Give this article a quick read: http://www.citizenwarrior.com/2007/11/modern-revelations-about-islamic.html. It very neatly puts the nature Islam in perspective.
Understanding Islam is very simple when you put the Koran in chronological order. The Koran, which was written by one man, and which blatantly contradicts itself, theologically mirrors Muhammad’s changing circumstances. When he was in the minority, his revelations were peaceful, winsome. After the flight to Medina, however, they began to turn aggressive and finally violent. It was at this time that Muhammad and his followers began raiding caravans – killing, raping and plundering. Later would come full-fledged blood persecution of the “infidels”.
Several years ago, when America chose a president who promised to fix the economy, but who was of low morals and ethics and who supported unrestricted legal abortion, Ralph Martin admonished the U.S. with the Bible proverb, “Do not accept a bribe for the perversion of justice”. Violating that principle will bring a curse whether the violator is an individual or a nation. And that is exactly what we have done to ourselves. Looking around at our society and culture, is it not obvious?
George W. Bush’s greatest mistake was not his profligate spending, bad as that was. The economy, though it may well reflect spiritual issues, must of necessity come after explicitly spiritual issues. W’s primary error was his insistence, beginning immediately after 9/11, that Islam was inherently a religion of peace. In saying this he fell into and fed the political correctness that has prevented us from defining our problem with Islam accurately, and thus, dealing with it effectively.
It was this same political correctness that, as just one example, enabled the Fort Hood massacre. The signs were there for any unbiased person to see, but the simple and correct conclusion, that radical (“to-the-root”) Islam is aggressively antithetical to all other ideologies, be they secular or sacred, has been disallowed by the prevailing ethos. Truth being verboten, we must always come up with an alternate focus. Thus, after the killings, Army chief Gen. Casey worried not that more good and innocent American soldiers were at risk of internal terrorism, but that the Army’s diversity goals were at risk.
America’s problem with Islam goes back to the nation’s very beginning, when we having lost the protection of the British navy, the Barbary Pirates with unrivaled cruelty killed, raped, and plundered our vessels (sound familiar?). We had done absolutely nothing to provoke these attacks (sorry, blame-America-firsters). The leader of those (Muslim) pirates boasted that his enemies must know how to either fight well or pay well:
The Americans asked Adja why his government was hostile to American ships, even though there had been no provocation. They reported to the Continental Congress that the ambassador had told them “it was written in their Koran, that all nations which had not acknowledged the Prophet were sinners, whom it was the right and duty of the faithful to plunder and enslave,” but he also told them that for what they considered outrageous sums of money they could make peace. -papers of Thomas Jefferson, via Wikipedia
The ongoing attacks were serious enough to occasion the founding of the American navy, but ultimately we took the spiritually expedient way out, when in an Eighteenth Century version of political correctness, one article of the Treaty of Tripoli declared that we were not a Christian nation. (Note, however, that the treaty and this article in particular are shrouded with inconsistencies, uncertainties and conflicting accounts.)
David Barton recounts how, in trying to understand and solve the intractable Barbary problem, Thomas Jefferson as our third President bought and read the Koran. It was on Jefferson’s personal copy of the Koran that much later, Keith Ellison, our first Muslim congressman, was sworn into office. Ellison proffered Jefferson’s Koran as dramatic visual evidence that Islam and America have a long,, intertwined and cooperative history together. Ellison is right about Islam and America going back a long way, but the only cooperation you will find is Islam’s tactical alliance with the political correctness that seeks to redefine our spiritual roots.
As always, while I disparage Islam, I do not disparage the many good Muslims who are caught in its coercive trap. May they find the freedom that is in the truth that is in Christ.
