Friday, August 5, 2011

Allah is not God

In a recent post about a barbecue bash at a Mississauga apartment complex,  Strictly Halal: Coming to your neighborhood, I wrote:
[In] the elevator this week-end, I saw a sign up for a barbecue party with this: "Food will be strictly halal." Not just halal, but strictly halal.

Slowly, incrementally, stealthily, our Muslim co-citizens are changing our landscape. "What's wrong with eating halal food?" you may ask. Well, the animals which the meat for this delicious barbecue comes from are killed IN THE NAME OF ALLAH, i.e. HALAL. So, these friendly Muslim neighbors are in effect forcing us to acknowledge this Allah, and by extension Islam. There is no tolerance in Islam, contrary to the beliefs of our multi-culti elites. It is Islam (or death).
I understood immediately that all this religious proclamation (halal food, etc.) has nothing to do with our God, but with a very different god. I don't think I've ever called Allah God. I've always referred to him as Allah.

Here's the View From the Right's Lawrence Auster elaborating on that point on his post, Why we should call the god of the Muslims "Allah," not "God":
My own usage, and that of many others, is not to use the word "God" when referring to the god of the Muslims, but Allah. The reason is that Allah is not the same as the God of the Bible, but fundamentally different. He is a God of unceasing hate and murder, a god of pure will, not a god who can be known and loved (as the Pope explained in his Regensburg lecture). Indeed, he is a god who commands death to people who believe in the God of the Bible in biblical terms rather than in Islamic terms. Therefore he should be referred to by his distinct Muslim name of Allah. He should not be given the dignity and legitimacy of the God of the Bible.
The rest of the entry describes how the Catholic Church goes through convoluted arguments saying that Allah is God, and therefore has no way to counter Islam that would so readily do away the Church. I'm sure, though, that this myopia is not confined to the Catholic Church, and the Protestant Churches (but surprisingly less so the Orthodox Churches) believe the same. Auster continues:
[T]he Catholic Church has got itself permanently screwed up by its official description of Muslims--in a Church document of the 1960s called Nostra Aetate and in the Catholic Catechism itself--as "fellow adorers of the One God." This articulation makes it impossible for the Church hierarchy to stand against Islam...

As long as the Church officially speaks of Muslims as "fellow adorers of the one God," it is impossible for the Church truly to reject Islam or oppose the Islamization of the West.