“When he (Rahman) said Allah enjoined all Muslims to wage jihad until Islamic law was established throughout the world, the scriptures backed him up.

When he said Islam directed Muslims not to take Jews and Christians as their friends, the scriptures backed him up.

You could counter that there are other ways of construing the scriptures. You could contend that these exhortations to violence and hatred should be “contextualized”—i.e., that they were only meant for their time and place in the seventh century.  Again, I would caution that there are compelling arguments against this manner of interpreting Islamic scripture. The point, however, is that what you’d be arguing is an interpretation.

The fact that there are multiple ways of construing Islam hardly makes the Blind Sheikh’s literal construction wrong. The blunt fact of the matter is that, in this contest of competing interpretations, it is the jihadists who seem to be making sense because they have the words of scripture on their side—it is the others who seem to be dancing on the head of a pin. For our present purposes, however, the fact is that the Blind Sheikh’s summons to jihad was rooted in a coherent interpretation of Islamic doctrine. He was not perverting Islam—he was, if anything, shining a light on the need to reform it.”

Quite disturbing, to anyone with a brain:

http://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/islam-facts-or-dreams/?utm_campaign=imprimis&utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=27422141&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-8Y7YdrXMqZjRuRfb_l6-7zuIBBwL7jz2HnCoT3jnkAgoK5gZbM3jNTpmHZGdGR6irm26sP4OVbyslsbbxQK7ceiFHRFQ&_hsmi=27422141

The fact is that radical Islam is a backward, medieval, and at times brutal belief system that needs to dramatically reform or be eradicated, and it is time that the liberal west woke up to that.