Islam, Islamism, and Moderation
The distinction frequently drawn between Islam, which is said to be moderate and peaceable, and Islamism, which is understood as a perversion of the cardinal tenets of the faith, seems both academic and unhelpful. Dutch politician Geert Wilders has claimed that no distinction exists “between good Islam and bad Islam. There is Islam and that’s it.” Might he be right?
There must obviously be something inherent in Islam which allows for large numbers of believers to kill and maim without compunction while sacrificing their own lives in the process. We do not see Christian or Jewish “terrorists” ramming jetliners into skyscrapers and the Pentagon, taking many thousands of innocent lives. We do not see them regularly blowing themselves up in crowded marketplaces, killing unarmed soldiers on American soil, or setting off incendiary devices on passenger jets. Beheadings, acid attacks, stonings, honor killings, burnings, kidnappings, and shooting sprees are not a staple of common Western behavior. The difference is incommensurable and those, primarily on the left, who labor to fudge the distinction by claiming a Jewish or Christian equivalence with the religious savagery of the Islamic world are in bad faith, and are nothing less than apologists for Islamic terror. Admittedly, from time to time a Baruch Goldstein or a Timothy McVeigh goes on a slaughter rampage, but such events are striking precisely because they are anomalous, whereas Muslim violence around the globe is almost a daily occurrence and is prescribed in the pages of the Koran.
It is true, as many scholars have remarked, that the earlier, Meccan portion of the Koran (610-622 C.E.) attests to a degree of tolerance, but the later, Medinese writings (622-632 C.E.), with but few exceptions, show little mercy to the unbeliever. There we find most of the ordinances relating to holy war. Andrew Bostom, author of The Legacy of Jihad, a veritable Encyclopedia Islamica, draws our attention to a famous hadith (or saying of Mohammed), no. 0272 in the Kitab Al-Iman, which decrees, “the Messenger of Allah (may peace be upon him) said: Verily the faith would recede to Medina just as the serpent crawls back into its hole.” The ophidian haven, we note, is not Mecca but Medina.
Even a cursory reading of the Koran will reveal that, like most scriptures, it is rife with contradictions. Such discrepancies are generally resolved by the principle of naskh, the doctrine of “progressive revelation,” according to which later revelations may cancel out earlier ones, giving doctrinal (if not temporal) priority to the Medinese section of the Koran. The earlier surahs, or chapters, that speak of peace and harmony could thus be abrogated or annulled (mansukh) by those which come afterward. The Koran itself permits such revision. Surah 2:106 reads: “We do not abrogate a verse or let it be forgotten without substituting a better or similar one.” But this is an old story, and the problem has been studied as far back as the 9th century Arab philosopher al-Kindi who, as Arabist Robert Irwin writes in For Lust of Knowing, “pointed to areas where the Qu’ran appeared to contradict itself and queried the Muslim doctrine of abrogation.”
Occasionally, a particular surah will even self-abrogate. Consider the celebrated surah 5:32, often cited by Muslims to emphasize the peaceful nature of Islam, which states that anyone who kills another human being “should be regarded as though he had killed all mankind.” There are several problems with this passage. To begin with, the phrasing is an almost exact replica of Eduyot 1:6 in the Hebrew Mishnah, circa 200 C.E. and collected in the Talmud, where it is written: “whoever destroys a single life, the Bible considers it as if he destroyed an entire world.” Such passages seem to justify the conviction of many scholars, going back to Ernest Renan’s essay Mahomet and the Origins of Islamism, that much of the Koran is a pastiche of Biblical sources, Talmudic traditions, and the Apocrypha.
Yet just as troubling, this Koranic verse immediately introduces an exception — “except as punishment for murder or other wicked crimes” — leaving the definition of “wicked crimes” open to interpretation. (Such a “wicked crime” is specified in 2:90 as unbelief: “May Allah’s curse be upon infidels. To deny Allah’s own revelation … they have incurred Allah’s most inexorable wrath.”) Further — and this is the sticking point — the very next verse appears to revoke its predecessor: “Those that make war against Allah and His apostle and spread disorders in the land shall be put to death or crucified or have their hands and feet cut off.” The notion of making war on Allah may obviously be interpreted in any number of different ways and indeed already has; spreading disorders is also open to interpretation and readily eventuates in the judicial killing of another human being. This is the theological rationale behind the current juridical atrocities in Iran, where people are executed as mohareb, “enemies of God.”
