Rand Paul: Boston Marathon Bombing Part of a ‘War on Christianity’

Sen. Rand Paul spent his Fri­day speech to the Value Voters Sum­mit de­scrib­ing a glob­al war on Chris­tian­ity. And, the sen­at­or said, we’ve already been vic­tims of this at­tack by rad­ic­al Is­lam­ists this year.

The “war on Chris­tian­ity,” Paul said, “came to Bo­ston this year, just in time for the mara­thon.” Paul said the April bomb­ing was part of a glob­al re­li­gious at­tack: “You may ar­gue they’re not tar­get­ing Chris­ti­ans, but they didn’t at­tack a mosque. They came to at­tack our people, a Chris­ti­an people.”

The Ken­tucky Re­pub­lic­an ar­gued from the be­gin­ning of his speech that Muslim ant­ag­on­ism to­ward Chris­tian­ity “shouldn’t be un­der­stated.” Even though Paul ac­know­ledged that rad­ic­al Is­lam is just a small fac­tion of the glob­al re­li­gion, it still makes up, Paul says, up to 100 mil­lion people.

“There’s 50 mil­lion, 100 mil­lion, this isn’t go­ing to be fought with a con­ven­tion­al war. It will re­quire Is­lam to de­fend Is­lam”¦. There are times when mil­it­ary ac­tion is jus­ti­fied, and ne­ces­sary “¦ we must be will­ing and able to de­fend ourselves against the ji­hadists.”

Paul’s main ar­gu­ment for fight­ing rad­ic­al Is­lam con­sisted of strip­ping fund­ing for Egypt and Pakistan.

Paul did make a point of say­ing that Is­lam has non­vi­ol­ent roots that “paved the way for our en­light­en­ment,” and said that the re­li­gion needs to go back to this.

The idea that Muslims aren’t look­ing out for, or con­cerned with, ex­trem­ism doesn’t really hold up. A spring Pew study found grow­ing con­cerns among Muslims in the areas con­nec­ted to the Bo­ston bomb­ing sus­pects about rad­ic­al­iz­a­tion. That same sur­vey found a wide re­jec­tion of sui­cide bomb­ing.

An­oth­er Pew study from May found that Muslim opin­ion to­ward the West and Chris­tian­ity is get­ting more fa­vor­able as In­ter­net use in­creases.