What if it were 1&1/2 Million instead of 1&1/2 Billion?

Submitted by Ron Thompson (United States), Aug 28, 2011 at 15:22

This survey by Daniel Pipes which I, perhaps perversely, find more optimistic than pessimistic, prompts a quesion that often comes to mind.

If we were faced with a religion of 1&1/2 million adherents, or 10&1/2 million, or even 100&1/2 (150M) million adherents, which continually produced a steady stream of suicide killers sent by or with the blessing of the clerics of that religion against Westerners, and far more lethally against their fellow believers, killers who targeted them while they were out shopping, and even while inside their places of worship, or at funerals for peole killed by earlier bombers, instead of a religion of 1&1/2 billion, would be so relentless in making excuses for that religion as we are with islam?

By somehow, consciously or unconsciously, continually making and re-making the vast collective decision that no matter how many are killed, or what degree of barbarous nihilism is reached, we must never, ever ask whether there is something wrong at the core of the religion of Islam, are we failing to consider what is perhaps in the long run the very best weapon we have against this plague of mindless villence and oppression?

Imagine if we had Christian or Jewish suicide killers loose among us - would we accept other Christians or Jews saying, "Oh, that's not the real Christianity (or Judaism)"? I can't believe we would, just as i can't believe that no one from islam has accepted resposibility, in the name of islam, for what has come out of islam in the past generation under the avoidance-names of "Islamism", or "militant" Islam, or most ridiculously, "violent extremism".

We see no signs there is any significant introspection among the thinkers of Islam, that they are asking, or ever have asked themselves, is there any chance there is something basically wrong with our creed? With our attitudes toward women? With our attitudes toward sex? With our attitudes toward peaceful resolution of conflicts, or toward the idea of peacefulness itself?

By we in the West joining with the believers of Islam, in tacitly agreeing that whatever is going on with the endless violence in Islam, toward its own adherents and toward the entire outside world of Infeldom, it can't possibly be that maybe there's something wrong at the core of the Message of Mohammed, we may ourselves be failing one of the two or three greatest moral tests of the Age.

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