Finally, A Little Honesty About Islam In Mainstream Media
A little, that is.

Shadi Hamid writes in the LA Times about why Islam isn't like other faiths -- as I've long been explaining here.

He explains the reason the Quran is different from the Bible in very articulate terms:

Contrary to what many think, there is no Christian equivalent to Koranic "inerrancy," even among far-right evangelicals. Muslims believe the Koran is not only God's word, but God's actual speech -- in other words, every single letter and word in the Koran comes directly from God. This seemingly semantic difference has profound implications. If the Koran is God's speech, and God is unchanging and perfect, then so is his speech. To question the divine origin of the Koran, then, is to question God himself, and God is not easily put in a box, well away from the public sphere.

Differences between Christianity and Islam also are evident in each faith's central figure. Unlike Jesus, who was a dissident, Muhammad was both prophet and politician. And more than just any politician, he was a state-builder as well as a head of state. Not only were the religious and political functions intertwined in the person of Muhammad, they were meant to be intertwined. To argue for the separation of religion from politics, then, is to argue against the model of the very man Muslims most admire and seek to emulate.

There's this pussyfooting around: "If Islam has been -- and will continue to be -- resistant to secularism"

Oh. Please.

"Resistant to secularism." Is that what they call it when they gun down people who are guilty only of going to a rock concert one Paris evening?

By the way, some prominent Islamic scholars have noted that without the commands for death to apostates, Islam would not continue to exist.

There are points of honesty in this LA Times piece not normally seen in mainstream media (about the Quran's difference from the bible, for example).

However, Mohammed was not just a politician but a brutal looter and mass-murderer who appears to have been a psychopath. He at one point called for the slaughter of a poetess who had mocked him. Her breastfeeding baby was torn from her arms so she could be gutted in front of her five children with a sword.

Also, this op-ed dances around the reality: Islam is a totalitarian system masquerading as a religion and it commands the death or conversion of the infidel.

Islam commands the takeover and Islamization of societies -- and the removals of rights (and life, if you're gay, an apostate, for example) of those who vary from what the Quran commands.

This is not compatible with Enlightenment values, our Constitution, or simple natural rights of humans.

I am an atheist and for freedom of religion and freedom to believe in all manner of silly things (like astrology, for example). And as long as your belief system doesn't call for the death of, say, people who don't believe that the moon in Capricorn has anything to say about their day, I have no problem with it.

Sadly, there's this propensity in so many of us in the West to deny the totalitarian nature of Islam and even that it is Islam motivating these attacks (even as Muslims who do the attacking explain that).

Poor Ted Olson, whose wife died on one of those planes on 9/11, even feels he must do it -- sadly, sans any real knowledge of Islam.

Christine Williams articulates the next stage here:

Until Western ostriches wake up and recognize that to oppose Islamic supremacism, the worst enemy of human rights and democracy, is not remotely anti-Muslim, but a necessary defense of Western civilization, we will continue to slowly lose our freedoms.

On one side, terror will be struck into disbelievers by violent jihadists, and on the other, stealth jihadists will (and have already begun to) fully infiltrate and infect all levels of government and private enterprise, with the ultimate aim of subjugating the House of War under the House of Islam.

Recall, from the Muslim Brotherhood Explanatory Memorandum:

"The process of settlement is a 'Civilization-Jihadist Process' with all the word means. The Ikhwan [Muslim Brotherhood] must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and "sabotaging" its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God's religion is made victorious over all other religions."