Is Islam A Religion of Peace?

Another discussion on that roilsomely tired topic is to take place in Ypsilanti, Michigan under the title "Catholic Witness in a Nation Divided", organized by Ave Maria Communications, a Catholic marketing network. There is a rather interesting speakers line-up. One that includes Robert Spencer, director of the website Jihad Watch, who loves debating the subject, but finds himself all too often locked out of the debate by the hordes of Islamist-protectors of the West, unwilling to bring emotional pain to Muslim sensibilities through reason and truth.

He is to be joined by Mustafa Akyol, a Turkish journalist, author of Islam without extremes; a Muslim case for liberty; Richard Thompson, president of the Thomas More Law Center; Shadid Lewis, regional director of the Muslim Debate Initiative USA; and Al Kresta, writer, missionary, and CEO of Ave Maria Radio. An Islamic Studies scholar named Andrew Bieszad, author of Lions of the Faith, will also be present.

Mr. Bieszad has written of Muslim atrocities committed against Christians from the very earliest days of Islam to the present. He knows all about the Crusades, the Christian reconquest of the Iberian peninsula, the Ottoman Empire, the chivalric orders of Christianity, and the Inquisition. He was a student of Islamic Studies at Hartford Seminary in Connecticut. Full of "brilliant, highly-educated Muslim and non-Muslim professors invested in scholarship".

Once a Protestant Seminary, the Hartford Seminary is now an institute of higher learning that promotes "Islamo-correctness". When Mr. Bieszad joined the Hartford Seminary in its Masters program he found himself being studiously corrected for his unacceptable critiques of Islam, despite the depth of his knowledge and research, including his ability to read original manuscripts in Arabic.

He was seen as hugely offensive during "Interfaith dialogue" class when he presented as the sole non-Muslim present claiming  aloud: "I am Catholic and I do not believe in Islam." Speaking his mind ensured he was subjected to insults and threats by Muslim students, one of whom informed him, "according to Islam you do not deserve to live". A statement in and of itself speaks to the peaceful nature of Islam.

Reporting these issues to the seminary administration, professors or other Christian students resulted in yawning disinterest. He was accused of intolerance and ordered to demonstrate a "better understanding of Islam".

At the seminary, relations were so unreservedly relaxed between Muslims and non-Muslims that overt invitations to conversion to Islam were encouraged, while Christian proselytism was strictly forbidden. Christianity was taught there as a subversive, covert, somehow shameful subject along with homosexuality and class discrimination, and patriarchal oppression.

He is anxious to begin work on his PhD, but up to the present it would appear that his reputation has preceded him; no U.S.-based Islamic Studies program he has applied to will accept him. Married, father to two young children, he makes ends meet through employment in a Connecticut grocery store. His scholarship undoubtedly useful in recommending fresh fruits and vegetables over fast foods.

He could point out that during Ramadan, the most holy month of the Muslim calendar, when the faithful is instructed to worship God through good thoughts and deeds, in the crucible of Islam, bloody atrocities in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Afghanistan and Pakistan have taken the lives of thousands of the faithful through internecine and sectarian hatred.

The sainted religion of peace that Islam represents, he could also point out, has so oppressed and preyed upon Syrian, Iraqi, Egyptian and other Holy Land authentic remnants of original Christianity that their representative numbers have shrivelled as they have been forced to flee episodes of Muslim violence against the vile presence of the infidels.

He could say that in contrast, in the approach to Christmas and Easter, Christians look on the sunny side of life while they celebrate the birth and death of the historical Jewish sage that they fervently believe represents the son of God, worshipping exuberantly or mourningly as the case may be, but abstaining from mounting deadly attacks on other Christians.

Which, then, is the religion of peace, now?