Muslim Pilgrims Urged to Shun 'Islamic' Terror

Specifically, a Saudi cleric told pilgrims at Mecca not to follow the lead of men like Osama bin Laden and his followers.

Saudi Arabia has a problem. For decades they have paid remittances to Osama bin Laden and his ilk. Now a remittance is money you pay somebody to get lost, or to leave you alone. The trouble is that Osama bin Laden and his pals are pocketing the remittances and are neither getting lost nor leaving the Saudi royal family alone. So now I have to ask the Saudi royal family: How do you like being targets? Not very well, apparently, or they wouldn't bother sending someone to address a bunch of people in Mecca to tell them not to play with Osama.

But this brings us to the bigger trouble: Osama and his buddies are the ones reading the Koran correctly, not the Saudi royal family or their sympathetic clerics. The Saudis have just proposed to take scissors to the Koran--but they can never, never admit that. And our problem is that when people read the Koran consistently, and act on it, that puts them at war with us--pure and simple. (And if they deny reading the Koran consistently, how are we to believe them? The Koran says that it's OK to lie to an infldel in order to further the holy war that every Muslim is exhorted to wage!)

We come down to the same problem, don't we? The only advice, then, that I can offer to any Muslim is this: Your entire religion is full of contradictions--and when you apply the Koran to untangle the contradictions, you end up with direct orders to kill the rest of us who are not Muslim. If that's what you want, then understand that we will defend ourselves. But if it isn't what you want--then I'd say you need to take a second look at the Koran, and then have a look at the Bible.