Excerpt:
The recent and growing controversy over the plan to build a thirteen-storey mosque near Ground Zero has, once again, concentrated public attention on the fact and nature of Islam. Is it, as its adherents claim, a "religion of peace," a bringer of benefits to mankind, a harbinger of a better world, a faith which, according to President Obama, accentuates "the dignity of all human beings"? Or, on the contrary, is it something entirely different, not so much a religion as a political ideology grounded in an incendiary and hortative arsenal of texts, primarily the Koran but also the hadith, the sirah and the theological ruminations of Islamic thinkers and jurists from earliest times to the present?
Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the moving force behind the Park51 mosque, assures us that Islam is not something to be feared but to be welcomed. Moreover, it is not Islam or even al-Qaeda that is the major fomenter of violence and upheaval in the world but—you guessed it—the United States. The United States, according to Rauf, is responsible for the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children. America "has more Muslim blood on its hands than al-Qaida has on its hands of innocent non-Muslims." As for the plague of suicide bombers indiscriminately spilling unoffending blood, this apparently has nothing to do with Islam as such, or the Koranic injunctions to "slay and be slain" (Surah 9:111) and to "slay the idolaters wherever you find them" (Surah 9:5), among innumerable other sanguinary commands. Rather, suicide bombers are justifiably motivated by "political reasons…and worldly objectives."