When religious beliefs become evil: 4 signs

(from 2013))

by John Blake, CNN

(CNN) – An angry outburst at a mosque. The posting of a suspicious YouTube video. A friendship with a shadowy imam.

Those were just some of the signs that Tamerlan Tsarnaev, accused of masterminding the Boston Marathon bombings, had adopted a virulent strain of Islam that led to the deaths of four people and injury of more than 260.

But how else can you tell that someone’s religious beliefs have crossed the line? The answer may not be as simple you think, according to scholars who study all brands of religious extremism. The line between good and evil religion is thin, they say, and it’s easy to make self-righteous assumptions.

“When it’s something we like, we say it’s commitment to an idea; when it’s something we don’t like, we say it’s blind obedience,” said Douglas Jacobsen, a theology professor at Messiah College in Pennsylvania.

Yet there are ways to tell that a person’s faith has drifted into fanaticism if you know what to look and listen for, say scholars who have studied some of history’s most horrific cases of religious violence.

“There are a lot of warning signs all around us, but we usually learn about them after a Jim Jones or a David Koresh,” said Charles Kimball, author of “When Religion Becomes Evil.”

Here are four warning signs:

1. I know the truth, and you don’t.

FULL ARTICLE FROM CNN 

Within hours of the Christchurch mosque attacks, people of various faiths rallied around Muslims

(CNN)Churches are opening their doors after mosques were told to close for security issues in the wake of the Christchurch, New Zealand, terrorist attacks. Mosques are receiving messages of solidarity and flowers. A fundraiser for the victims is nearing $400,000. And a UK-based national forum for Christian-Muslim engagement is calling on Christians to go along to Friday prayers at their local mosques — a call the archbishop of Canterbury endorsed.

Here’s how you can help the victims of the New Zealand terror attacks

These are only a few examples of how people and institutions are showing solidarity and offering help to Muslim communities all over the world after Friday’s shooting attacks on two Christchurch mosques that killed at least 49 people and seriously injured 20 others.

Here’s how you can help the New Zealand victims

In some of the worst terror attacks and mass shootings of recent years, Muslim communities have stepped up to help in different ways. In the aftermath of October’s Tree of Life Synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh, for example, the Muslim-American nonprofit groups CelebrateMercy and MPower Change launched a crowdfunding appeal that raised thousands for the victims.

FULL ARTICLE FROM CNN 

The Roots of the Christchurch Massacre

All those who have helped to spread the worldwide myth that Muslims are a threat have blood on their hands.

For Muslims, Friday Prayer is like Sunday Mass for Christians. It’s the day of community prayer. We travel to our local mosques, our religious sanctuary. Our families gather in the early afternoon to pray as a community. Kids run through the halls as the imam recites the Quran in Arabic. We eat together and mingle outside.

This week, as those of us in the United States attend Friday Prayer, the Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand, are preparing for funerals.

People around the world are praying for the dead in Christchurch after terrorist attacks at two mosques. The authorities say a 28-year-old Australian walked into two mosques with assault rifles and killed at least 49 people. New Zealand’s prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, called it “an extraordinary and unprecedented act of violence.”

Thoughts and prayers are not enough. These attacks are the latest manifestation of a growing and globalized ideology of white nationalism that must be addressed at its source — which includes the mainstream politicians and media personalities who nurture, promote and excuse it.

FULL ARTICLE FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES 

New Zealand mosque attacks and the scourge of white supremacy

Today’s New Zealand mosque shootings, which killed at least 49 people and were allegedly carried out by white supremacists, are only the latest on a long list of recent acts of white supremacist terrorism. Despite the growing and constant threat, Western governments have failed to adequately address the danger of white supremacy.

An abbreviated list of recent acts of white supremacist terrorism includes Robert Gregory Bowers’ killing of 12 Jewish worshippers at a Synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 2018; Alexandre Bissonnette’s massacre of six Muslims in the Quebec City mosque in 2017; Dylann Roof’s murdering of nine black Christian parishioners in a Charleston, South Carolina church in 2015; and Anders Behring Breivik’s slaughter of 77 people in Norway in 2011.

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, numerous other white supremacist plots, including some that planned to kill as many as 30,000 people, have been foiled by law enforcement in the United States. Just last month, the American FBI arrested Christopher Paul Hasson, a white supremacist and lieutenant in the US coastguard, for allegedly plotting terrorist attacks against black and liberal politicians and media personalities.

