The cruel murder by ISIS adherents of a defenceless, elderly Catholic priest celebrating Mass in a small Normandy church is by no means the first of its kind. Jihadists waging “holy war” have been doing similar cowardly acts to Christian clergy and lay-people here and there across the Maghreb, the Middle East and in Saharan Africa for twenty years now. The 1996 slaughter of Trappist monks at Tibhirine in Algeria by extreme Islamists was a foretaste of what has now become a commonplace event.
When it happens close to home, the media impact is greater; but the horrific reality has largely been under-reported by Western media
The Al Nusra Front in Syria (which has been backed by Erdogan’s Turkish regime and financed by Saudi Arabia and Qatar without any effective protest by Western governments) has been committing similar atrocities on Christians and other vulnerable religious minorities for the last six years.
ISIS or Daesh is only the latest manifestation of extreme Islamist fundamentalism which wants to wage religious war in the name of Islam.
As I wrote here a few weeks ago, the great irony of the Blair-Bush war on Iraq justified by the need to eliminate non-existent “weapons of mass destruction” was that the real WMD that existed in the Middle East was Saudi Salafism which has been exported worldwide by despotic regimes, including the Saudis and the Qataris.
It is all very well to say that Islam is a religion of peace; Salafism is not. And the proliferation of Salafist Islam across the world is dangerous. The danger has been long appreciated. I was personally briefed on it by US security services during my time as Minister for Justice.
Right across the Islamic world, madrassas preaching Wahhabism have been established, expanded and funded by Saudi Arabia, directly and through Saudi-funded “charitable” foundations. The result of all of this fundamentalist activity can be seen from Bali to Timbuktu, from Glasgow (where an “apostate” shopkeeper was murdered) to Los Angeles, to Nairobi, from Nice to the Twin Towers.
While the vast majority of Muslims are good, law-abiding people, there is a very real vein of extremist Islamic fundamentalism which is being fed and nurtured by Saudi Salafism.
We need to face it down. We need to challenge the Saudis and the Qataris about it.
We need those who claim to be moderate Muslims and their religious leaders to state unequivocally that nothing in the Koran can justify the killing, imprisonment or oppression of any man or woman on grounds of heresy, apostasy, or blasphemy, and to state unequivocally that such treatment of human beings for their beliefs is wrong wherever it happens in the world.
If Islam is to be accorded the status of a religion and given charitable status in our society, there can be no ambivalence on these issues. Either a religion teaches that no person or state has the right to kill a human for apostasy or it does not.
If a religion cannot be unequivocal on that simple issue, it must exclude itself from social recognition in a modern secular democracy. If it teaches ambivalently on that issue, it is a menace which must bear responsibility for all the consequences of such ambivalence.
Our constitutional guarantee of the free practice and profession of religion is expressly made subject to public order and morality. Any religion that advocates, defends or teaches a doctrine that its adherents may kill other humans here or anywhere in the world because of what they say that they believe or have ceased to believe, does not enjoy constitutional recognition or protection because that doctrine fundamentally flies in the face of public order and morality.
Of course, non-Muslims are not immune in this respect. If any extremist fundamentalist Christian or Jew preached Biblical authority for killing “infidels” on the basis of what the Book of Joshua claims God ordered by way of genocide (and it makes gruesome reading), we would have to act against them decisively too.
Our values are inconsistent with many aspects of traditional fundamentalist Islamic. We do not condone chastisement within marriage. We do not condone forced, arranged marriages. Every Muslim girl and woman must be accorded the rights and freedoms accorded to every other woman. No imam, mosque or sharia tribunal has temporal authority in our State. It is not intolerant to say so.
Those who believe that we in Ireland are centuries ahead of the Islamic world would do well to reflect on the relatively recent abandonment of many social injustices on women, ranging from criminalisation of family planning, sacking of women public servants who married, and the condoning of matrimonial rape to the Catholic doctrine of male superiority and womanly obedience in the family as set out in the encyclical Casti Conubii, (another eye-opener easily available online!).
In many respects the attitudinal time-gap between the Western world and the Islamic world is much shorter than we care to think. Before we look down on Islam or Muslims, we should reflect on how narrow that difference is.
There are signs at last that the appalling folly of backing the replacement of Syria’s secularist regime by an Islamist coalition backed by the Turks, the Saudis, and the Qataris is being abandoned by the naïve policy-makers in the US State Department. That is good. The illusion that the West can export pluralist, multi-party democracy delivered by smart bombs to the Arab world is now shattered.
The West (including Obama, Hollande, Erdogan and Cameron) came within days of using air warfare to blast away the Assad regime and making way for an Islamist repression in Damascus. The idiocy of thinking that there was a moderate government-in-waiting that would face down the Saudi backed Islamists seems hardly credible now.
In the meantime, Ireland has to get real about Salafism and Wahhabism. These forces are not going away. In a firm but understanding way, we have to identify and assert our own values at home and abroad.
Opposing such forces is an attribute of Irish citizenship. Clarity on these matters is not intolerance – quite the opposite.