By Prof. Paul Eidelberg, President, Israel-America Renaissance Institute,
We need a “politically incorrect” and radically new multidisciplanary and multinational understanding of Islam.
To speak of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as the “three Abrahamic faiths” or as the “three religions of the Book,” or, more significantly, as the “three monotheisms,” obscures rather than illuminates. These familiar tropes, says theologian George Weigel, ought to be retired.
The eminent French scholar Alain Besançon agrees. He writes, “The Abraham of Genesis is not the Ibrahim of the Qur’an; Moses is not Moussa. As for Jesus, he appears, as Issa, out of place and out of time, without reference to the landscape of Israel. His mother, Mary, or Mariam, identified as the sister of Aaron, gives birth to him under a palm tree. Then Issa performs several miracles, which seem to have been drawn from the apocryphal gospels, and announces the future coming of Muhammad.
Alain Besançon takes us deeper into the heart of the matter. He draws this theological distinction between Judaism and Christianity, on the one hand, and Islam, on the other:
Although Muslims like to enumerate the 99 names of God, missing from the list, but central to the Jewish and even more so to the Christian concept of God, is “Father” – i.e., a personal God capable of a reciprocal and loving relationship with men. The one God of the Qur’an, the God who demands submission, is a distant God; to call him “Father” would be an anthropomorphic sacrilege. The Muslim God is utterly impassive; to ascribe loving feeling to Him would be suspect If God is not “Father,” then it is difficult to imagine the human person as having been made “in the image of God.”
Now, let us admit that Islam has, over the centuries, given meaning and purpose to hundreds of millions of lives that have been decently lived. It is also true, however, that today, throughout the world, Islam finds itself in the midst of what Besançon aptly describes as “a long-delayed, wrenching, and still far from an accomplished encounter with modernity.”
Indeed, Islam continues to divide mankind into two groups, the faithful on the one hand, and creatures Islam calls “pigs” and “dogs” on the other, an attitude that fosters Islamic terrorism.
To clarify matters further, in 1985, note well that Iran’s delegate to the United Nations, Said Raja’i-Khorassani, declared that “the very concept of human rights was ‘a Judeo-Christian invention’ and inadmissible in Islam.”
The indiscriminate nature of Islamic terrorism can be explained by these words of Catholic theologian George Weigel: “The notion that there are ‘no innocents,’ that the enemy is ‘guilty’ simply by reason of drawing breath — logically entails a strategy of open-ended mayhem based on the radical dehumanization of the ‘other.’”
Dehumanization describes the terrorist acts of the Palestinian Authority. This consortium of Muslim-led terrorist groups reduces Jewish children to body parts by exploding the busses in which they ride to school. There is no essential difference between these Muslim terrorists and those that perpetrated the blood bath in Paris, …read more
Source:: Israpundit
