Acknowledging the problem

There are many apologists who believe the reason some Muslims today resort to terror has nothing to do with Islamic texts and more to do with economic deprivation and political disenfranchisement.

That is simply not true, and is contradicted by the equally impoverished and destitute populations of non-Muslim countries who do not engage in acts of random violence.

Refusing to connect religious text to acts of terrorism is not only wrong, it is also dangerous because it prevents the proper diagnosis of the global problem of terrorism under the guise of political correctness.

Take the video widely shared on the Internet recently, where a Dutch couple reads, in the street, verses of a religious text to random people who are unwittingly led to believe the verses are from the Koran, only to be confounded by the fact that they are from the Bible.

Islam is not the only religion with violent texts, goes the message of this video.

Granted, the Old Testament (not the New Testament) does have repugnant verses calling to violence and for the subjugation of women.

But what the makers of that video completely missed is the fact that the violent verses of the Old Testament have been buried in total obscurity for centuries, until they were dug out from oblivion by this video.

Moreover, what this deceptive sketch totally disregards is the fact that the Old Testament verses that were read out are not being evoked every day by some deranged clerics urging their followers to commit mass murder.

When was the last school bombed to smithereens because of the Book of Deuteronomy?

When was the last woman stoned to death or genitally mutilated because of the Book of Genesis or Exodus?

On the other hand, the destructive ideology of hating and killing the infidels is being aggressively taught and indoctrinated in many schools and mosques in parts of the Muslim world to this very day.

The results of this Wahabist dissemination of the violent Islamic texts on the well-being of the rest of the inhabitants of this earth are all too visible to ignore.

A recent poll has shown that a terrifying 92 per cent of Saudi Arabians support Daesh and believe that it represents the real Islam. The numbers are not much better elsewhere in the Muslim world.

It is time that we realise that denying the problem will not make it go away, but will only make it worse by preventing the proper understanding of its causes.

In Jordan, a 10th grade mandatory schoolbook teaches schoolchildren that Prophet Mohammad said that God had ordered him to fight all mankind until it embraces Islam, and only then would people’s lives be spared.

This is the problem that the above video clip ignores.

If Dutch schools had been teaching those Bible verses to their children like we do, I would accept the message of that video.

But today, only Muslims are highlighting and teaching the violent texts to their children. That is why the Dutch video experiment is utterly misleading and grossly disingenuous.

After the second Paris attacks (the first being Charlie Hebdo), the same apologists pointed out that the attackers, although Muslim, used to be alcohol-drinking and drug-smoking dropouts, and therefore, let us rejoice: Islam is as innocent of this mass murder as, say, Buddhism.

What these dishonest pundits deliberately avoid mentioning is that these otherwise regular lads got radicalised and became prone to massacring their fellow citizens only after they came in contact with Wahabist Islam, and not any other ideology.

It is at that moment of adhering to the strict teachings of Sunni Islam that the Paris attackers ceased being ordinary folks and became homicidal maniacs. The same is true of the San Bernardino massacre, and of each and every single politically and religiously motivated random attack on civilians these days.

There is always one common denominator that drives the murderers, and it is not the teachings of the Greek Orthodox Church, one can be sure.

The current Sunni Wahabist version of Islam is a very guilty culprit indeed.

Islam will only become innocent if the Wahabist ideology that has overtaken its core is drastically addressed.

This requires a colossal undertaking by Muslims to cleanse the Islamic texts of the widespread edicts of hate and death.

The cleansing must be coupled with the monumental overhaul of school curricula that incorporate such texts and feed them to the young across the Muslim world.

Until then, shying away from pointing to the root cause of the global epidemic of terrorism against civilians shall remain an exercise in blatant self-delusion.

The writer is a Jordanian attorney and partner in the law firm of Nabulsi & Associates. He contributed this article to The Jordan Times.