Columnist Eugene Robinson’s criticism of the speech made by President Obama at the National Prayer Breakfast, coupled with his column condoning the castigation of the Prophet Muhammad by the French newspaper Charlie Hebdo as free speech, exposes the unconscious bigotry that permeates the media.
A sure sign of this is his denial of the relevance of putting in comparative religious context the barbaric acts of ISIS, which he and others criticized the President for doing, because this then allows the faith of Islam to be singled out as a violent religion. It is evident that he shares the view expressed by others that Islam has some intrinsic evil strain and needs, as he put it, “reformation.”
This kind of thinking is not only benignly bigoted, it is futile. Islam emanates entirely from the Qur’an, a book that is more than fourteen hundred years old, which has never been changed and can never be changed. Nor will it ever change that human beings will draw different interpretations from it based upon their circumstances.
Those who find themselves in the circumstance of their land occupied by foreign forces can draw upon passages from the Qur’an that authorize them to wage war to drive the invaders out. And for people who find themselves in the circumstance of living under oppression, there are verses that compel them to fight that condition. Indeed, there is a verse in the Qur’an which says that if mankind had not been enabled to fight, then “all monasteries and churches and synagogues and mosques would surely have been destroyed.”
Muslim leaders counter the charge that Islam is a violent religion by condemning terrorism and citing Qur’anic verses reflecting the peaceable essence of the religion. However, this only creates skepticism by Americans because the words are undermined by violent acts perpetrated by Muslims they see almost nightly. The truth, which should be told, is that the Qur’an, while explicitly espousing using peaceable means, also permits violence in the same way that the Old Testament is a testament to violent, just warfare.
Thus, the Muslims who are beheading and burning hostages are operating in the age-old context that President Obama was making a point about. That is, they are using religion and God as their war inspirational tool. In the 1980s, when I was coming into the Islamic faith, Muslims around the world were being summoned to Afghanistan to fight in the spirit of jihad against the Soviet Union’s invasion of the country. Today ISIS summons Muslims in that same spirit to recapture the land invaded to destroy weapons of mass destruction.
ISIS’s barbarism is not theologically based, it is the asymmetrical warfare of terrorism. Because it lacks the drones and other modern weaponry possessed by, as ISIS puts it, the Christian invaders, it resorts to horrific terrorist acts that it miscalculates will shock and awe the American public into retreating from that sphere of the world. They hope that such despicable acts will bait Americans into an anti-Muslim sentiment, which they will use for recruitment by claiming our nation is at war with Islam.
If Robinson and the media are really interested in educating the American people about ISIS, then they will shed the religious labeling and rhetoric in their reporting and focus instead on the fact that the war ISIS is waging is like virtually every war that has ever been fought: over who controls the land.
