TOP CHRISTIAN VOICE UNCORKS ON LIARS IN MEDIA, POLITICS
Dr. Ravi Zacharias is one of Christianity’s foremost apologists. His ministry, Ravi Zacharias International Ministries, is based in Norcross, Georgia.
Is the West being slow-cooked by a resurgence of Islamic fervor across the globe, responding to individual attacks by separate groups but refusing to engage in the wider battle?
One of Christianity’s most widely respected thinkers and erudite apologists says that is exactly the case.
In an op-ed titled “Is Paris Burning,” Ravi Zacharias says Europe, America and the entire free world are being lied to by their politicians and most of their media, who refuse to ask the appropriate questions and brand those who dare to do so with nasty labels.
The Paris attacks targeted every-day people having fun – at restaurants, pubs, a soccer stadium and a concert hall.
Zacharias, who is speaking in Egypt this week, was in England the night of the Paris massacre.
The newspapers the next day described the horrific attacks that killed 129 and injured more than 350 with words like “carnage,” “massacre,” “assassination,” “murder,” “blood,” “death,” “screams,” “terror” and so on.
“Television programming was pre-empted and viewers were cautioned that some of the scenes of the slaughter were graphic. It was real,” Zacharias wrote. “A few hours later, names and pictures of the dead were shown. It was like we had heard this before. But it was new and real: the victims’ lives cut short in the peak of their careers. Children who weren’t going to come home.”
He said there is a sense that we are at war, but not officially and not seriously enough to name the enemy.
“War in small increments can be deadlier than large scale war because it doesn’t just desensitize the killers; it desensitizes all of humanity.
“Killers who do not represent a country and whose belief is debated ad nauseam as to whether it is a version or a perversion are truly sinister and are the cancerous cells of our time,” he continued. “They are protected by having no roots either in country or belief. The West is being taken down in small portions till one day the lie of the murderers being protected by smooth-talking power brokers with a bodyguard of lies will be seen for the terrifying belief that it is. No contrary view will be allowed then.”
Until that happens, Zacharias says deception will continue to rule the day.
“For now, the layers of distortion cover the graves of the murdered. The whole world has become a courtroom where clever lawyers make truth unattainable,” he wrote. “Whether it be 9/11 or the carnage at the Boston Marathon or blown-up planes or Paris, we will not find answers because to ask the question is either to receive a lie from some politicians or many in the media, or to invoke the wrath of hate-filled killers.”
Those who expose the truth about Islam do so at great risk to their personal safety. Many, such as Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer, also get lampooned in the media and even barred from entering once-free countries like Britain.
“So we ask,” says Zacharias, “what is the belief behind all this that kills with such callousness? We do not get any answers. We are told by some that it’s a religion of peace. Others call it a political theory at its core covered with the garb of religion to give it maximum protection as it invokes the laws of blasphemy.”
What is the answer?
“We had dare not unpack the truth. In one sense, strangely, one feels almost pity for these murderers,” he said. “The possessor of hate loses the essence of life much more than the victim does. Living with a heart so deceived breeds a decimating misery within and spreads the venom globally. There must be scores of young men within the belief who do not wish to inflict such pain but who now live with the pall of suspicion over them. Such is the contagion of a poisoned soul.”
In fact, those who try to break with Islam invite horrific consequences of their own. A man in Britain who converted a decade about from Islam to Christianity lives in constant fear of attacks. The father of six, Nissar Hussain, was brutally beaten outside his home last Tuesday by two hooded Muslims. He was dealt a broken arm, a broken knee cap and a concussion.
“This is the new Britain. This is the path Britain has chosen,” Geller, author of “Stop the Islamization of America,” wrote at her blog. “The U.K. Home Office banned me from the country for standing up against this Muslim brutality and thuggery — and they’ve ruthlessly moved against everyone who stands up against it. So now the Muslim thugs and jihad killers have the run of the place. ”
Clare Lopez, vice president for research and analysis for the Center for Security Policy, says she holds America’s leaders responsible for the failure to recognize Islam for what it is. There has always been a disconnect, she said.
“Our top leadership has never understood what Islam really is and implemented policies they thought were going to empower ‘democratic forces’ against dictators – never realizing the reason those dictators were able to hold things together was precisely because they suppressed jihad, and that if they let up the pressure or if genuinely free elections were held, the jihadis would win – or at least surge back up to cause mayhem again,” Lopez told WND.
Author and filmmaker G.M. Davis takes up the crucial question in his new book, “House of War: Islam’s Jihad Against the World.” In it, he not only asks but answers the forbidden question, concluding that “the origin of Islamic violence is Islam itself.”
Davis quotes Hiskett, who makes the following observation about multicultural Britain which could just as easily be applied to America:
“Britain has failed because the multiculturalists have failed to understand the nature of Islam. What they offer is a gallimaufry of humanist ideas, and some selective comparative religion, shorn of all ‘irrational’ elements, for which an unhallowed relativism, not a passionate accession of faith and a blinding encounter with divinity, is the premise. This is defended as ‘an ability to cope with the uncertainty posed by pluralism.’ In fact, it is an attempt to extinguish the sacerdotal. It may seem admirable in the fashionable context of liberal doubt. But what he multiculturalists forget – or have never understood – is that the equation is altogether one-sided. For the Islamic side there is neither doubt nor pluralism, and only very limited tolerance. … All multiculturalism does is to enable the Muslims to run rings around their trusting multiculturalist and interfaith well wishers, in the business of bending the British education system to their will.”
While countries like Britain, Germany, Sweden and Belgium appear to have made their choices of what path to follow, the quest for answers still haunts, says Zacharias.
“In one Middle Eastern country, an awful thing happened. Two young Muslims turned atheists were on a program. They argued for the reality that blood had been spilled across the centuries and that there was no denying that from its earliest days to the present, this was the same blood-letting in the name of the belief as originally given and carried out. Then one of them asked the cleric a question that was as pointed as could be. It was a powerful question with an irrefutable fact within the question. The question laid bare a reality that was deemed blasphemous. The next day that man and his family were murdered, just for asking a fact-laden question that was unanswerable without conceding the truth. For that, he and his family paid with their lives.
“That’s the depravity of our age. It is death to ask the pointed question because the answer, if true, betrays the real truth. The masquerade is on and it is deadly. We watch hundreds die. We hear speeches full of distortions; we tolerate deceit and even reward it. Some in power and in the public eye whitewash the reality while the blood of the murdered cries out from the ground. Our children and grandchildren will inherit the whirlwind because our media pundits and misguided speech-makers have sown to the wind by trading in lives for their power.”
Zacharias says there is hope even in the midst of the reigning lie.
“The lie has a shelf life. The truth abides forever,” he said. “God can even conquer through our perversion.”
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