The Head of the Entity Formerly Known as CAIR-CAN Says Never Mind the Jihad

Or words to that effect as he argues in the NatPo that (let's all say it together, shall we?) Every Religion Has Its Extremists.
 
Ever heard of the Ku Klux Klan, kafirs?
 
I think I'll let an expert field this one:

The so-called “members of other faiths” alluded to by Muslims are nearly always just nominal members who have no active involvement. They are neither inspired by, nor do they credit religion as Muslim terrorists do - and this is what makes it a very different matter.  

Islam is associated with Islamic terrorism because that is the association that the terrorists themselves choose to make.

Muslims who compare crime committed by people who happen to be nominal members of other religions to religious terror committed explicitly in the name of Islam are comparing apples to oranges.  

 Yes, some of the abortion clinic bombers were religious (as Muslims enjoy pointing out), but consider the scope of the problem. There have been six deadly attacks over a 36 year period in the U.S. Eight people died. This is an average of one death every 4.5 years.

By contrast, Islamic terrorists staged nearly ten thousand deadly attacks in just the six years following September 11th, 2001. If one goes back to 1971, when Muslim armies in Bangladesh began the mass slaughter of Hindus, through the years of Jihad in the Sudan, Kashmir and Algeria, and the present-day Sunni-Shia violence in Iraq, the number of innocents killed in the name of Islam probably exceeds five million over this same period.

Anders Breivik, who murdered 77 innocents in a lone rampage on July 22nd, 2011, was originally misidentified as a "Christian fundamentalist" by the police. In fact, the killings were later determined to be politically motivated. He also left behind a detailed 1500 page manifesto in which he stated that he is not religious, does not know if God exists, and prefers a secular state to a theocracy. Needless to say, he does not quote any Bible verses in support of his killing spree, nor did he shout "praise the Lord" as he picked people off.

In the last ten years, there have been perhaps a dozen or so religiously-inspired killings by people of all other faiths combined. No other religion produces the killing sprees that Islam does nearly every day of the year. Neither do they have verses in their holy texts that arguably support it. Nor do they have large groups across the globe dedicated to the mass murder of people who worship a different god, as the broader community of believers struggles with ambivalence and tolerance for a radical clergy that supports the terror.

Muslims may like to pretend that other religions are just as subject to "misinterpretation" as is their “perfect” one, but the reality speaks of something far worse.

The something far worse is this: the "radicals" are following things as written. The problem is with the operating instructions, which call for the subjugation of non-Muslims and the creation of an Islam-controlled Utopia. These instructions cannot be tampered with--or tweaked--because they are said to be "perfect" and "uncreated." In other words, what's really "extreme" are the teachings. Whether Muslims choose to follow them or not--and as we know and are constantly reminded by apologists like the chap who submitted the NatPo piece, many do not--is another matter. But to claim that the reason why many Muslims are waging jihad is because they haven't quite grasped the true nuances of the Quran—well, let's just call that radical disingenuousness. Or, to use the proper Islamic terminology, taqiyyah.

Update: Here's David Solway saying more or less the same thing (only far more eloquently, and with bigger words):

No responsible critic of Islam is saying that all who profess the faith are jihadists, fundamentalists, or corrupt and dangerous people. Many, at any rate in the West, wish for nothing better than to live at peace with their neighbors, to raise their families, and to prosper economically. They are the benign exemplars of their faith, practicing their cultural usages and ceremonies, suppressing everything in the Koran that would disturb their equanimity, living peaceably by omission, as it were. 

The trouble is that, for all its noble verses, its persuasiveness, and its softer, more tolerant ayat, the Koran is nonetheless, in its concatenated summons to violence and its comprehensive textual climate, a manual of war. Its injunctions and dictates requiring slaughter, oppression and every manner of cruelty against the unbeliever and the apostate fill surah after surah, and establish the incendiary and bellicose quality of the text, especially the larger Medinian portion. There is nothing to be found in its pages like the Sermon on the Mount, nothing like the bewildered questioning of God’s will (The Book of Job), nothing like Abraham’s bantering with the Lord, nothing quite like the gorgeous effusions of the Song of Songs, so compellingly erotic. The Pauline concept of agape is foreign to the Koran. There is no distinction between Caesar and God, between the political and the religious. Allah is remote and unapproachable. His Prophet issues commands to kill, dismember, repress, coerce, tax and enslave — commands that far outnumber his more humane utterances. 

This is the book whose fissile core is always ready to be activated by its rigorous adherents, who feel they possess a divine mandate to confirm their depredations. Those whom we quaintly describe as “moderate Muslims” are either unaware of all that is in their holy book or claim that they have “reinterpreted” Islam as something other than it has, for the most part, historically revealed itself to be — and as it is visibly and forcibly proclaiming itself at this very moment, whether in the form of sectarian bloodshed or projection of power and tumult abroad.