Forgetting the Fundamentalists

It's easy to be captured by the latest media events and forget about the enduring challenges we face.

While Covid and politics attract all the current attention, the long term challenge of dealing with Islamic fundamentalism hasn't gone away.

I have never shied away from my assessment of Islam as not beiong compatible with western civilisation and values. That doesn't mean all believers in that faith are bad people, but the tenets of the doctrine of Muhammed are simply awful and have no rational place in contemporary society.

Apologists will quote the peaceful portions of the Quran to appease their conscience, but these are the Meccan verses where Muhammad did preach peace and tolerance.

Unfortunately for us he had no success in spreading that message and was chased out and eventually settled in Medina.  This is where he began preaching hate, war and Muslim superiority.

These Medina verses trump the previous Mecca message under the Islamic principle of abrogation. This accounts for the duality of Islam where instructions to the faithful often contradict each other. Where conflict exists, the latter instructions prevail.

The fundamentalists believe that the inconsistent and ofter incoherent instructions from Muhammed are to be followed for eternity, with no accommodation for modernity.

To them, Muhammed beheading Jews and infidels is what they too are commanded to do. They can lie and deceive if it helps to perpetuate the Islamic caliphate and Muslim ummah.

Hence they are a continuing and perpetual danger to anyone not trapped inside their own Islamic mental prison - including other Muslims.

That's why we shouldn't be surprised why some poor teacher in France was attacked and beheaded by an Islamist this week. The poor teacher made the fatal mistake of showing students some cartoons of the founder of Islam.

Alarmingly, the 18 year old killer (a refugee) was motivated by a parent at the school who posted details of the crime on social media.

It reminds me of the violence and killing in Denmark and France when media outlets dared to do the same things.  Perhaps you recall the Je suis Charlie campaign where people declared their support for freedom of speech.

Unfortunately most of them had all the commitment of regular hashtag activists and then move on to the next no-real commitment cause of the day.

We have many threats at work within our community. We simply cannot afford to ignore one while addressing the others.