During last week’s House Homeland Security Committee hearing on “The Radicalization of Muslim-Americans,” Congressman Al Green (D-TX) took issue with the hearing’s focus on Islam and Muslims, asking the witnesses testifying before the Committee: “If you agree that radicalization exists within all religions to some extent, would you kindly extend a hand into the air.” Noting triumphantly that “all the hands are raised,” Green then asked: “Why not have a hearing on the radicalization of Christians?”
The immediate answer is obvious. On the one hand we have recent jihad plotters in the U.S., including Naser Abdo, the would-be second Fort Hood jihad mass murderer; Khalid Aldawsari, the would-be jihad mass murderer in Lubbock, Texas; Muhammad Hussain, the would-be jihad bomber in Baltimore; Mohamed Mohamud, the would-be jihad bomber in Portland; Nidal Hasan, the successful Fort Hood jihad mass-murderer; Faisal Shahzad, the would-be Times Square jihad mass-murderer; Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, the Arkansas military recruiting station jihad murderer; Naveed Haq, the jihad mass murderer at the Jewish Community Center in Seattle; Mohammed Reza Taheri-Azar, the would-be jihad mass murderer in Chapel Hill, North Carolina; Ahmed Ferhani and Mohamed Mamdouh, who hatched a jihad plot to blow up a Manhattan synagogue; and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the would-be Christmas airplane jihad bomber.
All of them and many others invoked the Qur’an and Sunnah to explain and justify their deeds.
And on the other hand, we have recent “radical Christian” acts of violence committed by people who invoked the Bible and Church teaching to explain and justify their deeds, including — no one at all. Not one. Even the much-vaunted abortion clinic bombers number only a handful, versus nearly 19,000 jihad attacks around the world since 9/11, and have been repudiated by all Christian sects and leaders — as opposed to the many Islamic authorities that teach jihad warfare against unbelievers and exhort their faithful to commit acts of violent jihad.
Rosie O’Donnell enunciated the idea memorably a few years ago: “radical Christianity is just as dangerous as radical Islam.” Since then, this has become a commonplace of mainstream media political discourse — remarkably enough, since it has absolutely no evidence to back it up.
Emblematic of how hard it is to find a “radical Christian” — that is, someone driven to violence by the teachings of Christianity, as opposed to genuinely radical Christians like Mother Teresa and the Amish — is that when Green spoke about “the radicalization of Christianity,” he was actually referring to Islamic jihadists, not to Christians at all.
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