In an address delivered in response to the recent terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, that killed the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans, President Obama stated that any denigration of others’ religious beliefs is to be firmly rejected, obliquely referring to a low-budget, American-made video released in July that ridicules Muhammad and that sparked the attack.

Obama went on to decry the “senseless violence” perpetrated there as absolutely unjustified.

I wonder: Would the president regard as guilty of denigration those who insist there’s a lifeblood connection between the Benghazi attack (a drop in the bucket of centuries of aggression) and the teaching and actions of Islam’s founder? Is he aware of what Muhammad—whom Muslims revere as the supreme model of human behavior—has declared to the world as regards his mission and its implications for Muslims wholly committed to their faith?

“I have been commanded to fight against people,” he has said, “till they testify that there is no god but Allah and believe in me that I am the messenger from the Lord and in all I have brought.”

In light of this statement, are we to understand that those responsible for the Benghazi murders were acting in some heinously un-Islamic fashion? That they acted in ignorance of these other words of his: “I have been made victorious with terror”?

President John Quincy Adams had it exactly right: “The precept of the Koran is perpetual warfare against all who deny that Mahomet is the prophet of God.”

William LaRochelle, Lewiston