, unwillingness to be fooled, and investigative persistence that should be required to get the job of Boston police commissioner, he might ask his friends at the ISB to explain why the true, peaceful Islam they supposedly teach there couldn’t withstand a challenge from the twisted, hijacked violent Islam that allegedly snares Muslims left and right as soon as they open their browser.
Instead, he told them that we are all Muslims deep down. To that, his Muslim audience must have happily agreed, since a hadith depicts Muhammad saying:
Every child is born on Islam, but his parents make him a Jew and a Christian, just as a beast is born whole (Sunan Abu Dawud 4714).
This belief that all people are born Muslim leads to the common practice of referring to converts to Islam as “reverts”: they are not adopting a new religion, but simply returning to their true and original religion.
Evans’ ISB audience must have wondered why the commissioner, if he really believes that yearning for peace makes one a Muslim deep down, doesn’t follow through, convert to Islam, and join the ISB himself. But whether he does or not, they can rest assured that he will not be watching out all that closely for any new Tsarnaevs or Mehannas or Abousamras who may be active there.
He knows that the only thing going on in the Islamic Society of Boston is a lot of yearning for peace. What could be more wonderful?
Join the conversation as a VIP Member