Is Islam violent? ISIS in Syria. Iraq and West Africa. In Pakistan, there is Lashkar-e-Taiba and the attempted murderer of the schoolgirl, Malala Yousafzai. Immigrant Moroccan men roughly pushing women and fondling them in the crowd in Cologne.

Murderous bombs in Paris and Manchester. Iran is at war with its neighbours as well as fending off an attack from the US and Israel. Ayan Hirsi Ali, a Somali female author who was raised a Muslim, writes, “Violence is inherent in Islam — it’s a destructive, nihilistic cult of death. It legitimates murder.”

The late Harvard professor, Samuel Huntington, argued that in the later years of the last century and the early years of this an uncannily high percentage of the world’s violent conflicts took place between Muslims and non-Muslims, Turks versus Greeks, Russians versus Chechens, Bosnian Muslims and Albanians versus Serbs, Armenians versus Azeris, Uighurs versus Han Chinese, Indian Hindus versus Muslims, and Arabs versus Jews,

Yet most Muslims don’t commit acts of violence. If Islam is intrinsically violent, then roughly a billion believers either do not understand their own religion or are too cowardly or unfaithful to follow its precepts. That is my sarcasm, but, indeed, this is what the violent Islamists say.

Myths, Misreadings, and........

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