Ah, if only you could “cancel” an archbishop. Western wokesters may thus lament after Archbishop Ieronymos of Athens and all Greece expressed recently that, as the Orthodox Times puts it, “Islam was not a religion but a political party.” The Times then quoted him as saying, “They [Muslims] are the people of war.”
Islamic entities were, unsurprisingly, none too happy. “The Western Thrace Turkish Minority Consultation Council (BTTADK) declared: ‘We condemn the statement of the Archbishop of Greece, Mr. Ieronimos,’” wrote Robert Spencer in FrontPage Mag on Thursday. “The Xanthi Turkish Union added that Ieronymos’ words were an ‘Islamophobic attack’ and even a ‘hate crime.’”
Spencer cites other reactions as well, but the most ironic came from the Turkish Foreign Ministry. “These provocative expressions of Archbishop Ieronimos, which incite the society to hostility and violence against Islam, also show the frightening level Islamophobia has reached,” it wrote in a statement. “Such malign ideas are also responsible for the increase of racism, Islamophobia and xenophobia in Europe.”
Why is the above ironic? Well, because in January 2018, “as Turkish troops launched a military operation in Syria against the Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG), 90,000 mosques in Turkey prayed the Qur’an’s ‘Conquest’ sura, sura 48, which calls upon Muslims to be ‘ruthless against unbelievers,’” Spencer also informs. “Why did they do that, unless they assumed that their military action had an Islamic aspect?”
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Spencer continues:
And in November 2019, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said: “Our God commands us to be violent towards the kuffar (infidels). Who are we? The ummah [nation] of Mohammed. So [God] also commands us to be merciful to each other. So we will be merciful to each other. And we will be violent to the kuffar. Like in Syria.”
So when Archbishop Ieronymos says that Muslims “are the people who seek expansion; that is the characteristic of Islam,” which he did, the Turkish Foreign Ministry should perhaps first complain to their president about their president — who apparently agrees.
This is especially true since the archbishop, unlike Erdogan, walked back his comments, claiming in a later statement that his criticism was directed at “the perversion of the Muslim religion itself by extreme fundamentalists.”
Erdogan, however, has much company. Just consider the Muslim cleric in the tweet below.
Also seeming to agree is Jihadi cleric Hussein bin Mahmoud, who said in 2014 that “Islam is a religion of beheading.” Then there’s Kuwaiti Islamic scholar Sheikh Muhammad Hammoud Al-Najdi, who in 2019 preached that “offensive jihad” is part of Islam and also stated, “Allah humiliates the infidels and polytheists through jihad” (short video with subtitles below).
Of course, the above are just anecdotes, and while more could be found, contrary statements from Islamic leaders also exist. (Do note, too, however, that it would be hard finding corresponding calls to violence from Christians or Jews). Thus is it instructive to note a very interesting German study involving 45,000 young people.
Released in 2010, it found that while increasing religiosity made Christian youth less violent, it made Muslim youth more violent.
Explanation? Many observers point to how calls to violence permeate the Islamic canon and that, numerically speaking and in terms of character, nothing corresponding to them is found in the Bible (click here.) Yet a far more significant point is seldom made.
Virtues and vices are caught more than taught, actions speak louder than words, and people don’t follow ideas — they follow people. Thus may Christians use as a guide for behavior, “What would Jesus do?” (WWJD).
Muslims also have a role model: They view Mohammed as “the Perfect Man.”
Yet while Jesus is called the Prince of Peace, a characterization even those disputing His divinity will usually accept, what was Mohammed?
He was a warlord who launched close to 30 military campaigns, many of which he led himself. He was a caravan raider (a bandit) and captured, traded in, and owned slaves. He ordered massacres, used torture, and had dissidents assassinated. He was a polygamist and made it lawful for masters to have sexual relations with their female captives. So it’s no wonder that Sheikh Muhammad Hammoud Al-Najdi cited Mohammed heavily in the video above when justifying “offensive jihad.”
In fairness, though, as with Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, or Tamerlane, Mohammad was largely a man of his time and place. That’s fine as far as it goes, too, except for one thing:
If someone said Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, or Tamerlane was “the Perfect Man” and his role model, would you turn your back on that person?
When different faiths have radically different conceptions of perfection, it’s no surprise when their adherents exhibit radically different behavior.