In asserting the peaceful nature of Islam against all the evidence to the contrary, many Muslims and their enablers will often bring up Surah 2:256, the famous “There is no compulsion in religion” dictum, which has been violated since time immemorial and is contradicted by innumerable other passages in the Koran. Surah 9:29, for example, is unambiguous: “Fight those of the People of the Book who do not truly believe in God and the Last Day, who do not forbid what God and his Messenger have forbidden, who do not obey the rule of justice, until they pay the tax and agree to submit.” Surah 9:5 enjoins the believer to “Fight and slay the Pagans wherever you may find them.” Surah 4:89 does not temporize with apostates: “If they desert you, seize them and put them to death wherever you find them.” The litany is interminable. It should be needless to say that to draw attention to such injunctions and their translation into practice cannot credibly be denounced as Islamophobic. Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, founder of The Values Network and author of Renewal: A Guide to the Values-Filled Life, who happens to take a broadly sympathetic view of Islam, cuts to the chase when he avers that “there can be no greater insult to the religion than to behave inhumanely while claiming to live by a higher spiritual and moral code.”
As might be expected, criticism of the Koran or of many of its decrees will be countered by Islamic scholars who depose that the passages in question have not been properly contextualized or competently parsed on the level of grammar, vocabulary, and classical usage. This is precisely the tack adopted by M.A.S. Abdel Haleem in the Introduction to his new translation of the Koran. But as any practicing Muslim knows, Koranic verses are understood to be eternally valid and always applicable in any or all circumstances. Haleem is unfazed and patently derelict with the truth. The conclusion he arrives at is that the “prevalent message of the Qur’an is one of peace and tolerance.”
Bangladeshi author of Women in Islam and former Muslim Abul Kasem does not think so. “Is there such a thing as moderate Islam? For the existence of moderate Islam/Muslims, there must be a ‘moderate’ Qu’ran, since the life force of Islam is the Qu’ran.” But the Koran, he points out, advocates violence in passage after passage and cannot be safely moderated. “Introducing innovation in Islam is a serious crime … subject to Islamic punitive measure, which is death.” Discounting the actual practitioners of terror, the majority of Muslims, Kasem explains, amounting to about 90% of the ummah, or community of believers, are Muslims in name only and have little idea of the Koran, ancillary writings such as the ahadith or even shari’a. A smaller group consists of what he calls “pretend Muslims,” and a third, even smaller number, who shrink from becoming martyrs but are sympathetic to the cause of worldwide dominion, comprises those who embrace “philosophical terrorism.”
Thus for Kasem, “there is no such true thing as moderate Muslims.” The real enemy, he concludes, “is not the terrorists. Rather, it is Islam. As long as the world does not internalize and comprehend this truth, and as long as wrong, PC policies are pursued this war will continue and the defeat of the non-believers is guaranteed.” Which is Kasem’s way of saying that our shallow belief in the efficacy of “moderation” is what may eventually do us in. Leslie S. Lebl of the American Center for Democracy agrees: the basic problem is “an ideology fundamental to ‘traditional’ or ‘moderate’ Islam as much as to its ‘radical variant.’” In other words, the Koran is seamless and its prescriptions hold across the board. Moreover, moderation is also a perfect cover for immoderation as well as its fecund seedbed and its sustaining medium. For Kasem, as is the case too with former Muslims like Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Ibn Warraq, what we call “moderate Islam” is the water in which the sharks swim and seek their prey.
