From the New Yorker:
The murders today in Paris are not a result of France’s failure to assimilate two generations of Muslim immigrants from its former colonies. They’re not about French military action against the Islamic State in the Middle East, or the American invasion of Iraq before that.
They’re not part of some general wave of nihilistic violence in the economically depressed, socially atomized, morally hollow West—the Paris version of Newtown or Oslo. Least of all should they be “understood” as reactions to disrespect for religion on the part of irresponsible cartoonists.
They are only the latest blows delivered by an ideology that has sought to achieve power through terror for decades. It’s the same ideology that sent Salman Rushdie into hiding for a decade under a death sentence for writing a novel, then killed his Japanese translator and tried to kill his Italian translator and Norwegian publisher.
The ideology that murdered three thousand people in the U.S. on September 11, 2001. The one that butchered Theo van Gogh in the streets of Amsterdam, in 2004, for making a film.
The one that has brought mass rape and slaughter to the cities and deserts of Syria and Iraq. That massacred a hundred and thirty-two children and thirteen adults in a school in Peshawar last month.
That regularly kills so many Nigerians, especially young ones, that hardly anyone pays attention. Because the ideology is the product of a major world religion, a lot of painstaking pretzel logic goes into trying to explain what the violence does, or doesn’t, have to do with Islam.
Some well-meaning people tiptoe around the Islamic connection, claiming that the carnage has nothing to do with faith, or that Islam is a religion of peace, or that, at most, the violence represents a “distortion” of a great religion. (After suicide bombings in Baghdad, I grew used to hearing Iraqis say, “No Muslim would do this.”)
A religion is not just a set of texts but the living beliefs and practices of its adherents. Islam today includes a substantial minority of believers who countenance, if they don’t actually carry out, a degree of violence in the application of their convictions that is currently unique.
4 comments:
The last paragraph is convoluted and sounds like a way to subtract weight to the rest of the article. Nevertheless, I believe this is the first time a major publication makes a direct link between the terrorists and Islam.
OMG!!!
Wow.
Close, very close. For years, many people argue that Islam is whatever Muslims do and only a few wage jihad. Now it is more than a few and too hard to ignore. At least those (or one fellow) that argue this way are consistent. They now say it's a type of Islam.
But it is more. It's the very example of Mohammad. It is the texts and it isn't new. One really has to repudiate the example of Mohammad; and we need to make it clear to moderate Muslims that their religion's founder sets an atrocious example even if some adherents evade this part of the religion.
Jason,
Apparently the slaughter at Charlie Hebdo has awakened some of those slumbering.
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