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Islam Is A Bad Religion--Joseph C. Atkins Gazette
In his latest Gazette article Joseph C. Atkins recites a list of Moslem atrocities. Atkins observed that, “All my life, from Sirhan to today, we have known little of Islam but as a religion of blood-thirsty killers. Muslims, not Christians, not Jews, not Buddhists, not Hindus carried out these atrocities.”
Is simple to selectively look at history, pick out certain events, leave out others and come to a distorted conclusion. A casual view of Atkins’ time frame will reveal that if Islam is a bloodthirsty religion it sure isn’t the only one.
Atkins’ beginning with Sirhan Sirhan’s murder of Robert Kennedy was especially poignant for me. As a Kennedy campaign volunteer on election day I took voters to the polls in the mission district of San Francisco. On television that evening I saw my candidate murdered by a Moslem. Earlier that year Martin Luther King had been murdered and not by a Moslem.
In 1968, the year Sirhan murdered Kennedy, an army of Viet Cong, I assume mostly of the Buddhist culture, in the TET offensive, killed thousands of Christians and Buddhists. In that sad, mad war, America’s Christian Quaker president Nixon ordered the bombing and invasion of Cambodia and Laos, killing thousands of Buddhists. And there was Mai Lay where “Christian” American soldiers murdered Buddhist women and children. In the Vietnam deception there was the irony of a Jewish Secretary of State of our oft-claimed “Christian” nation ordering the carpet bombing of
Buddhist Hanoi on the eve of the birthday of baby Jesus.
“Christian” America has been at war most of my life. Since I was born in 1936, America has invaded and/or bombed at least 21 countries. This does not include the CIA supplying arms, mercenaries,and intelligence to one side or the other, sometimes, as in the case of the Iran-Iraq war, to both sides.
Maybe the devil made them do it, but in World War II “Christian” America and Great Briton fire bombed Dresden killing 400,000 thousand civilians. The Nazis, also of the Christian culture, murdered 6 million European Jews and 20 million Russians. The Shinto Japanese raped Confucian Nanking. A Christian president ordered the vaporization of hundreds of thousands of Shintos, Buddhists and Christians with nuclear weapons. Buddhist’s in Cambodia created the killing fields and murdered 1,000,000 fellow Buddhists. In India, Hindus have been known to go on periodic Moslem and Sikh killing rampages. Pat Robertson, a self-appointed TV spokesman for Jesus, called for the murder of the president of Venezuela. Four American soldiers in Iraq are accused of raping a girl and murdering her Moslem family. A West Virginia woman and her fellow “Christian” American guards tortured and sexually abused Moslem prisoners at Abu Ghrab.
Our born again Christian president just confessed to operating secret CIA prisons. Guess what they do to prisoners in secret prisons. If the CIA isn’t torturing Moslem prisoners just why does our born again leader want the CIA excluded from the Geneva Convention ban on torture? It is astounding that we are even debating whether torture is right or wrong, what has happened to us?
Every belief has a long list of killers, often their very heroes. It was Martin Luther who had the Anabaptists, precursor of the Mennonites, placed in cages and lifted to the ceiling of cathedrals and left there. John Calvin slowly burned Unitarian theologian Miguel Serveto, taking half an hour to kill him. “Saint” Augustine approved the killing of Donatists in North Africa. When Catholic Columbus was exterminating and enslaving native populations in the new world, his brother in Christ, Torquemada, was torturing and burning Jews and Moslems in Spain. And Israeli Jews are guilty of their own torture and bombing of Moslems. It all brings to mind an old Kingston Trio song.
There just isn’t enough space to enumerate the atrocities exchanged between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland nor the Christian Crusades against Moslems, Jews and just about anyone in their way. Our born again leader declared at the beginning of his war on Iraq that it was a crusade. His word “crusade” must have confirmed the Moslem’s world’s suspicions.
Perhaps not noticing the moat in Christian eyes, Atkins instructs the Moslems that it is their responsibility to change the perception of Islam from bloodthirsty cult to peace-loving culture. Ah so, and it is the responsibility of Christians to prove they are followers of the Prince of Peace. Following Jesus isn’t easy for the Bible says that to be a Christian one must love enemies, return good for evil, turn the other cheek and forgive seventy times seven.
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9/10/07 8:22 PM
Jesus said, "I am not here to bring peace, but a sword". (although that sword was His tongue!)
Evidently Jesus forsaw the atrocities that would be committed in His name.
The real PRINCE OF PEACE is Bah'a'ullah, the Prophet-founder of the Bahai Faith.
Jesus [1st John 4:1] says:
....beloved believe not every spirit, but test the spirits to see if they are of God...