Guns Don’t Kill People, Liberalism and Radical Islam Do

After the recent attack on Manchester by Islamic terrorists, British author and journalist Douglas Murray provided a simple two-word suggestion for what help prevent future such violence in Great Britain: “less Islam.” To bolster his point, Murray pointed out that, “countries like Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic have very little Islam and very little Islamic terror. By contrast, France has a great amount of Islam and a great amount of Islamic terror.” Of course, Islamic apologists “promptly went bananas” (Murray’s words).

As we have seen for years now, and as recent events again demonstrate, “Islamic apologists” include not only those deceived by Islam, but also includes those deceived by liberalism as well. I say again, there are few greater threats to life, limb, and liberty in the world today than liberalism and Islam. Radical Islamists drive the vans, pull the triggers, slash the knives, strap on the bombs, cut off the heads, and so on, while radical liberals in the media and the state houses—among other dastardly and deadly things—provide the political cover for the slaughter to continue.

In spite of the obvious differences in their worldviews—the “Do What Thou Wilt” godless philosophy that dominates in modern liberalism vs. a rigid, uncompromising (and man-designed) religious code that dominates radical Islam—both share a common trait that deceives one (liberals) into thinking that the other (radical Islam) can be “tolerated:” a disdain for Christianity.

Millions of Christians and other such “apostates” (tens of millions by some estimates) continue to die at the hands of Islamists. For one of the worst examples (one the media often ignores), according to Africa: The Holocausts of Rwanda and Sudan,

Well over two million southern black Christians, Muslims, and animists in the Sudan have died, the great majority civilians, in a genocide that few in the world have heard about. Since 1983, ethnic cleansing and a religious holy jihad (since 1992) have created a holocaust that rival the two great genocides in Europe (the Holocaust and Stalin’s Gulag)…In the Nuba Mountains the Arab Muslim fundamentalists practiced an age-old custom of taking blacks into slavery, forcing conversion of many to Islam, and then decided to wipe out the fifty tribes by genocide, similar to the situation in Darfur in the west.

Tragically, modern liberals are so desperate to rid the world of Christians and Christianity that they will tolerate almost anything, except authentic Christianity. What’s more, as the violence from radical Islamists rages on (and on, and on), time and again, liberal pundits and politicians, as they are forced to address the bloodshed—and after even their own are murdered—go to absurd lengths to avoid even the hint of a mention of Islam. As Daniel Greenfield put it after knife-wielding Muslims rampaged London, “Islamic terrorism has no religion even when it’s shouting, ‘This is for Islam.’”

Of course, after yet another round of killing in the name of Islam, godless liberals also give us the obligatory—and lazily idiotic assertion that—when it comes to “violence in the name of religion” the “Christians did it too!” To liberals, all religious extremists are equal, though, when one honestly compares radical Christianity with radical Islam, nothing could be further from the truth.

In fact, when it comes to killing the innocent, violent religious extremists of any flavor could learn a thing or two from the violent anti-religious extremists that dominate the modern left. The greatest murderers in the history of humanity were the godless socialists and communists of the 20th century. As renowned scholar, educator, and author Walter E. Williams notes,

Between 1917 and 1987, Vladimir Lenin, Josef Stalin and their successors murdered and were otherwise responsible for the deaths of 62 million of their own people. Between 1949 and 1987, China’s communists, led by Mao Zedong and his successors, murdered and were otherwise responsible for the deaths of 76 million Chinese. The most authoritative tally of history’s most murderous regimes is documented on University of Hawaii professor Rudolph J. Rummel’s website and in his book “Death by Government.”

Multiple sources, including professor Rummel, conclude that, in the past century, atheistic regimes worldwide have led to the deaths of tens-of-millions, with some sound estimates putting the total number of deaths at more than 250,000,000!

Very often, the drive to kill was an effort to purge religion—especially Christianity—from the state. Even Wikipedia notes that the slaughter in the Soviet Union started with multiple “anti-religious” campaigns that began in the early 1920s, where “new legislation…severely prohibited religious activities and called for a heightened attack on religion in order to further disseminate atheism.” In 1937 alone, more than 85,000 Russian Orthodox priests were executed.

Though there are certainly distinctions between the godless socialists and communists of the 20th century and the European and North American liberals of today, there are also very scary similarities. In his mid-19th century Critique of Socialism, Alexis de Tocqueville summarized well the ideology of socialism when he wrote,

They unceasingly attempt to mutilate, to curtail, to obstruct personal freedom in any and all ways. They hold that the State must not only act as the director of society, but must further be master of each man, and not only master, but keeper and trainer. For fear of allowing him to err, the State must place itself forever by his side, above him, around him, better to guide him, to maintain him, in a word, to confine him. They call, in fact, for the forfeiture, to a greater or less degree, of human liberty, to the point where, were I to attempt to sum up what socialism is, I would say that it was simply a new system of serfdom [a medieval form of bondage].

Sounds much like the efforts of modern liberals doesn’t it? And even when they claim to be champions of “personal freedom”—as is often their cry when it comes to everything to do with matters in the sexual realm—modern liberalism is still filled with violence and bondage. With nearly 60 million unborn children killed since 1973, U.S. abortion-supporting liberals must be the envy of genocidal maniacs the world over. American abortionists have managed to turn what should be one of the safest places in the universe—a mother’s womb—into a killing field. Worldwide, since 1980, a staggering 1.5 billion children have been aborted.

In addition, guided by the false belief that “Do What Thou Wilt” (especially in the sexual realm) frees us from the shackles of the “antiquated” ideas on morality and personal ethical behavior, liberalism has set about to discredit and abandon many of the eternal and inescapable absolute truths set down by our Creator that should be the cornerstones of all good government. Thus, almost any sexual perversion imaginable is, in the U.S. today, a “right.” And instead of being free, tens of millions of Americans are now slaves to their sexual desires. As a result, STD rates in the U.S. have reached record, epidemic rates.

Of course, just as there are many Muslims who are not terrorists, there are many liberals who are not Christian-hating, terrorist-tolerating, sex-crazed abortionists. However, just as the world’s greatest problem with violent terrorism lies within Islam, the world’s biggest problem with godless, pleasure-peddling statists lies within liberalism.

(See this column at American Thinker.)

Copyright 2017, Trevor Grant Thomas
At the Intersection of Politics, Science, Faith, and Reason.
www.trevorgrantthomas.com
Trevor is the author of The Miracle and Magnificence of America
tthomas@trevorgrantthomas.com