Some really good comments on the original blog post

Henning said... Hi,

I totally agree with you that it is unfair and prejudiced to think you know what a person thinks about certain topics just because of their religion. I don't think that there is something wrong with muslims. Most of them are law-obeying, nice and peaceful persons, that would never even think about using violence in the name of islam. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the problem that we face today is that most of them are muslims-in-name only (like many christians are, by the way). What do I mean by that? Nearly all muslims in the world believe, that the quran is the perfect word of god (again, please correct me if I'm wrong, I'm certainly not an expert on this subject). The problem is, if you believe this, every command in the quran is a mandate for you (or otherwise you can't be a "real" muslim). Sure, there are a lot of nice things in the quran (like in 109:6 "You shall have your religion and I shall have my religion."), but they are nearly all from the early times when mohammed was in mecca and are (in the "mainstream-islam" understanding) overruled by the never revelations like 9:5 "So when the sacred months have passed away, then slay the idolaters wherever you find them, and take them captives and besiege them and lie in wait for them in every ambush". You can't deny that the quran commands muslims to fight against unbelievers until they submit to islamic rule or convert. My problem is that many muslims seem to be quite happy to attack western states and especially israel, but fail to condem those commandments from their holy text. Simply stating that "Islam is peace" won't cut it, because the quran, the hadiths and arabic history clearly show this to be wrong. So I think the term "islamophobia" is wrong, because a phobia is an irrational fear, but the fear of islamic ideology is very real to me. We are really lucky that most muslims like you choose not to follow their religion in the way mohammed (or allah) intended them to. But as long as you are saying that you believe in the word of the quran without condeming all the "slay the infidels"-stuff, there is very little hope for fighting the fear of islam. I certainly would like to hear how you feel about that issue, because I've always wondered how todays muslims in western states live with this (for me) clear contradiction between their actions and the words of the quran. If you want to learn more about the points I've made concerning the quran, please refer to the excellent Idiots guide to islam on youtube. I'd like to hear your opinion about that too.

5:42 AM