Many in western democracies are blind to radical Islam’s threat to their security and cultural values, speakers said at a day-long discussion of Islam during the National Religious Broadcasters International Christian Media Convention.
“The majority of Muslims are peaceful and good citizens,” Robert Edmiston, a member of Britain’s House of Lords from the Conservative Party, said at the Feb. 24 event in Nashville. “But there are some that are extremists, and they are gaining ground.”
The threat Islam poses stems not merely from a radical fringe but from central doctrines of the Muslim faith, some of the speakers said.
“Moderate Islam is to Islam what nominal Christianity, cultural Christianity is to Christianity,” said William Lane Craig, a professor of philosophy at Houston Baptist University who has studied Islam for 30 years. “It is a mere cultural set of mores that one has adopted, but it isn’t representative in either case of the fundamental teaching of the original book of that religion, whether the Quran or the Bible.”
Caroline Cox, another member of the House of Lords, said “verses of peace” are in the Quran, but the Islamic principle of “abrogation” teaches that “verses of the sword” trump those advocating peace.
“Way back in the early days of Islamic theology, the authorities found it very hard for Allah to be inconsistent. So they had to reconcile the inconsistency between the verses of peace and verses of the sword. They did so by the principle of abrogation, whereby the earlier revelations of the prophet [Muhammad] are abrogated by the later revelations,” said Cox, a former member of the Conservative Party who currently is not affiliated with either of the two major British parties.
“And unfortunately for all of us, the earlier verses, the earlier teachings or revelations, are the verses of peace. The later ones are the verses of the sword. And so those who do use those verses of the sword to justify their terrorist activities, which we see on our television screens, are operating in many ways from the correct theological interpretation according to traditional Islamic teaching,” Cox said.
Cox added, “You cannot say that [jihadi terrorism] has nothing to do with Islam.”
Topics at the NRB Islam discussion, at the Gaylord Opryland Resort and Convention Center, ranged from national security to culture to the church.
Islam and security
If estimates by the Gallup polling organization are correct, 7-10 percent of Muslims worldwide believe in violent jihad, author and Middle East expert Joel Rosenberg said. That translates to approximately 150 million supporters of jihad — a number equivalent to half of the U.S. population.
The Iranian government and the terrorist group ISIS advocate “apocalyptic jihad” and pose perhaps “the most grave danger right now,” Rosenberg said. Those two groups believe they can hasten the end times and the coming of an Islamic messiah by committing genocide, he said.
Iran’s leaders think a way to hasten the messiah’s appearance is “to annihilate two nations, two civilizations: Israel, which they believe is the little Satan, and the United States, which they believe is the great Satan,” Rosenberg said. “But the Iranians’ strategy thus far has been, wait until you can acquire [or] build the nuclear weaponry to accomplish that end.”
In light of Iran’s genocidal theology, it would be foolish for the U.S. to strike a nuclear deal with Iran that allows the Middle Eastern nation to maintain nuclear weapons, Rosenberg said.
Frank Gaffney, a former adviser to President Reagan, warned that “global jihad” — not just the isolated activities of ISIS — is the present generation’s “existential threat.”
There is “a global jihad brought to us by these Islamic supremacists for the purpose of imposing what they call sharia on the entire world and creating a caliphate or a similar kind of governing arrangement to rule according to it,” Gaffney said.
Rosenberg and Gaffney made their comments during a panel discussion moderated by Richard Land, former president of Southern Baptists’ Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission.
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SOURCE: Baptist Press
David Roach
