CHRISLAM: Lying Catholic priest insists: Qur’an doesn’t justify beheadings

Sep 05, 2014 09:28 pm Robert Spencer

On Wednesday I wrote a response to a piece in Aleteia, “Does the Quran Command Beheading?,” by Fr Dwight Longenecker. Now Fr. Longenecker has doubled down: “Does the Quran Justify Beheadings?,” by Fr Dwight Longenecker, Aleteia, September 5, 2014. My comments are interspersed below.

The famed expert in Islam, Robert Spencer, has taken me and Aleteia to task in this column asking for an apology for an “extraordinarily misleading article.” I’m afraid I cannot offer Mr. Spencer an apology, but I can offer an apologia: that is a defense and an explanation.

I didn’t say he owed me an apology. I said: “For this extraordinarily misleading peace, Fr. Dwight Longenecker and Aleteia owe their readers a retraction and apology.” I said that because his piece contained basic inaccuracies liable to mislead people into complacency. I stand by that assessment.

I suspect he and many readers believe me to be too soft on Islam. They only need to connect to my blog here and read my recent posts on ISIS and the Islamic sex abuse scandals in Britain to see that I am not soft on the horrors of Islamic violence. Those who have a taste for denunciations and imprecations against Islam will be satisfied if they read those posts.

This is a condescending and inaccurate characterization. The point is not to hurl “denunciations and imprecations against Islam,” but to identify the source of the threat properly, so that we can take effective steps against it. If jihadis have a convincing case when they invoke the Qur’an and Sunnah to justify beheadings and other violence against unbelievers, non-Muslims need to know that, as it can help provide a sense of what might expected from Muslim groups in the West in fighting against this — which is exactly what Fr. Longenecker calls for. If the Islamic State has a case that is Qur’anically justifiable, we might not see many Muslims in the West join in the fight against it, despite their pro-forma condemnations — as in this piece, where Hamas-linked CAIR’s Nihad Awad denounces the Islamic State while calling not for the West to fight against it, but to join the jihad against Assad that the Islamic State is waging.