The Soapbox: Political Discourse

One day after ISIS released a video of the beheading of American Journalist Steven Sotloff, Secretary of State John Kerry gave a speech in which he said Islam is a “peaceful religion based on the dignity of all human beings,” and continued to assert that ISIS is not “the real face of Islam.” A few days later President Obama echoed that sentiment, "ISIL is not Islamic. No Religion condones the killing of innocents, and the vast majority of ISIL's victims have been Muslims." -Barack Obama (Sep 10, 2014) Islamic apologists often like to distance Islam from Islamic terrorism the way atheists like to distance themselves from Communism. But just as Communism couldn't exist without atheism, Islamic terrorism couldn't exist without the Qur'an. The willful blindness about Islamic terrorism ignores the violent history of Islam and the Qur'an which encourages it. So what is the real face of Islam? To answer this question we must take a brief look at the ...

As the Israel-Gaza conflict rages on, so do the accusations of civilian deaths and disproportionate use of force by Israel. These charges are nothing new, we've heard these same arguments during the first Gaza conflict in 2008. I began to wonder where did these new rules of war come from? It certainly hasn't always been the standard. During World War 2, while military and industrial installations were targeted, civilian targets were also fair game. Such as the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the semi-indiscriminate bombing of Berlin. Somewhere along the lines the rules of war changed. The first real shift occurred during the the Vietnam war. The news media and anti-war protestors were quick to pick up on communist propaganda and harp on civilian causalities. The American troops returning home were spit upon and called baby killers. These accusations were an obvious attempt to slander and shame the United States military, and it worked. Militarily we won t...