Posted on 01/17/2003 6:11:48 AM PST by chance33_98
Church's sign has Muslims outraged
Florida pastor says criticism of Islam is legal and fair
Associated Press Friday, January 17, 2003
Jacksonville --- The Council on American-Islamic Relations-Florida is calling on state religious leaders to repudiate a Jacksonville Baptist church's roadside sign the group claims is anti-Muslim.
The sign outside the First Conservative Baptist Church in Jacksonville's Mandarin area reads: ''Jesus Forbade Murder. Matthew 26:52. Muhammad Approved Murder. Surah 8:65.''
Altaf Ali, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations-Florida, said his organization attempted to talk with the Baptist church's officials about the sign, but were rebuffed with belligerent language.
''All Americans must band together to condemn hate speech designed to divide our nation along religious and ethnic lines,'' Ali said. ''Any attempt to marginalize or vilify one religious community is an attack on all people of faith.''
The church's pastor, the Rev. Gene Youngblood, who also leads the Conservative Theological Society and Conservative Christian Academy, said he has been using the marquee-type sign to express the church's opinion for 15 years and has no plans to remove the message.
''First and foremost, are we not entitled to freedom of speech?'' Youngblood said.
Youngblood, who said he is an expert on world religions, said he had been threatened and his property vandalized. He said he has filed 13 police reports since July.
Youngblood said his church would issue a formal statement later.
Iman Zaid Malik, spiritual leader of the Islamic Center of Northeast Florida, said some Christian friends brought the offensive sign to his attention.
''Misinformation must be rejected by all people of conscience,'' Malik said. ''This shows that the vast majority of Americans reject hate and seek a society where good overcomes the evil.''
Malik said the Quran verse indicates that those who believe and are steadfast in battle will overcome much larger armies. It is not an endorsement of murder, he said.
The verse reads: ''O Prophet [Muhammad]! Inspire the believers to conquer all fear of death when fighting, [so that] if there be twenty of you who are patient in adversity, they might overcome two hundred; and if there be one hundred of you, they might overcome one-thousand of those bent on denying the truth, because they are people who cannot grasp it.''
The Council on American-Islamic Relations said the Quran also states, ''whoever murders a person . . . it will be as if he killed all mankind, and whoever saves a life, shall be regarded as if he saved all mankind.''
ON THE WEB: Council on American-Islamic Relations-Florida: www.cair-florida.org
First Conservative Baptist Church: www.conservative.edu/main.htm
The indiscrinate massacre of all Muslims in Jerusalem, be they man, woman, or child, combatant or invalid, was murderous zealotry at its most vicious. So was the mass killings of Jews in Germany by Crusaders passing through on their way to the Holy Land in 1096, and the remaining 200 years of the Crusades provide plenty more examples - unless you feel that Christianity needed "defending" from the little Jewish children of Mainz.
Murder by Muslim Wahabbis was and is backed by the Koran.
Jerusalem was besieged by the Romans because the Jews had decided to start a war to drive out the "infidels". A war that had been preceded by 60 years of terrorist activity by Jewish zealots, marked by Palestinian-style assassinations and other murders.
In the 11th Century, The Holy Sepulchre of Christ and all Christian establishments in Jerusalem were destroyed by Moslems, and all Christians in Jerusalem were killed or persecuted, but in your mind the Crusades were undertaken because "infidels were occupying the Holy Land."
The Holy Sepulcher was destroyed in 1009, 90 years before the Crusades, by a nutcase named Hakim who later proclaimed his own divinity and banned Muslims from fasting during Ramadan and making a pilgrimage to Mecca. By that time Hakim was favoring Christians and granting them all sorts of protections. Byzantines rebuilt it in 1048. And there was no mass massacre or persecution of Christians in Jerusalem that provoked the Crusade; there were still several thousand Christians living in the city at the time, who were only ordered out when the Crusaders appeared outside the city walls. Although when the Christians took over Jerusalem in 1099 they made a point of killing every Jew and Muslim who had the bad luck to get trapped in the city. And how can you say that the Crusades were NOT undertaken to remove the "infidels"? That was the whole point of the Crusades: the Muslims were in control of the Holy Land which by right should be Christian.
Today, Moslems strap bombs to themselves and murder innocent civilians and fly jets in buildings, and you have the nerve to say they have the same claim that Jews had 2000 years ago and Christians had 1000 years ago.
Your grasp of history and reality is truly amazing....
It's a matter of historical record. What amazes me is that you would pretend that such wars weren't waged because of resentment of who controlled the Holy Land.
A cop-out. You just wrote a whole post detailing how justifiable the Crusades were, and then when the same people who launched it executed it, you run away from it. That doesn't wash. The fact is, Christians in the 11th century found plenty of scriptural reasons to justify their actions, just as the Muslims do today. That Christianity has managed to grow out the violent zealotry it was mired in in those days is to its credit - but don't pretend that that violent zealotry didn't exist. The Crusaders slaughtered innocents in the name of God - the Christian God.
