DAR AL HARB - U.S.A. - FLORIDA: DOES ISLAM HAVE SUCH A THING AS "THE GOLDEN RULE"?!?, IF NOT, HOW CAN THEY EMBRACE IT?!?

Islam needs to embrace Golden Rule
BY ROBERT L. EGOLF
SPECIAL TO THE STAR-BANNER

Never have the media embraced so mistaken an angle on a story as on Pope Benedict XVI's speech in Regensburg, Germany, and the aftermath in the Muslim world.

Every newspaper story I read has a doddering old pope blundering into an ill-conceived quotation from a Byzantine emperor, insulting Islam by connecting it with violence, and the Muslim world's eruption over his supposedly inappropriate choice of words.

Indeed, in some parts of the Islamic world the appropriate response was to run out and burn down a few Christian churches and even murder a nun to show the world Islam is not a violent religion. In other words, according to the media, shame on the pope for foolishly and thoughtlessly poking a stick in a hornet's nest.

The problem with this scenario is that, in fact, the pope knew exactly what he was saying, and he surely meant to say it. His words were carefully chosen. Their purpose was to call to account the Muslim world's willingness to license violence, to make excuses for violence in the name of their religion.

The pope apologized for being misunderstood and has expressed his desire for dialogue. He has not retracted the accusation. The pope's public declaration was exactly what much of the rest of the world beyond Islam believes in private, but is too cowardly or delicate to say out loud.

And who is more appropriate than the pope to state the Christian case? Secular Muslim governments are scared to death of their radical imams and mullahs. None of them have the guts to face down their own homegrown radical Islamic fundamentalists. And yet it is these same radical Islamists who are found at the root and fountainhead of nearly every terrorist act perpetrated in the world today.

It is not so much that Islam is a violent religion. Perhaps in the main it is not, any more than Christianity is violent in the light of its past atrocities.

It is more that the Muslim street, in country after country, is extraordinarily and notoriously thin-skinned about every real or imagined slight to Islamic religious sensibilities. In this rude and vulgar modern world such an antiquated attitude can only bring with it constant turmoil. And it does not help that this bellicose attitude is stoked and manipulated by the political and religious leadership in every Muslim nation.

So the pope has confronted the issue. Until Islam can find within itself the will to embrace the Golden Rule found in its own scripture, until it stops indoctrinating its children, and especially its young men, in hatred and intolerance, and I might add, finds them jobs, until it is willing to treat other religions in its own heartlands as it demands Islam be treated in its diaspora, until it can truly respect at home the diversity it hides behind in Western cultures, until it discovers its womenfolk are co-equally God's own creatures, and until it learns to ignore or laugh at what misinformed or ignorant men may say about Islam or Islam's prophet, until that day the violence will continue.God (or Allah or YHWH) help us all.


Pertinent Links:

1) Islam needs to embrace Golden Rule