The Religion of Peace wins false converts with guns. Strong faiths do not need guns to win real converts. If this continues over time muslims will not have to worry about a potentential backlash, there will be a real backlash. Trying to expand your religion or your influence, or your land by gunpoint isn’t something that’s going to happen, let’s face it: if you have to resort to tactics like this, then you are weak and cowardly.
Editing below is mine.
GAZA (Reuters) – Militants Terrorists in the Gaza Strip released two kidnapped journalists from the American Fox News Channel on Sunday after forcing them at gunpoint to say in a videotape they had converted to Islam.
Correspondent Steve Centanni, a 60-year-old American, and New Zealand-born cameraman Olaf Wiig, 36, were in a hotel in the Palestinian coastal strip after two weeks of captivity.
A previously unknown group called the Holy Jihad Brigades had made a sweeping demand for the United States to free Muslim prisoners in exchange for the release of the men. The United States had rejected the demand.
“I am really fine, healthy, in good shape and so happy to be free,” Centanni told the Fox Channel.
Centanni recalled the trauma of the ordeal, being held at one stage in a garage, and said he and Wiig were forced to convert to Islam at gunpoint.
“I’m thinking ‘oh God, a remote warehouse with a big noisy generator, they could simply shoot me in the head and nobody would hear it’,” Centanni said.
Hint to terrorists: Steve probably wasn’t thinking of Mohammed or Allah when he thought “oh God”.
This quote from Britt Hume at Fox News, sums it up best to me:
Yes, and what an appealing faith these thugs must believe Islam is, that conversions have to be effected at the point of a gun. And what of the argument that all of the ills and troubles that beset the Palestinian people, that lead them to terrorism, are the cause of what they endlessly refer to as the illegal Israeli occupation.
Consider the latest rounds of trouble in Gaza and Lebanon, two places from which Israel has withdrawn.
It has been noted that not for one day after the Israeli pullout from Gaza did the rocket attacks that came from Gaza ever stop. We’re not dealing here with something that is susceptible to a political resolution of the kind of which the State Department and many a president has dreamed.
We’re dealing here with a lawless enemy whose goal far transcends any side-by-side, two-state solution. That isn’t going to do it. We’re dealing with a terrorist, gangland-style enemy, which I think it’s fair to conclude, and this episode only further illustrates it, must be defeated.
Much more at Little Green Footballs