.... this is about as convincing as arguing that the murderous bits of the Bible were responsible for the brutality of the IRA. For many of the young people who have been persuaded to go off and fight in Syria and Iraq have hardly got past the first chapter of Islam for Dummies.
They often know next to nothing about the Qur’an and are about as motivated by reading the few passages they have as the average republican terrorist was motivated by Saul’s genocidal destruction of the Amalekites in the first book of Samuel. Yes, the language of violent jihad may borrow its vocabulary from Islamic theology – it’s a useful marker of shared identity – but root motivation is as it always is: politics. The IRA weren’t Bible-believing Catholics, they were mostly staunch atheists. Catholicism was simply a marker of who counted as “one of us”. And the same is true of Islamic terrorism. [Giles Fraser, 2378 comments]
[TOP RATED COMMENT 562 votes] And here it comes again: "nothing to see here folks. These Islamic terrorist attacks carried out by Islamic fundamentalists have nothing to do with Islam."
Like clockwork.
[2ND 297] So why is it that the Tunisian government's first reaction after yesterday's murders is to close down "certain Mosques"?
[3RD 193] "Islam is for the most part, a religion of peace"
Of course, founded by an imperialist feudal warlord who waged holy war and commanded his followers to do the same, how could it possibly not be a religion of peace.
[4TH 186] "The reason this is important has nothing to do with exonerating religion. I don’t care about apologetics here. So let me acknowledge that both the Qur’an and the Bible have passages that are deeply immoral."
Give me a comparison of numbers of people following the word of the bible literally, then the qur'an. I'm not sure you'd like the outcome. This false equivalencency has to stop, because it's at best disingenuous and at worst dangerous. You cannot separate the politics from the religion in the case of *slam.
[5TH 184] And here it comes again: "these Islamic terrorist attacks carried out by Islamic fundamentalists have nothing to do with Islam".
[6TH 156] You clearly have not read the koran. [Guardian Cif] Read more
