Ask yourselves a simple question and you might get to the heart of the matter. Yes. This is in relation to the Orlando shooting. Yes, this is a rebuke of all Donald Trump proposes to stand for.
Why is it that when Robert Lewis Dear, Jr. killed a police officer and two civilians, while also injuring five police officers and four more civilians, that neither the news media nor any politicians referred to the shooter as a ‘Radical Christian Terrorist?’ If we are going to be uninformed enough to lend credence to the faulty religious views of murderers, then at least we should avoid hypocrisy and refer to all those who commit heinous acts in their misguided religious beliefs under the same terminology.
Dylann Roof – Radical Christian Terrorist. Randall Terry – Radical Christian Terrorist. Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson – Radical Christian Terrorists. This list could go on for days. These were all people who committed murder because they believe their faith demanded action. Yet we do not refer to them as Radical Christian Terrorists.
Why? In the simplest terms because the majority of America identifies with the Christian faith and fully understands that a murderers perversion of truth and justice does not represent the actual religion. It simply represents people unintelligent or angry enough to convince themselves that their hatred is justified – that they are messengers. Misguided as though they may be, we get that they are misguided because we are much more cognizant of their faith and what it should represent.Christianity should be about tolerance and love. Peace and Joy.
So too should we understand, then, that Islam is not the problem here; anger, hatred, violence and the ability to murder a large number of human beings in a swift time frame is being facilitated. But not by faith and not by Islam.
The media, like it or not, are playing into the hands of terrorist. They want a Holy War – and every time we refer to Islam as the problem behind terrorism, we take it one step closer to that goal. Every time Donald Trump wants to ban a religion from entering the country, every time he incessantly and vociferously rebukes the faith and refuses to understand that the faith itself is not the problem, we take the actual terrorists one step closer to the Holy War they so desperately crave.
But, the thing is, it’s not a Holy War; it is a war like any other. It is about territory and natural resources. It is about politics and government – it is not about Christianity v. Islam.
The current President and his predecessor have both been cognizant of this reality.
“We are not at war with Islam. We are at war with people who have perverted Islam,” President Obama said at the Summit on Countering Violent Extremism in February 2015.
“They try to portray themselves as religious leaders — holy warriors in defense of Islam,” the president said in the same speech. “We must never accept the premise that they put forward, because it is a lie. Nor should we grant these terrorists the religious legitimacy that they seek. They are not religious leaders. They’re terrorists.”
While Trump wants to make this about Islam, even George W. Bush would not make that leap because he too understood the truth. "Americans understand we fight not a religion. Ours is not a campaign against the Muslim faith. Ours is a campaign against evil," Bush said following the September 11 attacks.
While technically an educated man, Trump lacks both the intelligence and demeanor to be a leader. For those of my friends and readers who believe he is taking us in the right direction, first, understand that many of his ‘platform’ goals are not even constitutional. Want to ban Muslims from entering the country? Well, there’s that pesky First Amendment standing in the way.
The moment we allow the pillar of our Constitution to be degraded, the sooner we lose what we should truly cherish. Money, property, belongings, those are all meaningless without freedom. We can say what we want, we can go to church (or not) where we want.
Those are fundamental liberties and Trump wants to take them away from you. Wake up America, Trump does not want to make anything great; he wants to destroy the greatness which already exists.
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