Oh yeah, how could I forget. Peace. It's all about peace. It's all about dedicated followers devoting themselves to lives of peace. It's like Buddhism or Jainism (they're the ones who won't even squash a bug and so sweep the ground before them as they walk to prevent needless insecticides) or Christianity or Judaism. It's JUST like all of those, really.
Really not.
I've just finished reading the latest out of India as it collects itself following a series of well-planned, well-timed and unusually brutal terrorist attacks featuring, you guessed it, Muslim extremists.
Now these extremists weren't just out to ruin someone's holiday, mind you. They were out for blood, and the more of it the better. They were so vengeful, in fact, that targeting a Jewish cultural center wasn't enough. They had to torture those victims before they killed them. Among the dead was a young 20-something rabbi from Brooklyn and his wife. Their toddler son was rescued during the mayhem by an employee at the center.
Little Moshe Holtzberg's parents were so badly tortured before they were shot that the seasoned mortician who performed the autopsy says he will be traumatized for the rest of his life.
Ah, it's all about peace, right?
In one of the hotels, 17 victims were lined up and shot execution style. Peacefully, I presume.
And a porter who served a glass of water to one of the terrorists before the onslaught began was rewarded with a fatal shot to the forehead. Couldn't they have just tipped him instead? On second thought, that would not have been the peaceful thing to do.
If I hear one more apologist for contemporary Islam bring up the Crusades as some sort of sorry excuse for why it's okay for Muslim madmen (and women) to do what they do, I am going to FREAK OUT.
Enough about the Crusades already. The folks who died on 9/11/01 had NO connection to the events of a thousand plus years ago. Neither did the partygoers at the Bali nightclub, the soliders on the USS Cole, or Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and his wife Rivka.
I'd feel a whole lot better and a whole lot more loving towards my Muslim brothers and sisters on the whole if they would stand up worldwide and denounce the wingnuts who attacked in Mumbai. But their silence is deafening and so I am left with yet another bitter taste in my mouth when thinking about Islam.
It's a shame, really. Back in the 1980s when fundamentalist Christians were bombing abortion clinics and maiming or killing innocent bystanders and office workers or targeting the families of the doctors who were, let's face it, performing legally protected procedures (albeit horrific), I could not in good conscience stand with those morons as a fellow Christian and remain silent. They did not speak for me and I wanted people to know this. We may have had a religion in common, but our interpretation of the Scripture that reminds us to love one another was somehow vastly different. I never want someone killing in my name or trying to justify it in the name of my god.
Is it the same with most Muslims now? Is their understanding of their faith at odds with that of the Mumbai terrorists and are they planning to say so, or are they silently in solidarity with them?
The old saying goes something like this: If your religion makes you a better person than mine makes me, then you have the better religion.
The same, conversely, is also true.
None of this matters, though, to little Moshe who is still too young to understand why his mother and father will not come when he cries for them.
May God protect him always.
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