British Law Against Glorifying Terrorism Has Not Silenced Calls to Kill for Islam.
LONDON, Aug. 20 — From his home on the northwest edge of this city, Muhamad al-Massari runs a Web site that celebrates the violent death of British and American soldiers. It is visited by tens of thousands of people every day, he said.
"If you kill our civilians, we kill your civilians," Mr. Massari declared during an interview.
Mr. Massari’s Web site, and his public remarks, appear to violate of the Antiterrorism Act of 2006, which makes it a crime to glorify or encourage political violence. Inciting violence has long been illegal here but the new rules, drawn up after the London subway and bus bombings in July 2005, are intended to be much tougher.
Yet despite the antiglorification law, and an array of other measures approved since last summer’s bombings, Islamist leaders like Mr. Massari persist, some of them declaring it the duty of British Muslims to kill in the name of Islam.
It would be easy to dismiss guys like al-Massari as incendiary bigots or seditious zealots spewing their cranial diarrhea from the same cess pool that spawns neo-nazi skinheads. Yet unlike the small pockets of adolph wanna-bees that scurry to the dark edges in Western society, the ranks of men like al-Massari are far from small. They are often prominent, well educated men in societies across the globe. These men are nurtured by misguided 'religious' dogma propagated by radical 'holy' teachers in mosques or madrassas. There is an estimated one billion Muslims in the world today and, to be charitable, if only one percent of those professing that religion held the same perverse, violent views as al-Massari, those people would still number 10 million.
But do these hate mongers reflect the true teachings of their religion's founder and his beliefs? This week, Cal Thomas examines 'The Real Teachings of the Koran'.
...Asked whether the Koran commands the killing of or violence against all nonbelievers, Ali Khan, national director of the Chicago-based American Muslim Council, replied: "No. (That's) far from the truth. There's nothing in the Koran, no verse that I'm aware of, that advocates the killing of nonbelievers."That says it all.
The terrorists and those who preach from mosques throughout the Middle East must be reading a different version, then, because virtually all of their sermons that I've read claim their God wants them to kill all "infidels."
"This kind of tactic of taking verses out of context can be used against any religious faith," says Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for Washington, D.C.-based Council on American-Islamic Relations, an Islamic civil rights and advocacy group. "It can and has been used against the Bible and has been used against the Quran."
Yes, but virtually all Christians and Jews denounce the infinitesimal few who claim to be Jewish or Christian and use their "holy books" to justify violence against others as a direct command from God.
