Dr. Cader sounds like a very urbane, cosmopolitan gentleman, much like the erudite Muslim scholar, Abdelwahab Meddeb, whose French broadcast, Culture D’Islam, I listen to weekly. Both try to combat Muslim fundamentalism. Unfortunately, their erudition is waging an uphill battle against the Wahhabi madrassas sponsored by Saudi Arabian petro-dollars.
The bloody ISIS massacres in Iraq merely repeat the religious slaughters of other true believers who insisted on taking their “revelations” for Allah’s/Yahweh’s very word. All Abrahamic religions started this gory tradition when Yahweh commanded the Jews to slaughter even Canaanite women and babies. This has formed the divine basis for killing the heathen and heretics without mercy ever since. The Catholic church continued the tradition by massacring “heretics” as in the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre, (1572 massacre of 30,000 Protestants by French Catholics). Both the Catholic and Protestant leaders prepared the ground for the Holocaust by arguing for centuries that the Jews were obstinate, devilish Christ-killers. In 1543, Luther published On the Jews and Their Lies, in which he says that the Jews are full of the “devil’s feces ... which they wallow in like swine” and advocated that their “synagogues and schools be set on fire, their prayer books destroyed,” concluding that “we are at fault in not slaying them.” The Catholics’ blood-libel elevated Simon of Trent to sainthood; claiming that Jews had slaughtered the toddler to use in their Passover rites; and attributing hundreds of miracles to this mini-Christian martyr. The Sunni and Shia Muslim have been massacring each other since the First Fitna or First Islamic Civil War (656–661).
More ecumenical/secular Christians, Muslims, and Jews would like to forget this heritage, like hiding the disreputable relative in the closet. (But Luther and the popes weren’t fringe fanatics.) Unfortunately, murderous, religious intolerance is solidly rooted in the Abrahamic religions; the Koran and Christian scriptures being largely similar to a second and third edition of the Jewish Torah. Today’s ISIS simply does what Luther and multiple popes advocated prior to when secularism via the Enlightenment loosened the hold of superstitious, biblical inerrancy in the West. Unfortunately, fundamentalist Jewish settlers insist their scriptures promised them Greater Israel; fundamentalist Christians say their scriptures agree with the Jewish fundamentalists; whereas fundamentalist Hamas claim that the Koran gave them the same territory. And since Yahweh/Allah/Jesus and their revelations are all infallible, a nuclear war to settle the question appears inevitable unless all three groups become secularized.
