Why is President Trump’s order to temporarily halt immigration from seven primarily Muslim countries so controversial? A shocking new CBS poll offers insight: Fully two-thirds of Democrats believe Islam breeds no more violence than any other faith.
As Breitbart reports, “Merely one-in-seven Democrats believe that Islam is more violent than other religions, such as Christianity, Mormonism, Judaism, and Buddhism. One-in-ten Democrats believe that Islam is less violent that other religions, according to the poll of 1,019 adults, which was taken Feb. 1 and Feb. 2.”
“In contrast, Republicans have a far colder view of Islam. Sixty-three percent of Republicans view Islam as aggressive compared to other religions, and only two percent view Islam as more pacific than other faiths,” Breitbart continued.
Here’s a snapshot from the CBS poll:
Shockingly, Breitbart also informs, “Still, 25 percent of Republican voters believe Islam’s encouragement of violence is level with Christianity’s doctrines, including the Beatitudes passage, reported by Matthew: ‘Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.’”
While mainstream-media polls don’t have a perfect track record for accuracy, it’s folly to think the above doesn’t reflect a largely uninformed, and misinformed, populace.
Revisionist History
If lies are spread about healthful food having killed people in the past and junk food being no worse, it’s no wonder when people are confused about what to feed their bodies. Misinformation creates the same confusion about what to feed the mind, and this brings us to anti-Christian revisionist history.
Consider the Crusades. While they’re generally portrayed as an effort by an imperialistic West to convert and loot a peaceful Muslim world, they actually were defensive wars against Islamic aggression.
Realize that by the 400s A.D., Christianity was the dominant religion in the Mideast and North Africa. This quickly changed after Islam’s birth in 622, however, as Muslim armies set out to conquer the Christian lands.
And by the end of 11th century, the Islamic hordes had whittled away most of the Byzantine Empire (the remnant of the Roman Empire), reducing it to little more than Greece. At this point, Byzantine emperor Alexius I in Constantinople reached out to a rival, Pope Urban II, for help. Inspired to act, the pope gave a rousing sermon, at the Council of Clermont in 1095, in which he appealed to the people of Europe to stop bickering amongst themselves and rally to the aid of their brothers in the East. Thus the first Crusade was born.
As Thomas Madden, chair of the History Department at Saint Louis University, put it, the Crusades “were not the brainchild of an ambitious pope or rapacious knights but a response to more than four centuries of conquests in which Muslims had already captured two-thirds of the old Christian world. At some point, Christianity as a faith and a culture had to defend itself or be subsumed by Islam. The Crusades were that defense.”
As for offense, people are naturally aghast at the atrocities committed by the Islamic State — drowning people in cages, burning them alive, beheading children, etc. — in an effort to convert the world. Yet they assume there must be some Christian analogue, somewhere, in history. Maybe the inquisitions?
In reality, by the time the first inquisition was born in the 11th century, heretics had already been prosecuted (and persecuted) for 1,000 years — by local lords whose judgments were often capricious and arbitrary. It was then that inquisitions were created, as works of mercy designed to bring order and justice to the process. I treated this in-depth in “The Inquisitions and Iniquity: Burning Heretics or History.”
Another good source is the fine BBC documentary (shown below), The Myth of the Spanish Inquisition.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjEA-WfD1DQ
Revisionist Current Events
This spun history is reinforced by spun current events. Just consider a flawed 2015 study by the New America Foundation claiming that “white right-wing Americans are actually the biggest terror threat to the United States,” as Mediaite put it, before comically following up with “once you choose to ignore the 2,977 people murdered by jihadists on September 11, 2001.”
Yes, and the U.S. started the war against Japan on December 8, 1941 — once you choose to ignore that Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7.
Yet it gets more ridiculous still. Not only does the “study” not consider that (non-Hispanic) whites are 62 percent of our population while Muslims are only one percent, but it includes in the category of “right-wing extremists” people who are deranged and devoid of any coherent ideology.
In contrast, Islamic jihad is a global movement involving common motivations and goals and is responsible for virtually all the terrorism bedeviling Western civilization. These acts are done in Islam’s name, too, with perpetrators generally screaming “Allahu Akbar!” as they slaughter innocents. When was the last time you heard someone commit a terrorist act and yell “Christ is King!”?
(Related to this, as I demonstrated using data analysis, it’s also a myth that whites commit an inordinate percentage of mass shootings.)
Some will say this Islamic violence is no surprise, citing, as Breitbart has, Koranic injunctions prescribing jihad; others will counter that one can find violent passages in the Bible as well. There is a profound difference, however.
The Islamic canon — the Koran, Hadith, and Sira — has literally 9.6 times as many words devoted to political violence as does the Old Testament: 327,547 vs. 34,039. (The New Testament has zero.)
Yet even this doesn’t tell the tale. As Bill Warner, director of the Center for the Study of Political Islam, pointed out in 2009, “The political violence of the Koran is eternal and universal. The political violence of the Bible was for that particular historical time and place. This is the vast difference between Islam and other ideologies. The violence remains a constant threat to all non-Islamic cultures, now and into the future.”
Something else has influence for all time, however. Virtues (and vices) are caught more than they’re taught, which is why examples set are so significant. As to this, Christians may use as a guide for behavior the rhetorical question, “What would Jesus do?” Likewise, Muslims view Mohamed as “the Perfect Man” and model for behavior.
The difference is that Jesus came as the Prince of Peace, without armies or weapons, and even leftists don’t suggest he was a bad man (they rather try and co-opt His message). And Mohamed?
He was a warlord, caravan raider, and slave owner and trader who used torture and committed massacres and mass beheadings. He very much was a man of his time, like Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, or Tamerlane. And that’s the point:
If someone told you Genghis Khan was his role model, would you turn your back on him?
Perhaps all this helps to explain a certain German study, one involving 45,000 young people. It found that while increasing religiosity among Christian youths made them less violent, increasing religiosity among Muslim youths actually made them more violent.
Getting back to the CBS poll, there’s no doubt that many, afflicted with equality-on-the-brain, stated that all religions are equally violent because that’s the politically correct answer. Nonetheless, the relativistic notion that “all faiths are equal” is widely embraced today, and it does corrupt judgment. It’s no different from believing that all animals are equally dangerous and petting the lion as you would the lamb.
