Jihad – a multi-headed monster.

Submitted by J.Shearer (United Kingdom), Jan 2, 2003 at 15:49

Thank you Daniel Pipes for raising this issue and to have done so with objectivity and grace.

One of the great shames of the world and more specifically the West, is that it wilfully ignored a genocide of Christians and others, that was going on in Sudan. -- a genocide of massive proportions, under the religiously sanctioned concept of murderous jihad. The reasons for this silence are difficult to guess but the most charitable reason one can put was that politicians and even church leaders in the West did not want to ‘hurt' Muslim feelings. Their cowardice and shame has no bounds, for it led directly to the murder of millions. As a consequence, for two decades, I have had nothing but contempt for Popes or Arch Bishops of this and that.

Yet another form of jihad is ethnic cleansing. In Kosovo for instance, Serbs are being driven out of a land that has been theirs for centuries and their ancient churches are being bombed. It is an attempt to purge and erase Serbs' historic attachment to that land. Whilst in the Moluccas in Indonesia, a combination of murderous and ethnic cleansing jihad is underway on Christians, while our blessed Christian religious leaders in the West, pontificate and berate our elected politicians on Iraq.

In Bethlehem and Nazareth, two towns that have been historically Christian, is yet another manifestation of jihad. Here Muslims overwhelm the region by force of numbers whilst at the same time harassing Christians, such that they eventually leave for the safety of the West .Yet paradoxically it is only Israel which is singled out for opprobrium by our church leaders. They don't seem to realise that it is Israel, the only recognisably decent state in that region, that alone guarantees a Christian presence in the Holy land.

Jihad also takes the form of issuing death threats and fatwas against any who criticise Islam, of organising spam hate mail against authors critical of Islam and thus threatening freedom of expression, even right here in the West,and of the totally spurious claim that Judaism and Christianity are part of Islam.

Thus, jihad is not just the extension of Muslim rule over territory but also the conquest of constitutional, intellectual and spiritual space occupied by ‘infidels'.

Whilst Daniel is somewhat optimistic for a reformation of Islam, I do not hold out any such chances or a re-think on jihad by Muslims, even if its forces are defeated in battle, for there is no precedent in the history of Islam that allows one to make such an assumption. There is no debate free of fear and no real education in that society, except that of rote learning of the Koran. All that will happen is that militant Islam will abate for a while, but come back again with increased vigour and greater danger, as Muslim populations grow in the West.

Jihad is a multi-headed hydra and cutting single heads just compounds the problem. The West has to re-think how it deals with this particular beast.

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