Let us imagine for a moment that two female Christians blew up a couple of airliners and killed everyone on board. Imagine further that another Christian woman blew herself up in a subway station and killed nine people, that Christians were systematically murdering thousands of black Africans, and that they kidnap a thousand people and slaughter several hundred terrified children. What would the world be saying about Christians? If Christians themselves remained silent, or even if they didn't, would there not be demands from every quarter of the globe to rid ourselves of a religion which motivates and countenances such atrocities? How, people would ask, can anyone accept a faith that justifies such horrors? Christianity and Christians would be justly treated with the contempt and disgust they would so richly deserve.
So why do Muslims get a pass? Why do we think that somehow all this terror, all this killing is aberrational? Why is Islam not held to account for the crimes being committed in its name? If it were Christians who were guilty of such savagery we would be deafened by outraged voices accusing the Faith of being systemically rotten, and those voices would be correct. It was Jesus, after all, who instructed us that the quality of any belief system, like the quality of a life, can be told by the fruit that it bears.
Hundreds of children are put through the darkest hell for three days by incredibly cruel Muslims acting on the conviction that they are doing Allah's will, and what do we hear from the Islamic community? Where is the anger and outrage? Where are the cries from Muslims for repentance, for introspection, for prayer and fasting in the Muslim communities? Where are the anguished pleas from Muslims for forgiveness for a religion which is apparently so deeply sick in its soul? Don't they feel that as co-religionists they share in the guilt of the crimes committed by their brothers and sisters? Christians would, and they would be expected to. Christians are still disparaged for the Inquisition, the Crusades, and the internecine strife in Ireland, and still even now periodically ask forgiveness for offenses committed by our fathers and our brothers. Maybe the anger, outrage, and cries of repentance and pleas for forgiveness are out there, but, if so, they haven't come to our attention.
Meanwhile, while we're waiting, let's have no more post-modern twaddle about the equal moral and spiritual legitimacy of all religions. Let's have no more nonsense about Muslim tolerance, mercy, and peace. Let's not hide from unpleasant realities. Any religion that would permit the atrocities that have occured in Russia to take place in its name without sending mosques all over the world into paroxysms of remorse, self-doubt, and a resolve to eliminate the evil scourge from their midst, is a barbaric, savage creed that has no place in a civilized world. Any religion which accepts the mass murders of terrified children with equanimity, satisfied, evidently, that the will of God is being done is truly Satanic.
