Islam: Religion of Peace and Tolerance

"There are states with whom we share the same values, such as the political horizon of free elections or a free market economy. However, no one threatens these states with wiping them off the map. No one fires at their border towns; no one wishes that their citizens would leave their country. There is a term, political correctness. This term I consider to be a euphemism for political cowardice. Therefore, let me not be cowardly.
There are dozens of days of independence being celebrated every year in the Czech Republic. Some I may attend, others I cannot. There is one I can never miss, however: it’s the Israeli Independence Day.
There was a hideous assassination in the flower of Europe in the heart of European Union in a Jewish museum in Brussels. I will not let myself being calmed down by the declaration that there are only tiny fringe groups behind it. On the contrary, I am convinced that this xenophobia, and let’s call it racism or antisemitism, emerges from the very essence of the ideology these groups subscribe to.
So let me quote one of their sacred texts to support this statement: ‘A tree says, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. A stone says, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.’
I would criticize those calling for the killing of Arabs, but I do not know of any movement calling for mass murdering of Arabs. However, I know of one anti-civilization movement calling for the mass murder of Jews.
After all, one of the paragraphs of the statutes of Hamas says: ‘Kill every Jew you see.’ Do we really want to pretend that this is an extreme viewpoint? Do we really want to be politically correct and say that everyone is nice and only a small group of extremists and fundamentalists is committing such crimes?

Czech President Miloš Zeman. Photo: David Sedlecký / WikiCommons.

The above text is part of a speech that Czech President Milos Zeman delivered at the Israeli Embassy in Prague, quoting the Koran, in the wake of the atrocity attacking a Jewish museum in Brussels, Belgium. The text of that speech has outraged the Organization of Islamic Cooperation whose Secretary General, Iyad Ameen Madani condemned the speech: "It is only appropriate that President Milos Zeman apologizes to the millions of Muslims worldwide for his deeply offensive and hateful anti-Islam statements."

Which, on the face of it is more than a little puzzling. Apologize for reading verbatim texts that appear in the Koran? Not that an unbeliever had the temerity to publicly quote from a Koranic verse, but that the verse was quoted, altogether. Granted, to prove a point. The OIC's statement read further: "The Secretary General reiterated that Islam is a religion of peace and tolerance and that terrorism should not be equated to any race or religion; a stance upheld by all majur UN texts on the subject of countering terrorism. He added that the OIC countries share a profound respect for all religions and condemn any message of hatred and intolerance."

Islam, however, is profoundly intolerant, it holds that there is but one true religion and that is Islam. The precursors to Islam, Judaism which pre-dated Islam by thousands of years, and Christianity by over half a millennium, according to Islamic scholars were 'unfinished' religions which Allah permitted the Prophet Mohammed to help him perfect through Islam, rendering the previous two utterly redundant, their continued worship an insult of profound proportions to the one true religion.

As a religion of peace and tolerance Islam outdoes itself on the world stage, from the Middle East to North Africa, Asia to Europe, in breeding adherents whose hearts burn with hatred for non-Muslims and in their piety swear to uphold the precepts of honourable jihad, martyring themselves for the cause through the slaughter of innocents who happen not to be sufficiently pious in their Islamic ritual practise, or those who obdurately refuse altogether to honour Islam.

Islamic sectarian violence is so intractable and viciously venomous that the two main sects, Sunni and Shia, wage brutish battles against one another where the more steeped in fanaticism Islamists are, the more bestial the atrocities they wreak on their victims from beheadings to vengeful mutilations of children, mass rape of women and wholesale routing of hundreds of thousands of fearful Muslims of the 'wrong' sect through mass migration of the desperate.

The merest whisper of an affront against the honour of Prophet, lest his name be taken in vain, or the mishandling of the Koranic holy book, let alone a waggish cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed to demonstrate the hypocrisy of a religion that celebrates itself as humanely peaceful, given to brotherhood and goodwill while exhorting to violence is enough to launch violent rampages of enraged Muslims against those whom they consider to be Islamophobic.

The conspiracies that take place in non-Muslim countries that have given safe haven to Muslims desperately escaping political and social repression and oppression, escaping brutal civil wars, and which endanger the lives of those citizens of the countries that have responded to their plight with compassion, speak volumes about Islam's intolerance and propensity to promote violence. Muslim contempt for the broken values of the West under democracy as opposed to the straitened human values of Islam is legend.

The Islamist purists who have expunged their consciences as human beings from all pity and compassion for others, who create mass terror through their violent sweeps leaving in their wake countless wounded and dead, threatening that more will join the dead if women leave their homes, should Western types of activities including education for girls be adopted in a Sharia-imposed society and who embark in conflict against established states to counter them with their own, occurs on a regular basis.

Tyrannical rulers who impose their minority tribal/sectarian will on majority populations who then rebel with the regime unleashing their military might upon their own citizens, slaughtering them in their tens of thousands to retain power, do so in the name of all that remains sacred in Islam for this is their religion and this is the religion that they insist gives them the right and the obligation to do as they will, in contradiction to basic human rights.

 

Stringer / Reuters    Homs, Syria on March 9, 2014.