“Sharia law is for Muslims. So if there is a Muslim majority state then it has to be run by Sharia,” stated basketball legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar with surprisingly little public controversy in a September 23 interview. This statement and other elements from Abdul-Jabbar’s biography only accentuated reservations concerning a Muslim president recently raised by Ben Carson, even as Jabbar in another interview dismissed Carson as “bigoted and irrational.”GO READ THE WHOLE THING.
More than four decades after Muslims slaughtered seven people in a home he owned, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar argues at Time that blaming Islam for the Charlie Hebdo murders says more about our ignorance of Islam than it does about the shortcomings of the religion itself.
“Knowing that these terrorist attacks are not about religion, we have to reach a point where we stop bringing Islam into these discussions,” Abdul-Jabbar insists. “I know we aren’t there yet because much of the Western population doesn’t understand the Islamic religion.”
Forty-two-years ago this Sunday in Washington, D.C., the property that the Hall of Fame center purchased for his Islamic teacher’s use served as a stage for terrorism every bit as shocking as the ghoulish performance at Charlie Hebdo’s Paris office. The Time article by the UCLA and Lakers great strangely never mentions the sectarian bloodbath that occurred under his roof.
The abridged version is that a crew of Philadelphia-based Nation of Islam (NOI) members invaded the home, murdering several adults and children execution style. They drowned a newborn baby in a bathtub. In slaying the children, a ringleader reasoned that “the seed of the hypocrite is in them.” The “hypocrite,” Hamaas Abdul Khaalis, had called NOI leader Elijah Muhammad “a lying deceiver” and judged his followers criminals disgracing the name of Islam in letters imprudently sent to numerous mosques.
Like the Charlie Hebdo murders, the assailants sought to avenge an insult to a venerated religious leader. Like the Charlie Hebdo murders, the assailants executed innocent, defenseless people, including five children ranging from a few days old to a fourth grader. Like the Charlie Hebdo murders, religion, not money or sex or power, primarily motivated the attacks.