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It is only fair to acknowledge a number of important dissenting voices. Director of the Middle East Forum Daniel Pipes famously believes that “if radical Islam is the problem, moderate Islam is the solution.” In The Trouble with Islam, Irshad Manji cites the principle of ijtihad, or democratic consultation and interpretive flexibility, as a crucial factor of Islamic life. David J. Rusin, director of Islamist Watch, cites a number of anti-jihad imams and “moderate” Muslim organizations, concluding that “the resurgent jihad is a conflict between an authoritarian interpretation of Islam and a more spiritual, secular interpretation.” Similarly, political commentator Barry Rubin, who argues that conservative Islam is at war with “revolutionary” Islam, considers that believing Muslims “can always find ways to ignore or reinterpret” their foundational texts. Rubin has recently interviewed Zeyno Baran, a senior fellow of the Hudson Institute and editor of The Other Muslims: Moderate and Secular, who agrees with her interviewer that a “civil war” is ongoing between Islamists and “traditional Muslims.” Baran believes that “the ideology of Islamism is…the root cause of the violence” and affirms that “Islam is not just about the written text but the living tradition”
Salim Mansur, author of Islam’s Predicament, adds the rider that “For Arabs, Islam is custom sanctioned by religion as doctrine. This does not hold for non-Arab Muslims, and problems arise when non-Arab Muslims, such as Pakistanis or Malays, pretentiously strive to outperform Arabs as fake Arabs.” Mansur’s focusing on normative Islam as custom first and theology second (or first-and-a-half) surely applies to many practicing Muslims, and perhaps not only to Arab Muslims, as he believes. But given the parietal atmosphere of threat, coercion and almost daily bloodshed, as well as the political and psychological hegemony of the Koran, whose fissile core is always ready to be activated, one may suspect that the more aggressive version of Islam may ultimately prevail over its more nuanced and presumably benign competitor. Certainly, its eruptive potential cannot be dismissed or extenuated.
A house revolt by “moderate Muslims” (assuming Kasem is mistaken) would plainly be a move in the right direction and might do something to reduce the incidence of terrorist attacks. But terrorism and religious discord will likely stay with us, whether overtly, latently or intermittently, so long as Islam remains literal and unemended. The issue is whether re-interpretation is possible. Egyptian physician-scholar Tawfik Hamid insists that without an “alternate approach” to the Koran, moderation is a dead letter. Presently engaged in preparing a new and different reading of portions of the Koran, Hamid clearly believes that such a reformulation is possible and that behavior modification may consequently be achieved.
Of course, it is more than a question of bringing the “higher criticism,” based on historical and textual principles, to bear upon the Koran alone, for the entire auxiliary corpus, the ahadith and the sirah (life, or way, of Mohammed), would also need to be reassessed. As William Kilpatrick reminds us, “75% of the sira is about jihad. These are inconvenient facts for those who hope Islam can be reformed.” He refers as well to Moorthy Muthuswamy, author of Defeating Political Islam, whose statistical analysis of the Koran is equally shocking: over 60% of its content is of a militant and hortatory nature. This interconnected library of faith, with the Koran at the center and the sunnah (ahadith plus sirah) radiating outward from the source through the chain of transmitters (isnad) into posterity, would seem far too complex, interfused and labyrinthine to yield to significant renovation. We are dealing with a vast and integrated canon that also includes the various schools of classical Islamic jurisprudence, or madh’habs. Good luck to anyone with the stamina and temerity to separate out the “offending” constituents of so resistant an amalgam in all its theological, political and legal reticulations. The chances of success would seem to be approximately zero.
One must be especially wary of well-meaning and tender-minded Muslim apologists such as Hamid or his distant colleague Nasr Hamid Abu Zaid, a professor in Leyden since having fled his native Cairo. They are not only tilting at windmills; they are also prone to oversimplification and misconstrual. In an interview with the Qantara.de website, for example, Abu Zaid argues that the calls to violence inscribed in the pages of the Koran were caused not by theological hatred but by the need to defend the nascent Muslim community from the enmity of their own tribes and families. In the context of indiscriminate warfare, slaughter and conquest, this seems, to put it gently, rather far-fetched.
The penchant to exaggeration or to advance a prettifying hermeneutic is difficult for reformist advocates to resist, if reform is their real intention. Nonie Darwish, author of Cruel and Usual Punishment and Now They Call Me Infidel, contends that “Muslims in America seem to teach, at least temporarily, religious principles that stand in stark contradiction with the core ideology of Islam. Such lies about what Islam is have worked in favor of Muslim expansion. The confusion and double talk in Islam works well in silencing others.” To take a recent example, a group of nine Muslim scholars representing the Muslim Public Affairs Council has released a video on YouTube meant to counter jihadist violence among radical Muslim youth. But the campaign is unconvincing. For one thing, the video is riddled with misconceptions and laundered interpretations of what is plainly set down in the larger Islamic text. For another, it is not reassuring that, according to The New York Times report, some of these scholars are “politically controversial” (the Times thinks this is a good thing!) and others are converts to Islam.
