Indiana Columnist Scolds Anti-Sharia Lieutenant Governor for Stoking ‘Hate’ Against ‘His Fellow Hoosiers’

Don Knebel, a hail-fellow-well-met feelgood columnist for the Indiana Citizen, is peeved at Indiana Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith. It seems that Beckwith “recently said that we should give people ‘permission to hate again’ so they, like he, can hate Islam. He then wished Muslims, the practitioners of Islam, ‘the best,’ but only if they become Christians.”

Strong stuff indeed. Christians living in Nigerian villages might indignantly upbraid Beckwith, if they could get a breather from the more or less daily jihad massacres to which their loving Nigerian neighbors subject them. Knebel, however, is indignant enough for all of them. He is angry that Beckwith “calls Islam a ‘demonic death cult.’” He adds primly that “it is at least odd to describe as a ‘cult’ a religion that counts as adherents about 25% of the earth’s people.”

Beckwith’s problem, in Knebel’s view, is that he doesn’t know anything about the Religion of Peace: “It is also not clear how much, if anything, Pastor Beckwith knows about the teachings of Islam.” But never fear, Don Knebel is here to teach him: “So, it may come as a surprise to him, and perhaps to others, that the Quran, which Muslims believe is the literal word of God, expressly incorporates all the biblical teachings of Jesus and the Jewish prophets.”

Of course, it doesn’t do anything of the kind. The Ten Commandments are a notable omission from the Qur’an’s many retellings of the Exodus story, and the seventeenth chapter of the Qur’an contains numerous moral precepts, but none of them are presented as absolutes; all of them are hedged around with caveats.

Knebel keeps digging, adding: “The Quran also expressly teaches that Jesus was born of the Virgin Mary and is the Messiah. The most significant difference between the teachings of the Quran and the beliefs of most Christians today is whether Jesus was the divine son of God. Muslims reject the idea that Jesus was the son of God, which they interpret literally, with the Quran saying: ‘Wonderful Originator of the heavens and earth! How could He have a son when He has no consort?’”

He appears unaware of the Qur’an’s repeated exhortations to “kill them wherever you find them” (2:191, 4:89, 4:91, cf. 9:5), or its command to “strike the necks” of the “unbelievers” (47:4), or its command to fight against the “people of the book” (Jews and Christians) until they are subjugated under the hegemony of Islamic law (9:29). There is no parallel to those exhortations in Christian teaching according to any Christian sect, although Knebel would almost certainly point to violent passages in the Old Testament and claim that they’re equivalent, ignoring, as everyone who makes this argument always does, the fact that jihad terrorists routinely cite the Qur’an to explain and justify their violent acts, while there are no scripture-quoting Jewish or Christian terrorist groups. Knebel is also likely unaware of the fact that the literal interpretation of the Qur’an’s exhortations to wage war against unbelievers and kill or subjugate them is mainstream in the history of Qur’an interpretation, and remains so today.

Knebel concludes: “But whatever the teachings of the Quran and the beliefs of Muslims, it is surely improper for a state government official, Christian pastor or not, to expressly stoke hate against the beliefs of about 100,000 of his fellow Hoosiers. We have way too much hate in our society today as it is. Our country is being torn apart by politicians who are, all too often, seeking power by dividing us based on how we look, who we love and what we believe. It seems to me that we would be much better off if all of us, and especially those of us who are Christians, took more seriously the teachings of Jesus in his Sermon on the Mount: ‘You have heard that it was said, “Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.” But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven.’”

And so we get yet another in an apparently endless series of establishment media articles by “experts” who know nothing about Islam, and who assume that all suspicion of it, or dislike of it, stems wholly and solely from “racism,” “bigotry” and “Islamophobia.” Yet he misleads readers by leaving out any hint of Islam’s violent, supremacist, and expansionist aspects, and probably doesn’t even know that those aspects of Islam exist. And so Indiana Citizen readers come away thinking about how important it is to guard their community from anything that might prevent it from being “inclusive,” and have no idea that they’re opening their doors and their hearts to adherents of the most exclusivist and intolerant ideology on earth. Don Knebel is no doubt a nice guy, a civic leader, a good Joe, and he wants to be broad-minded and welcoming. And he has no idea of how his best instincts are being used against him.