January 31, 2016
Islam and the First Amendment
By David Deming
Donald Trump created a media firestorm when he called for a moratorium on Muslim immigration to the US. Trump was denounced as a xenophobic racist -- as if Islam was not a religion, but a race (go figure). Trump's announcement was apparently prompted by a terrorist attack in San Bernardino, California, where two Islamic terrorists killed fourteen people. The San Bernardino incident followed in the wake of a coordinated strike by ISIS in November that slaughtered 130 people in Paris, France.
It's an absurd but deadly circus. Time after time, Islamic terrorists murder innocent people, and leftists immediately fall all over themselves to embrace Muslims and declare Islam to be a "religion of peace." In my home state, the director of the Oklahoma chapter of CAIR denounced anti-Muslim rhetoric and warned, "hateful words too often lead to violence." Listening to this sort of propaganda one might obtain the impression that Christian Crusaders were massacring innocent Muslims. The reality is that Islamic terrorists worldwide are intent not just on the genocide of Christians but the replacement of Western Civilization by a universal caliphate. If any people doubt this, I would invite them to watch the Frontline documentary, The Rise of Isis.
A group called the Islamic Circle of North America has been putting up billboards in major cities in the US. The billboards read "Muhammad believed in peace, social justice, and women's rights." Of course he did. Muhammad's idea of peace and social justice was killing anyone who refused to accept his religion. And it is true that women have certain rights in Islam. So did African slaves in the antebellum South. Southern States enacted Slave Codes that detailed and protected these rights. It's easy to completely deceive people with half-truths.
Michael Moore scaled the heights of stupidity by standing outside the Trump Tower in New York City holding up a sign that read, "we are all Muslim." Moore knows we're not literally all Muslims, so presumably his message was that we're all capable of being victims of religious discrimination. President Obama has steadfastly refused to even acknowledge the existence of Islamic terrorism. The message we're supposed to take from this is that Islam is just another religion, like Buddhism, Hinduism, or Presbyterianism.
In 1997, a left-wing think tank in the UK, the Runnymede Trust, coined the neologism "Islamophobia." "Islamophobia" is now defined in a lengthy Wikipedia article as "prejudice against, hatred towards, or fear of the religion of Islam or Muslims." A phobia is an irrational fear. Thus the term by its very existence presumes what necessarily must be demonstrated: that dislike of Islam is irrational.
We're repeatedly assured that Islamic terrorists are not Islamic, that Islam is a religion of peace, and we should wholeheartedly embrace our peaceful Muslim brothers and open our borders to them. We're supposed to accept all of this while we're being slaughtered like sheep. What makes the promulgation of this nonsense possible and acceptable to a large segment of our society is simple ignorance. According to a recent Pew Poll, most Americans "know little or nothing
about Islam."
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