The Boston Bombers
The recent events in Boston have again raised the level of consciousness in America about the continuing (and growing) threat of radical Jihadist Islam. It amazes me, however, how the present administration and many in the mainstream media are so reluctant to call it Islamic terrorism. Too many liberal pundits try to find extraneous reasons for why mass killers like Tamerlan and Dzhohkar Tsarnaev do what they do. They want to blame society or poverty or even brain damage from boxing.
The truth is clear, however, that the driving force for most terrorists’ attacks in the 21st century has been their radical Islamic faith. I know all Muslims are not violent or terrorists, yet the fact that nearly all terrorists are Muslims cannot be denied. We have to ask, is there something about that religion that engenders violent expressions of hate toward non-believers? Even just a superficial review of Islamic history shows it has a bloody record reaching all the way back to Muhammad himself. Muslims throughout history have spread their faith through the sword and horribly oppressed those who resisted.
One example was on the Indian subcontinent. Historian Will Durant, in his Story of Civilization, concluded that “the Mohammedan conquest of India was probably the bloodiest story in history”. Tens of millions of Hindus were massacred and enslaved by invading Muslim armies in the latter years of the first millennium A.D. and the early centuries of the second millennium.
Another more recent example was less than a hundred years ago in modern Turkey. The Ottoman Empire exterminated more 600,000 Armenians during World War I (1915-1918). The reason for the genocide was in part because of the Armenians’ resistance to give up their Orthodox Christian faith to follow Islam.
The point is that radicalized Muslims can find plenty of historical precedents for killing ‘infidels” (nonMuslims) in the name of Allah. Today we see a revival of this violent strain of Islam spreading across the world and even taking control of whole nations. It’s time the press and western governments started calling it what it is: evil!