Jewish World Review August 3, 2004 /18 Tamuz, 5764

Islam is a religion of WHAT? II: A response to our critics

By Jackie Mason & Raoul Felder

http://www.jewishworldreview.com | Over two weeks ago, Jackie substituted for radio host Jim Bohannan. On that show we discussed the religion of Islam and The Koran. Our point was a simple one: obviously not all Muslims are evil people, but the basis of the religion itself, fairly put, is not one of love and charity, as are the basic tenets of our Judeo-Christian religions.

Simple put, there are Jews that eat ham and shrimp, but the religion does not direct cutting their heads off. There are Catholics who do not go to Mass every day, but the Pope does not call them "Infidels." And we must make the uncharitable observation that it is not a group of Norwegian cub scouts that are slicing the heads off people around the world, and blowing up women and children who happen to be in their way on their trip to get to the 40 virgins waiting for them in terrorist heaven. On the radio show we referred to a previous article we had written on the subject.

On the show, time did not allow us to give the specific citations, chapter and verse to each quotation, as we did in the article itself. We received over four hundred responses, virtually all supportive, a bit more from Christians than Jews. There were but a handful of negative ones and two that pointed out that we dangled a participle. CAIR, an Islamic organization, filed a complaint with the FCC and with the radio network. Apparently, they believe that the First Amendment only applies to them and not to us. The network had them on the air to present their side of the story. We are not at all unhappy about this, in fact we applaud the fact that they had an opportunity to make their case, such as it is, over national radio. We guess, that is one of the differences between us and them.

We received many interesting responses to our comments, amongst which was an article written by Dr. Anis Shorrosh, a Palestinian Muslim by birth. Dr. Shorrosh comments about the popularity of Islam with African-Americans, "...Strange enough, no one tells the African-Americans that it was the Arab Muslims who captured them and sold them as slaves, nor the fact that in the Arabic the word for black and slave is the same, "Abed."

It would be a final, terrible and sad irony that if African-Americans, who literally for hundreds of years have been exploited, mistreated and suffered, should, after all of these tribulations, when they have fought for and gained their rightful place in society, now fall for a con-job from these, often evil, people, who, we believe simply wish to exploit them once again.