Peter Smith: Praise Allah for Leaders Like Ours
I must be thick. The very many official assurances we keep hearing that Islam is the religion of peace just don’t seem to ring true, not to my ill-educated ears, not with so much bloody hate being spewed and perpetrated in its name
Is it believable? Is it happening? I am afraid it’s true. A former great nation, the birthplace of the civilised modern world, is in the throes of having any remaining shreds of greatness and integrity stripped away by the latest in a succession of weak-kneed, mediocre at best and traitorous at worst, political leaders.
David Cameron is standing in the British Parliament — where giants have stood who must surely be weeping – rightly deploring the latest, most God awful, atrocity committed by Islamists. Is it possible to imagine anything worse than rampaging through a school, deliberately killing 132 children, as happened in Pakistan? How low can human beings sink? Under this destructive Islamic ideology there appear to be no limits.
But apparently, according Mr Cameron, none of this is down to Islam proper. Islam he tells us is a ‘great religion’. It is, he says, a ‘religion of peace’. What we are seeing is a ‘perversion’ of Islam.
So let me get this straight because I didn’t go to a fancy public school or undertake the kind of deep study of Islam that Mr Cameron has evidently undertaken. Each of the now-thousands of modern-day atrocities committed by those loudly claiming that Allah is great are all the result of those owing allegiance to a Mr Hyde version of Islam. The Dr Jekyll version is the true faith.
I ask, in my innocence, how did this happen to the religion of peace? Why Islam? Could not these deranged individuals and terrorist groups have founded their own ideology to avoid contaminating the religion of peace? Why pick on Islam? Why not pick on Christianity, isn’t that peaceful enough to contaminate; or Judaism, or Buddhism or Hinduism, or any other ism? It is a mystery inside an enigma. I admit to being not clever enough to work it out.
Thankfully I am not alone. Strange as it may seem, those committing barbarous acts – bombings, suicide bombings, beheadings, hiding behind schools and hospitals while they try to kill Israelis, killing children, killing unbelievers, killing Christians, killing Muslims who don’t toe the religious line, killing capriciously, enslaving women, preaching hatred – all believe they are following the tenets of the true Islam. They are Mr Hydes and don’t know it. Mr Cameron might take the trouble to speak to some of them personally and put them right.
No, I tell you what; let’s ask the various ‘peaceful’ leading Islamic clerics and scholars in the UK, in the US, in Canada, in Australia to publicly explain, in clear terms, what Islamic scripture (the Koran, the Hadiths and other authoritative writings) says about the place of non-Muslims and women in Muslim societies governed by Sharia law. Knowledgeable independent interlocutors might be employed to keep explanations on track. Only then will we, the great unwashed, be privy to the kind of insight belonging to Mr Cameron and, in fact, to all Western leaders.
Short of that I just connect the dots. Occam’s Razor comes to mind. The Koran has violent passages directed at unbelievers and, according to secondary sources I have read, so does the peripheral Islamic scripture. The radical preachers regurgitate their scripture; Islamic terrorists act it out. And they keep acting it out on every continent and very regularly. Ergo Islam – not some imaginary evil Islamic alter ego – is the source of violence.
It must be a lack of public school deduction that prevents me seeing things as clearly, as Mr Cameron. Or perhaps, as George Orwell wrote, ‘there are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them’. I’m just not intelligent enough to believe that Islam is a religion of peace when so much hate is spewed out and perpetrated in its name.
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