Daily Verse | Nahum 2:8
Nineveh is like a pool
whose water is draining away.
“Stop! Stop!” they cry,
but no one turns back.
Happy Monday, my friends! And to you, stalkers, lurkers, and prowlers. I now see that vitreous humor isn’t funny.
On Friday I wrote about three Muslims who were relocated to the United States who have either recently acted, or planned to act, violently against other people in this country. The mainstream media tends to ignore stories of Muslim violence and it would be easy to dismiss the examples I gave you as aberrations — exceptions to the norm, the ‘norm’ being that the vast majority of Muslims are peaceful.
That’s factually true. Estimates of how many Muslims live in the United States vary, sometimes wildly, but credible estimates seem to be in the range of Pew Research’s 3.85 million (1.1% of the US population) in 2020 to Gordon Conwell’s 4.4 million Muslims (1.4% of the US population) in 2015 and “projected to more than double to 10 million by 2050 (2.6% of the US population).”
Obviously, the vast majority of Muslims are peaceable people.
However, there are a couple of things we need to keep in mind. The first is that apologists seeking to defend Islam from the reputation that the radical jihadists create will often cite instances where even Christians have acted violently (for instance, the medieval Crusades or an individual claiming to be a Christian says they were told by God to murder someone). By doing so, the apologist tries to position Islam as morally equivalent to Christianity, no more or less violent than another world religion. “All religions have their radicals,” they argue, “and Islam is no different.”
The problem with this argument is that while both Christians and Muslims may have their “radicals,” what motivates them is completely different. When a Christian murders another person, they are acting contrary to the central tenets of their faith. “Do not murder,” one of the Ten Commandments, comes to mind. Jesus telling his disciples, “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another” (John 13:34-35).
Then there’s Paul’s declaration in Romans 13:9.
The commandments, “You shall not commit adultery,” “You shall not murder,” “You shall not steal,” “You shall not covet,” and whatever other command there may be, are summed up in this one command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
On the other hand, when a Muslim murders another person, they are acting consistently with the central tenets of their faith. Take, for instance, Sura 9:5, commonly referred to as the “Verse of the Sword”:
9:5. When the sacred months are over slay the idolaters wherever you find them. Arrest them, besiege them, and lie in ambush everywhere for them. If they repent and take to prayer and render the alms levy, allow them to go their way. God is forgiving and merciful.
Osama bin Laden began his “Letter to America” with verses that gave him and other jihadists permission to fight unbelievers.
“Permission to fight (against disbelievers) is given to those (believers) who are fought against, because they have been wronged and surely, Allah is Able to give them (believers) victory” [Quran 22:39]
“Those who believe, fight in the Cause of Allah, and those who disbelieve, fight in the cause of Taghut (anything worshipped other than Allah e.g. Satan). So fight you against the friends of Satan; ever feeble is indeed the plot of Satan.”[Quran 4:76]
See the difference? When a “radical” jihadist commits a killing in the name of Allah, it is not someone who has taken a verse out of context and somehow perverted the Koran. They have in fact followed precisely the commands of their holy scriptures.
If Christians were to follow precisely the commands of their Holy Scriptures, we’d see a radical shift in our culture.
The second thing to keep in mind is that while the majority of Muslims are peaceful — either being ignorant of or flatly ignoring these deadly verses — the peaceful majority are irrelevant. It’s the radicals, the extremists who drive the agenda. Brigitte Gabriel founded ACT for America, the largest national security grassroots organization in the U.S. and often speaks on politics, culture, and national security. Here, she participates in a panel discussion on what happened in Benghazi, but addresses a question from a Muslim law student and explains why the peaceful majority doesn’t matter.
So while the majority of Muslims are peaceful, it’s not them who we are immediately concerned about. We’re more concerned about the Muslims here in the U.S. who are willing to act on their Koranic beliefs, like the Muslim passenger who tried to crash the cockpit of a JetBlue flight last Wednesday or the Muslim in LA who tried to run down a crowd of Jews — again, last Wednesday.
If, as Brigitte Gabriel suggests, 15-25% of the Muslim population is radicalized — meaning that they take seriously the passages from the Koran telling them to fight the unbelievers — then in the U.S., that’s between 577,500 and 962,500 radical jihadists on our soil.
To give you a sense of scale, the size of the United States’ combined military is 1.358 million. Compare that to the higher number of “radical” Muslims, nearly one million people. That doesn’t mean that there are that many radicalized Muslims among us, only that statistically, there could be.
If that’s even close to accurate, however, that means that we will continue to hear stories like those linked above, and that the number of those stories will grow.
But don’t worry. Diversity is our strength and I’m sure it will all work out.