Mohammad, I see a problem with fatwas

Submitted by Frank Comment (United States), Sep 10, 2005 at 11:34

For years I had observed, tolerant, unwilling to form an opinion on Islam. (I did not see the PBS special.) But I've seen enough. Not all religions are tolerant. That was true of mainstream Christianity during the Middle Ages, when the Inquisition searched out and killed heretics. And it is currently true of much (probably most) of modern-day Islam, many of whose religious leaders think they have the uncivilized right to call on their believers to murder others for religious reasons: the now-well-known fatwa. I now understand why the "young Turks" of the early 20th century found that they had to tame Islam, to prevent it from overwhelming them. The Islamic "republic" of Iran is a joke, a country where candidates must be approved by a set of justices the Christian equivalent of whom would be Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson (who, fortunately, are constrained by a non-fatwa tradition). One of the writers on this site decries the "underrepresentation" of Muslims in the United States, without noting the much more real underrepresentation of Christians and Jews (and others) in Muslim lands, where they have been either eliminated or marginalized by force or legal means. Muslim Hamas in the West Bank is consciously driving out Palestinian Christians. You want to be a Palestinian Christian? Go to Israel. You want to leave Islam? Not publicly in an Islamic country if you want to stay alive. Many things done in the name of religion have been ghastly, but Islam is the only major religion I know of to be founded by a man who killed others, not merely for self-protection, but for the aggrandizement of his version of spiritual truth. Intolerance is built into the religion. Mohammad, I see a problem.

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