Demonizing Islam

It has been sickening to watch the response of the right-wing media in the United States to the recent terror attacks in London.  One right-wing pundit, Mike Thompson, claims that Islam is at war with Chistianity, and it is the duty of Christians to fight Muslims everywhere.  His colleague at Human Events – Middle East "Expert" Daniel Pipes – is a strong advocate for interment camps for Muslims.  The Wall Street Journal publishes editorials and interviews with Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci whose book, The Force of Reason, is a hate-tract against Islam.  Of course the neo-cons over at the Weekly Standard weigh in with a piece that urges the Bush administration to suspend the visa-waiver for Europeans because of the all of the Muslims that have European passports.

The response in Germany has been somewhat more muted.  Several right-wing Bush-blogs such has Fakten Fiktion fan the flames of anti-Islam intolerance.  The neo-fascist weekly Junge Freiheit has an interview this week with Peter Scholl-Latour who warns that Muslims will soon be deploying unconventional weapons such as radioactive "dirty bombs" in their acts of terror.  I note that the German "expert" on Islam – Hans-Peter Raddatz – is getting a great deal of exposure.  Read the transcript from his interview on Deutschlandradio here where he equates Islam with terrorism.  And Denkpass points out today that the Bavarian Interior Minister Guenther Beckstein is using the events in London to implement repressive measures against Muslims in Germany.

One  voice of reason in all of this post-bombing commentary has been that of Karen Armstrong.  I mentioned Karen Armstrong and her book – The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness – in a recent posting.  Perhaps no other writer has been more helpful to those of us who want to understand the god of Islam.  In her recent commentary in The Guardian, Armstrong make the case for changing the words we use to describe these acts of terror:

We need a phrase that is more exact than "Islamic terror". These acts may be committed by people who call themselves Muslims, but they violate essential Islamic principles. The Qur’an prohibits aggressive warfare, permits war only in self-defence and insists that the true Islamic values are peace, reconciliation and forgiveness. It also states firmly that there must be no coercion in religious matters, and for centuries Islam had a much better record of religious tolerance than Christianity.

She then points out that the press never labeled acts of violence by the IRA as the work of "Catholic Extremists".  We also cannot forget that ten years ago 8000 Bosnian Muslims were slaughtered in Srebinica  while the world stood by and did nothing.  The atrocity was committed by Serbs who no doubt considered themselves to be exemplary Christians.  Did we call them "Christian terrorists"?