A Matter Of We

This article was brought to my attention by a reader of this blog, and I feel that I need to address it properly. TO THE DICTIONARY!

Main Entry: ter·ror·ism
Pronunciation: \ˈter-ər-ˌi-zəm\
Function: noun
Date: 1795
: the systematic use of terror, especially as a means of coercion

See that word up there? Systematic? It means carefully planned, usually by a group of people. 9/11 was terrorism. It was an organized act by a group of extremist terrorist, many of whom were Islamic, meant to cause fear, panic and paranoia.

The tragedy at Fort Hood, while a terrible, horrid act, does NOT constitute terrorism. It was an unorganized shooting rampage perpetrated by a lone person. What Ralph Peters and his supporters need to understand is that, despite any connotations you bring to the word, calling this act terrorism does not make it any better or worse than it previously was, and is erroneous to boot. Maybe, just maybe, if we stopped pecking over semantics, we could get to the heart of the issue and actually, for once, remember the victims of this tragedy.

The second thing that Ralph Peters needs to realize is that evil is three-dimensional, and cannot be attributed to any one thing, such as one's religion. Hitler, for example, had a bad parental upbringing, low self esteem, and was rejected from art school. It's as ludicrous as saying somebody's hair color makes them evil. To do something like this, somebody needs to have been very messed up all throughout their life. To say that an evil act, such as terrorism, a school shooting, or the Fort Hood tragedy, can be caused by a single factor is a simple, comfortable, and easy solution. I don't blame Mr. Peters or his supporters for acting like generally curious humans and choosing an easily-digestible solution, because that's how we keep our sanity. It's okay to have that idea as a kind of mental life jacket, as long as you're able to realize that it's not that simple.

The third thing Ralph Peters must realize is that Islam is not an inherently an evil religion. In fact, it is from the same Abrahamic roots as Christianity and Judaism. Although the three religions have a few differences, mainly on the identification of Christ as the Messiah (meaning that all three believe that Christ existed, but Judaism and Islam question His status as the Messiah, although He is seen as an important prophet in all three.) and the existence of djinns. The three also share much of the same stories of the Old Testament, such as The Great Flood and Joshua and the Wall. Contrary to some propaganda that has been circulated by various media, verse 9:11 of the Quran (or Koran, if you want to use the Romanized pronunciation) contains nothing remotely similar to events that occured on 9/11/2001. For the curious, the verse reads as follows:

Yet if they repent, and take to prayer, and render the purifying dues, they become your brethren in faith:
Asad(9,17)
[17] and clearly do We spell out these messages unto people of [innate] knowledge!

which basically is talking about evening prayer and pilgrimage to the Mecca, a holy place to Muslims, very similar to how some Christian churches have taken pilgrimmages to Babylon.

The propaganda I've seen most commonly distributed says that verse 9:11 reads as follows:

For it is written that a son of Arabia would awaken a fearsome Eagle. The wrath of the Eagle would be felt throughout the lands of Allah and lo, while some of the people trembled in despair still more rejoiced; for the wrath of the Eagle cleansed the lands of Allah; and there was peace.

As you can see, not true at all. In not translation of any major Islamic holy text does anything remotely resembling this pop up.

It becomes incredibly disturbing when you realize how much the small percentage of extremist Islamics have grown to represent the face of an entire religion that, 9 times out of 10, is generally peaceful. I've seen no religion, including Islam, that advocates harming or killing a person, and the small percentage of Muslim that use religion to justify heinous acts aren't following any religion, or at least I would argue that. The general population of Islamics are not like the ones you usually see in the media. Imagine if somebody looked at Melissa Huckaby, the Sunday School teacher who raped and murdered a four-year-old, or James Kopp, the Christian who murdered a doctor who performed abortions*, or the Ku Klux Klan, or the Soweto Bombings, and thought those people where what Christians like Ralph and I and my uncle Larry were like all the time. Ask yourself: are those people really Christians, or are they just using it as an excuse to justufy their actions? When somebody who's never heard the Gospel before sees a Christian on the news for the first time, do you want it to be these people? Because that's what's happening with Islam right now.

I read a comment on the article that said this:

coswriter:When are we going to go to total war against these islamist animals? Will we continue to be picked off one at a time like sheep? Profile, profile, profile. Shut down mosque's whose imam or worshipers aid, abet, or carry our terrorism against the United States. Shut down this animal's mosque, others there knew he was a terrorist in the making. Obama the Coward in Chief won't do anything.
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Now, I'm fine with the poster's political views on Obama, it's their opinion, but it's the "shut down this animal's mosque" part I've got a problem with. How would you feel if someone barged in and shut down your church?

By the way, if you think I made th comment up, it's the very first comment on the second page in the article link, and it was written a day or two before I knew of the article. I really WISH I'd made it up, but alas.

What really bugs me is the fact that this is becoming a matter of Us v. Them, instead of We helping each other. And you know what happend the last time it was Us v. Them. Two nations got the power to destroy all life on Earth three times over. One of them was the USA.

Tomato

*Not taking a stance on abortion here, either way. I'm just saying it's wrong to murder a doctor who had a family because of a political disagreement. Please keep the comments away from an abortion argument, because that not what this post was about.