President Obama said the actions of Muslim terrorists “are irreconcilable with the rights of human beings, the progress of nations, and with Islam. The Holy Koran teaches that whoever kills an innocent, it is as if he has killed all mankind; and whoever saves a person, it is as if he has saved all mankind.”
The president was drawing on Sura 5:32. Somehow, though, he managed to leave out the very next verse, Sura 5:33:
The punishment of those who wage war against Allah and His Messenger, and strive with might and main for mischief through the land, is: execution, or crucifixion, or the cutting off of hands and feet from opposite sides, or exile from the land: That is their disgrace in this world, and a heavy punishment is theirs in the hereafter.*
I must say that some of that sounds even worse than waterboarding. But, in any event, it’s hard to see how ignoring it is consistent with forming a “partnership between America and Islam must be based on what Islam is, not what it isn’t.”
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* I’m quoting from one of the copies of the Koran I keep in my personal library — published by the Ministry of Hajj and Endowments of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia — but I have no reason to doubt that the same scripture could be found in Thomas Jefferson’s Koran.