A dozen people gather outside the Chattanooga Muslim temple Friday to express unity with Muslims worshiping inside the building. At left, the Rev. Carol Howard Merritt; center, the Rev. Brian Merritt. (Photo Beth Foster. See other photos on Facebook)
By David Tulis
A group of Christians, jews and secularists gathered for prayer and commiseration Friday outside the Muslim Temple off Gunbarrel Road in Chattanooga following an important presentation Monday by Sheriff Jim Hammond.
Hamilton County’s leading official warned in a lecture that imperial Islam is a threat to constitutional government and a free people as envisioned by the state’s and the nation’s largely Christian group of founders.
The demonstration of about 25 people was led by the Rev. Brian Merritt of Mercy Junction of Chattanooga while Muslims inside the facility were on their knees and noses in Jumu’ah prayers to Allah.
Attending was Rabbi Bill Tepper of Mizpah Congregation, who gave a blessing at the Prayers in Solidarity with Muslim Sisters and Brothers event.
The gathering was billed a prayer service but was also a public protest against Sheriff Hammond. “Residents of Hamilton County should have confidence that all religions are protected under our shared guaranteed constitutional freedoms,” Mercy Junction had said in a statement. “It is an inherent danger when armed agents of the government condemn a religion practiced by the people they serve. Singling out a particular religious community for persecution by county officials is reprehensible and the height of immorality.”
Chattanooga Police Department police chief Fred Fletcher attended, but appears to have stayed at the margin of the gathering.
Said attendee Rosemary Hurayt, “I am here because I do not like when public officials make racist, sexist or homophobic comments to prejudice their employees.”
Attendees went inside the Muslim facility to take part in worship of Allah, the Muslim deity, having been welcomed by Azhar Sheikh, an Islamic Society member.
It is perhaps debatable whether Rev. Merritt and his wife, a fellow Presbyterian minister, Carol, represent the Christian scriptures with accuracy. Nonetheless they represented in that venue Christianity with its doctrines of grace, its accounting of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross for His people, and Christ’s powerful claims upon equity and justice in terms of God’s revealed law.
Future slaughters under jihad
They support Muslims in Chattanooga perhaps without knowing about the Islamic literary trilogy that is the basis of Mohammedanism — the Koran, the Sira (Mohammed’s biography) and the Hadith, the Muslim commentaries.
These books are that part of Islam that Sheriff Hammond and Sevier County sheriff Ron Seals have in view in warning about future slaughters in Tennessee by faithful Muslims. The conflict of blood may not exist among Muslims and Christians as people. But it exists in the contradictory texts — the Bible of God’s revelation, and the Koran and its supporting materials declared by the prophet.
These gentle Christians and the rabbi Tepper are embracing a bramblebush of law and practice 1,400 years old with a consistent record of warfare and, among other forms of holiness, slavery.
While liberty is a tenet of Christianity, slavery is a teaching of Islam. In Mohammed’s system, every Christian is a kafir who must submit to Islam as slave, taxpayer or convert, or be destroyed. Slavery is pleasing to Allah and a natural order in society. In the U.S. the word slave is anathema. In Islam, it is a good word for which there is no shame.
Mohammed’s religion has the most developed slave code in the world, according to Bill Warner, a long student of Islam who publishes extensively on the system at the Center for the Study of Political Islam in Nashville. A Christian who is not killed in battle is enslaved. If he converts, he stands a chance of being freed.
Of special delectable interest, possibly, to the Revs. Merritt are the provisions of sex slavery such as that endured by Kayla Mueller chained in a room and raped repeatedly by ISIS boss Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Al-Bagdhdadi’s lieutenants also used and defiled her before she was slain. Girls of conquered areas are warehoused and sold as chattel for sex among ISIS warriors, according to the New York Times’ Rukmini Callimachi.
Mohammed practiced sexual slavery possessing women for sexual gratification alone. His followers go and do likewise, as everything recorded among Mohammed’s actions are blessed.
In the moments before he raped the 12-year-old girl, the Islamic State fighter took the time to explain that what he was about to do was not a sin. Because the preteen girl practiced a religion other than Islam, the Quran not only gave him the right to rape her — it condoned and encouraged it, he insisted.
He bound her hands and gagged her. Then he knelt beside the bed and prostrated himself in prayer before getting on top of her.
When it was over, he knelt to pray again, bookending the rape with acts of religious devotion.
“I kept telling him it hurts — please stop,” said the girl, whose body is so small an adult could circle her waist with two hands. “He told me that according to Islam he is allowed to rape an unbeliever. He said that by raping me, he is drawing closer to God,” she said in an interview alongside her family in a refugee camp here, to which she escaped after 11 months of captivity.
Alarming to Trudy Rubin, a writer at the Philadelphia Inquirer whose review appears in the Chattanooga Times Free Presss, is the lack of outrage among Westerners to this teaching and practice of sexual abuse against non-Muslims.
Sources: Photo https://www.facebook.com/bethneyfoster
Trudy Rubin, “A shocking silence on the Islamic State sex slavery,” Chattanooga Times Free Press, Sept. 6, 2015
Shelly Bradbury, “Dozens gathers at Islamic center to show support,” Chattanooga Times Free Press, Sept. 5, 2015, http://www.timesfreepress.com/news/local/story/2015/sep/05/dozens-gathers-islamic-center-show-support/323607/
Bill Warner, The Doctrine of Slavery, an Islamic Institution (Nashville: Center for the Study of Political Islam, 2010), 71 pp. See p. 47.
Rukmini Callimachi, “ISIS enshrines a theology of rape,” New York Times, Aug. 13, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/14/world/middleeast/isis-enshrines-a-theology-of-rape.html?_r=0
The Christians at Mercy Junction invite celebratory characters such as William Boyd Nix to join them in fellowship and love. (Photo Fellowship of Heretics on Facebook)
