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Politics : Islam, The Message -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Brumar89 who wrote (644)	11/24/2002 1:56:44 PM
From: StormRider	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 758

MUSLIMS AREN'T ALONE IN BREEDING INTOLERANCE PHILIP GAILEY, St. Petersburg Times, 11/24/02 sptimes.com Things were a lot simpler before Osama bin Laden replaced our own Muhammad Ali as the face of Islam in this country. Since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, many Americans, myself included, have been wrestling with the question of what to make of the religion of Islam. Is it, as President Bush says, a "religion of peace" that has been perverted by extremists? Or is it, as some conservative Christian leaders assert, a force for evil? The Rev. Franklin Graham, son of Billy Graham, has called Islam "a very evil and wicked religion." He later explained he was condemning Islamic extremists, not all Muslims. Then along came the Rev. Jerry Falwell to denounce Islam's founder, Mohammed, as "terrorist." The one thing I'm sure of is that there are better authorities on Islam than Graham or Falwell. I stumbled upon one in the latest issue of Reason magazine, where Boston Globe columnist Cathy Young puts this debate into an illuminating historical perspective. She reminds us that every belief system, or religion, that lays claim to One Truth, or One God, holds the seeds of violent intolerance. The same questions now being asked about Islam have been asked about Christianity in the past. Young writes that, as the religious scholar Alex Kronemer has pointed out, "Mohammed was no bloodier a figure than Moses - and the Bible contains plenty of language no less violent than the Koran's. At one point, Moses takes the Israelites to task for sparing the women and children of a vanquished enemy tribe and instructs them to kill all the male children and all the women, except the virgins, who can be taken as slaves and concubines. Mosaic law also makes idolatry or the worship of other gods a capital offense, along with a host of other crimes, including adultery, cursing one's parents and sodomy…" Falwell may not want to admit it, but Christianity has had its Taliban moments - the burning of women accused of being witches, mandatory attendance at sermons, the persecution of Jews and the bloody Crusades, to name a few. As Young reminds us, Martin Luther's 1543 polemic The Jews and Their Lies urged Christian rulers to rid their lands of the "abominable blasphemy" spread by Jews and "act like a good physician who, when gangrene has set in, proceeds without mercy to cut, saw, and burn flesh, veins, bone and marrow." His advice also included "to set fire to their synagogues," destroy their homes and forbid rabbis to teach "on pain of loss of life and limb…"