Needing a Host

The Ebola virus will not fly across the ocean and down your chimney to infect your family. If heaven forbid you ever catch Ebola, it will have been transmitted to you by an individual who already had the disease. If you are ever injured by a jihadist, that harm was caused by a notion that does indeed seem to travel through the air (or the airwaves). There are poisonous ideas being disseminated on the World Wide Web. People are being taught religious hatred online. They are being instructed to do violence in the name of faith as an article of faith. This is a perversion of man's relationship with the Lord. This is an assault on decency and conscience. Across the ages, many faiths have been spurred to violence, but over time, those faiths have reformed to denounce brutality carried out as Divine Will. To this point, Islam has experienced no such reformation. It is time for the hundreds of millions of Muslims who are sickened by the Islamic State, Boko Haram, al-Qaeda and similar aggressive jihadists to rally to denounce their evil acts to save their own faith. If the good Muslims do not rise up to counter the evil actors within Islam, it demonstrates that Islam itself and not a few terrorists hiding behind misinterpreted doctrine is the real problem. The world will shortly know whether a few million deluded believers corrupt one of the world's great religions or whether peaceful Muslims will stand as one to redeem their own faith.