The "religion of peace," near Ground Zero.

This is from reader Patrick Sweeney:

"I am a speaker for the Catholic Evidence Guild New York Chapter. The mission of the guild is public speaking on the Catholic faith.

We were only a mile away from the World Trade Center site. We were out on 10/5/2002. My topic on "Christianity and Islam" was interrupted by a Muslim who objected to the claim, which I would think was self-evident, that there was a religious motivation to the 9/11 attacks.

He said their cause was not Islam but "injustice". Since the 9/11 attackers were not Palestinian but Saudi Arabs, I wondered where there was injustice. The answer is a simple as "God has promised the world to Islam. Convert or die."

In the mind of the person I was speaking to "peace" was "the triumph of Islam" and "justice" was "law according to the Koran". The conclusion is there is no peace in New York without Islam's triumph here (not merely freedom of worship). There is no justice in New York without our rights defined according to the Koran.

I live next door to a Muslim and live among many Muslims and speak to them often about their faith. There’s an active Islamofascist movement in the United States--I may have even spoken to a member of a “cell” of them. But for me the long-term problem is that there’s a passive acceptance of them among the mainstream Muslims. It boils down to a question of a good end (the promised triumph of Islam) pursued with an evil means (war and terrorism). The history of Islam shows that military conquest is a laudatory and legitimate in their view.

The Islamofascist movements here and throughout the world are not fringe movements like the KKK or American neo-fascists but numerous, well-funded, and deadly. So for me, the question of whether Islam is a religion of peace is as irrelevant as the question of whether Hitler was a Christian or not in 1939. The war on terror must be fought and won."


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