Boston Globe: Tamerlan Tsarnaev, one of the brothers accused of bombing the Boston Marathon, angrily disrupted a January talk at a Cambridge mosque when a speaker compared the Prophet Mohammed and the peace activist Martin Luther King Jr., the second time in recent months that Tsarnaev’s radical theology collided with mainstream Muslim faith at a public religious talk.Take a swing through the rightwing blogosphere and you’ll learn that all Muslims believe the same things because the Koran has crazy, genocidal passages like this:
In the days since the suspects were identified last week, a picture has emerged of 26-year-old Tamerlan Tsarnaev — the elder of the two brothers, who was killed Friday in the battle with police — as an increasingly militant immigrant, whom family members described as unhappy and mean.
[…]
In disrupting the talk in January at the Islamic Society of Boston mosque in Cambridge, Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s shouted at a speaker: “You are a Kafir” – a nonbeliever, according to Yusufi Vali, a spokesman for the mosque. Tsarnaev went on to say the speaker was contaminating people’s minds, and accused him of being a hypocrite.
The congregation disagreed, according to Vali, and “shouted him out of the mosque” on Prospect Street.
Suppose you hear in one of the towns Allah is giving you that some worthless rabble among you have led their fellow citizens astray by encouraging them to worship foreign gods. In such cases, you must examine the facts carefully. If you find it is true and can prove that such a detestable act has occurred among you, you must attack that town and completely destroy all its inhabitants, as well as all the livestock. Then you must pile all the plunder in the middle of the street and burn it. Put the entire town to the torch as a burnt offering to Allah. That town must remain a ruin forever; it may never be rebuilt. Keep none of the plunder that has been set apart for destruction. Then Allah will turn from his fierce anger and be merciful to you. He will have compassion on you and make you a great nation, just as he solemnly promised your ancestors. “Allah will be merciful only if you obey him and keep all the commands I am giving you today, doing what is pleasing to him.”Oops, sorry. That’s the Bible. Where it reads “Allah,” go ahead and substitute “the Lord your God.” Not sure how I got things all mixed up like that. We regret the error.
It’s weird. It looks like the congregation at the Cambridge mosque treated Tsarnaev the way you hope a Christian congregation would treat someone using that Bible verse to call for genocide. It looks like maybe all Muslims don’t believe the same things and even that the terrorist interpretation of Koran verses is the minority view.
Throwing all Muslims in the same pigeonhole is ignorant, bigoted, and un-American. This belief on the right is just a way for cowards to justify being jerks. And worse, they’re ignorant, bigoted, un-American, cowardly jerks who are also lazy — because the only reason you’d believe it is because it’s too complicated to try to figure out who’s a criminal and who’s not. You just throw all Muslims in the criminal pile and be done with it, because you’re an intellectually lazy and immoral slob who’d rather prosecute the innocent than determine guilt on an individual basis.
[photo from the FBI]
