Call me an Islamophobe, please. Seriously.

How does one reconcile Ramadan’s rosy picture of Islam with these oft-recurring and ubiquitous acts of terrorism — all perpetrated by Muslims and in the name of Islam?

Ramadan insists that Islam does not teach terrorism, much less suicide bombings. However, considering that we have reached a point now that on almost any given day some Muslim somewhere detonates him- (and now, her-) self in an effort to kill the perceived enemies of Islam; considering that, since Ramadan’s three-day lecture, nearly 500 additional people have been killed in suicide attacks, primarily in Iraq — is that not profound evidence to the contrary? Shall we judge based on words (such as Ramadan’s) or deeds (such as the Islamists’)?

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200 Million Minority:

Islam’s apologists completely miss the point.

By Raymond Ibrahim

April 27, 2007 7:00 AM

For three consecutive days, April 10-12, Tariq Ramadan, the controversial Muslim activist who was denied a U.S. visa for questionable activities (such as making “charitable” donations to the terrorist organization Hamas, which regularly commissions suicide-attacks), was invited by Georgetown University to give a one-way talk live via satellite — a move which many, including several Georgetown faculty, protested.
The Washington Post reports that Ramadan’s overarching theme was that “Islam and democracy are not incompatible in their tenets of equality and freedom for all and that tensions between them have arisen because of historic problems — such as European colonialism, political manipulation by Middle Eastern autocrats and the influence of minority Islamic groups he described as ‘literalists.’” As to the question of Islam and violence, the Georgetown Voice reports he asserted that, “[Terrorism] is not only non-Islamic, it’s anti-Islamic.” And when discussing the presence of Muslims in the West, he bemoaned the fact that “We are obsessed with the few [radical Muslims] and not seeing the many [moderate Muslims].”

Meanwhile, on the very same three days that Ramadan was exonerating Islam of terrorism, various Islamic groups around the world engaged in wanton acts of terrorism:

On April 10, three suicide bombers in Morocco detonated themselves while being chased by police, killing, among others, a child. That same day, at the other end of the Islamic world, in Iraq, a woman detonated herself killing 16 men who were waiting in an employment line. On April 11 in Algeria, an al Qaeda-sponsored suicide-bombing campaign targeted the prime minister’s office, claiming 33 lives and wounding 222. And on April 12, hours after a suicide truck tore through a major bridge in Baghdad, killing at least ten people, another suicide bomber detonated himself in the Iraqi-parliament cafeteria, killing at least eight (including lawmakers who were trying to create a viable democracy for Iraq).

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MWRlNjJmNzU4NzZkZDk0NDgxNDMzMWEwMmNhMzJmYzE=