Guest Commentary: Some balance needed

A letter in the April 12 issue speaks of the “genocide” of Christians by Islamic groups in north Africa and the Middle East. The persecution of any religious group anywhere is wrong, but by the U.S. government’s own figures, between 82% and 97% of the victims of ISIS and other groups in the Middle East have been Muslim.

Jim Fontana is wrong to say that most of the Koran mandates hostile behavior toward non-Muslims. Some of it does. Similarly, the Christian Bible asks us to stone people who worship other Gods, people who commit adultery, blasphemers and a host of other transgressors. In the same manner that most Christians ignore those dictates, the overwhelming majority of Muslims ignore the exhortations of the Koran to commit violence.

Fontana is correct to say that combating terrorism is a primary goal of the FBI. However, he infers that this means combating Islamic terrorism. What he leaves out of that sentence is the fact that in 2017, according to the Anti-Defamation League, the majority of terrorist murders in the U.S. were carried out by white supremacists. A Duke University report in 2013 pointed out that Muslim groups in the U.S. actually thwarted more terrorism incidents than did the U.S. government.

It’s easy for us to remember the 19 Muslims who committed the atrocities of Sept. 11, 2001. Forgotten, if we see this only as a Muslim attack, are the dozens of American Muslims who died that day in the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.

To suggest that Muslims have a monopoly on terrorism is to forget the thousands of Americans who were lynched by the Ku Klux Klan, a quasi-Christian group. The greatest terrorist incident committed in the United States prior to the Oklahoma City bombing was committed by Mormons at Mountain Meadows in Utah.

I spent eight of the years of the 1970s living in Ireland and saw first-hand how adept so-called Christians are at committing terrorism.

Terrorism truly doesn’t belong to any religion, only to bigotry and extremism; terrorists merely exploit religious labels to further their agenda and breed on polarized viewpoints.

I’m a practicing Christian in Ramona. I count Muslims among my closest friends and have traveled in Muslim countries. What I take from Islam is different — I yearn to have the discipline to pray five times a day as many of them do, or to prostrate myself to God when I hear the call of the Muezzin. I wish that I could be as earnest about my Lenten fast as some of my Muslim friends are about their Ramadan fasting.

I would encourage people of all faiths to learn the truth about Islam and would recommend the book “Muhammad” by Karen Armstrong, a former Catholic nun. Before we point fingers at Muslims, we should remember the words of Jesus in the gospel of Matthew: to “remove the beam from your own eye in order to be able to see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.”

Michael Hall is a Ramona resident.