Devout Muslims have a sacred responsibility, according to the command of Allah through his prophet Muhammad, to "slay the idolaters wherever you find them (Sura 9:5)." Over 100 verses in the Koran call for the death of infidel Christians and Jews. We have seen the tragic fruit of this ideology both on 9/11 and at Fort Hood. Islam is not, in fact, a religion of peace but of violence, death and war.
Islam, through the example of Muhammad, sanctions the marriage of girls who are but children. Muhammad himself began having sex with his youngest wife Aisha when she was just nine years old (Bukhari, Vol. 8). Just last week, a 12-year-old girl in Saudi Arabia went to court to divorce her 80-year-old husband. In the West, these are acts of pedophilia and utterly at odds with the Christian principle that the sexual purity of young females is to be protected until they are mature enough to voluntarily and freely enter into marriage.
Christians are granted only second class status under Islam, and are given only three choices where Islam reigns: conversion, submission or death. Conversion from Islam to Christianity remains a capital offense in many Muslim countries. In supposedly free Egypt, Coptic Christians are even today routinely harassed, persecuted and killed by Islamic fundamentalists. Freedom of religion, a profoundly American value, is utterly absent in Islam. Further, this practice is directly at variance with the fundamental concept in American jurisprudence that we are all, everyone of us, equal under the law.
Women under the iron fist of Islam are given "horrid" treatment. In many Islamic countries, women are not allowed to receive an education or even show their faces in public. Husbands are taught in the Koran that they may literally beat their wives into submission, completely contrary to the Christian admonition that husbands are to "love their wives as Christ loved the church."
The blatant and deadly sexism in Islam is contrary to the fundamental Christian precept that men and women are full equals before the true God in spiritual worth, value and significance.
The practice of honor killings is widespread in the Islamic world. According to the U.N., over 5,000 women a year are brutally murdered under the flag of Islam, in many cases because they have brought "dishonor" to their families by becoming the tragic victims of rape. The "horrid" practice of honor killings sadly has come to the U.S. A Muslim husband decapitated his wife in New York, while a Muslim father in Texas shot his two teenage daughters to death in the back of a taxi cab and another Muslim father in Arizona ran his daughter down with the family SUV. The crime in the latter two cases was that their daughters had become too "Westernized." This practice is utterly at odds with the Christian teaching that fathers are to nurture and protect their children.
