Joseph Farah invokes the “No True Scotsman” fallacy in his July 28 WorldNetDaily column, claiming that Anders Breivik could not possibly be a Christian because Christians don’t kill people like that:
Breivik has never been a part of a Christian fundamentalist church or faith. Instead, he casts himself as not very religious, and the only church he ever attended regularly was the state church. And while he considers himself at war with Islam and multiculturalism in Europe, he seriously considered an alliance with radical Muslims to wreak mayhem, havoc and bloodshed in his perverted cause.
[…]Like many extremists before him, Breivik’s goal was to kill as many people as possible to set off a wider conflagration that could and would only be settled by violence.
Breivik demonstrates his lack of understanding of the most basic Christian principles, like Jesus’ warning to Peter in the Gospel of Matthew (26:52): “Then said Jesus unto him, Put up again thy sword into his place: for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword.”What does Breivik make of this clear warning? Amazingly, he sees it as a command by Jesus to use the sword against His enemies when it was just the opposite.
What you won’t find in Farah’s column, of course, is any acknowledgement that WND is cited six times in Breivik’s manifesto, including one of Farah’s own columns, eadlined “The Bible and self-defense,” in which he explains that “The Bible couldn’t be clearer on the right – even the duty – we have as believers to self-defense.” Farah says he wrote the column as a follow-up to a previous column in which he issued a “plea to Americans … to buy firearms as a first step to fighting terrorism” as a response to Christians who “wrote challenging my prescription as unbiblical, unscriptural and ungodly.” Farah includes numerous Bible verses he claims supports his point.
If Farah was an honest journalist, he would have acknowledged the presence of his work in the manifesto of a terrorist and explain himself to his readers. But since Farah is not an honest journalist, hell will freeze over before that happens.