By Walid Shoebat

Spanish police arrested two people on Tuesday suspected of distributing ISIS propaganda. The local La Vanguardia newspaper quoted police sources as saying the latest arrests were made in Cornella, a small town near Barcelona. All what Spain’s interior ministry had to show in order to arrest these sympathizers was that these Muslims were spreading ISIS propaganda:

“With their propaganda and proselytizing activities they were helping the ideology of the terrorist organization Daesh,” Spain’s Interior Ministry said in a statement, referring to ISIS by its Arabic acronym.

In late March in Badalona, four members of a family were arrested and earlier that month, a Moroccan woman was arrested for spreading propaganda intended to spread ISIS propaganda.

While ISIS propagandists should be put on trial as terrorists, as we see in Spain, in the United States we have ways to go in combating ISIS. One would presume that anyone who assists ISIS with online media should face criminal prosecution. This should include anyone proliferating ISIS social media that is intended as propaganda material done in order to recruit sympathy and support for ISIS. In the United States the government could use the “material support law” to prosecute for such activities under providing “technical expertise” to a designated terrorist organization.

But, this is highly doubtful that the “material support statute” could be constitutionally applied to the simple promotion of a terrorist group on Twitter, Facebook and the Internet since in the United States, the key issue in prosecuting distributors of terror recruitment  is whether such distribution is considered an “expression of sympathy for terrorist ideology” which would be considered “protected speech” and is not considered work that is undertook to support the terrorist group or assist its operations.

So in the United States, Muslims can publicly say (which they have done on countless occasions) that “we support Hamas,” “we support Hezbollah,” “we support Al-Qaeda,” and “we even support ISIS” and they pretty much can get away with it.

So what is the crux of our problem here?

Freedom of Speech was never meant to endorse the rights of those who would do wicked deeds. Period.

Questions arise whether we should have no right to “offend God,” which brings in the Muslim argument about critiquing Islam in order to infringe on the right to free speech. The counter argument to this is that our rights, as they were designed by the founding fathers, come from the will of God, that is the God who “transmitted the Bible,” and “not the Quran,” and such was the intent of the founding fathers who wanted to protect us to freely express our faith and not to express the right to spread violence.

Isaiah 59 sums up the whole issue perfectly. In Isaiah God teaches that in order to remove peace from the earth all what has to be done is to allow sin to be committed and by being separated from God, peace is then removed, and the spread of violence automatically “hatches the eggs of vipers and spin a spider’s web.” Isaiah 59 then says that “whoever eats their eggs will die, and when one is broken, an adder is hatched.”

Such people, Isaiah describes, as “hands are stained with blood” and that these “rely on empty arguments, they utter lies; they conceive trouble and give birth to evil.”

Such is the definition of terrorism. Islamic terrorism therefore is hatched up as a result of faulty theology which according to our current societal understanding of “Free Speech” is “protected speech”.

God predicted this centuries ago and describes people who are living in sin as being separated from God and will always end up committing violence: “Their deeds are evil deeds, and acts of violence are in their hands … They pursue evil schemes; acts of violence mark their ways“.

The signature of such evil, as the Bible describes, stems from not knowing the way to peace: “The way of peace they do not know; there is no justice in their paths. They have turned them into crooked roads; no one who walks along them will know peace.”

So the way to peace is “the knowledge of justice” and in order to pursue justice, society needs to maintain laws that are intended to prevent violence. This is what is missing in the United States today which has always been exercised in ancient Israel and throughout Church History.

So how can justice prevail or how can mankind understand that peace is only attained when a society obeys God?

Justice requires laws that protect us from violence. Yet today, we live by modern Christian mottos like “love the sinner but hate the sin” which is usually accompanied by a multitude of sentiments that says that we, as a society, are not to pass judgment or punishment for certain sins.

Bad theology has plunged our modern societies into an evolving chaos in which eventually God proclaimed: “And there went out another horse that was red; and power was given to him that sat thereon to take peace from the earth, that they should kill one another … ” (Revelation 6:4)

If we think that our simplistic mottos will bring peace and love, or that the problem with terrorism is simply Islam,  think again. It is our imbalances between understanding “true freedom” versus “the freedom to sin” and by that violence is spread. It is this that is the root cause of violence. The spread of Islam is simply a sign of a decadent society which believes in faulty freedoms and nothing more.

Historically, where Christianity did not enforce preventative laws, Islam spread with a multitude of other heresies. It is when the Church followed God’s justice that peace finally prevailed and such peace was never attained by peaceful means, but by enforcing the laws through sheer violence.

Violence by itself is no crime, for it needs to be viewed within context, but in a simplistic world, evil always is wedged in by using simplistic arguments like “God hates the sin but loves the sinner”.

How so, especially when God Himself said: “The Lord tests the righteous and the wicked, and the one who loves violence His soul hates” (Psalm 11:5). Therefore, God hates terrorists and so shall we. In Psalm 5:5 God is described as “You [God] hate all who do iniquity,” (Psalm 5:5) And regarding the heathen God says “I have abhorred them” (Lev 20:23) and then we have “There are six things the Lord hates, seven that are detestable to him: haughty eyes, a lying tongue, hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked schemes, feet that are quick to rush into evil, a false witness who pours out lies and a person who stirs up conflict in the community.” (Proverbs 6:16-19)

The correct motto then is that God hates law breakers. He punishes the sinner through His laws that are to be carried out through government which sets God’s justice.

Until that is accomplished, do not only blame Islam for the violence that we witness on daily basis. We should blame ourselves for promoting a faulty understanding of freedom and a faulty understanding of God.