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April 30, 2007

Using Circular Reasoning To Explain Away Muslim Violence

Topics: Understanding Islam

While researching online this morning, I stumbled across an old op-ed titled, "The Prophet and the limits of free speech," by Syed Badiuzzaman. What struck my attention about the piece is that one - it is without doubt the most amazing example of circular reasoning I have ever seen, and two - it's exactly the kind of logic used by Islamists the world over to attempt to explain away Muslim violence against anything and everything that doesn't conform to their rather narrow world view. Take Baediuzzaman's first paragraph:

Since its inception, Islam has always been a religion of peace, tolerance and compassion. Yet, as it has always been, there will be some people somewhere in this world to do something provocative to Muslims and like to see them retaliate and engaged in violence, so that they look bad in the eyes of the world. The leaders of the Muslim world have a very significant role to play at this very moment in calming down the Muslims and dealing with the situation in a peaceful manner, which the Prophet Muhammad himself had preached for all his life.

For Islamists like Baediuzzaman, Muslims are peaceful, tolerant, and compassionate, it's "those other people" that make them look bad because peaceful, tolerant, and compassionate Muslims react violently when people anger them. It's not the angry, violent, Muslims' fault, it's the fault of those terrible people that made them mad. Go figure!

Interesting way of thinking, but not characteristic of only Islamists. Apparently Democrats think the same way: In spite of much evidence to the contrary, Democrats say that al-Qaeda in Iraq has stepped up the violence in Iraq because we haven't pulled our troops out fast enough and our strategy isn't working, rather than al-Qaeda has stepped up the violence because the Democrats are trying to force us to surrender and get our troops out now, and not having just fallen off the turnip truck yesterday, they recognize that their demands and plans are parroted by the Democrats which in turn causes even more disunity here at home.

The fact that al-Qaeda is responding to the surge totally escapes the Dems.

Posted by Richard at April 30, 2007 7:39 AM

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