Christianity began as an offshoot of Judaism and a political/religious response to the Roman Empire. Its founder preached accommodation and compromise rather than resistance to those under Roman domination. So it began as a religion of peace, and some would say of peace at any price. Though its scriptures deliver a message of peace and non-violent submission to authority, any philosophical problems that the message might pose have been successfully overcome, at least to the satisfaction of successive Christian clerics and leaders of Christian armies. Often enough, that religion of peace became one of war.
By contrast, Mohammad was a 7th century Arab trader who, after being inspired by a religious experience became convinced that he was God’s prophet on Earth. He set out to build an army and to lead it in a war to unite all the tribes of Arabia into one huge super-tribal force: a combined religious and military organisation, with himself as supreme commander and chief theocrat. His Islamic Empire in time spread from the borders of India to the gates of Vienna, and from Spain to Nigeria.
Islam thus began as a religion of war, with a bible (ie the Koran) that was and remains a warrior’s manual. Muslims, the overwhelming majority of whom have arrived in Islam via birth rather than conversion, have cherry-picked the scripture and have tried to re-badge the creed as one of peace, but with limited success. A further difficulty lies in the fact that the founder Mohammad forbade additions or alterations to the Koran. It is literally a closed book. So while proclaiming their Islam as a religion of peace, Islam's clerics have never been able to shake off its origins as a religion of war.
Muslims also have a problem when trying to live peacefully beside non-Muslims. Their Koran tells them on every other page that they are the elect of God and that their (inferior) infidel neighbours are headed for eternal damnation in Hell’s fire. Peacefully-inclined believers continually and in the main sincerely try to market Islam to themselves and others as a religion of peace. But periodic outrages are carried out by a youthful and militant minority of their fellow Muslims who incline to take their unalterable Koran a bit too literally. In the absence of serious efforts by Muslim clerics to denounce them, these outrages look like proceeding indefinitely into the future.
Typically, a multiple murder-suicide event as occurred in New York 2003 or in Paris in 2015 is followed by an Irish stew of analytical angst with a variety of conclusions drawn: it is all the fault of the victims, or of the West in general; it is not the fault of Islam; it is the legacy of the Crusades… Afghanistan... etc... Iraq… etc.
See Andrew Bolt’s dissection* of the statement by the Australian National Imams Council. See also Mehdi ('Yes... But') Hasan on the same subject in the Grauniad:
Let me be clear: to explain is not to excuse; explication is not justification. There is no grievance on earth that can justify the wanton slaughter of innocent men, women and children, in France or anywhere else.
The savagery of Isis is perhaps without parallel in the modern era. BUT the point is that it did not emerge from nowhere: as the US president himself has conceded, Isis “grew out of our invasion” of Iraq. [Caps not in the original: IM.]
If in France or any other non-Islamic majority country the number of outrages per year increases sufficiently, the result will be series of government responses from restrictions on Muslim immigration to a religious civil war: with unknowable consequences.
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/sack_the_mufti_now_no_the_paris_massacre_wasnt_the_fault_of_the_west/
*NB: Bolt may be the literary equivalent of a right-wing radio shockjock, but that doesn't prevent him from sometimes being right.
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