I saw an article on Facebook yesterday of 8 nude bodies hanging from 8 crosses with the title “ISIS Crucifies 8 Christians in Syria for Apostasy from Islam.” Pretty emotional stuff. The article, which links here, has over 27,000 Facebook likes. Here is the text of the article in its entirety:
Various sources have received independent confirmation from inside Syria that these men were former Muslims that had converted to Christianity, Illinois Review reports. (Photo: Illustration from the documentary about the Armenian genocide) They were not ‘..rebel fighters from a rival faction..’ as many news outlets are reporting.
Each of the 8 men were charged with the crime of apostasy for renouncing Islam and converting to Christianity. When confronted by the ISIS members, they refused to “revert” to Islam.
This is the “only” reason they were crucified. According to Islamic jurisprudence, crucifixion is a method of death reserved for Christians. They do not crucify other Muslims.
If you took journalism in school, there are a few things that should stand out to you as a bit fishy… “Various sources” are mentioned, but no sources are listed. If you to go the “original report” that it links to at the Illinois Review website, you find the exact same text as simply been copied and pasted and has been copied and pasted onto several other websites reporting the same story. On the Illinois Review website, you do find the “sources” listed but they Twitter accounts and a random business website. Not the mention the fact that the provocative photo of the nude hanging bodies is actually from a documentary on the 1915 Armenian genocide, not from this past weekend. While the article does cite this, that should be a pretty big clue of the emotionally misleading nature of the post.
You simply can’t believe everything you read online. The truth is websites like the Illinois Review, the VIE website the article I’m referring to is on, as well as the business website that is listed as a source is that they are all pretty much no different than my blog. Just some random people putting stuff up online, only in their case, they’re trying to make it look a credible and factual news source.
You then read credible news sources and find out no one is actually sure if these crucified men were dead already and then hung up to be displayed or were actually crucified alive. The actual photos show a public display of the bodies on a platform hanging by their hands, but not Jesus-cross crucifixions that the 1919 photo depicts. Other reports state that these men weren’t actually Christians, but were moderate Muslims who were opposing the militant regime.
Who’s to say which is the correct version? Not me. That’s not my point here. My point is be careful what you believe and spread because it can cause serious problems when it comes to our own racism and hatred.
There are several major problems that this type of “journalism” stirs up:
- It makes people hate Muslims and want to kill them. Check out these comments from beneath the websites who posted about these as the crucifixion of Christians:
“Islam must be destroyed! The intolerant anti-Christian and anti-Semite Muslims are barbaric nuts!”
“Muslim scum! I hate these f***ers! they need to be wiped off the face of the earth!”
“All Islamic savages need to be eradicated, that is “obliterated,” from the earth. However, as they are a total manifestation of Satan, Satan would then devise another way to implement his manifesto against God. It seems there no “peace” for Christians.”
- It gets all Christians thoroughly mocked for gullibility, having no journalistic integrity and doing anything to create a sensationalized story that victimized us, as you can find in the comments on this Baltimore Sun article
- It makes us think that all Muslims are extremists, causing us to racially profile the Arabs and Muslims in our every day lives.
Morgan Spurlock, director of the award winning documentary Super Size Me, had a show out a few years ago called 30 Days, in which someone would live in an opposite culture of what they were used to within America for 30 days. In a 2005 episode, a white conservative Christian from Charleston, SC lived with a Muslim family in Dearborn, MI (Dearborn has the densest Muslim population in the USA) for 30 days and had to live, work and function as a Muslim. The show was fascinating. What struck me most was the Muslims he lived with talking about the racial profiling they endured and the assumptions people made about them, as if because they were Arab, they wanted to kill Christians and blow up buildings.
How racism and racial profiling of this type works is that we see extremist actions by Arabic Muslims and we assume all Arabs/Muslims are this way. Meanwhile, there is a huge percentage of Arabs and Muslims that are not this way we are now filled with prejudice toward. Any friendly Muslim or Arab we meet in person is the exception to our prejudiced rule of who Arabs and Muslims are.
The irony of racial profiling is that we don’t treat our own group the same way. We see extremists acts of our own group (in my case, white people and/or white Christians) and we label those extremists as the exception, not the rule. White professing Christians blow up the Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995 and we don’t immediately assume all white Christians blow up buildings. Or we see Westboro Baptist Church holding “God Hates Fags” signs all over kingdom come and we don’t assume all Christians are this way. If someone were to associate you with either Timothy McVeigh or with Westboro because you are white and a Christian, how would you respond?
So don’t do the same to Muslims and Arabs who adamantly disagree with militant groups like ISIS and Hamas.
And yes, Islam does make all this trickier. There are passages in the Quran that command violence and murder of people who don’t believe in Islam and there is definitely a conquest bent to the book and the origins of the religion. Do these things make me nervous? Yes a little. Am I trying to defend Islam or the Quran? No I’m not. But I will say there are some verses in the Old Testament of my Bible that are pretty disturbing if they are taken out of context, such as killing people who commit adultery or killing a son who is stubborn and rebellious. An extremist “Christian” could do some pretty scary things with these Scriptures, whereas we are able to understand and explain them using some pretty basic hermeneutics of context and covenant. Is there a way of interpreting the Quran where Muslims don’t feel commanded to kill and murder apostates? I’d assume so. Before jumping the gun and assuming all Muslims are terrorists, we should probably ask our Muslim friends how they interpret these texts. (Which begs the question, do you have any Muslim friends? Because you should.)