FULL ARTICLE FROM AL JAZEERA 

Muslims and Jews must focus on facing the common threat of white supremacy

Last month, my dear friend Amy texted me pictures taken from the stalls in the bathroom where her daughter is a high school student in the Midwest. One picture had a swastika, the lower left corner said, “Kill” while the upper right corner read, “Jews.” “Kill Jews” was scrawled on other parts of the stall as well. Her daughter is one of a handful of Jews in a school of 1500.

The statements scrawled on the stall of the high school articulated a clear threat to the physical safety of Jewish students and yet there was a part of Amy that understandably felt numb, exhausted. With a constant stream of hate, the burden is left on the disenfranchised to navigate which form of discrimination rises to level where combatting it is a survival-based necessity and which to ignore or accept as the collateral damage of being a minority.

A few short months before this incident, eleven members of the Tree of Life Congregation were massacred in cold blood, targeted for their Jewish identity. According to FBI data released in November of last year, hate crimes against Jews increased thirty-seven percent between 2016 and 2017.

Anti-Semitism, like Islamophobia, is undoubtedly on the rise. Now more than ever, it is essential that Jews and Muslims recognize one another as natural allies against the common threat of white supremacy and continue to cultivate an alliance rooted in social justice, dignity and recognition.

This is already happening. For example, crowdfunding campaign by the Muslim American community to support the Tree of Life Congregation raised nearly $250,000. In 2017, a similar campaign raised over $150,000 to help with cleanup after a Jewish cemetery in St. Louis had been vandalized.  After a mosque burned down in Texas, a neighboring synagogue offered their keys for Muslims to continue their worship services.

FULL ARTICLE FROM THE HILL 

Senate Confirms Dangerous Christian Extremist as CIA Director

The new head of the CIA is a dangerous Christian extremist who believes the U.S. is at war with Islam.

Earlier today, the U.S. Senate confirmed Representative Mike Pompeo as the new head of the powerful Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

Pompeo, a Kansas Republican and prominent member of the House Intelligence Committee, is a radical Christian extremist and a sharp critic of Islam who endorsesthe notion of a “Holy War” between Christians and Muslims, and believes the fight against terrorism is a war between Islam and Christianity.

Speaking at a church group in Wichita, Kansas, in 2014, Pompeo claimed that Christianity was the “only solution” to combat terrorism, arguing that the greatest “threat to America” is caused by “people who deeply believe that Islam is the way.”

Pompeo told the church-goers:

This threat to America is from people who deeply believe that Islam is the way and the light and the only answer.

These folks believe that it is religiously driven for them to wipe Christians from the face of the earth.

Pompeo continued:

They abhor Christians, and will continue to press against us until we make sure that we pray and stand and fight and make sure that we know that Jesus Christ our savior is truly the only solution for our world.

In addition, at an event hosted by a Virginia-based think tank last year, Pompeo again invoked the notion of a Holy War, describing the wars in which the U.S. is involved in as being “between the Christian West and the Islamic East.”

FULL ARTICLE FROM GLOBAL RESEARCH (CANADA)

The Real Muslim American Threat? It’s Against Us (Muslim Americans)

A parade of white extremists has been nabbed recently for plotting to kill Muslims. Have you read about it? Didn’t think so.

There’s a growing threat in America involving Muslims. The FBI has even recently issued a warning to alert local law enforcement about it. But our politicians and media continue to ignore it.

The threat I’m speaking of is not “radical Islam,” as the right loves to call it. Rather I’m talking about the threat of “radical Americans” who are plotting to kill Muslim Americans and to stoke the flames of hate versus Muslims in hopes that others will be inspired to do just that.

Now some may be asking “What threat against Muslim Americans?” I can fully understand that reaction, given how little our media cover plots to kill Muslims. It appears to many in the media, Muslim lives simply don’t matter.

So let me bring you up to speed on what is going in the world of “radical Americans.” Just last Friday, Glendon Scott Crawford was convicted in federal court of trying to develop a “weapon of mass destruction” to kill Muslims in his upstate New York community near Saratoga Springs. Scott, an industrial mechanic at General Electric, was constructing a “death X-ray machine” to kill Muslims because he viewed them as the “enemies of Israel,” per the indictment.

Just so it’s clear, no one has claimed that Crawford was mentally ill. He was simply a man who so despised Muslims that he wanted to use his electrical skills to kill them with radiation. He had even successfully tested, with FBI undercover agents, the remote trigger for the device. Thankfully, he will be sentenced to 25 years to life in prison.

FULL ARTICLE FROM THE DAILY BEAST