So Ted Cruz wants our country to admit only Syrian Christian refugees, Donald Trump and Ben Carson think we need to monitor or close Mosques here in the U.S. and force Muslims to register, and John Kasich wants to create a federal agency to promote Judeo-Christian values.
What is wrong with this picture?
Well, a lot of things, but here’s a big one. All of them are convoluting terrorism and religion.
They are doing so because they do not understand something they should already know: Terrorism has no religion.
This is something Nausheena Hussein, deputy director of the Minnesota branch of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said recently when he condemned the Paris terrorists. I think he identified a fundamental truth all Americans need to hear, indeed, all non-Muslims.
So let me repeat it again: Terrorism has no religion.
Never mind that the name ISIS stands for Islamic State in Syria (and Iraq). ISIS leaders may claim to be acting in the name of God, or establishing a modern caliphate, but they are liars.
ISIS has no conscience, no morals, no principles, is led by cowards who use hidden bombs and surprise attacks to kill indiscriminately to put fear in others.
No person or group that acts that way is religious no matter what they say about themselves.
But their false claims do matter to the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims, and they are saying so. Immediately after the Paris attacks Muslim youth all over the world posted and tweeted the phrase: “Not In My Name.” In addition, major Muslim leaders and groups here and in Europe have also condemned ISIS.
Our role can be to lend whatever support we can to them. What we should not do is to try to tell them how they should respond, what they should be saying, or insist that ISIS does represent Mohammed’s teachings.
Just as Muslims cannot and should not tell Christians or Jews that extremists among them do in fact represent the teachings of Jesus or Moses, non-Muslims should stop saying this about ISIS and the teachings of the Qur’an.
Religion doesn’t make people terrorists. False religion might, but not real religion. Terrorists are terrorists.
The irony is that ISIS wants Americans to believe they are true Muslims because they want us to fear all Muslims, making it more likely we will do the very things Republican presidential candidates say we should do.
That would hand them the kind of anti-Western propaganda money could not buy. We should not allow this to happen.
So the next time you hear someone go off on Muslims because of ISIS, you might remind them of what Barry Goldwater, a true conservative of another generation, said about the uproar over gays in the military, “It’s not nothing, but it’s damn close to it.”
linnposts.com 