From The Gathering Storm
It is well known that John Esposito is a blatant apologist for militant Islam.
The 1990s, he said, would “be a decade of new alliances and alignments in which the Islamic movements will challenge rather than threaten their societies and the West.” In 1994, he supported the notion that Hamas, the suicide-bombing Palestinian terror group, is also a community-focused group that engages in “honey, cheese-making, and home-based clothing manufacture.”Esposito also claimed on NPR that Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasir Arafat’s call for Jihad is comparable to a “literacy campaign” or the “fight against AIDS.”Clearly, Esposito accepts a rose-colored version of militant Islam that has little connection to reality. But rather than damaging his reputation, this approach has served him surprisingly well in both academic circles as well as government. Indeed, he was a leading source of information on Islamic movements for the Department of State during the Clinton years.
In a news article entitled ‘Lecturer Dispels Myths About Islam’ in the LedgerOnline, Esposito ‘exposes’ our ignorance of Islam.
John Esposito said he gets asked the same questions repeatedly these days, one of them being, "Why is Islam such a violent religion?" In a lecture, "Violence in the Islamic Tradition," at Florida Southern College on Friday, he posed a question in response: "Why is it we have so much of a problem distinguishing between what a majority of Muslims do and what extremists do?" Esposito goes on to use the everyday apologist tactic of “Well we were just as bad as them” instead of answering to the issue at hand.
Esposito pointed to a quote by former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski that the 20th century was the bloodiest in human history. He asked, "Who was it that engaged in and perpetuated the violence? Not Muslims, but America and Europe. It was not waged in the name of religion, but it was fought by religious people and legitimated by religious chaplains." Christians fail to notice their own complicity in such violence while reacting with shock to violence inflicted by Muslims and wrongly seeking to characterize Islam as a whole as a violent religion, he said. Esposito is helping conduct a worldwide Gallup poll, "Can You Hear Me? Listening to the Voices of Muslims," which he said dispels many stereotypes held in the West about Muslims.
"A majority of Muslims admire the West for its scientific achievements, its freedoms of speech and assembly.Uh huh. Where was Mr. Esposito and the Muslim admiration for free speech during the Mohammed cartoon controversy and other perceived offense to Islam that drew that small minority of thousands of Muslims into the streets worldwide?
"Is it moving as fast as it should? No. Authoritarian regimes -- and most Muslim countries are ruled by authoritarian regimes -- and extremists are not interested in that debate," he said.That’s news to Al Qaeda and bin Laden who preaches the overthrow of the sheikdoms in Arabia.