While such efforts, to the extent that they are genuine, are to be applauded, they tend nevertheless to resemble stopgap contrivances compromised by a mixed message. Injustice against Muslims is presented as a fact and, although it is affirmed that “Injustice cannot defeat injustice,” there is no mention of a major source of such injustice, the violence perpetrated by Muslims on their co-religionists. And then there are simple errors of historical fact. “The Prophet Mohammad,” says Imam Suhaib Webb, “when on the battlefield, saw that amongst the enemy there were innocent women and children killed, and he was openly angry. He is prohibiting us from killing the innocent. It is very clear.” Unfortunately, it is not “very clear” at all, as a study of the Koran and a knowledge of the early history of Islam makes even clearer.
A similar initiative launched by the MPJP (Muslims for Peace, Justice and Progress), which endeavors to “promote conflict resolution” and to “invalidate extremism and bigotry,” seems to be engrossed by the spectre of “Islamophobia and the negative stereotypes of Muslims in the West.” This is a very bizarre preoccupation, considering that there is very little Islamophobia to be found in the West. Europe bends over backwards to accommodate its Muslim communities (especially in Holland and Scandinavia), the UK is bristling with mosques and chockablock with Muslim organizations (the Muslim Council of Britain, the Muslim Association of Britain, the Islamic Human Rights Commission, the Federation of Student Islamic Societies, the Cordoba Foundation, the satellite TV Islamic Channel, etc.), and the U.S. is immensely tolerant of its Muslim citizens and their manifold representatives, to the point of scrubbing allusions to Islam in the reporting of terrorist events. In fact, the 2008 FBI “Hate Crime Statistics” report shows that 61.1% of hate crime victims were Jews; only 7.7 % were Muslims. In the UK, anti-Jewish incidents nearly doubled from 2008 to 2009; Muslims appear to be doing just fine, thank you. This is the real trend. “Islamophobia” is nothing but a rhetorical weapon brandished by radical and subversive Islamic groups and their leftist fellow travelers to facilitate their incursion into Western life and politics.
The common denominator in all such cases, apart from an acrid whiff of disingenuousness, is that the Koran remains untouchable. More reasonably, Abu Zaid, in the above-mentioned interview, sees the Koran not as an eternal book but as the product of “formative influences,” which is palpably true. Indeed, it has now come to light that ancient parchment pages of the Koran, recovered during the restoration of the Great Mosque in Sana’a, Yemen, reveal fascinating differences from the three standard Koranic texts preserved in the Library of Tashkent, the Topkapi Museum and the British Library. This cache incontestably proves that the Koran was a historically evolving document, although the Imamic consensus will certainly resist acknowledging the value of the find. For to dwell upon the stratigraphic nature of the Koran amounts to heresy.
But when Abu Zaid proceeds to assert, without the slightest wisp of either evidence or ordinary perceptiveness, that “the Prophet’s invitation to the people to follow him in their faith is based upon the assumption of their freedom to choose,” he has left the real world far behind and wafted off to Cloud Cuckoo Land on the wings of a radiant fantasia that neither the Koran, the history of Islam, nor the current evolution of the faith can sustain. Abu Zaid obviously believes what he is saying, which makes him, however unwittingly, a convincing apologist for the barbarians at the gates. Naturally, this is what we in the West want to hear: it soothes our fears, panders to our sense of ourselves as an open-minded and tolerant society that is entirely warranted in accepting an alien discourse and supremacist theology in its midst, and justifies our obsequious reluctance to stand up in our own defense.
Andrew Bostom cites the great scholar of Islamic law, Joseph Schacht, to exactly this effect. “Because they cannot face the problem, because they lack historical understanding of the formation of Mohammedan religious law, because they cannot make up their minds … on what is legislation, the modernists cannot get away from a timid, halfhearted, and essentially self-contradictory position.” And as David Kupelian rightly observes in his recent How Evil Works, “As long as the West becomes continually weaker and more contemptible in its attempts to placate Islam, the conflict will just intensify … it is our weakness that is fueling the growth of Islamofacism.” But we Westerners are intent on aggressively defending our weakness. We persist in dreaming in Islamocolor.
