On Islam and ISIS

On Islam and ISIS
People light candles at the scene of a massive car bomb attack in Karada, a busy shopping district where people were shopping for the upcoming Eid al-Fitr holiday, in the center of Baghdad, Iraq, Monday, July 4, 2016. (AP Photo/Hadi Mizban)

People light candles at the scene of a massive car bomb attack in Karada, a busy shopping district where people were shopping for the upcoming Eid al-Fitr holiday, in the center of Baghdad, Iraq, Monday, July 4, 2016. (AP Photo/Hadi Mizban)

Ramadan ended this Tuesday, something the majority of Americans are likely unaware of, or simply don’t care about. Ramadan is a month commemorating the first revelation of the Quran to Muhammad. During the time of Ramadan, Muslims fast from sunrise to sunset. This is a holy month in the Islamic faith.

And in the last week alone, there have been at least four terrorist attacks carried out. Over 200 people dead in Iraq, 44 dead in Turkey, 23 in Bangladesh, and most recently, three terror attacks in the span of 24 hours at the Islamic holy site of Medina, the resting place of the prophet Muhammad.

America is a land where religion never really caught a hold. We have too much freedom, and therefore no centralized church. It’s hard for many of us to relate to something like this, because we don’t actually have any “holy sites” in the United States. But suffice to say, Muhammad is a fairly important feature in Islam. He’s the prophet of their faith, someone who brought the word of God to them (because Allah is literally arabic for God, it’s not a different word, it’s God. Just the plain, Abrahamic God) and birthed the religion many have devoted their lives to. And ISIS, the so-called “Islamic” State of Iraq and Syria, has been carrying out attacks, killingpeople, in their holy month.

So don’t you think it’s past high time for us to stop equating one with the other?

How can we sit back and blame Islam for terrorism when ISIS’s most prominent and numerous victims are Muslims themselves? According to the U.S. Counterterrorism office, when the religious affiliation of the victims was able to be ascertained, they found that between 82 to 97 percent of victims of terrorist attacks were themselves Muslim.

How are we continuing to encourage this environment of fear and bigotry when it’s becoming abundantly clear that correlation does not in any way mean causation is beyond me. How we’ve sat back as the Middle East has turned into a virtual bloodbath during Islam’s holiest month and continued to blame an entire people and religion for the tiniest fraction of them is absolutely beyond me. At this point, the notion that these murderers and rapists have anything to do with religion at all is laughable. They don’t have a faith, their only faith is fear, and they know what scares people the most right now is a damn religion.

I can already hear the angry clacking of keys responding with all the examples of how Islam is the bloodiest religion, complete with examples of terrible things from the Quran and stories they’ve heard from friends in the military who were over there! There may be some questionable verses in the Quran, but no more than there are in the Bible. That tends to happen when you continue to evolve as a people but stick to a book that’s over 2,000 years old as a moral guide. Our morality isn’t even the same as it was 20 years ago, much less 200, much much less 2,000.

I’m in honest shock at the deafening silence from the American media until the last week. One of the bloodiest months in the history of the Middle East, but they still sensationalize things to put us in this “Us Vs. Them” mentality. There is definitely an “us vs. them” to this, but the “them” in question is not a religion that numbers well over a billion people. It’s the terrorist organization that keeps murdering Muslims and Christians and Atheists alike just for being people.

I can’t even compare them to Westboro Baptist anymore. The analogy still fundamentally works, but at this point, it needs to be common sense that the people blowing up Muhammad’s resting place and murdering Muslims in scores during the month of Ramadan have no affiliation with the religion in question.

As it stands, I can only express my deep sadness that this has happened, and that so many people around the world keep dying in the name of hate.

Categories: Commentary
Tags: ISIS, Islam