I found a link to an unusual website while perusing one of the blogs I check each day in hopes of finding news or information to write about in my Examiner column. This one caught my eye immediately. It calls itself
ISLAM: the Religion of Peace. As the name implies, the group certainly has an agenda: showing that, whatever else Islam is, it definitely
isn't a religion of peace.
One of the ways they support that contention is by compiling lists of terrorist attacks from publicly-available international news sources. As their"about our list" page states, they only count attacks that could be considered religiously motivated (honor killings for instance, though not crime or combat-related deaths) and they only count attacks that result in deaths. Even with those limitations, the two month list which, when I looked at it at least, ran from this October 20th to December 18th, was chillingly long. For November alone they listed 139 Jihad attacks in 14 countries that resulted in 529 dead and 1075 critically injured. Breaking it down into each individual attack brings home the horror even more:
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10/20/2009. Islamabad, Pakistan. 6 killed, 29 injured. Two suicide bombers attack a women's university about a minute apart, leaving six students and staff dead.
10/23/2009. South Waziristan, Pakistan. 18 killed, 6 injured. Eighteen people in a wedding party, mostly children, perish in a horrific bombing attack on a minibus.
11/01/2009. Srinagar, India. 2 killed, 0 injured. Islamists murder two traffic cops in a hit-and-run surprise attack at an intersection.
11/01/2009. Lascanood, Somalia. 5 killed, 4 injured. Suspected Shabaab radicals blow up a car with five people inside.
11/02/2009. Yala, Thailand. 2 killed, 0 injured. Two men riding in a pickup truck are shot to death by a terrorist disguised in a burka.
These attacks occur everywhere in the world where there are Muslim communities. I was amazed to see how many of them took place in countries you wouldn't have thought would have this problem. By my count, the last two months saw 46 of them take place in Thailand, for instance (Thailand!?). The USA is not immune either. Everyone is familiar with this one:
11/05/2009. Fort Hood, Texas. 13 killed, 31 injured. A Muslim psychiatrist yelling 'Allah Akbar' murders thirteen unarmed U.S. soldiers on their base in Texas, including a pregnant woman.
But probably not this one:
11/02/2009. Glendale, Arizona. 1 killed, 0 injured. A woman dies from injuries suffered when her father runs her down with a car for being too 'Westernized.'
That last one is counted under the "religiously-motivated" category mentioned earlier. It should also be noted that here that the victim was a Muslim. In fact, the vast majority of victims of Islamic violence are other Muslims. This makes the "we're just defending Islam" or "avenging insults to Islam" claim some terrorists use to justify their actions a little hard to swallow.
Considering the stark and unapologetic way the evidence was presented here, I had to wonder if this site was motivated by "Islamophobia" or some other bias. Who are they? On their
FAQ page, they say, "
Someone who doesn't want to pay the jizya (a head tax paid by all non-Muslims in Islamic lands). They also claim to have no association with any other group, religious, political or otherwise. Considering what sometimes happens to critics of Islam, their desire for anonymity is understandable.
The reason they give for creating the site is:
We were inspired by the on-going rate of violence in the Islamic world and the relative indifference of Muslim groups like CAIR. We believe that it is this apathy which sustains the violence.
Although initially optimistic that awareness of the misery would prompt change, we were disappointed to find that it has not (had that) effect. Instead of genuine remorse or resolve to end the violence, we hear only blame, excuse, victimization, whining and a general shunning of responsibility from Muslims for what is happening in the name of Islam.
After several years of this, we reluctantly concluded that the narcissism and lack of introspection is a product of the religion itself. This prompted us to research "the Religion of Peace" to discover what it is that makes Islam so very different.
Comments
They are quite likely biased towards the Jews, but you are right - the diary of violence speaks for itself. All religions are bad; they cause religiously-motivated extremism at worst, people living in fantasy land at best. It's time to stop giving legitimacy to religious beliefs and sensibilities.
Hoomer, your comment betrays a lack of knowledge of all the good that various religions have resulted in...or a lack of desire to give credit for it.
Violent fanatics come in all worldviews...religious and non-religious alike. Take a stroll through Cambodia's killing fields sometime if you ever doubt this.
This is heartbreaking. It leaves me speechless... Every person who reads of such horrors is heartbroken, except somehow, they are able to turn a blind eye to the horror when it's in the name of their particular god(s). I'm not saying horrors aren't committed which are not religion-driven, of course they are as well. But religions are serial killers. All of them.
Carol,
I agreed with you up until your very last sentence...when you went the way of ignorance rather than accuracy. Are Quakers, Unitarians, Methodist Abolitionists, Native American spiritualists, Ba'ha'i, or Tibetan Buddhists REALLY "serial killers"? Can you honestly believe this, or does your personal distaste for religion lead you to propagate the same errors as Hitchens, Dawkins and co.?
The ironic thing is that judging from the places on that list the vast majority of those killed were more than likley other muslims, very sad.
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