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In his speech
responding to the horrific murder of journalist James Foley by a British
jihadist, President Obama delivered the following rebuke (using an alternate
name for ISIS):
ISIL speaks for no
religion… and no faith teaches people to massacre innocents. No just God
would stand for what they did yesterday and what they do every single
day. ISIL has no ideology of any value to human beings. Their ideology is
bankrupt…. we will do everything that we can to protect our people and
the timeless values that we stand for. May God bless and keep Jim’s
memory. And may God bless the United States of America.
In his subsequent
remarks outlining a strategy to defeat ISIS, the President declared:
Now let’s make two
things clear: ISIL is not Islamic. No religion condones the killing of
innocents, and the vast majority of ISIL’s victims have been Muslim….
ISIL is a terrorist organization, pure and simple. And it has no vision
other than the slaughter of all who stand in its way…. May God bless our
troops, and may God bless the United States of America.
As an atheist, I
cannot help wondering when this scrim of pretense and delusion will be
finally burned away—either by the clear light of reason or by a surfeit
of horror meted out to innocents by the parties of God. Which will come
first, flying cars and vacations to Mars, or a simple acknowledgment that
beliefs guide behavior and that certain religious ideas—jihad, martyrdom,
blasphemy, apostasy—reliably lead to oppression and murder? It may be
true that no faith teaches people to massacre innocents exactly—but innocence, as the
President surely knows, is in the eye of the beholder. Are apostates
“innocent”? Blasphemers? Polytheists? Islam has the answer, and the
answer is “no.”
More British Muslims
have joined the ranks of ISIS than have volunteered to serve in the
British armed forces. In fact, this group has managed to attract
thousands of recruits from free societies throughout the world to help
build a paradise of repression and sectarian slaughter in Syria and Iraq.
This is an astonishing phenomenon, and it reveals some very uncomfortable
truths about the failures of multiculturalism, the inherent vulnerability
of open societies, and the terrifying power of bad ideas.
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