On Easter Sunday this year I was
attending a church in Clarksville, Maryland. (I would have gone to my
regular church in Laurel, Maryland, but I’m severely allergic to
lilies*.) At that service, there was a short play demonstrating the
Easter story from the point of view of Heaven. Two rows to my left, a
Muslim woman who had been invited to see the play was in shock. She
was rocking back and forth in fervent prayers. In her eyes, blasphemy
took place. In my eyes, the Gospel was being preached.
President Obama made two statements on
June 4, 2009. The first, and most publicized, was his speech at Cairo
University. The second was a quiet statement two days after Privates
William Andrew Long was killed and Quinton I. Ezeagwula was murdered by a
jailhouse convert to Islam.
The President is taking a position on
Middle East peace that most Americans who care about Middle East
peace don’t want. Most Americans want a State of Israel that is
strong enough to defend itself against the threat of annihilation.
They want peace between Israelis and Arabs. Whether or not they agree
on whether Israelis should have settlements in place in the West Bank
and Samaria, most Americans think that it’s a matter that the U.S.
can’t impose from above.
At the same time, most Americans don’t
want to live with a militant Islam, especially since the forms of
Islam they face on a regular basis are the Black Muslims, who believe
whites are the children of the devil, and the Islamic terrorists who
murdered over 3,000 people on September 11, 2001, or 7 B.B.O. (Before
Barack Obama). Politicians on both parties have said that these
terrorists are not the true face of Islam, and that most Muslims want
to live in peace.
I believe the latter. I know many
Muslims who want peace and oppose terrorism. They aren’t the
religious fanatics. However, even at its most peaceful, Muslim
societies don’t accept people of other faiths as political equals.
There is a supremacist cast to Islam.
Muslims believe that Mohammed was the final prophet of God, thus
Islam is the final form of religion. People of the Book, such as
Christians and Jews, who have scriptures, are tolerated, but granted
second-class status. Pagans and unbelievers are to be killed or
converted by force.
Furthermore, the claims of Jesus
Christ, documented in the Gospels, that He was the Son of God and He
died for our sins on the Cross are shocking and blasphemous to the
Muslim ear. The greatest sin for a Muslim is for a human to claim
Divine attributes. As long as Christians are a significant majority
in the United States, then there will be conflict with Islam.
Yet further, many Muslims tend to
believe that Westerners are immoral. We do things that are, to be
frankly, immoral whoever sees it. Westerners drink to get drunk.
Westerners use drugs, watch porn, commit adultery and tolerate
homosexual relationships. Westerners skip church, or even doubt that
there is a God in Heaven who will judge the living and the dead. Some
Westerners go beyond doubt and laugh at God. The difference between a
Hezbollah and a Southern Baptist on immorality is trivial. The
hijackers of 9/11 attended several strip clubs and bars the night
before their crime, not to loosen up, but to steel their souls.
However, Southern Baptists have not hijacked many airplanes to make
their point, and I can’t remember a Southern Baptist inflicting
more torture on his enemies than making them listen to male quartets
singing Gospel to a piano**. The way to fight immorality is to
convert the person involved, not kill them or threaten them.
The murder of a United States Army
private in Little Rock was the act of a free-lance jihadi; the
murderer, who I shall not name, was a product of prison and
recruitment by militant Muslims. The murderer, who will fry in Hell
unless he repent, believed that by killing American soldiers in the
heartland, he would be taking part the alleged conflict between all
Muslims and the United States. However, the murderer is wrong.
President Obama is correct in appealing
for peace with the Muslim world, though his apologetic tone and
historical facts are in error. He also compounded his domestic errors
by waiting too long to make a statement condemning the murders of the
American privates. He spoke quickly when the abortionist Doctor
George Tillman was murdered, soundly condemning the crime. Murder is
murder, and murder in the name of a political cause is still murder.
So, when two world systems cannot
agree, what should people do?
We must ask if there are two world
systems, or merely groups of people? Here in the West we tend to
thing of monolithic religious movements, because the West created the
only successful monolithic religious movement in history, the Roman
Catholic Church. The wide variety of opinions of Muslim scholars and
imams on various subjects makes Protestant churches seem like the
Rock of Doctrine. Muslims have different national backgrounds, speak
different languages, have different economies, and have had a history
of war and conflict among each other. The Ottoman Empire wasn’t
held together out of the love of Islam, as anyone who read Colonel.
T.E. Lawrence *** knows. Within my lifetime, Iraqis and Iranians
fought a grueling, eight year-long war, and Muslim Iraq invaded
Muslim Kuwait and Muslim Saudi Arabia. Muslim Indonesia tried to
crush Muslim Malaysia. Muslim Indian soldiers have fought Muslim
Pakistani soldiers.
If there is conflict, we can exploit
conflict in a positive way. We can never get rid of the extremists
totally, but we can make them feel isolated and disinclined to
violence. By noting that the U.S. doesn’t have a fight with Islam
per se, the U.S. works on this division between the vast majority of
Muslims who are more interested in a paycheck and paying the mortgage
than in jihad.
In many Muslim countries, extremist
religious parties are being defeated at the polls. The latest include
Lebanon, where the March 18 Coalition defeated a Hezbollah backed
coalition, obtaining 71 to 57 seats in Parliament. In addition,
Pakistan in 2008 reduced the militant Islamic vote from 11 percent to
3 percent. Iraqi municipal elections were also defeats for the
militants. In these cases, often the militant group resorts to
terrorism or rebellion to force government concessions; in the case
of Pakistan, the Army responded to the Taliban rebellion by moving
into the Swat Valley, regardless of civilian displacement, and in
Iraq, by continuing the political process. Friday’s elections in
Iran will be a test to see if radical President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
can hold on to an electorate that is disappointed over a lack of
economic progress.
Still, one can go too far and lead the
Muslim world to disappointment. Christians are not going to convert
to Islam. Christians are not going to abandon Israel, and Christians
are going to insist on civil liberties in the Muslim world, including
the right of Christians to worship freely without facing blasphemy
charges. If the President strings the Muslim world along, they’re
in for disappointment, and things can get worse.
I am not a believer in kumbaya and
having friendship instead of conflict. I recognize conflict will
exist between nations and peoples and faiths. Instead of a positive
peace, I’ll settle for a negative peace, where you can hear men and
women on both sides say, “Well, I don’t like them, and I don’t
want my daughter to marry one, but it’s not worth the powder to
fight them. I’ll let them be if they let me be.”
Perhaps the Great Orator should try
putting that on the teleprompter.
* Really allergic. I tried to assist at
church the week after, and I nearly fainted when I stepped out into
the sanctuary past the altar. When I die, please provide any other
flower BUT lilies at my service.
** Don’t shoot me; I like gospel
quartets.
*** Or watched “Lawrence of
Arabia”****
**** Or read the Mad Magazine parody
thereof.
