Islam 101 - Part 5

ISLAM VS. CHRISTIANITY - DIFFERENT TRADITIONS

Even if the Qur'an is more violent than the Bible, when you add up the amounts of violence done by both Islam and Christianity they're about the same, right? So in reality, they're just as bad as each other. Right?

Those with a proper sense of perspective can see otherwise. While both religions (and indeed all religions) have a history of religious violence, it does not inherently follow that they all had the same amount and that it was all of the same nature, or that they pose the same threat to the world today.

Islam spread by the sword. The Islamic world as we know it today was created by a series of brutal conquests of non-Muslim lands that began shortly after Muhammad's death. The Muslims swept out of Arabia and took Damascus in 635, Basrah in Iraq in 636, Antioch in 637, and Jerusalem in 638. They went on to sweep west across North Africa, into Spain, and finally into France. There they were halted at the Battle of Poitiers/Tours, not far from Paris, in 732 AD. And this was only the first wave of jihad. Much more was to come.

This sharply contrasts with Christianity, which did not spread by force. For the first three hundred years of its existence Christians were persecuted by the Romans because they were Christian. In the early days of Christianity the Church sent missionaries out to preach and win people over to their faith. These were priests and monks, not warriors. Islam, on the other hand, spread by using its armies, and attacking lands that had never threatened it, or in some cases even [I]heard[/I] of it until it arrived on the doorstep of some unfortunate future dhimmis. Even when it faced no major resistance, it continued to fight and conquer.

Nevertheless, liberal apologetics will invariably point to two historical conflicts as "proof" that Christianity's history is as bloodstained and barbaric as Islam's:

- THE CRUSADES - As far as the popular wisdom goes, the Crusades were unprovoked acts of imperialist aggression on peaceful Muslim lands. But in fact the Crusades were a late Christian response to 400 years of unprovoked attacks on them by the Muslims, an attempt by Europe to recapture the lands the Muslims had taken, which amounted to over half of Christendom in that 400-year period, and give aid to their besieged Byzantine cousins in the Holy Land. Of course, the Crusaders were not whiter-than-white, and atrocities were committed by both sides. But the idea of unprovoked imperialist Crusades is politically motivated, ahistorical propaganda. In fact, without the Crusades, Europe may well have been Islamised and we would not enjoy the freedoms we now enjoy. The Crusaders, as morally-questionable as they sometimes were, deserve our gratitude, not our scorn.

- THE INQUISITION(S) - To hear liberals tell it, during the Spanish Inquisition and its children, millions of people were killed for the crime of heresy and not conforming to Christian orthodoxy, and this proves how barbarous all of Christendom was at that time. More accurately, the Inquisitions were an aberration in the life of the Church, which historically by no means endorsed such actions. Early church fathers such as Tertullian, Origen and Lactantius all spoke out against capital punishment for heresy. Even when it began to be considered as an option by the authorities, there was no consensus. St. John Chrysostom, one of the most influential church fathers, wrote that "it is not right to put a heretic to death". Others also opposed the idea. The idea that "millions" of people were killed is pure fantasy. Historians have put the number at something like 32,000. However, more recently some have suggested that this number is massively exaggerated and that the number is more like 3,200. In either case, even the highest estimate comes to nothing like the numbers killed by Islamic jihad during the same period. In fact, jihadists kill more people every year than died during the entire Spanish Inquisition. Of course, it is despicable that the Church would ever condone such actions, so clearly against the teachings of Christ, at all. But the Inquisitions were simply not of the same magnitude as the Islamic jihad, and in any case are a matter of history, with no Christian groups trying to repeat them today.

Again grasping at the thinnest of straws, apologists will then try to tell us that there has been just as much Christian terrorism in the modern day as there has been Islamic terrorism. They will point to abortion clinic bombers to prove this point. There are several problems with this, however. Firstly, the amount of lethal attacks over the last 35 years or so is extremely small, not remotely comparable to Islamic violence, which has produced around 9500 terrorist attacks since 9/11 alone. Secondly, Christian authorities have been quick to condemn such violence on Christian grounds - namely that while they believe abortion to be murder, so also are the actions of these terrorists murder. This is contrasted to Islamic condemnations of "terrorism", in which they usually don't even specify who the terrorists are, or otherwise try to whitewash the fact that violence could have anything to do with Islam at all. When it comes to condemning jihad on Islamic grounds, their arguments are pitifully thin. In fact, they have never been inclined to apologise or show a sense of shame for Islamic violence at all. While Christians today still make groveling apologies for the Crusades and the Inquisitions, no serious Islamic authority has ever apologised for the centuries and centuries of jihad waged by its followers in the name of Islam. Are they ignorant? Or do they not care? Or do they support such violence? No one seems willing to ask.

And what of Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber? Contrary to the myths that still circulate around liberal circles, McVeigh was not a Christian at all, but an agnostic. He told friends, "Science is my religion".

The Ku Klux Klan were also Christian, we're told, and no one can deny that they didn't do some pretty awful things. Rather, the KKK were a bizarre and non-mainstream offshoot of Christianity, have killed less people in the last fifty years than Islamic terrorists do every single day.

And what of the Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda, which we are told wants to institute religious law in the country? Is this just like the jihadists trying to impose sharia? No. It is not backed by any Christian sects or clerics, and in fact there is much evidence to suggest that the group are little more than a puppet group for cynical Sudanese Muslims who use them to stir up trouble for the government of Uganda. For example, LRA leader Joseph Kony has gone on record denouncing the keeping of pigs - which sounds rather Islamic, doesn't it?

It is clear that Islam poses far more of a threat to the West today than Christianity ever has done. There are no Christian (or Jewish, or Buddhist, or any other religion, for that matter) groups committing acts of violence against unbelievers and quoting scripture to justify themselves. Islam, on the other hand, has been responsible for hundreds of thousands of violent acts on non-Muslims for 1,400 years now - and those acts were usually backed up with specific Islamic traditions and quotes from the Qur'an, and still are today. The few periods during which Islam was not waging war on the rest of the world correspond exactly to the times when it was too weak to pursue military jihad. Westerners need to learn to accept this, in the face of PC multiculturalism and "diversity", and admit that one religion is more of a problem than another, instead of pretending that all religions are equally likely to inspire violence in their followers. No one can fight an enemy effectively if they are afraid to even name that enemy.

Next week: Moderate Islam - and why it doesn't exist to any significant degree