This is why Geert Wilders, who believes the Koran is not only a holy book but a war manual and an ideological treatise on the level of Mein Kampf, is currently being prosecuted in a Dutch court. As he deposed at an Alliance of Patriots meeting in New York in October 2008, in a speech called America, the last man standing, “in its essence Islam is a political ideology … [it] is not compatible with freedom and democracy.” “Now you know why,” he continued, “Winston Churchill called Islam ‘the most retrograde force in the world’ and why he compared Mein Kampf to the Quran.” Wilders’ position is not to ban the Koran outright, as many have alleged, but to proceed consistently: either ban the Koran or remove Mein Kampf from the proscription list. Wilders appears to favor the latter option since, in the long run, at least in the West, censorship never works.
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I have no foolproof solutions to propose to our dilemma, only a faint hope and a strong recommendation.
The faint hope is that the soi-disant community of “moderate Muslims” will prove Pipes, Manji, Rusin, Mansur, Baran, and Rubin correct and Kasem, Muthuswamy, Hirsi Ali, Warraq, and Darwish wrong, and eventually come to the fore — although this may entail a process of generations, assuming it is at all feasible. (Acclaimed French essayist Pascal Bruckner is wryly skeptical; “the problem with the moderates,” he writes in The Tyranny of Guilt, “is that they are precisely … moderate.”) Further, as with the communicants of all religions, the tendency to privilege the customary elements of practice — Baran’s “living tradition” — over the sclerotic dictates of faith, or to regard the latter as merely providing, in Mansur’s phrase, doctrinal sanction for cultural habit and observance, may go some way to taming the more radical cohort. Is such a hope realistic or modal? The operative term here is “may” for there is no assurance that a more domestic attitude will prevail over doctrinal rigidity. As Howard Bloom suggests in The Lucifer Principle, “To allow a faith or ideology to be overthrown would be to abandon a massive neural fabric into which you’ve invested an entire life, a network that cannot be easily replaced, perhaps that cannot be replaced at all.”
Given the centrality of the Koran and the pivotal importance of the dogmatic literature, even the public condemnation by Muslims of Muslims, the attempt to exorcize internal demons — an effort which, it must be acknowledged, is not a mainstream phenomenon — may not materially alter the situation. Consider the plight of the pacifist Ahmadi sect which struggles to present Islam as a religion of peace, and has in consequence been ruthlessly persecuted by fellow Muslims. Two Ahmadi mosques were recently attacked in Lahore, with 94 dead and another 2,500 taken hostage. Over the years, the fate of the peaceable Baha’i Faith, with its roots in Shi’a Islam, has not been markedly different; Iran has just handed out 20-year prison sentences to seven Baha’i leaders. These communions obviously face a Sisyphean ascent.
The strong recommendation is that we begin to instruct ourselves, recognize that we are involved in a war for our very survival as a civilization, know who the enemy is, and be prepared to take whatever steps are necessary to prevent our ultimate eclipse. We must learn our history for as Ralph Peters, author of Endless War, tells us, “those who do not know history will die of myth.” We must resist the plangent modalities of Islamospeak lulling us to sleep with tranquilizing platitudes about a “religion of peace,” vernal consolations, redemptive insights, and private exaltations. We should also remain vigilant against the promulgation of meretricious “facts.” A correspondent to the National Post, one Rizwan Jabbar, in a letter of August 7, 2010, justifies the Cordoba Center project near the site of Ground Zero by referring to “the ten million Muslim slaves who helped build the nation.” Jabbar presumably learned his history from his imam, a Saudi textbook, or perhaps from Howard Zinn. And many who should know better will swallow the flounder whole.
