It won't be big enough...
Proposal: The Museum of the Victims of Jihad
Where is the tribute to those lost to the great evil of our times?
May 10, 2016
Danusha V. Goska
...
The twenty-first century needs a Museum of the Victims of Jihad. Jihad is a major force in world history, affecting everything from desertification to international trade routes, for example Christopher Columbus' discovery of America.
Koran 9:5 and hadith of Bukhari 1:24 are just two of the verses that stipulate that Muslims are to fight non-Muslims until they become Muslim. Muslims, citing these texts, have been killing non-Muslims for 1400 years. Motivations such as greed, bloodlust, jealousy, tribalism, territorial expansion, revenge, hunger, and dynastic disputes have long sparked war. There is, though, perhaps no other written texts that have for so long and so unambiguously instigated murder. Soldiers in war killed for Nazism, for example, for a mere six years.
It is difficult to find one coherent treatment of jihad per se. As Bill Warner has written,
"Islamic nations are nearly 100% Muslim. Those countries were Christian, Buddhist and Hindu. Exactly how did this change happen? When you read history it seems that Islam came, and, magically, the countries are Islamic … The entire history of the rise of Islamic imperialism is denied in the curriculum of our schools."
The textbook History Alive! The Medieval World and Beyond teaches, "Muslims should fulfill jihad … in their struggle to resist evil. The tongue may convince others to take up worthy causes, such as funding medical research. Hands may perform good works and correct wrongs." Or there's this; jihad is "a struggle within each individual to overcome difficulties and strive to please God." "Islam spread peacefully," reports Pearson's My World History. In Prentice Hall's The Modern World, the 9-11 hijackers are merely "teams of terrorists."
Distortion of Islam is not limited to grade school. New York University's Slavoj Zizek is a superstar scholar of Kim Kardashian wattage, though he is significantly less well groomed. He insists that 9-11 is equivalent to the "Christian" Oklahoma City Bombing. The Koran is not inspiring anyone: "one should instead focus on today's global capitalism" and "the catastrophic consequences of global economy." ISIS is representational of "western corruption by products;" ISIS members are businessmen selling cotton and oil. Westerners are "barbarians"; they practice "fundamentalist violence" through "anti-immigrant populism." When Muslim gangs rape women, they perform "a carnivalesque rebellion of the underdogs."
Politicians from both parties have distorted jihad. "Islam is peace," George Bush declared. "ISIL is not Islamic. No religion condones the killing of innocents," said Barack Obama. Hillary Clinton opined that the four dead Americans in Benghazi might be the victims of "guys out for a walk one night who decided they'd go kill some Americans."
Elites have so often repeated that violence committed by self-identified jihads has "nothing to do with Islam" that "nothing to do with Islam" has become a punchline: see here, here and here.
Contrast this with the PC insistence that any evil committed by a Christian be treated as an expression of an essential, ineradicable flaw in Christianity. Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, is frequently cited as an example of "Christian terrorism." In fact he declared himself an agnostic saying, "Science is my religion," and there are no Christian verses telling Christians to kill, and neither Jesus nor his apostles killed anyone. The attempts to identify Nazism as Christian are extremely powerful, even though they defy every known fact.
Another approach that distorts history: slice up the jihad narrative into isolated episodes: "Turks against Byzantines," "Tolerant Moors against Inquisitorial Spaniards" or in the words of Rolling Stone's cover story on Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, "how a popular, promising student was failed by his family and fell into radical Islam."
...
On the other hand, on June 10, 1998, the New York Times reported that Jakarta rapists said to their victims, "You must be raped because you are non-Muslim." Some accounts of the riot report that rapists shouted "Allahu Akbar." A Cologne imam said Muslim-on-German sex assaults "were the girls' own fault, because they were half naked and wearing perfume." Islamic scripture, history, and practice sanction Muslim men raping non-Muslim women the men have overpowered; as quoted above, that very tradition is an ISIS recruiting tool. Given this context, a purely economic explanation for mass rape in Jakarta or Cologne is suspect.
Finally, a disclaimer: I am not a website designer, a wealthy philanthropist, or a museum professional. I cannot make the Museum of the Victims of Jihad a reality. I describe, here, only what should and could be.
