Peter Smith : Islam a Threat? Bet Your Freedom on It
There is no meaningful equivalence to be found between prevailing Islamic and Christian belief systems, no matter how fervently our Prime Minister might wish it otherwise. Muddled or wishful thinking in appraising the Islamist threat makes the jihadis’ task that much easier.
How do we put the current threat to Western civilisation from Islam into an undistorted perspective? The Koran has numbers of violent passages directed at unbelievers and ‘sinners’, and literally many thousands of Muslims believe in acting them out. But people whose views I otherwise respect tell me — I believe to ease their minds and mine — that the Bible has many violent passages and that it is only a relatively short time in the history of mankind since Christians, along with those of other faiths, exhibited marked intolerance to those not toeing the received theological line.
These people are factually right. Look at Deuteronomy Chapter 22 for example. Stoning and death is instructed to be meted out to ‘damsels’ who prove not to be virgins on their wedding nights and also to adulterers, both men and women. And as Geoffrey Blainey (A Short History of Christianity) points out: “A high level of religious tolerance is almost a modern invention. A few centuries ago it was almost unthinkable.”
OK, so do violent biblical passages and evidence of historical intolerance among Christians ease my mind or, and more to the point, should they? Well they don’t and I don’t think they should, although they seem to have an anaesthetic effect on many people who are otherwise level-headed. So far as I can tell, their thinking is that Islam is going through a phase with its version of the Enlightenment over the horizon. Its adherents will then become just like us, with God put in His proper place.
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