I believe that Islam is on the cusp of a new era, balancing on a spire (or minaret, if you will) between the new and the old. And every citizen of Western Civilization has in the back of his mind, a question he is afraid to ask: does Islam have a peace problem?
It’s unfortunately a difficult conversation to have. American Liberalism has silenced this issue for nearly a century, calling in the PC police to the cry of “Islamophobia!” But this is a conversation we need to have, not just as a country, but as a species.
Let’s look at the facts. There are 1.6 billion Muslims in the world. The lowest estimate, by Glenn Beck, puts 90% of the Islamic population as peaceful, while the highest by Fareed Zakaria puts it at a whopping 99.993%. And if those numbers don’t scare you, let’s take a look at the problem qualitatively. In the past 10 years alone, there have been 5 Muslims selected for the Nobel Peace Prize: Mohamed ElBaradei, Muhammad Yunus, Tawakkul Karman, Malala Yousafzai, and of course, Barack Obama. This is a sign of not just casual peacefulness, but full-blown, intrinsic, and organized peace movements in Islam. I’d like to see the PC police argue with those numbers!
Others try to argue that religion has nothing to do with it. Reza Aslan recently went on record saying, “Islam doesn’t promote violence or peace. Islam is just a religion, and like every religion, it depends on what you bring to it.” Au contraire, monsieur Asla: many other religions have peace problems, too. Christianity makes a great example. Yes, it started out with not just one, but seven Crusades and followed that up with a good dosage of the Spanish Inquisition, but those old passions have died off, creating a peace problem today in Christianity, too. And as the old saying goes, correlation proves causation.
The question is, do we want to believe the selective evidence and stories the lamestream media force feeds us, or do we want to face the real facts about real Islam?
