Tolerance, Intolerance, al Qaeda, and Moral Cowardice
Mike Walker, Colonel USMC (retired)
All,
In the coming days, please compare the outcry in the "enlightened" West as well as the Islamic world and so-called "Muslim Street" over the "proposed threat" to burn a Quran in the United States that never happened vice the wholesale slaughter of an Arab Christian congregation celebrating Mass in Baghdad last week or the mass murder of Sunni Muslims as they worshipped God in their mosques in Pehsawar District, Pakistan this week. Both attacks were claimed by an erstwhile Islamic group called al Qaeda.
This follows the brutal killings of Sufi Muslims in July in Karachi and Ahmadi Muslims in May in Lehore. Sufi's follow and existential path to God and their followers have written, over the centuries, some the greatest poetry the Islamic world has ever seen. The Ahmadi are an eccentric Islamic sect but are also the only Muslim group that are pacifists in the Quaker Christian sense.
All these barbaric acts were made allegedly in the name of God by supposed followers of God who call themselves member of al Qaeda. This is a lie. These are not just acts in the eyes of God. They are great sins. Al Qaeda likes to use the word "Satan" in labeling its enemies. If any group in the world today deserves the label "The Great Stan" it is al Qaeda. Al Qaeda is an abomination before God, the Almighty.
If the world's Islamic leaders are not willing to say once and for all that al Qaeda and its supporters are both evil and bad Muslims, there is little hope for the future. The leaders of the Islamic world must openly say that the members of al Qaeda are fasiq, and that their teachings, such as preaching the killing Muslims and Christians in their places of worship, are bid'ah, damnable innovations and a perversion of Islam.
The members of al Qaeda should be sentenced to death as apostates just as the Quran commands. The supporters of al Qaeda should be publicly excoriated as violators of the Quran, the word of God, and as fajir, sinners before Allah.
Further, the non-Muslim world along with the Muslim world can no longer sit quietly as these horrors take place. They must speak out clearly and forcefully against this form of religious extremism. This is a moment when people of good conscience, regardless of their belief or non-belief, must make a stand and speak out.
Speaking out in one unified voice is worth more than dozen battalions on the battlefield. If we are not willing to exert the moral courage to prove the pen mightier than the sword then the sword is all we will have left to wield.
As Edmund Burke well said on different occasions:
"I take toleration to be a part of religion. I do not know which I would sacrifice; I would keep them both: it is not necessary that I should sacrifice either."
"When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle."
The good must now associate for anything less is intolerance in its ugliest form and can only lead to ever greater deaths of innocents.
Semper Fi,
Mike
