GUILTY UNTIL PROVEN INNOCENT 133
Mathew 26 52. Muhammad Approved Murder. Surah 8:65,  Reverend Fred
Morris, the executive director of the Florida Council of Churches, which repre-
sents 3,500 congregations with 1.5 million worshippers, strongly denounced
this attempt to attack the founder of Islam:
As a Christian, I am disappointed at this unchristian effort to disparage Islam.
Jesus never attacked other faiths. . . I am proud to regard Islam as our sister
among the Abramic religions. (Associated Press, January 22, 2003)
The Reverend Richard Cizik, vice president for governmental affairs of the
National Association of Evangelicals, has been quite vocal in trying to stop
demonization of Islam.   We do not worship the same God,  he says,   but I
also of do not believe in Islam as the new Ôevil empireÕ  (Lattin, 2004).
Interestingly, Christians of nonfundamentalist persuasions, who read the
same religious book as the fundamentalists do, have adopted a more concilia-
tory approach toward Islam and Muslims. Some have even tried to defend the
Prophet Muhammad. Alex Kronemer, a graduate of Harvard Divinity School,
is a coproducer of the PBS documentary Muhammad: Legacy of a Prophet. In
his article   Understanding Muhammad  (Kronemer, 2002), he rejects the
notion that Islam is fundamentally warlike, that Muslims are dangerous, and
that the Prophet Muhammad was primarily a military leader:
Historical context must likewise be remembered when judging Muhammad. The
notion that Muhammad was a man of war as contrasted Jesus and Moses, as
Jerry Falwell recently asserted, ignores the fact that Muhammad fought only a
handful of battles in his lifetime, resulting in barely one thousand casualties on
all sides.
This might be compared to such Biblical figures as David, who is praised in I
Samuel 18 for killing his   tens of thousands,  famously earning the murderous
jealousy of Saul who only killed his   thousands  ; or to Moses who, in the book
of Numbers 31, chastises his army for sparing the women and children of the
vanquished Midianites.
In his article, Kronemer does not imply that Southern Baptist preachers do
not know their Bible. His objection seems to be that they are guilty of serious
anti-Islamic bias in that they conveniently ignore the fact that passages of the
Bible condone and encourage bloodshed, not sparing even noncombatant inno-
cent women and children.
According to an Associated Press report of December 6, 2003, a leading
evangelical Christian organization, Fuller Theological Seminary, is using fed-
eral funds to launch a one-million dollar program to ease strained relations
with Muslims through an interfaith code of ethics. The initiative, funded by a
grant from the Justice Department, includes teaching the code to Muslims and
Christian community leaders in the Los Angeles area and publishing a book on
this topic. According to Sherwood Lingenfelter, Fuller s provost and senior
vice president,   We hope to lead a large portion of evangelical Christians into
a better understanding of Islam. After 9/11 there was a great deal of hostility
in the Christian community toward Muslims.