Islam

 Mention of Islam has been made in earlier posts with regard to the Palestinians.  But perhaps we should open the lens a bit wider.

Only Islam, as I see it, seems in conflict with other religions.  In the lower regions of the Philippines they have established themselves as a deadly minority.  In India, they never seem to have made peace with the Hindu population.  Muslim refugees who fled to Sweden have succeeded in having thoroughly alienated the people who invited them to their country.  The Islamic hostility to Christians in Muslim majority countries is well known.

So what's the problem with Islam?  In my opinion, it's that they lack secularization.  There are secular Muslims, but they survive only if they keep their heads down.  Islam is a religion that condones, and indeed promotes, the murder of anyone who speaks in a manner Muslims find disrespectful.  That is not acceptable in today's world.

No institution is beyond analysis and criticism; not the army, not a political leader, and not a religious leader.  It is only in totalitarian countries where critical analysis is banned.  There was a time when the Church in Rome made efforts to have Martin Luther killed.  But that was long ago.  This is now.  How dare some Ayatollah order Solmon Rushdie to be assassinated for having written a book to  which the Ayatollah takes exception. 

We see this same trait shown in the Palestinians.  They play the injured-party card.  Consider their charges.

The Jews took their place in Palestine.  The data shows this to be untrue.  Both Jews and Muslims who today populate Palestine were largely immigrants.

When the Jews were under the yoke of the Romans, many centuries earlier, there were no Muslims in the place which the the Romans had renamed Palestine.  Mohammed still had not been born.

Just as Christians appropriated the Jewish Torah and tacked it onto their Bible, calling it the Old Testament, the Muslims appropriated both the Jewish Torah and the Christian New Testament and stitched it all into Islam.  He made some minor changes, like saying Abrahams had been asked to offer Ishmael to God as a sacrifice instead of Isaac.  They acknowledged Jesus but denied him Godhood.  (The Jews would pretty much agree with the Muslims on that one, but they never made a big fuss over it.)

The Palestinians insist that the holy sites in Israel/Palestine belong to them.  Such sites include the Temple Mount which was once part of the temple that Solomon built and that Herod rebuilt after the first one was torn down.  How does that make it Islamic?  It was built by a Jewish king and, after again being destroyed, rebuilt by another Jewish king at a time before there were any Muslims.

The burial site of the very first Jew, Abraham, in a cave in Hebron, is also claimed by the Palestinians.  Again, in Abraham's day there were no Muslims.  They make the same claim for Joseph's tomb.

And how do the Palestinians treat these sites?  They first attempted to keep the Jews away from them.  But even worse, they had their sanitation crews throw waste in the temple yard.  They vandalize Joseph's tomb.  When archeologists found what appears to have been the alter that Joshua built, they work to tear it apart until stoped by Israeli authorities.  Is this how one deals with sites one claims to be meaningful to one's people?

Muslims in the Palestinian areas hate the Jews for their narrative, a narrative that is true and honest, while their's is false.  Never the less, they have managed to sell their narrative to some Americans, as well as to the UN, and anyone who doesn't care for Jews.