Rod Parsley has trouble with one of the Ten Commandments.
Parsley is the fundamentalist pastor of an Ohio megachurch who was belatedly renounced by John McCain, two months after Mother Jones reported that Parsley, whom McCain had praised and campaigned with, had declared in a book that Islam was a “false religion” that ought to be “destroyed.” (For a video, produced by Mother Jones and Brave New Films, showing Parsley in full anti-Islam throttle, click here.)
Sometime after McCain on May 22 rejected Parsley’s endorsement, Parsley put out a video in which he responded to the McCain controversy and sought to explain his “Biblical worldview” on Islam. In this statement, he violated the thou-shall-not-fib rule.
First, he accused “political hit squads” (meaning, yours truly) of describing his views in “the most ominous and extreme terms.” You can review the MotherJones/Brave New Films video and decide for yourself how “ominous and extreme” Parsley has been. Then, more telling, he betrayed himself, by running away from his own views. In the video, he says his take on Islam is “in the mainstream” and that “I have always, and I will continue, to make a clear distinction between Muslim terrorists and the vast majority of peaceful Muslims.”
Not true. In his own book, Silent No More, Parsley declares,
There are some, of course, who will say that the [Islamist] violence I cite is the exception and not the rule. I beg to differ. I will counter, respectfully, that what some call “extremists” are instead mainstream believers who are drawing from the well at the very heart of Islam.
In other words, Islamic terrorists are not bad apples; the faith itself is evil. In his book and in a video sermon on Islam, Parsley does not differentiate between Islam and radical Islam. In fact, he says the two are the same. He also claims that the entire Islam religion is a Satanic deception. And he notes that Islam “is an anti-Christ religion that intends, through violence, to conquer the world.” All this is not the mainstream view of Islam.
So when Parsley maintains on his recent video that he does indeed distinguish between radical Islam and the rest of the faith, he appears to be lying. Sure, it’s not nice to accuse a man of the cloth of being a liar, but I don’t know how one gets around such an obvious conclusion in this case. Parsley clearly knows what he has said and written in the past. He must realize that he is now engaging in nothing but spin.
In his own video, Parsley says, “I understand that the raw truth of the pulpit cannot survive untempered in the political sphere.” Entering the political sphere, he has denied stating what he actually stated. And there ain’t much “raw truth” in that.
(Credit to Right Wing Watch for spotting Parsley’s video.)
