jihadi—Every Moslem can consider himself an avenging warrior, a Moslem Danite, a double nought vigilante.
The worshippers of the god Mahomet (or Muhammad...or choose your spelling from his hundred names) exercised their vengeance in Paris yesterday. They killed five cartoonists, and five other employees of the paper, and two police. Will that give them a gold crescent moon medal from their jihadi assassin cell?
It is quite true, that over one billion Moslems did not engage in this demonic bloodlust. It is also true that non-Moslems have the same bloodlust. Anders Behring Breivik complained of the Islamisation of western Europe. 22 July 2011 he bombed government buildings in Oslo killing eight people, then he went to a Norwegian Labour Party youth camp and killed sixty-nine more people. In America, on 19 April 1995 Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols killed 168 people bombing the federal building in Oklahoma. It is also quite true, that non-Moslems are endangered in every country where there is a majority of Moslems, or an active Moslem guerrilla presence.
Anytime a public utterance, writing, or cartoon is done that is found offensive to some Moslems, a retaliatory reprisal in human killing(s) can occur anywhere else in the world. A Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, published a dozen cartoons on 30 September 2005. Several other papers published them. The French paper, Charlie Hebdo, which was attacked yesterday, also published those cartoons. Over an hundred people were killed in Nigeria, Christians were murdered in churches, western targets (NATO, embassies) were attacked and some people murdered there over those same cartoons.
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postscriptum 11.15 a.m. 17 January 2015: Charlie Hebdo printed again, and the moslems have let the blood flow again:
http://www.france24.com/en/20150117-charlie-hebdo-protests-niger-pakistan-algiers-zinder-france/
"...The unrest came a day after four people were killed and at least 45 others were injured in protests in Niger's second city of Zinder, with demonstrators ransacking three churches and torching the French cultural centre. ...
...There was also bloodshed in Karachi, Pakistan, where three people were injured when protesters clashed with police outside the French consulate, officials said. Among them was an AFP photographer, who was shot in the back. ..."
The distinctions between prophet, messiah, and god are lost on me. Then there are all the angels and saints. I don't quite understand the nature of monotheism: is it that there is only one god, or that there are all these other gods/angels/demi-gods/devils/wizards, but we are not supposed to worship them? In this regard I can understand how Christian missionaries were very confusing to many people in history: Jesus is the son of God, then he turns out to have been God all along, and you are supposed to pretend to eat his flesh and drink his blood. This would have offended cultures with cannibalism taboos, and in fact stymied the work of missionaries in China for several centuries.
ReplyDeleteYes. There are also the terms, 'monolatrism', and 'henotheism', which have the worship of the one god, while ignoring the rest. There are speculative philosophies that run through a continuum of polytheism to monotheism. Christian missionaries were confusing, and offensive to many. The concept of a triune God was and is difficult for many. There have been, and are anti-trinitarian Christians. Historically, the Arians were the most significant. To-day, this is a divide between Christians, and those that claim to be Christians and have created a new religion.
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