Bill O'Reilly Comes Close to Making a Valid Point But Then Misses A Golden Opportunity

Some days ago, Bill O'Reilly had on his show a woman who had come from an Islamic background. She explained, in heavily accented English, how the tenets of the Islamic faith were abusive to women and their human rights.

The next day, Bill O'Reilly put on a Muslim chap, who disputed the earlier woman's contentions. When O'Reilly pointed to passages in the Quran that seemed to buttress what the woman had said, the Muslim said that such passages were open to many interpretations and that the interpretations that Bill was suggesting were not correct.

When Bill read passages from the Hadith that further supported what the woman had said, the guest said that while some Hadith were valid, others were not. Somewhere near the end of his remarks, the Muslim fellow said that he knew these things because he was an Ahmadiyya Muslim.

I suspect that O'Reilly along with most of his viewers missed the significance of this Muslim identifying with the Ahmadiyya. My own view of this Muslim man immediately softened. I recognized him now as one of the really good guys. But, here is the thing; Muslims in Pakistan forbid the Ahmadiyya from identifying themselves as Muslims. Indeed they have a deep hatred of the Ahmadiyya and have set upon them and murdered them. Indonesian Muslims also despise them. They have suffered abuse in virtually all Islamic lands.

Are the Ahamadiyya Muslims? India accepts them as such. However, the Muslims in India do not. Here in the U.S. we do.

The point is that, while I might agree with this Muslim and his interpretations of the Quran and with those Hadith he holds to be valid, his views are shared by precious few Muslims in Islamic nations. In short, he really doesn't represent the Islamic view on a great many matters, not the least of them being the Islamic view of women as expressed in Islamic nations.