Sulayman’s Stories

Sometimes I wonder why I have to answer such silly questions, but after hearing a coworker, a Florida Republican on TV, and a BJP worker interviewed on video in Gujarat all say the same phrase “all terrorists are Muslim,” I have to again debunk the silly falsehood.

First of all, I feel like the people who believe this have a pitifully short memory. 11 million people died in the Holocaust, with Hitler and the Nazis often bringing up Christianity as justification. The word terrorist itself even came from the French Revolution, with mass killings. Bill Clinton went on TV to condemn the senseless murders by Slobodon Milosevic’s regime.

Going now to modern times, we have a long list of terrorists in America; Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the KKK, and Timothy McVeigh for starters. If you want Christian terrorists, well there’s Eric Rudolph, Scott Roeder, and Seung-Hui Cho (who compared himself to Jesus in his suicide video). There’s others, like Jewish terrorist Robert J. Goldstein who had an arsenal bigger than David Koresh and 50 Muslim targets in Florida before he was caught.

Outside of America, it’s not like all terrorism is from Muslims either. Come with me to Latin America and you’ll see more terrorist groups than the Middle East has. FARC, The Shining Path, MRTA, and Colombian ELN are some of the big players. When I was in Honduras, I saw armed guards even before the political upheaval. The Morzanist Patriotic Front in Honduras is small but probably not gone. Europe still deals with groups like ETA and the IRA, which has killed more people than 9/11. Serbian war criminals murdered tens of thousands of Bosnian Muslims in the 1990’s, is that not terrorism? Africa deals with so-called-Christian terrorist groups like the Lord’s Resistance Army, which employ child soldiers among their other heinous acts. India has been dealing with terrorists from places like Assam and Sri Lanka, as well as Hindu and Marxist and Sikh extremists, and is still dealing with the aftermath and reprecussions of attacks like the Gujarat massacres in 2002 that killed thousands of innocent Muslims. Israel has been dealing with terrorism from alleged followers of Christianity and Judaism for decades.

There’s an annoying tendency for people to assume that maybe so-called-Muslim terrorists do a certain tactic; which then becomes an accusation that Muslims do it (oh, many people like Giuliani’s former spokesman don’t even bother to make the distinction between “terrorists” and “Muslims”). When you have a somewhat-smart-looking commentator on Fox News saying that Christians don’t bomb planes, then you know that people are not thinking properly here. If you name any specific terrorist attack, I can show you examples of it happening elsewhere.

• I’ve been asked if Beheading is somehow Islamic since it seems to happen in Iraq. No, it’s just a grisly murder meant to shock people. That’s why it happens in Colombia and Mexico.
• Throwing acid on people, which gets a lot of bad press in South Asia (and is based in culture and not religion), is anongoing crime wave in Hong Kong
• Trying to blow up a plane; well where to begin? When Sikh terrorists blew up Air India 182? I don’t trust profiling at airports ever since Anne Murphy tried to smuggle a bomb onto a plane.
• Suicide bombing, the LTTE carried out more attacks than Hamas. Heck, there’s even been atheist suicide bombers such as the Salonica Dynamiters.
• Female Circumcision, a pre-islamic practice that is condemned by religious scholars of all faiths, is still practiced by some African and Egyptian christians.

I know that this should be common knowledge, but terrorism is universally accepted as wrong; it is condemned in every religion.

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~ by Sulayman on January 10, 2010.