As anti-Islamic rhetoric grows following last week’s deadly terror attacks in Paris, killing 132 people, several Fox Business Network personalities joined the choir on Tuesday, likening the religion to a deadly virus.
“Winston Churchill warned of what he called the dangers of Islam back in 1889,” Varney & Co.’s British host Stuart Varney said. “Here is the quote: ‘Individual Muslims may show splendid qualities but the influence of the religion paralyzes the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world.’ Strong stuff 100 years ago.”
“It was,” FBN reporter and panelist Ashley Webster, who is also British, agreed. “He was very famous, Winston Churchill, for that line, ‘Islam is as dangerous in a man as rabies in a dog.’ He was very strong in his feelings for Islam, basically saying Christianity teaches tolerance, Islam simply does not.”
Churchill wrote of the “dreadful curses of Mohammedanism” in his 1899 book The River War.
Varney lamented that such anti-Islamic proclamations would not fly in contemporary society. “The main point is he would not be able to say that in Britain today or Canada today.” (Varney presumably singled out those two countries for their stricter “hate speech” laws.)
“Right,” FBN reporter Elizabeth MacDonald chimed in. “And, by the way, the founding fathers—John Quincy Adams and his father John Adams—said virtually the same thing. They warned about the dangers of Islamists basically acting with natural hatred toward infidels, who in Christianity preaches the direct opposite.”
“It's interesting 116 years ago when those lines were written by Winston Churchill could be written today and they would be applicable,” Webster added.
“Written but not said,” Varney bemoaned. “And if you write them, you are in trouble too.”