Mohammed’s Radio, by Martha Thomases – Brilliant Disguise

July 30, 2011 Martha Thomases 31 Comments

It’s tough out there for a Muslim.  

For example, if a Muslim happens to live in Oklahoma, and wants to be assumed to be as much a part of his community as any of his neighbors, he’s out of luck.  

Jews know what this feels like.  No one has yet passed a law making kashrut illegal, but we have faced similar misconceptions about what our religion requires.  Some think Jesus was murdered because Jewish priests demanded it.  Some think we celebrate Passover by killing Christian babies to use their blood for matzoh.  Some think American Jews are more loyal to Israel than to our own country.

And some think every time a Muslim does something wrong, he does it because it’s part of his faith.

In this country, no one makes similar assumptions about Christians.  If someone is Christian and does something horrible (e.g. Timothy McVeigh in the aforementioned  Oklahoma), no one demands that other Christians denounce him.  

I get this.  Crazy people will use any excuse to justify their actions, even if it doesn’t make any sense.  We are not obliged to abridge our speech or modify our beliefs just because some lunatic might misunderstand something we say.  

However, if we expect to be taken seriously, we will be aware of how we sound, and we will speak up when we are misunderstood.

As an example, I suggest Anders Breivik, the nutcase who shot up a children’s camp in Norway and murdered more than 70 people.  According to what he himself wrote, he was heavily influenced by the kind of right-wing rhetoric with which we’ve become all too familiar in this country.  

I don’t think that all self-identified Tea Partiers want to shoot up a group of children, even when children belong to families with whom the Tea Party disagrees.  I do think it’s vile to use the situation to describe the killer as a Muslim.

All the evidence available thus far suggests that the only Muslim involvement was that their existence enraged Breivik.  And yet, Pamela Geller felt comfortable describing him as a “jihadist.”  

If we want to talk about what constitutes a jihadist, let us consider the Taliban.  They believe that the laws of God supersedes the laws of men, and that anyone who disagrees with them deserves to be punished.  Sound familiar?  It does if you’re an American who believes in equal rights for homosexuals or that a woman who wants to be able to control her reproductive organs, or if you think The Crusades was a bad idea.  We have people here who support a similar agenda.

Real Christians should denounce this kind of speech.  
Media Goddess Martha Thomases will celebrate her 31st wedding anniversary this week, and she expects plaudits and tribute.