Source: The Ottawa Citizen
BY FRED LITWIN AND SALIM MANSUR, OTTAWA
We are daily inundated with news of horrors from the Arab-Muslim world to the extent that for many in the West Islam as a venerable faith-tradition can no longer be distinguished from the organized terror and violence of radical Muslims, or Islamists.
There is something gone terribly wrong in the world of Islam, and setting aside political correctness there is the urgent need to publicly identify and discuss the evil of Islamism masquerading as a religion.
But what is this ideology, Islamism, for which we must not make any allowance, as we would not for Nazism?
From leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood in Arab countries, the Iran of Khomeini, fundamentalist parties in Pakistan, and affiliated groups — Hamas, Hezbollah, the al-Qaida network, al-Shabaab and the Taliban — we hear their politics is the genuine expression of Islam as practised by “Salafis” or the first generation of Muslims in seventh-century Arabia. In this view Muslims who disagree with Islamists are heretics or, even worse, apostates deserving to be killed.