Recently President Macron of France said: ‘Islam is a religion that is in crisis all over the world today’. He did so in response to three brutal murders of innocent French men and women, including a teacher and three Christians in a church.
The teacher was beheaded by a Muslim for showing cartoons of Mohammed as part of a school lesson about freedom of speech. The three Christians were knifed in church for seemingly no other reason than that they were Christians in a church.
Like the rest of us, President Macron is aware that similar crimes by Muslims are committed all over the world. By way of recent examples, in Pakistan Christian girls are kidnapped, forcibly converted to Islam, married off (in one case a 13-year-old girl was forced to marry a 44-year-old man and affirmed by the court). In Pakistan Christians are falsely accused of blasphemy and courts sentence them to death or long terms of imprisonment. In Mali, terrorists murdered a 75-year-old Christian missionary whom they had imprisoned for 4 years. In Nigeria, Boko haram and the Fulani tribesmen kill and mutilate Christians, because they are Christians. In Nagorno-Karabakh the population of some 50,000 families, nearly all Armenian Christians, are being shelled and attacked by the military might of Azerbaijan reinforced with Islamist terrorists dispatched there by Turkey. Mr Erdogan presumably believes Turkey didn’t murder enough Armenians in the genocide of 1915-1923. Even in multi-cultural London 3 crosses were ripped off a Baptist church by an ‘enraged Muslim’ in broad daylight, presumably as a protest against freedom of religion.
In response to President Macron’s modest and diplomatic remarks, President Erdogan of Turkey in a speech insulted him, calling him ‘mentally ill’. He referred to all Turks being Muslim, and all Muslims Turks. Most Turks are Muslims, largely because over the centuries Muslims murdered most of the Christians in the Ottoman empire, hardly a commendation of Islam in the eyes of the rest of the world. Other Turkish government figures called France a place that is ‘dangerous for Muslims’, a curious observation when it is Muslims who are doing the killing of innocent non-Muslim French people.
Muslims in many Islamic countries are burning French flags and campaigning to boycott French goods, while the President of Pakistan called for Islamophobia, whatever that is, to be made illegal, thus extinguishing the right of freedom of speech.
If Islamophobia is in fact a distrust of Islam, or Islamodispistia, perhaps we need to dispassionately ask why this might be. The answer is very simple: because of the behaviour of certain Muslims. Were their behaviour law abiding and peaceful, they there would not be the distrust. The non-Quaker world does not distrust Quakers.
The behaviour of these certain Muslims is evidence that are not to be trusted. Since there is no obvious distinction that would allow some kind of preselection that could be made between Muslims who behead, murder, rape, enslave etc and those who don’t, all Muslims are therefore suspect, and logically so. Only a fool, or someone who yielded to intimidation, could think otherwise. Hence, Mr Erdogan seeks to play the West for fools and intimidate.
But does the inspiration of Islam to commit acts of violence, following Islamic teaching, constitute a ‘crisis’ in Islam. Islam has always inspired violence from its founding and on down the centuries to the present day, and it will continue to inspire violent acts until the day the forces of Islam are utterly defeated by none other than the returning King of Kings, Christ the Risen Lord.
Most Muslims want the rest of the world to think well of Islam, so they find the actions of the Islamists embarrassing, even shameful. This ‘silent majority’ also have a growing unease that Islam is at its core evil, cloaked in a veneer of respectable religion.
If a Muslim wants to suggest that such crimes are legitimate because Allah wants Muslims to kill those who show a cartoon of Mohammed or a Christian praying in a church, then on what grounds would he object were a Christian to kill those who desecrate a church or who enters a mosque and kills all those praying there? Presumably, he believes there is one set of rules for Muslims and another for everyone else. On what basis is this valid? Certainly not on any basis of logic, only on the basis that the bully must be right. If that is so, then the Muslim has revealed his religion is based on bullying and therefor evil. If it is evil, then it is not unreasonable for others to criticise, distrust, even hate it. If he wants to suppress such criticism through coercion, it merely increases the evil even more.
How will the true God of justice, whom we see in the person of Jesus Christ, judge such evil on the day when the secrets of all men’s hearts are judged? Will not the true God of justice reject the evil doers because of their evil deeds?
Now the time has come for Muslims to repent and follow Christ. Jesus offers forgiveness for all sins, including the sins Islam inspires Muslims to commit. But reject such a forgiveness and avoid repentance and the guilt must remain. There is only one name given to mankind by which men may be saved. That name is Jesus Christ.
Fear the living God, for he is a consuming fire. God bless you all.
Graham Ford
President – Jesus Christ for Muslims