Muslims Are Scared To Speak Out Against Fundamental Dogma In Their Own Religion

by Leo O’Hagan

Once you have ascertained that a broadcast incident such as burning someone alive in a cage is morally despicable, doesn’t it behoove everyone to agree that the perpetrators of such an act are deserving of condemnation?

There ought be no if, buts or maybes and no one can defend a form of Islam that condones such acts as relevant and justifiable in any context, medieval or not. You don’t need to be Christian to see that beheading someone on camera is dastardly. You can’t dress any of these acts up as anything other than inhuman, no matter what the supposed philosophical or religious genesis.

No one should try to defend a whole religion based on tenets that are in “the book” (in this case the Quran) and say that you can interpret it in many ways, some peaceful and some not (Obama – “don’t judge Islam on what it is rather than what it is not”). Obama implies that we should “not cast the first stone” because Christian history is not without similar sin.

Surely we can now definitively say that any violent act committed in the name of any religion points at the wrongness of fundamental religiosity itself, no matter the timeline its radicalism exists. We can all agree that fundamentalism is the root cause of the conflicts taking place in the name of Allah, as we can even if we were Christians in the 14th century when the Inquisition was burning people at the stake.

But if you were a Christian during the time of the Inquisition it took incredible bravery to speak out against it (even if you believed in Christ). Moderate and peaceful Muslims suffer under the same caveat because fear in the face of radicalism is all too real and for good reason.