My dear liberal Muslim friends (I know you’re out there), the holy month of Ramadan is drawing to a close, and it has been the bloodiest in recent history. Some of the victims have been members of your own faith, but the perpetrators have not been the ones who hate Islam. They have been the ones who are fervently devoted to it, who were celebrating Ramadan along with you. Spilling infidel blood, in their view, is just another way of expressing piety and honoring God during the holiest of months, like praying and fasting.
I know that you absolutely despise these people as much as I do, and you want to have nothing to do with them. But how much killing in the name of your God can you still tolerate, before you are fed up with your own faith? And how much longer are you going to maintain the pious lie that this has “nothing to do with islam”? According to witnesses, the attackers in Dhaka told some of the hostages: “You people don’t have to be afraid; we came here to kill the non-Muslims.” After which they asked every single person to recite verses from the Qur’an, and proceeded to slit the throats of those who couldn’t. Nothing to do with Islam, honestly?
You insist that your God is compassionate and merciful, and that “islam” means “peace”, but you should stop fooling yourself. Your God is the greatest terrorist of all. Any being that condemns people to eternal torture for the mere thought crime of failing to believe in His existence upon insufficient evidence (I’m also looking at you, Christians) is a sadistic, malicious, tyrannical, cruel “terrorist”, in the most literal sense of the word.
I’ve often had discussions with you liberal Muslims about your beliefs, and to my amazement, many of you couldn’t even clearly renounce your belief in Hell. You evade the question, you start to hem and haw, you resort to euphemism. This troubles me. You cannot even clearly disown the notion that unbelievers like me will be punished for all eternity, by a being whom you worship as infinitely good and perfectly just? And you are somehow surprised that this inspires hatred and violence? That some impressionable youths take the notion of heaven and hell to heart, along with the other lurid nonsense in the Qur’an, and want to pay heed to the divine mandate for violence, giving unbelievers a taste of what awaits them in the afterlife? And yet you are prepared to say, with a straight face, that this has “nothing to do with islam”?
Stop paying lip service to the very same Holy Book that inspires tens of thousands of murderous thugs, in terrorist groups across the globe. Stop pretending that your book is inherently peaceful, and that all interpretations are equally valid. Stop tying yourself in exegetical knots trying to defuse and downplay the countless inflammatory verses. You are trying to salvage your religion, but I’m afraid its doctrines are rotten to the core.
In fact, why would you still want to associate with this religion at all? Why not abandon ship? Why don’t you reject faith altogether and become an atheist or agnostic?
You’re not afraid of hell, are you?