Through a distorting glass

Submitted by Ami Isseroff (Israel), Aug 26, 2002 at 08:32

Your articles, and reader's comments, view Islam through the distorting glass of lobbyists and the trauma of 9-11, of Saddam Hussein and of the Intifada.

Before 9-11, Islam was distorted in reverse, by lobbyists and apologists who wanted us to believe that there was no threat at all from militant Islam.

Islam is a religion like any other, and its tenets are clay in the hands of politicians and practitioners. In Judaism, Deuteronomy's "Kill everything that breatheth alive" was forgotten in favor of nonviolence for 2000 years, and apparently now it is revived in some quarters. The mild and loving religion of the Gospels became the Christianity of the Crusades and the Inquisition, but also that of the Quakers and St. Francis. A billion Muslims have many ways of life and interpretations of the Quran.

It is doubtful that terrorism is due to Islam itself, since violence and aggression are just as characteristic of the secular Ba'ath movement and the Fatah-Tanzim.

It is Islam will change, as Christianity did, when there is a substantial middle class in the societies that have produced Al-Qaeada. Violence will ebb from Middle Eastern societies when it becomes clear that violence is not the path to salvation.

Ami Isseroff - MidEastWeb for Coexistence RA
http://www.mideastweb.org

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