America's willful ignorance

Robert Spencer, of Jihad Watch, was more than up to the task of taking on Jamal Badawi's joking challenge that he'd give $1,000,000 to anyone who could prove that the Koran actually condones warfare (rather than promoting a "religion of peace"). After citing to one blood-thirsty chapter and verse after another, and after pointing out that Arab-speaking fundamentalists certainly understand the Koran to incite religious war, Spencer concluded as follows:

This is one of the fundamental defects of the post-9/11 discourse in America: Muslim spokesmen again and again have insisted that Americans accept that Islam is a religion of peace, without offering a shred of evidence to this effect. Meanwhile, Muslims worldwide continue to commit violence in the name of Islam, and bland denials like Badawi’s not only do nothing to stop them, but perpetuate political myths that continue to mislead Americans about the sources of terror. As long as this goes on, nothing effective can or will be done to stop the ideology of jihad terrorism from proliferating in mosques and Islamic schools in the United States and around the world.

Read it all here.