I wasn’t surprised by former British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s recent statement about a “problem within Islam.”
It’s not as though I’ve never heard anything like it before. I hear it all the time.
Still, his words ”“ in response to a recent attack in London that left a British soldier dead ”“ made me wonder: How might the public have reacted in a different context, had Blair replaced the word “Islam” with “Christianity” or “Judaism”?
I’m guessing not well.
I am a bit bemused by the claim that the vast majority of terrorist attacks in Europe or the US have been by non-Muslims. In say the last 20 years, is that true?
Of course it’s not true, Terry Tee. Nor does her rhetorical question about Christianity or Judaism work, because neither of those faiths contains commandments to subjugate or kill adherents of other religions. Neither religion sanctions murder.
“I’ve written many reasoned commentaries in defense of Islam…..”
Yeah…..I’ve no doubt that she has. But I wonder how many she’s written in condemnation of terror carried out by radical Islam? I’ll have to research this a bit, but with the lable “activist” in her bio, I’m guessing that there aren’t many.
Maybe Melody should ask the family of the butchered British soldier how they feel. Or the family of Daniel Pearl. To say nothing of the families of the 3000+ people slaughtered on 9/11. Somehow, I don’t think that “it hurts” would quite cut it.
I was thinking about this in the shower this morning (as one does!) and it struck me that for her claim to be valid that non-Muslims have been responsible for most attacks, we would have to push the timeline back to say the 1970s for Europe. That would yield the nominally Catholic IRA bombing and maiming in England for many years (sometimes with funds raised in the U. S.); the pseudo-Marxists of the Red Army Fraction and the Red Brigade, murdering and kidnapping in Germany and Italy; the atrocities, including many car bombs, of the Basque separatists in Spain; and perhaps worst of all, the genocide in the former Yugoslavia (Catholic Croats and Orthodox Serbs vs mostly Muslim Bosnians – but in this latter case, we might note the US and NATO intervening to force the Serbs to stop and eventually the perpetrators being brought to justice at The Hague.) Many sadnesses and tragedies here – but, we might note, these are from previous decades. It is specious to exclude the last 10 years or so, in order to exclude Muslim acts of violence.
So much for Europe. What about the claim that most terrorist attacks on American soil have been by non-Muslims? Again, it seems to me that this requires some distorting footwork. You have to parse American as applying to the whole continent. In that case we have many horrors in Mexico (drug gang wars, for example) – but is that what the public thinks of as terrorism? I think not. Beyond that there are random acts in the U. S. by crazed individuals (eg the Unibomber). But in terms of scale, and especially the number of victims, her claim regarding perpetrators of terrorism in America is simply untrue.
I believe the extremist Muslims got the bombing habit from the Red Brigade in Europe, via Yasser Arafat. They have now adopted it enthusiastically and made it their own. This author is trying to obscure the extent to which this is true.
Poor Melody. Such a victim. Alive and obviously capable of self-pity at imagined victimization. Poor, poor Melody, she’s misunderstood so much! and wishes so much to be misunderstood.