Imam Gets Caught Preaching Islam, AKA Calling For Death To Jews
I'm an atheist, but the Jesus stuff of feeding the poor and caring for the sick is a sentiment I can get behind.

I used to believe Islam was just a slightly different flavor of religion -- chocolate to Judaism's strawberry and Christianity's, oh, butter pecan. It is not, as I found, after I started reading the Quran and commentary on Islam after 9/11.

There are numerous calls for death to the infidel in the Quran:

By most conservative counts, the Quran contains over 100 passages that call Muslims to take up arms against unbelievers in the name of Allah.

"Kill them [unbelievers] wherever you find them... And fight them until there is no more unbelief and worship is for Allah alone" (Quran 2:191-193).

"Strike off their heads and strike from them every fingertip" (Quran 8:12).

Esmeralda Bermudez writes in the LA Times:

A Northern California mosque that was targeted in a vandalism hate crime found itself at the center of controversy this week after an imam delivered a sermon with inflammatory remarks about Jews.

"Oh Allah, liberate the Al Aqsa Mosque from the filth of the Jews," Imam Ammar Shahin said in Arabic in his July 21 sermon at the Islamic Center of Davis.

"Oh Allah, count them one by one and annihilate them down to the very last one," he said in the videotaped service.

The comments, which were translated and distributed to the media by the nonprofit Middle East Media Research Institute, or MEMRI, have been roundly criticized by local and national Jewish leaders. A few of them have written a complaint to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

...Shahin apologized Friday, saying he let his emotions "cloud my better judgment."

This is called "taqiyya," lying to protect Islam.

Again, Islam calls for the death or conversion of "the infidel," and the earlier interfaith'y passages in the Quran (the Mecca portion, before Mohammed had power) are abrogated (erased/nullified) by the later passages calling for death to non-Muslims.

This is not to say that individual Muslims necessarily practice their religion this way, or even understand this about the Quran. However, if you look at terrorism, gays and apostates being killed, and women being beaten, the justifications are not "misunderstandings" of Islam; they are from the Quran and Hadith.

This piece -- at Center for Inquiry, an atheist site -- is an excellent detailing of the violence Islam demands of its followers and a call for a humanist rethinking of Islam.

I don't believe that Islam can be reformed in any meaningful way, because the Quran is said to be the word of Allah, perfect and unquestionable, but I do like the sentiments in this piece.