This includes Barack Obama, who has just come out in support of the Cordoba project. In his Ramadan message for this year, he declared that “here in the United States, Ramadan is a reminder that Islam has always been part of America and that American Muslims have made extraordinary contributions to our country.” “Really?” comments Robert Spencer with scarcely disguised contempt. “Maybe Robert Gibbs will be so kind as to provide us with a list of the Muslim Founding Fathers, the Muslim heroes of the American Revolution, the names of the Muslims killed fighting in the Civil War (for the North, no doubt — you know, “racial equality”!), the Muslim Senators and Congressmen who served with distinction in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries — I’m sure the Obama administration will have no trouble coming up with all that, will they? And I trust it will also contain a list of those ‘extraordinary contributions’ that Muslims have made to our country. Aside from being the impetus for some extraordinary innovations in airport security, I can’t think of any.”
Despite the assumptions of the Jabbars and Obamas and the googolplex of the deluded, there is undeniably a war going on. Interestingly, Robert Lewis, editor of the Canadian journal Arts & Opinion, believes the war may already be won, thanks to “the world-transforming revolution in communications” and “the introduction of the Internet,” which injects the lifestyle temptations of the West into the once-inoculated Muslim mind. “Once exposed to the ways of the West,” he writes, “there’s no going back home.” But although “the effects of terrorism and suicide bombings cannot begin to compete with the Internet as a hegemonic tool,” Lewis admits that the Islamic peril has by no means diminished, since radical Islam may likely react out of desperation and adopt “the apocalyptic solution,” a reference to the Iranian bomb. Lewis is certainly right in warning about the threat posed by weapons-grade iranium (as it were), and he may also be correct about the long-term effect of the Internet on the Muslim sensibility, but the critical issue here is one of time. Both the explosive and the infusorial forms of Islam would need to be resolutely fought if we are to avoid detonation on the one hand and the gradual insemination of Islamic norms, practices and laws into the Western body social on the other.
Rather that wait on the hypothetical triumph of Western communications technology, which may or may not happen — and possibly not in time to escape undesired ends — vigorous, unsentimental, and politically uncorrect measures are absolutely indispensable. These would include the shutting down of terror-preaching mosques (as well as the cancellation of the Cordoba project), the deportation of extremist imams, a ramped-up prosecution of phony Islamic “charities,” the stringent oversight of Wahhabi-inspired madrassas with a view to eliminating them altogether, the delicensing of Islamic organizations allied to the Muslim Brotherhood, tightened immigration policies, the prohibiting of shari’a law and finance, the close monitoring of Middle East Studies departments in our universities whose real mandate is not to teach but to proselytize and indoctrinate in favor of Islam, and an all out campaign to dry up the sources of Islamic funding in all areas of public and professional life.
Failing the implementation of such measures, we are embarking on a long day’s journey into night. And let us make no mistake about this, the adversary is a formidable one. Islam, says Elias Canetti in Crowds and Power, is a “Religion of War.” One of the four ways in which “devout Mohammedans” assemble into crowds, apart from prayer, the Hajj and, theoretically, the Last Judgment, is “for Holy War against unbelievers … The Koran, the book of the prophet inspired by God, leaves no doubt of this.”
The “surge” worked in Iraq. The counter-surge of much Islamic popular feeling, exploding demographics, institutional infiltration, lawfare, forum shopping, inflammatory rhetoric, “stealth jihad” and relentless terrorist warfare may work equally well against the pusillanimous West. For this is more than a new Thirty Years War we are engaged in, but a religious and civilizational conflict that will extend into the indefinite future.





A book never written:
“THE MODERATE KORAN”
“Updated and Revised for the Twenty-First Century, Non-Violent, Moderate, Muslim” “Violence and Mohamed Free”
(a very short book).
Until this book comes out, waiting for a “Moderate Islam” makes less sense than staying up all night waiting for the tooth fairy.
The observation that “Moderate Islam” is the the ocean in which the the sharks of radical Islam swim is a perfect illustration. We have been lulled into complacency about Islam for too long by the self-delusion of moderate Islam.
We need to be absolute in our refusal to allow the slightest accommodation with sharia or any other apect of Mohammedanism in the US. Similarly, we have to reject other non-Western inroads — such as referring to 610-622 A.D. as 610-622 C.E. What the hell is C.E.? Europeans mark the beginning of their history as being the birth of Jesus Christ. This is a religious decision, but justified by history — European/Western/Christian civilization is the product of influence of the Christian religion upon the Greco-Roman civilzation which expired in the 5th and 6th centuries A.D. Forget the Mohammedan footbaths in schools and start wondering how long it’s gonna be before we see stonecutters changing the dates on every cornerstone. Next time you’re in a museum and see dates as B.C.E. or C.E. grab the nearest stuffed animal and shove it up the director’s arse.
