RELIGION IN THE NEWS
A report and comment on religious trends and events being covered by the media. This week’s item is from the London Times on Line, April 14, 2006, with a headline: Teenager Kills His Sister For Living a Western Life. The following are excerpts: Ihan Suruku was so angry when his sister started to wear make-up and date German men that he put a gun to her head at a bus stop and killed her. The 18-year old Turk fired three bullets into her brain and calmly walked away. Boys at a nearby school attended mainly by the children of immigrant Muslim families cheered and applauded when news of the murder reached them. The so called honor killing of Huton Suruku, 23, last year shocked Germany, and sparked intense debate about a conservative Muslim immigrant community at odds with a secular society. That anger was rekindled yesterday when Suruku, a minor when the murder took place was sentenced to nine years and three months by a Berlin court considered lenient by many Germans. Ihan, 19, was jailed after admitting that he wanted to wipe the stain from our family. There are 40 honor killings a year in Germany and most of them result from the failure of arranged marriage, which are illegal in that country.
Tom:
Dave, this seems to me to be a dilemma for Western society primarily because we become a therapeutic society. In other words, well, we really have to work with this peeson. He’s sort of dysfunctional, and came from dysfunctional family, we’re just going to him nine years, even though he blew his sister away, shot her three times in the head. How is all of this going to get reconciled? We have the same thing---we just had a trial recently of one of the terrorists who helped plan the 9/11 disaster.
Dave:
He should have had the death penalty.
Tom:
Well. but you see again, we are a therapeutic society, we have to look into his motive and his needs, and he grew up with these religious ideas, and so on. What do we do about it?
Dave:
Well, Tom, it’s, of course---this is Islam now and it has not too much to do with therapy and psychology, but, as you say, how we perceive it. But this is a clash of civilizations. Jesus really set the standard that the West follows. They don’t follow much of what Jesus said, but they do follow this. Give unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God that are God’s. And He set a division between the secular world and the church, the true church. That is not allowed in Islam. Islam is a theocratic society, the Imams control the government, really. Look at Iran, it’s a religious society. Look at Sudan, they adopted Sharia. That’s Islamic law there in Khartoum, the government in Khartoum adopted that, and for that reason we’ve had about two million Sudanese in the south killed. Fifteen of the nineteen northern states of Nigeria adopted Sharia, and the result has been, hundreds of churches have been burned down, thousands of people have been killed, because you must follow the rules of Islam according to the Qur’an, according to Muhammad. This is what the Taliban was all about, they were enforcing Islamic rule. Okay. So when these people moved to the West---Well, it’s not against the law for a Muslim girl to date a non Muslim man, but that is a crime for a Muslim, so they find themselves in conflict with the laws of the land, and they are going to break those laws in order to obey Islam. Now Tom, it’s a little bit more dangerous than that. These guys who knocked the Twin Towers down and attacked the Pentagon, and so forth, they thought they were fulfilling God’s will, and the Qur’an says that pagans are to be killed, they are to be given the opportunity. Now they didn’t give them the opportunity. They should have been given the opportunity to convert to Islam or we kill you. That’s what Muhammad taught, but I guess they thought there wasn’t any chance that they would convert to Islam. They are trying to terrorize us, terrify us into giving in to their demands, so they thought they were doing God’s will. Now when you think you are doing God’s will, look, we believe that we should not obey the government either when it tells us to do something that isn’t God’s will. As the apostles said: You judge, is it better for us to obey God or man? And so, Tom, if they want us to do something---in other words in China for example, you can only have one child. So they insist if the mother of one child is pregnant again, there must be an abortion. I believe that that’s an abomination to God. We could not obey that. Well then, they are going to put us in jail, they are going to force the abortion, or whatever. So there’s a conflict, but Jesus did not teach that you kill people who disagree with you.
Tom:
Yeah, we rarely have those rarely are fighting by Baptists or Methodists or Pentecostal.
Dave:
Tom, we were in Vienna not too long ago and you’ve got to guard the synagogue. We went to see the synagogue in down town Vienna, and you’ve got police in flack jackets, you’ve got automatic weapons, they have to guard the synagogue 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and it’s not Presbyterians, as you said, or Baptists who they are afraid may attack, it’s Muslims. So, now we had better face---we talked about it in the past, Tom, but we had better face the facts. It is not a few fanatics! You see, this young brother was not a fanatic, he is a real Muslim! If we don’t understand Islam is the problem, then we are not going to be able to deal with this properly, and as long as we keep saying Islam is peace--- like President Bush who keeps saying, Islam is peace. What would he say about this? He couldn’t say this young man was not obeying Muhammad in the Qur’an. He would have to admit that, indeed, he was. Now that’s the problem!
You are listening to Search the Scriptures Daily, a radio ministry of The Berean Call. Still to come, Dave and Tom continue their weekly in-depth study of the Doctrine of Salvation, please stay with us.
