Killing Missionaries, Fellow Muslims, and Civilization

By Alan Caruba

The latest news out of Afghanistan is the brutal murder of missionaries who were part of a Christian medical team. Among the many excuses for Islamic barbarism is that the West is at war with Islam. No, Islam is at war with civilization.

In early August, after having hiked for more than ten hours to bring medical aid to isolated Afghan villagers, a team composed of six Americans, two Afghans, one German and a Briton, doctors, nurses, and logistical personnel, were gunned down by Taliban in the remote Parun valley of Nuristan province about 160 miles north of Kabul.

Their crime, according to Zabiullah Mujahid, a Taliban spokesman, was that they were “spying for the Americans” and “preaching Christianity.” They were members of International Assistance Mission (IAM), one of the longest serving non-governmental organizations operating in Afghanistan.

The team leader was Tom Little, an optometrist from Delmar, New York. He and his family had been in Afghanistan for thirty years with a break during the Afghan-Soviet conflict. He and his wife had raised their three daughters there. AIM receives private donations.

None of this made any difference to the Taliban that killed him and the others. Elsewhere in Afghanistan that day, a child was murdered by Sunni bombers and a bomb hidden in a wheelbarrow left five others dead. In Pattani, Thailand, a Buddhist husband and wife were murdered by Muslim gunmen in their bicycle shop and their 4-year-old nephew was wounded. In Kirkuk, Iraq Muslims shot a woman to death and in Baghdad two civilians were blown to bits by bombers.

Islam is an equal opportunity “religion of peace.” It kills Muslims, Christians, Buddhists and anyone else in the name of Allah. All this killing is rooted in the Koran, justified by the view that unbelievers have no right to life unless they convert. Even then, the schism between Sunni and Shiite Muslims is sufficient reason to kill each other.

There are well over a billion Muslims in a world of some six billion people and, while most undoubtedly want peace, their religion requires that the world be divided between Dar al Islam and Dar al Harb, the world of Islam and the world of war.

It can be argued that Christianity has blood on its hands and, historically, that is true, but what is most true about Islam in the last century and this one is that it represents a war on civilization itself.

In a Europe that has seen an influx of Muslims, nations there are struggling with them wherever they have gained large enough numbers to demand submission to Sharia law and other imported customs inconsistent with modernity.

Americans paid little attention to Islam until 9/11 destroyed the Twin Towers and a portion of the Pentagon. Up to then, Islam seemed far away despite a series of embassy bombings and other events.

Now Americans struggle with an Islam that wants to build a mosque within steps of Ground Zero in New York City. This has come as a shock to many, but Islam has a long tradition of building mosques over the sacred ground of others.

The Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem was built over the site of the Jewish Temple on the Temple Mount, sacred to Jews. In Constantinople, now Istanbul, the Hagia Sophia Cathedral was converted to a mosque. Throughout India, an estimated 2,000 mosques were built on the sites of Hindu temples.

Wherever Islam gained a foothold and became the state religion—in Islam there is no separation between church and state—the backwardness, the oppression of women, the refusal to accept another religion unless its practitioners accept a second-class position in society, are all endemic to Islam.

Islam is mired in the seventh century mentality of its founder and charged with a hostility, not just to other faiths, but to modernity itself, to the advances of civilization that seeks to reduce tensions between nations and peoples.

We are not dealing with people devoid of contact with modern civilization. Al Qaeda recruits via the Internet. They show how they behead “infidels” and urge more attacks everywhere against them.

For those who leave Islam, the punishment prescribed in the Koran is death. For those who “insult” Islam, the punishment prescribed is death. And for those who bring free medical care to villagers is death.

The proposed New York mosque should be built only when a synagogue or church can be built anywhere in Saudi Arabia where Islam began and where the harshest form of Islam, Wahhabi, is practiced.

If Islam calls the world of unbelievers Dar al Harb, the world of war, why can’t the world understand that Islam is at war with it?

© Alan Caruba, 2010