Islam and the Koran can and are being used to (inexcusably) excuse violence against non-believers. The people doing that and the people excusing/apologizing for it are wrong. The people committing that violence should be dead. The people apologizing for it need to learn that there is no excuse and that they will pay a high price for even attempting to excuse murdering innocents to pursue their twisted aims.
Islam is about 700 years "younger" than Christianity. What were Christians doing to non-believers 700 years ago? Muslims are doing the same thing in an era of cheap, powerful, portable weapons easily moved around by modern transportation. That's neither excuse nor apology for what they are doing. But maybe it makes understandable.
Anarchists were doing almost identical things early in the 20th century. An anarchist even committed the event that triggered World War I. The world (at great cost and misery) survived that time as it will survive this one.
Ah. Another veiled "well what about the Christians" trope. Let me try and address this.
Firstly let me say I would agree that the Bible’s Old Testament is filled with pages and pages of celebrations of cruelty. There are, however major differences with any comparison to Islam.
Firstly, Christianity has had centuries of criticism and has been forced to mould itself into the house cat it is today. From the 16th century onwards Christianity has seen its influence and extremism corroded by the scientific revolution and philosophical discourse of the last 500 years. As the Muslim world was largely shielded from The Enlightenment that brought us Descartes, Voltaire, Rousseau, Hobbes, Isaac Newton, and Adam Smith and also fundamentally shifted the moral landscape, it is no surprise that we see such atrocities. And I’m not just talking about “extremists” blowing up people in Syria. Just ask Merim Yehya Ibrahim Ishag, a Sudanese woman, who was raised as an Orthodox Christian, despite having a Muslim father. She was sentenced to death by the Sharia court in her country for adultery when she married a Christian man and then was also charged with apostasy when she declared herself a Christian during the trial.
Lastly Christianity has a get out of jail free card or maybe reset button is better analogy in Jesus who basically said “ignore everything in the Old Testament”. Unfortunately Islam does not have that same convenient footnote. In an era of nuclear bombs and AK – 47s we don’t have 500 years to wait for Islam to “evolve”.
Your final point about “anarchists” is a complete non-sequitur,
as the event was not being carried out for explicitly religious reasons. By this I mean t
aken from a doctrine perceived and preached as the infallible word of God. I feel the need to highlight this before anyone makes the utterly reductive and facile arguments about Hitler being a Christian, or the IRA terrorist bombings in Ireland.
Yes the world might survive in the sense that a cancer ridden coma patient survives but let us be clear about this. The attempt to excuse, rationalise and ignore only leads to the same thing happening further down the road with increasingly horrific results. Nothing will change until we have an honest conversation about the toxicity of this destructive ideology and bring about the full weight of criticism as we would any other set of terrible ideas. Sadly the mainstream media, political elite, regressive liberals and even you with your veiled Islamic apologetic tone are part of the problem and all have blood on your hands.