A Muslim lawyer was posed a question by a “white supremacist.” The lawyer, one Qasim Rashid, believes that he delivered a powerful answer:
White supremacist asks Muslim lawyer why there is no ‘Christian ISIS,’ gets schooled
Rashid gets harassed on the internet by anti-Muslim a-holes on the regular. One of them, who was likely quite proud of this “hot take,” asked him “Where’s the Christian version of ISIS and every other religion then?”
Rashid replied with thousands of years of receipts known as World History.
Rashid proceeds to list every atrocity, or imagined atrocity, committed by whites in the past. He lists the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the near annihilation of the Australian Aborigines and many Native American tribes, the Spanish Inquisition etc.
Let’s not get into the argument that some of those deeds were committed IN SPITE of Christianity, not because of it. Generally, the Church preferred converting native peoples rather than exterminating them. Instead, let’s focus on the more obvious point:
All of the listed crimes occurred long before any of us were even born. Most of us are aware that the Church was responsible for heinous crimes – IN THE PAST. It’s likely that the person who posed the question was asking about a “Christian ISIS” TODAY, not one that existed centuries ago. The question was, to spell it out more clearly, “Where IS the Christian version of ISIS…” not “Where WAS the Christian version of ISIS. We live in the present, and we worry about the future; there’s nothing we can do about the past.
But Rashid does list some current-day atrocities, such as the “Lord’s Resistance Army” in Uganda. This is what we are supposed to consider “modern-day Christianity.” While ISIS can cite any number of Islamic writings to justify its practices, can the Lord’s Resistance Army cite credible sources for its practices from Christian literature? I’d really like to know, but I suspect that the answer is “no.”
Rashid also mentions Christan militias in Central African Republic, and this is a good place to ask: Are ALL modern Christian atrocities the work of Africans? Shouldn’t we take race into account?
“Of course not!” he would reply. After all:
In America white supremacists, who are self-described Christian, are the single largest terror threat to American security, that’s according to the FBI and 392 police agencies…
This last claim is a difficult one to either prove or disprove, as definitions of “terror” vary widely, as do definitions of “white” and “supremacist.” According to Snopes:
Deaths from Muslim extremism vs far-right extremism
A major April 2017 report by the Government Accountability Office tracked incidents of far-right and Muslim extremist violence, and concluded the following:
Between 12 September 2001 and 31 December 2016, there were 23 fatal “Radical Islamist Violent Extremist-Motivated Attacks,” resulting in a total of 119 deaths in the United States. In the same time period, there were 62 fatal “far-right violent extremist-motivated attacks”, leading to 106 deaths.
Just two events account for more than half of the 119 deaths resulting from Muslim extremist attacks: the December 2015 San Bernardino attack, which killed 14 people, and the June 2016 Pulse night club attack, which killed 49 people.
According to the University of Maryland’s START consortium, between 12 September 2001 and 2016 there were 31 fatal “Islamist extremist” attacks, leading to 119 deaths. In the same time period, there were 89 “far-right extremist” attacks, resulting in a total of 158 deaths.
So both data sources agree that far-right extremist attacks are far more common, but they differ on the total number of deaths, with one source concluding that Muslim extremist violence has killed slightly more people (119 deaths, as opposed to 106), and another concluding that far-right extremist violence has killed significantly more (158 deaths, as opposed to 119).
According to START, Muslim extremist violence killed seven times more people than far-right extremist violence between 1990 and 2016, despite five times fewer fatal attacks. However, this period included the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and the attacks of 11 September 2001, the two deadliest terrorist incidents in American history. When those outliers are removed from the figures, according to START, far-right extremist violence caused 272 deaths between 1990 and 2016 — more than twice as many as the 130 deaths from Islamic extremism during the same period.
So whether Muslim or far-right extremists have killed more Americans depends on how you measure such incidents and which source you use. And sorting through attacks and placing them in the categories of “terrorism”, “violent extremism” or “hate crimes” can sometimes be extremely complicated.
But when it comes to extremist violence perpetrated by refugees, the numbers are unequivocal. In the four decades between 1975 and 2015, only 20 individuals who arrived in the U.S. as refugees either attempted or carried out a terrorist attack – resulting in three deaths. And, of most relevance to President Donald Trump’s proposed immigration ban, all three of those killings were perpetrated by anti-Castro refugees.
Not a single death has resulted from terrorist activity by a Muslim extremist refugee.
Even taking this at face value, there is a glaring problem with this analysis: It takes into account ONLY American deaths in America – and ignores the fact that Muslims account for only 1% of Americans (according to the Huffington Post). Obviously, this is going to impact the frequency of Islamic attacks on American soil.
Leftists love to cite the (supposedly) low number of American deaths due to Islamic terrorism as evidence that Islam does not pose much of a threat to us. It’s interesting that, when it comes to this particular statistic, they seem to be concerned only with the welfare of Americans.
If we compare this with the activities of leftist charitable organizations, such as The Clinton Foundation or Save the Children, we see that when it come to other matters, the focus is decidedly global. The Clinton Foundation website states:
We operate programs around the world that have a significant impact in a wide range of issue areas, including economic development, climate change, health and wellness, and participation of girls and women…
Because of our work, nearly 35,000 American schools have provided kids with healthy food choices in an effort to eradicate childhood obesity; more than 150,000 farmers in Malawi, Rwanda, and Tanzania are benefiting from climate-smart agronomic training, higher yields, and increased market access; working with partners, more than 8.5 million trees and tree seedlings have been planted to strengthen ecosystems and livelihoods; over 600,000 people have been impacted through market opportunities created by social enterprises and health and wellbeing programs in Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia, and Africa; through the independent Clinton Health Access Initiative, over 11.5 million people in more than 70 countries have access to CHAI-negotiated prices for HIV/AIDS medications; an estimated 85 million people in the U.S. will be reached through strategic health partnerships developed across industry sectors at both the local and national level; and members of the Clinton Global Initiative community have made more than 3,600 Commitments to Action, which have improved the lives of over 435 million people in more than 180 countries.
Nobody can accuse the Clinton Foundation of being primarily concerned with Americans; their emphasis is clearly a global one.
The Save the Children website states:
In 2016, Save the Children reached more than 157 million children, including more than 56 million children directly. We worked in 120 countries, including the United States, where we reached 683,000 children.
Their efforts are also global.
Yet when it comes to the victims of terrorism, these same people appear to be blind to the suffering of the victims of Islamic terrorism worldwide; it’s only the ones in America who seem to count.
The whole point of preventing a mass influx of Muslims into the United States is so that we do not become like Western Europe, North Africa or the Middle East, where attacks are far more frequent. Leftists are like a doctor who, tending to a young patient who has begun smoking, tells him, “You have nothing to worry about! Any adverse affects won’t develop for a long time. Keep smoking if it makes you happy; it’s only a little bit of smoke after all.” Of course, by the time the patient is diagnosed with cancer or emphysema, it will be too late.
The time to worry about Islamic terrorism (and the other ill effects of having a large Muslim population) is right now, when they only constitute a small proportion of our population. If we wait until they grow to 10% or 15% of our population, it will be too late.
Rashid makes the claim that ISIS is the result of Western bombings in the Middle East. If being bombed sows the seeds of terrorism and extremism, then I’d like him to explain to us why none of the non-Muslim countries, bombed by the U.S., are hotbeds of terrorism.
Rashid implies that ISIS is not truly Islamic. I’ll let David Wood explain why this is not so:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXBgqa-xQwY&w=560&h=315]