The point is that they share much common ground with Christians, and that this common ground is in danger of being destroyed by extremists within Islam who seek a civilizational confrontation NOT based on their desire to promote Islam, but rather to seek power.
We are dangerously close to war, and while I wholeheartedly support this war, I want to make damned sure we strike at the enemy, not leave it alone.
The enemy is Wahabbism, and the House of Saud.
We (our government) have yet to speak the name of Saudi Arabia when we talk about our enemies in this conflict, that's dangerous. It would be like fighting WW II without attacking Germany.
These fools think that I have somehow "sold out" for simply pointing out that they are falling in the trap set by bin Laden.
This belief is based on the Gospel of Barnabas, promoted by the Vulgate Bible, and generally recognized as a false belief by most Muslims.
This belief is based on the Gospel of Barnabas, promoted by the Vulgate Bible, and generally recognized as a false belief by most Muslims.
The Vulgate is a generally accurate translation into Latin of the Bible, and makes no mention of such a story.
There was a quite tasteless story circulating among the 2nd century Gnostics: according to them, Simon of Cyrene was crucified in Jesus' place, while the latter stood nearby laughing at how easily the Romans had been fooled. I think that is ultimately the source of the verse in the Koran, surah 4:157, that states:
"They declared: 'We have put to death the Messiah, Jesus son of Mary, the apostle of God.' They did not kill him, nor did they crucify him, but they thought they did."
But in no case does Islam recognize Christ's death on the Cross and His Resurrection, the central mystery of the Christian faith.
Let's say you are completely correct, the Jewish Revolt of the 1st Century and The Crusades of the 11th-13th Centuries were solely the result of resentment about who controlled Jerusalem.
Furthermore, let's say that there is a complete moral equivalence between Islamic fundamentalists attacking and killing Jews in Israel and Jews killing Romans in the 1st Century as well as Christians killing Jews and Muslims during the Crusades.
To the current credit of Jews and Christians, something happened to purge the streak of violence from these religions. No such reformation has come about in Islam.
Violence is normative in fundamental (Wahhabi) Islam. Violence is not the norm in fundamental Christianity.
No Christian can point to the New Testament to justify violence. Fundamental Muslims can point to the Koran to justify violence and murder. In order for Islam to undergo a reformation, Wahhabism must be exterminated and all copies of the Koran need to be re-edited to take out sections approving the murder of Jews and Christians.
The possibility of this occuring is ZERO. Islam will never outgrow its current infantile state because its core contains this diseased element of hatred for Jews and Christians (or any other religion for that matter).
Wherever there is strife and conflict in the world, chances are Islam is involved. You may say that Wahhabism doesn't represent mainstream Islam, but mainstream Islam chooses to ignore those sections of the Koran telling Muslims to kill Jews and Christians. Should Wahhabism disappear, another virulent form of Islam will appear, and that form will take its justification from the Koran.
Where, in the New Testament, is there a single scriptural reference that would justify murder?
Of course they do not, if they did, they'd be Christians.
The whole point that I have been making in this forum is that this is not a war between religions, in spite of the attempts by Usama bin Laden, Hamas, and all known Islamic extremist terrorist groups to make it just that.
These groups, though well-funded, are a minority within the world of Islam, and they are actually fighting moderate Muslims for the heart and soul of Islam. If they goad the western world into staging what could be viewed as a modern-day Crusade against Islam, they will have succeeded in their task. Because then, the teachings of the Qu'ran will apply, and Muslims will feel bound by their beliefs into fighting the Christian world.
We don't need to wage war against more than a billion people, we need to wage war against them that want war.
I want to pinpoint the enemy, and fight them in manner that could not be spun into appearing to be a Crusade. I want to strike at the heart of the problem, and I believe that to be primarily the Wahabbi sect, their Saudi financiers, and hatred driven by ignorance.
And I want them destroyed.
But a way was found to justify the Inquisition.
Agree with the first part, no way the second part will happen, is there?
What does that leave as a choice?
The extermination of Islam as a religion?
How do you forcibly convert over a billion people without becoming that which you fought to destroy?
The way HAS to be through the spread of moderate Islam, and the philosophies of organizations such as the Islamic Supreme Council of America, and the physical destruction of Islamic extremism and the people who would finance its spread.
Christianity (in the New Testament) promotes peace, and yet extremism and inter-faith struggles have surfaced in the modern world, most notably Ireland. So expect that there will always be extremists, but if the vast majority of the people do not allow themselves to be pulled into the irrationality of killing in the name of God, we can survive this as we survived the spread of communism.
I am the last person in this site that you'd expect to see quoting Pat Buchanan in a positive manner, and yet, it seems that stand in full agreement with him on this issue.
"In the last century, America was threatened by a global communist revolution. Avoiding all-out war, we outlasted it. And we can outlast this Islamist revolution. What we must avoid is a war of faiths, a war of civilizations between Islam and America. And those who propagandize for such a war are the unwitting or willful collaborators of Osama bin Laden."---Pat Buchanan
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