Was going to post this ludicrous article in the Washington Post with some comment about its spurious moral equivalence e.g. between the Koran and the Bible ("revered by many Americans"), but see that commenter "Jason Born" has made the comment for me:
Again we witness a fatuous attempt to read Islam through a relativist prism that absolves it on any responsibility for the violence committed in its name and its ideological interests. To wit: "Many of its controversial rules, like death for blasphemy and apostasy, have parallels in the Hebrew Bible, a book revered by many Americans." Yes, to a point. But when was the last time a Christian or a Jew in America or elsewhere cut the throat of an apostate? When was the last time a Christian or a Jew (or a Hindu or a Buddhist or a Scientologist, for that .matter) gunned down writers and artists for committing blasphemy? This false equivalency, this peurile collapsing of history into some kind of generalised all-religions-are-equally-bad narrative, is expressly designed to prevent us asking questions of the all-too-real prevalence of Islamically inspired killing whether in Paris, London, Boston, California, Madrid, Iraq or Syria.
Again: "the kind of Sharia jihadists want is not the kind most American Muslims want" - as if Sharia comes in a choice of seventeen flavours instead of being a coherent, principle-specific body of jurisprudence defined, not by Isis, but by the hadith and rulings of classical Islamic scholars including Bukhari, Sahih Muslim and others, all of whom are largely unanimous in their rulings on killing apostates, dealing with unbelievers, the second-class status of women, the sanctioning of child marriage and punishments including amputation.
McCants makes assertions certain in the knowledge that most of his audience are ignorant of the facts, creating a hollowed-out space into which he and other apologists can decant fictional and dangerous misrepresentations of a truth that we will need, sooner or later, to face up to.