I am not in any way trying to diminish the legitimate persecution Christians in the Middle East are facing, nor am I making any truth claims about what did or didn’t happen to those dead bodies that were publicly displayed in Syria. What I do want to do is help prevent the stirring up of unfounded sensationalism that breeds hate, fear, racism and vengeance.
Do we need to be praying for the Christians who are being persecuted in the Middle East? Most definitely.
But we also need to be praying for the moderate Muslims and the secular Muslims undergoing some of the same persecution, along with the many innocent Arabic children caught in the crossfires.
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I agree that a lot of the misconceptions about Muslims come from a lack of education on what the core beliefs of their religion truly are. Ill admit, up until I started college, the extent of my education on Muslims pretty much came from whatever i saw on TV or read in the newspaper which obviously paints an incorrect picture. Stories about peaceful Muslims does not boost ratings so i was under the assumption that violence was a large part of their religion.
This is a interesting article regarding the discrimination Muslims face in our society: https://www.du.edu/korbel/hrhw/researchdigest/minority/Muslim.pdf
Will the real Islam stand up? How can any Muslim keep on plugging this same narrative that there’s a true Islam and another Islam that has hijacked the true Islam. There’s one Islam and the vile butchery of ISIS is a manifestation of Islam that uses bona fide statements from the Qur’an, the Hadith and the Sura. Their version is supported within the texts: they select those passages that support their brutal jihad, just as you select or cherry-pick the passages that support your interpretation. But both come from the same texts. There can be no whitewashing this ideology any longer. Violence against non-Muslims in the name of Allah is a core edict in Islam and no moderate Muslim can dismiss that. Islam is a perverse travesty of religion that simply cannot exist in a civil society. It has within it an alter ego that condones and applauds violent, murderous hatred of non-Muslims and no matter how much or how often moderate Muslims proclaim their peaceful intentions, the world is always conscious of Islam’s dual character. Until Muslims take ownership of this duality as coming from within the core texts of Islam they can never bring the kind of objective analysis and scrutiny to understanding how such brutal behaviour—the beheading of children—is possible in the name of Islam. If I were a Muslim after seeing the atrocities of the last few days I would have no choice but to give up Islam. I would not want even a name association in common with these depraved fanatics. I would be only too happy to join the ranks of apostates from Islam, not wanting even a name association in common with these monsters.
Hi Liza, thank you for your comments, I definitely hear you. I’m certainly not attempting to defend the Islamic faith. I obviously disagree with it at a very foundational level in that I believe Jesus is our Savior and is God in the flesh. Like I linked in my post and like you said, there are many texts in the Qur’an that advocate for violence and murder of non-Muslims. What I want to put us on guard against is seeing every Muslim and even broader, every Arab (many of whom are not Muslim), as terrorists or monsters, etc. For example, there is a Christian family at my church who are Middle Eastern refugees that have been in the States for 14 years. The mom is Syrian and the dad is Iraqi. Their youngest two children were born in the States and their oldest was born in Syria. We do a summer park ministry in the neighborhood and I find their kids consistently being picked on and ostracized because of their ethnicity. Kids call them “Osama” and other racial slurs. This is the sort of thing I’m trying to get us to wake up and see is a byproduct of the way we associate all people as the same without seeing the many nuances, something that isn’t fair or loving.
Thank you for responding, Noah. I absolutely do not want to tar everyone from the Middle East or Arabs in general with the same brush–terrorist, etc. I am concerned, however, that the core Islamic texts contain edicts that are fundamentally incompatible with the values of our western democracies. I appreciate that not all Arabs and Muslims would follow through on many of the more violent calls to rid the world of “infidels” but I question the wisdom of allowing such edicts to remain in the Holy Books of Islam. The Christian and Judaic texts have gone through many “revisions” over the centuries in light of changing times and social, emotional needs. Stoning women to death, for example, or crucifying criminals were accepted punishments in early Judaic culture but were eventually rescinded as barbaric punishments. Last week, the Islamic State stoned two women to death, and has crucified several tribesmen. Here’s what the Qur’an states:
*The only reward of those who make war upon Allah and His messenger and strive after corruption in the land will be that they will be killed or crucified, or have their hands and feet on alternate sides cut off, or will be expelled out of the land. Such will be their degradation in the world, and in the Hereafter theirs will be an awful doom.” (Qur’an 5:33)*
If passages that uphold these kinds of barbaric edicts were expurgated from the Qur’anic texts, then Islam might be a religion of peace. But in its current form it clearly sanctions the brutal onslaught of the Islamic State and the punishments being meted out. The beheading of children who are non-Muslim is within the dictates of their reading of Islam. Given the difficulty of knowing how individual Muslims will interpret passages like these, I would prefer either apostasy or reform of all the Qur’anic texts.
Thanks again.
*On Monday, August 11, 2014, Disqus <notifications@disqus.net > wrote:*
I’m with you. I’d be interested to hear from a moderate Muslim on why they don’t apply these texts anymore but still call the Qur’an authoritative. I know for me as a Christian, it’s what makes Jesus and the New Testament so unique. Jesus comes right out in Matthew 5 and says: “You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’ But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also. (Matthew 5:38-39 NIV)
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