* Newsflash: NYT still can’t figure out what terrorism is: “we are still trying to learn more about it”-(no wonder they are just about bankrupt/ed)
From JW:
“Islam: The way of life of Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus and Muhammad”
* Yep. Here comes the Muzz Buzz:
From our All Your Tradition Are Belong To Us Department comes the legend on this CAIR dawah (proselytizing) bus from Chicago, about which Marisol wrote here.
“Islam: The way of life of Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus and Muhammad.”
Weasel Zippers found this billboard in the Tampa Bay area:
Muslims hope this billboard along Interstate 4 will entice the curious to visit the Web site and learn about their religion. “We don’t want everyone to just have this negative stereotype about Islam,” Farooqi  said. “We’re just trying to do our part to get people to see that there is another side to the story.”
           Gee, and what kind of story would that be, Farooqi ?
This is an odd departure for CAIR. Usually Islamic spokesmen in the West spin their reverence for these Biblical figures as a manifestation of Islam’s generous and ecumenical spirit: see, Islam even reveres the principal figures of other religions! See, for example, this Christmas column by CAIR’s Ibrahim Hooper (thanks to Axel). In it, Hooper proclaims the Islamic reverence for Jesus without ever telling his readers — beyond a vague reference to the fact that “Muslims and Christians do have some differing perspectives on Jesus’ life and teachings” — that the Qur’an curses those who profess Jesus as the Son of God (9:30) and rejects the Trinity as blasphemy (5:73, 4:171). The thrust of his column is that Islam generously recognizes the importance of the central figure of Christianity, with the implication that if Muslims can revere Jesus in this way, why can’t Christians revere Muhammad?
But the legend on the bus is different: it reflects the Islamic supremacist notion that the Biblical prophets and Jesus were all prophets of Islam whose Islamic teachings were corrupted by their followers to create Judaism and Christianity. This idea is rooted in the Qur’an — see, for example, 3:67, which declares that while the Jews and the Christians both claim the patriarch Abraham as one of their own, he was actually a Muslim!
This concept completely delegitimizes Judaism and Christianity, relegating them to the status of false faiths, corrupted versions of the original Islam that was taught by their most important figures. Will this supremacist and utterly un-ecumenical claim on CAIR’s dawah buses sell well with infidels? Well, probably it will turn some heads, and get some people to inquire. But in any case it is very interesting to see this delegitimization of Islam’s fellow “Abrahamic faiths,” so often denied by Islamic spokesmen in the West, openly affirmed in a campaign of Islamic proselytizing.