The guidelines for Letters to the Editor of The Chautauquan Daily include warnings that libelous, demeaning or accusatory statements are unacceptable. This also means that the truth must be curtailed, for it is the truth that supremacist Muslims find inappropriate and offensive, even by those who perpetrate the acts.

Muslim deaths v. mosquito deaths

Nevertheless, I refer to guest speaker Hussein Rashid, who denied the intensity and frequency of religious violence, citing that Muslims kill a mere 17 Americans per year (surely, not in the year 2001), while mosquitoes kill an average of 750,000. This is the new Moral Inversion, that Sharia law is now moral and mosquitoes immoral. Are we to flick a wrist at jihadists and the growing body count? (According to Muslim historian Firistha, Muslims killed ~400 million Indian people during invasions and occupation of the Indian continent alone, bringing the worldwide total to more than 890 million victims since the birth of Mohammed.)

Seal of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant. Uploaded to Wikimedia Commons in 2008 Original author: User Monotheist on Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 Unported License

Are we to disregard the religious bigotry? sadistic cruelty? kidnappings? rapes? lifelong captivity? persecution of women? and worldwide terrorism? and arm ourselves with cans of repellant and netting? This may well be the Enlightenment that Rashid attempted to explain – that we misinterpreted the Middle East, that the wretched mosquito kidnaps young girls for sexual slavery, burns churches, and espouses destructive propaganda in America’s universities.

Rashid did eventually declare religions to be violent, but I submit that all religions cannot be so classified. Religions are not equal; their doctrines differ greatly. Buddhism promotes peacefulness, loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity. Hinduism’s many philosophies prescribe honesty, patience, self-restraint, and refraining from injuring living beings. Judaism and Christianity are commonly guided by the Torah and Ten Commandments. Islam’s guide is the Trilogy: Quran, Hadith and Sira.

“No killing” v. “slay the idolaters”

Compare one Commandment, “Thou shalt not kill/murder,” with the Qur’an’s 109 verses that call Muslims to war with nonbelievers, to kill infidels wherever they hide, to chop off heads and fingers, threatening Hell if they do not slaughter.

Unlike the Old Testament’s verses of violence that are explained in context of history, those in the Qur’an are open-ended, as relevant today as in the past. Islam’s ideology promotes violence until the nonbelievers accept humiliation, convert to Islam, or are killed – a history of bloodshed and suffering.