Perversion of Islam?

Seven lie dead after another horrific attack on London. The targets were, as usual, innocent members of the public enjoying the vibrant, enlivening freedom of a buzzing, friendly, cosmopolitan western city. And as the first news reports spread across the globe, millions correctly guessed the religion of the perpetrators.

UK Prime Minister Theresa May observes, rightly, that enough is enough. However, she goes on to say, much less correctly, that jihadist violence is a perversion of Islam, caused by extremism. She is wrong, and not just because we see no extremist beekeepers yelling the praises of their beloved hive god as they smite and behead those who don't keep bees. Extremism is a euphemism for a literal interpretation of Islam. The Quran is clear in its call to Muslims to strike out against the enemy until the entire world is subsumed by Dar al Islam and Sharia law reigns supreme.

Using motor vehicles to run down pedestrians is a foul and murderous perversion of driving. Taking a kitchen knife to the chest of an innocent bystander is a violent and deadly perversion of culinary equipment. But to follow, verbatim, a revered written instruction to visit harm on those who don't belong to your chosen in-group, is not a perversion of anything. It is an understandable, inevitable response to a global convention that anything characterising itself as a religion must be respected and given the status of unquestioned truth.

Mrs May pledges to take immediate action. Sadly, her noble intentions are misdirected. Increasing custodial sentences may please the vengeance-driven consumers of the gutter press, adherents of the perversely oxymoronic 'punitive justice', but it will have little effect on the smugly smirking, virtuously bearded, self-interested wannabe martyrs lining up to emulate their exploded and shot-up heroes.

She refers obliquely to 'difficult conversations'. This is the most encouraging part of her speech. What is needed, right now, is an end to the undeserved respect that religion has for far too long enjoyed. Children should be taught, in schools, from an early age, to question everything they are expected to believe on no credible authority whatsoever. Tiptoeing around religious sensibilities may seem the right and decent thing to do but it is not. Politically correct 'respect' (all too often, in fact, a front for self-preservation, to avoid being targeted by mobs of religious bullies) puts us all at risk because it legitimizes baseless religious claims.

Children of all ethnicities, confessions and nationalities must be taught that unsupported assertions may be - indeed, should be - immediately dismissed. If someone tells you that the prophet flew through the night from Makkah to Madinah on a winged horse, you should demand at least basic evidence before revising your learnèd opinion that horses cannot and do not fly.

Enough is indeed enough. But the battleground for a truly effective campaign is the classroom.

We have the power to end this horror

Most of the world is still in trauma after Monday's (22 May 2017) unspeakably horrific attack on a concert venue in central Manchester, UK, our sense of disbelief, disgust, anguish and tragedy magnified by the realisation that young children were deliberately and cynically targeted.

"I feel that a line has been crossed," remarked an old, trusted friend of mine, amid the following morning's numbing shock. "It is time for this to stop, and the solution has to be education."

My friend is right insofar as education is most certainly the way forward. I'm not so sure about a line being crossed this week - let's not forget the dreadful events in Beslan, thirteen years ago, in which a school was taken over by suicidal terrorists - but there can be no doubt that ideology-driven terror attacks must be made a thing of the past. The sad fact is, an effective solution is within our grasp, yet we fail to pursue it.

My work as a school teacher in the Middle East brings me into close contact with children of over seventy nationalities and a range of ideological backgrounds. Yesterday afternoon, two boys, one indigenous, a child of Muslim parents; the other white-British, had an argument that ended with the local boy remarking to his classmate, "I wish you had been in Manchester." Our subsequent investigations left me in do doubt that the child considered the bomber something of a hero, a symbol of power that the Western world would be imprudent to ignore. Both boys are eleven years old. Before we wave this away as the inconsequential chatter of a naif, let's consider where and what this boy might be a few short years from now, when he reaches the age of majority.

The way we approach the concept of religion in schools must change, completely, and immediately. The automatic assumption that religious assertions are immune from criticism, question and ridicule must be dropped. Any claim that cannot be supported by evidence - such as the false belief that a Muslim who dies while killing infidels goes straight to a martyr's reward - must be commonly held to be false until it can be positively and conclusively proven to be true. We should be neither ashamed nor afraid of pointing out the emptiness of the promises delivered by clerics on nothing more than the supposed authority of self-contradictory, ancient texts.

The current, almost universal practice of pussyfooting around Muslim sensibilities is outmoded, patronising in the extreme, and recklessly dangerous. (Such practice, by the way, has nothing to do with respect; it is all about not getting your windows smashed, i.e. pure self-interest.) Those whose brains are not memetically rotted by Islam outnumber Muslims by some six to one, and a good proportion of the infection-free ones are rationalists and humanists. They cannot blow us all up. Schools need to start teaching rational thinking, as an exclusive and essential alternative to swallowing religious falsehoods, right now. You do not go to heaven if you destroy yourself and a group of schoolgirls in an explosion. You die, like them. Game over. Done. The only result is grief on an unimaginable scale. The gain, for all concerned, is zero. The losses are immeasurable.

Straight talking is our only hope.