Opus 2011-93, Discernment Watch: Islam, a Religion of Peace, Part II, The Continuing Story

The same people who label Islam a “religion of peace” always want to point out the violence of the Crusades.  They portray the Crusades in many ways, each with an element of truth in a framework of lies.  One factoid:  What we call the Crusades involved Christian armies invading areas controlled by Muslims.  So far, so good.  What is ignored is that these areas were once Christian and had been conquered by Muslim armies.  Another factoid:  Crusaders went on the crusades to get rich.  Some did have that motivation, some succeeded.  But money was not the catalyst.  For centuries the Holy Land had been controlled by Arab Muslims.  They got along just fine with the Christians.  Because they made so much money on Christian pilgrims traveling to the Christian shrines in the area they kept the roads open and policed them against bandits.  They charged taxes and fees and were getting wealthy off the trade.  Then another ethnic group took over the power of the Muslim leadership, the Seljuk Turks.  They had a different attitude.  They did not police the bandits, they became the bandits.  Murder and rape became the order of the day for Christians daring to come to the Holy Land.  Then they closed Jerusalem to Christians all together.  It was only then that the “money hungry” Christians got angry enough to invade.  I could go on with other factoids.  One book that is good on this is The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam and the Crusades by Robert Spencer.

You might say that Islam mellowed over the years.  Did you know that the last organized invasion of Europe by Muslim armies was in 1683 when they laid siege to Vienna for the third time? 

Maybe the violence died out after that.  Did you ever sing the "Marine’s Hymn" as a child?  Or an adult?  Listen to the first lines,

    From the halls of Montezuma
    To the shores of Tripoli,

The first line refers to the Mexican-American war of 1846.  The second line refers to the war against the Barbary Pirates in the early 1800's.  The Barbary Pirates were Muslims who lived in the area of modern Libya, Tunisia and Algeria.  They made it a habit of attacking merchant shipping, selling the cargo and with the prisoners they either held them for ransom or sold them into slavery.  The Muslims looked at it as a part of the jihad, the conquest of the world by Islam.  It was only after we formed a navy and went to war with them that the piracy stopped against our ships.

Have you been following the story of the civil war in Sudan.  They just managed to have a referendum that allows the south to split off from the north.  What is the issue?  The north is Muslim and the South is predominately Christian.  For years you have been able to buy slaves in Sudan.  Who were the slaves being sold?  Christians.  Who was doing the selling?  Muslims.

Recently there have been stories of massacres in Nigeria.  Groups of machete bearing Muslims surrounded Christian villages in the middle of the night and began to hack people to death.  Their crime was being non-Muslim.

Remember the massacre in Mumbai, India.  Muslims infiltrated the country and went on a rampage killing Jews and Hindus.

If you are paying attention you can see a steady flood of violent actions by followers of Allah against people of other religions or sects of Islam.  It happens repeatedly in all countries.  The one consistent detail is that the attackers are Muslims, killing in the name of Allah.  You can say this is not the real Islam.  Next we will look at the Koran on Violence.

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