Ibn Warraq's best book is "Defending the West," linked below. The rest of the article can be found at Religion News Blog.
(Amherst, NY) — In response to the recent tragic events at Fort Hood, Texas, the Center for Inquiry, a secularist think tank, has released a statement/editorial from Ibn Warraq, Islamic scholar and leading figure in Quranic criticism.
Warraq is a senior research fellow at the Center for Inquiry and author of five books, including Why I Am Not a Muslim and Defending the West (both published by Prometheus Books). The statement follows below.
....It is time to abandon apologetics, and political correctness. Not all Muslims are terrorists. Not all Muslims are implicated in the horrendous events of September 11, 2001 — or of November 5, 2009. However, to pretend that Islam has nothing to do with 9/11 or the Fort Hood massacre is willfully to ignore the obvious. To leave Islam out of the equation means to forever misinterpret events. Without Islam, the long-term strategy and individual acts of violence by Osama bin Laden and his followers make little sense. Without Islam, the West will go on being incapable of understanding our terrorist enemies, and hence will be incapable to deal with them. Without Islam, neither is it possible to comprehend the barbarism of the Taliban, the position of women and non-Muslims in Islamic countries, or — now– the murders attributed to Major Hasan.
We are confronted, after all, with Islamic terrorists; and we must take the Islamic component seriously. Westerners in general and Americans in particular no longer seem able to grasp the passionate religious convictions of Islamic terrorists. It is this passionate conviction, directed against the West and against non-Muslims in general, that drives them. They are truly, and literally, God-intoxicated fanatics. If we refuse to understand that, we cannot understand them....
One atheist admits his personnal dislike for the three major theistic religions, but then adds a caveat:
Islam like Christianity and Judaism are wrong and are – in large parts – morally repugnant. Unlike, Christianity and Judaism though, fundamentalist Islam is actively trying to kill me and people like me around the world.
Well, I am a Christian, and I can plainly state that they are trying to kill me as well. One need only think of the convert to Christianity who, when he or she is baptized as the public expression of what has happened privately, they are often times tortured, burned alive, or put to death in other ways. I would venture to say this graphic example I posted recently is not atheists being burned -- in fact, why would an atheist find it necessary to promote his non-belief in an Islamic country? Since "survival" would be the leading "ethos" in the atheistic paradigm, there is not underlying spurning outside that stance. Christians are asked to be baptized (Acts 2:38, Acts 19:3-5), often times this is a declaration made in front of believers and non-believers alike in a river for instance. this is a death sentence.
A recent story, for instance, comes from Infidels Are Cool and is entitled "California: Muslim man charged with 'anti-Christian' hate crime," passes this thought along:
Maybe they should start “stepping up security” at churches instead of mosques. The Fort Hood shooting was a perfect opportunity for Islamists to show off their non-existent victimhood. Yet we have heard any stories of hate crimes against Muslims since the Fort Hood shooting.
Maybe they should, I think Infidels Are Cool (IAC) will unfortunately be proved correct. More from IAC:
