Yes, George Packer of The New Yorker, of all publications,
gets it:
The murders today in Paris are not a result of
France's failure to assimilate two generations of Muslim immigrants from its
former colonies. They're not about French military action against the Islamic
State in the Middle East, or the American invasion of Iraq before that. They're
not part of some general wave of nihilistic violence in the economically
depressed, socially atomized, morally hollow West--the Paris version of Newtown
or Oslo. Least of all should they be "understood" as reactions to
disrespect for religion on the part of irresponsible cartoonists.
They are only the latest blows delivered by an
ideology that has sought to achieve power through terror for decades. It's the
same ideology that sent Salman Rushdie into hiding for a decade under a death
sentence for writing a novel, then killed his Japanese translator and tried to
kill his Italian translator and Norwegian publisher. The ideology that murdered
three thousand people in the U.S. on September 11, 2001. The one that butchered
Theo van Gogh in the streets of Amsterdam, in 2004, for making a film. The one
that has brought mass rape and slaughter to the cities and deserts of Syria and
Iraq. That massacred a hundred and thirty-two children and thirteen adults in a
school in Peshawar last month. That regularly kills so many Nigerians,
especially young ones, that hardly anyone pays attention.
Because the ideology is the product of a major world
religion, a lot of painstaking pretzel logic goes into trying to explain what
the violence does, or doesn't, have to do with Islam. Some well-meaning people
tiptoe around the Islamic connection, claiming that the carnage has nothing to
do with faith, or that Islam is a religion of peace, or that, at most, the
violence represents a "distortion" of a great religion....
A religion is not just a set of texts but the living
beliefs and practices of its adherents. Islam today includes a substantial
minority of believers who countenance, if they don't actually carry out, a
degree of violence in the application of their convictions that is currently
unique.
We can argue whether or not
the violence is inherent in Islam. (I contend it is. Look at its history.) But George Packer is right.
And those still in denial about Islam are engaging in foolishness -
deadly foolishness.
----
A big hat tip to Ace.
Amen.
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