Monday 29 August 2016

Countering the Pontiff of Terror

I've written before about the infamous, the egregious Yusuf al-Qaradawi, an Islamist cleric who has over 40 million followers in the Muslim world.  He calls for the suicide murder of Jews, the killing of homosexuals, of apostates, of blasphemers, the beating of women.  In short, he's a nasty individual, at least judged by our liberal western mores. He is sectarian, misogynist, homophobic: the whole panoply of nastiness we find in the nooks and crannie of Islam.
In the article below, Mr Rada, the Egyptian ambassador to the US calls for Qaradawi and his ilk to be shut up, to be marginalised, to be challenged.
The ambassador is right.
His final para calls on the "international community" to "destroy the intellectual fuel that justifies the evil of terrorism."
He's right about that too.
Pity that Rada gets to this conclusion via a ritual denial of any problem within Islam.  People like Qaradawi, says the ambassador, have "held Islam hostage and desecrated its vision...". They have "perverted the message of Islam and distorted its values".
Nowhere does the ambassador explain how the representations by Qaradawi are "desecration" or "perversion" of Islam.
Still, just as one must hold one's nose and vote for Hillary, one must hold one's nose, and agree with the ambassador: ignore the apologia and take home the main message:
Stop the poison of Islamists like Qaradawi.
Countering the Pontiff of Terror