Proposal: The Museum of the Victims of Jihad
Proposal: The Museum of the Victims of Jihad
Where is the tribute to those lost to the great evil of our times?
May 10, 2016
Danusha V. Goska
...
The twenty-first century needs a Museum of the Victims of Jihad. Jihad is a major force in world history, affecting everything from desertification to international trade routes, for example Christopher Columbus' discovery of America.
Koran 9:5 and hadith of Bukhari 1:24 are just two of the verses that stipulate that Muslims are to fight non-Muslims until they become Muslim. Muslims, citing these texts, have been killing non-Muslims for 1400 years. Motivations such as greed, bloodlust, jealousy, tribalism, territorial expansion, revenge, hunger, and dynastic disputes have long sparked war. There is, though, perhaps no other written texts that have for so long and so unambiguously instigated murder. Soldiers in war killed for Nazism, for example, for a mere six years.
It is difficult to find one coherent treatment of jihad per se. As Bill Warner has written,
"Islamic nations are nearly 100% Muslim. Those countries were Christian, Buddhist and Hindu. Exactly how did this change happen? When you read history it seems that Islam came, and, magically, the countries are Islamic … The entire history of the rise of Islamic imperialism is denied in the curriculum of our schools."
The textbook History Alive! The Medieval World and Beyond teaches, "Muslims should fulfill jihad … in their struggle to resist evil. The tongue may convince others to take up worthy causes, such as funding medical research. Hands may perform good works and correct wrongs." Or there's this; jihad is "a struggle within each individual to overcome difficulties and strive to please God." "Islam spread peacefully," reports Pearson's My World History. In Prentice Hall's The Modern World, the 9-11 hijackers are merely "teams of terrorists."
Distortion of Islam is not limited to grade school. New York University's Slavoj Zizek is a superstar scholar of Kim Kardashian wattage, though he is significantly less well groomed. He insists that 9-11 is equivalent to the "Christian" Oklahoma City Bombing. The Koran is not inspiring anyone: "one should instead focus on today's global capitalism" and "the catastrophic consequences of global economy." ISIS is representational of "western corruption by products;" ISIS members are businessmen selling cotton and oil. Westerners are "barbarians"; they practice "fundamentalist violence" through "anti-immigrant populism." When Muslim gangs rape women, they perform "a carnivalesque rebellion of the underdogs."
Politicians from both parties have distorted jihad. "Islam is peace," George Bush declared. "ISIL is not Islamic. No religion condones the killing of innocents," said Barack Obama. Hillary Clinton opined that the four dead Americans in Benghazi might be the victims of "guys out for a walk one night who decided they'd go kill some Americans."
Elites have so often repeated that violence committed by self-identified jihads has "nothing to do with Islam" that "nothing to do with Islam" has become a punchline: see here, here and here.
Contrast this with the PC insistence that any evil committed by a Christian be treated as an expression of an essential, ineradicable flaw in Christianity. Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, is frequently cited as an example of "Christian terrorism." In fact he declared himself an agnostic saying, "Science is my religion," and there are no Christian verses telling Christians to kill, and neither Jesus nor his apostles killed anyone. The attempts to identify Nazism as Christian are extremely powerful, even though they defy every known fact.
Another approach that distorts history: slice up the jihad narrative into isolated episodes: "Turks against Byzantines," "Tolerant Moors against Inquisitorial Spaniards" or in the words of Rolling Stone's cover story on Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, "how a popular, promising student was failed by his family and fell into radical Islam."
...
On the other hand, on June 10, 1998, the New York Times reported that Jakarta rapists said to their victims, "You must be raped because you are non-Muslim." Some accounts of the riot report that rapists shouted "Allahu Akbar." A Cologne imam said Muslim-on-German sex assaults "were the girls' own fault, because they were half naked and wearing perfume." Islamic scripture, history, and practice sanction Muslim men raping non-Muslim women the men have overpowered; as quoted above, that very tradition is an ISIS recruiting tool. Given this context, a purely economic explanation for mass rape in Jakarta or Cologne is suspect.
Finally, a disclaimer: I am not a website designer, a wealthy philanthropist, or a museum professional. I cannot make the Museum of the Victims of Jihad a reality. I describe, here, only what should and could be.
Proposal: The Museum of the Victims of Jihad
