This article first appeared with Independent Journal. Originally published under the title “Anyone Using The Phrase ‘Islam Is A Religion Of Peace’ Needs To Read This” Days after the ISIS-inspired terrorist attack in San Bernardino, President Obama’s address to the nation concerning the threat of ISIS...
Agility and innovation? Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s version of history is all that and more. Leaping facts in a single bound, he ducks and weaves though a thicket of politically correct cliches to land effortlessly upon the desired conclusion: the West owes everything to...
This was published in the Australian Inquirer. It is a more general version of a longer article posted previously on Lapido Media. As the expressions of shock and solidarity subside after the Paris killings, the challenge to understand will remain. Much commentary of the past week...
Leading commentator Janet Daley's article in Saturday's Telegraph ‘The West is at war with a death cult’ stands for everything that is woeful about European elites’ response to Islamic jihad. It is a triumph of religious illiteracy. The jihadist enemy, she asserts, is utterly unintelligible, so beyond...
By Mark Durie Many leaders have been stating that the Islamic State’s actions are ‘unprecedented’, ‘extreme’, ‘unique’, or even ‘eccentric’. Western leaders who are intervening in the Syria-Iraq conflict justify their actions by declaring the Islamic State to be uniquely evil. In announcing military action and...
Recently Lapido Media published an article of mine entitled ‘Three Choices’ and the bitter harvest of denial: How dissimulation about Islam is fuelling genocide in the Middle East. In it I argued that Western theological illiteracy, made worse by demonstrably false statements put out by...
Published first by Lapido Media: see here. Also see summary and comment by Jenny Taylor here. In northern Iraq religious genocide is reaching end-game stage. Islamic State (IS) soldiers, reinforced with military equipment originally supplied by the US, are driving back Kurdish defenders who had been protecting...
Andrew Brown of the Guardian has commented on my response to A Guide to Refuting Jihadism, which was published on my blog, and also on Lapido Media. Brown writes: Can you dissuade fanatical jihadis using theological argument? by Andrew Brown (as revised on Feb 10, 2014) It doesn't really...