Possumblog

A spanner in the works.

Or something.

But last night after the ballgame, I got word from the 8th grader sitting next to me that in addition to the math homework she had, and the language homework had, she also needed a current event article for social studies due today.

I tend to do the searching for these for the kids, mainly because they take too long to find things and tend to wander over to entertainment sites. (Not Possumblog, obviously, since it's not entertaining.)

ANYway, they've been studying world religions and junk, and they're on Islam right now, and her teacher wanted them to bring in articles about Islam. Best I could tell from her take on the assignment was that the news articles needed to be all about the lovey-dovey, RoP angle.

Okay, well, I'm just not in the mood for that.

I gave her this article, without comment, for her to read herself and see what she thought. In the car on the way to school this morning, she asked what it meant when it said "radical."

Well, radical in this context is when you have a group of people who say all they want is to live quiet peaceful lives, and all they do is go around trying to kill people who have different beliefs, because, doggone it all, they just can't have a quiet peaceful life with all these filthy kafirs around.

Not said quite like that, but close enough.

As I told her (and Jonathan, too, since he was in the backseat) there are millions of fine folks who believe jihad is an internal struggle against the power of Satan--just like Christians who put on the "armor of God" to battle the influence of evil in their lives. But there are a number of jihadis--a minority of believers, sure, but still darned big enough in raw numbers--who want nothing to do with such placidness, and only want to purify the world of the stain of the infidel.

And to be fair, as I told her, there are Christians who have similar views, too.

There is a difference, though, in that in this country there is a very vocal, very active, very large (both in numbers and in percentage) counterbalance, not just of Christians, but people of all faiths (or lack thereof), who are swift to condemn people like this, and eager to bring them to justice should they commit crimes in support of their misguided faith. For some reason, some members don't quite get around to criticizing any faiths OTHER than Christianity, but even if we take them out of the equation, you still have a healthy group of people who really DO want to have a free country where everyone is free to interact with each other.

Radical Islam has--again, on the basis of percentages--a very small minority of people willing to extend the same condemnation to the evil that lurks within the greater body of Islam. Moderate or pacifistic Muslims who speak out against radicalism do exist, but they face a determined, emboldened enemy who think nothing of imprisoning them, or killing them. It's bad enough to be an infidel, but the whiff of heresy and apostacy kicks the shariaist's angry glands up another whole notch. So, there's a lot of fear there, and I believe some sense of apathy, that has thus far made the Muslim-Condemnation-of-Fellow-Muslims-Who-Commit-Atrocities- in-the-Name-of-Allah a rather small organization.

You know, hand-holding multi-cultural feel-goodism is all great and wonderful, but let's not ignore the fact that there are people out there who actually want to destroy, with extreme prejudice, that very self-same type of happybird cloudfloaty land.

So, kids--treat people the way you want to be treated. But keep your powder dry.

Posted by Terry Oglesby at March 30, 2007 01:06 PM