Reading the Letters to the Editor of Wellington’s “Dominion Post” daily newspaper I am noticing an interesting phenomenon. On the subject of Islam, those letters signed by an Islamic sounding name are all for promoting the false idea that Islam is a religion of peace and tolerance, whereas those letters signed by European sounding names are refuting such nonsense and pointing out the reality instead. The latter have generally become better informed than those whom one would hope might know a little more about the religion they supposedly practice. It is hugely disappointing that Muslims do not acknowledge what is written in their Qur’ans and stop treating the rest of us as ignoramuses. It is very obvious to most that all through history Islam has had bloody borders, and that today terrorism is still delivered largely by Muslim hands. If anyone has any doubts about that and would like to make some comparisons, then check out the bald facts presented by the Islam: The Religion of Peace website.

However, it is apparently not obvious to everyone yet, especially our leaders, as the letter I read in yesterday’s newspaper, signed by someone with an Islamic sounding name, quoted none other than Tony Blair from an interview with Newsweek back in December 2001. Back then Mr Blair is quoted as saying “True Islam is immensely tolerant and open. Fundamentalism in Islam is no different from the Protestants who go on the streets of Belfast and shoot a Catholic, any Catholic. We’ve all had our fundamentalists.” Of course some water has flowed under the bridge since then, and the Protestants and Catholics have stopped shooting each other in Belfast, but nothing has changed regarding what is written in the Qur’an about slaughtering infidels to further the agenda of Islamic domination and universal global submission to Allah. We have since been told that Mr Blair has a copy of the Qur’an for bedtime reading, and that he has read it cover-to-cover twice over now. What is not quite so well known is that reading the Qur’an from cover-to-cover can leave you very uninformed about Islam unless you also know the chronological order in which Qur’anic surahs (chapters) were written and therefore which ones will negate contradictory earlier ones. The surahs of the Qur’an are not presented chronologically but in order of their relative lengths instead. Mr Blair has so far given no indication at all that he understands that fact, nor the results of applying that fact (nasikh - the abrogation of earlier surahs by contradictory later ones) in order to correctly understand the message of Islam.

The letter also quoted US President George W. Bush as saying: “The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That’s not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace.” This apparently comes from somewhere on the official White House website. Clearly Mr Bush has not been properly informed either - or else he is engaging in a little taqiyya of his own - either diplomacy, cunning or outright cowardly appeasement.

The letter finishes with it’s final sentence as follows: “Anybody who doubts the integrity of Islam shouldn’t prove their own intolerance by judging something they don’t understand.”

Oh boy, now that is rich! It just so happens that maybe we who “doubt the integrity of Islam” have extremely good reason to do so, and that not only the word “intolerance” is used here according to the postmodern language revisionist’s devious definition of it’s meaning, but that we also understand far more than the writer is prepared to acknowledge. We understand the writer either does not know his own religion, or if he does, that he doesn’t want us to understand it truthfully either.