CE means “Common Era”; without looking up the origin of the term, I have taken it to be the product of a specically Jewish sensibility. As you know, Christ means “Messiah” and not every Westerner is of the opinion that we are yet living in the Messianic era. Or do you deny that Jews and Judaism are central and primary in Western cultural history?
There is no such thing as a moderae muslim.
We need to have “OPEN AND READ THE KORAN DAYS” all over the United States.
Read this book and see who the muslims “really” are and the words they practice.
Until we do this, the majority of Americans won’t care what is going on until it is too late!!!
Americans appear to be a society of “I got mine”, so I don’t care what happens. Time to change that.
the common era notations were changed by pc historians…Before and After Christ was just too much..so we now have the “common era” notations.
Islam, like Judaism and Christianity, has contradictions. Unfortunately, these contradictions in Islam are even greater than the latter. We face a terrible problem as a Western society:
How can we legitimately lead a religion with over a Billion adherents away from violence without dictating what aspects of it are legitimate and which aspects are not?
There are no contradictions for the enlightened, kind Gork. Islam is clear; kill or subject all unbelievers. The Bible is clear, all men must be saved through Jesus Christ, that is what the Bible is about from Alpha to Omega, God the Creator of all things, wants to remake fallen men in His image (fill them with eternal love and creativity), save them from themselves and all evil.
Which would you choose?
Jeff, How about..neither..! Or any of the others.
Surely we can adopt Dr. Tawfik Hamid’s model by separating belief from behaviour. One step over the line behaviour wise – and there should be serious consequences.
Actually, unlike Judaism and Christianity, Islam prescribes a specific methodology to follow when there are contradictions in the Koran, which David Solway briefly brushed upon in the beginning of his article. When verses of the Koran contradict each other the latter verses abrogate, i.e., supersede, the earlier verses. Which means that the earlier verses of the Koran, the Meccan verses originating prior to the Hijra and that constitute virtually all of the peaceful verses, are abrogated by the latter violent Medinan verses originating after the Hijra when Muhammad had turned to jihad and politics.
By the way, it was this transformation of Islam from the realm of religion to the realm of politics and jihad that accounts for the spectacular success of Islam. Had Islam remained just a religion after the Hijra, Islam would have died out with the death of Muhammad and no one would have ever heard of Muhammad and Islam. However, when Muhammad turned to politics and jihad, then suddenly Islam became spectacularly successful as most of the known world was conquered a short 100 years after the death of Muhammad forcibly converting millions in the process and rendering millions more into harsh and degrading dhimmitude.
Islam was created by Salman Parsi to fend off proselytizing Chrisitans (even though the three wise men were Persian Astrologers) in what was the largest Empire of the world – The Sassanians of Iran. We had an issue with the world of proselytizing in Persian philosophy and present day Zoroastrians ban it. Converting someone to believe (Sagittarius) is different to use logical (Gemini) explanation. We had in Iran a General called Kartir, who was so annoyed at what the Christians were doing that he massacred thousands and then converted many back to Iranian philosophy. Historians are not too sure on all this, as the Moslems burnt all the books. So the bad Karma created by Kartir, produced the mess we are in. When Salman (who btw was the son of the High Priest of Sassanians) came with a new idea to enlighten the world, he was given his marching orders by the Emperor. He then literally crossed the water and went to the Semites and told them that they should follow the Arab descendant of Abaraham in the Qureshi family and was hired by Fatima etc etc.
The reason we are here with Islam is that unlike the other religions Salman made sure it was very clear about what must be done. Parts of the Koran are very very clear about killing. He did this in order to simplify his product and be able to sell it more. Many warriors bought it. Many more politicians bought it.
I hope the background to all this helps some.
“Admittedly, from time to time a Baruch Goldstein or a Timothy McVeigh goes on a slaughter rampage…”
Well you lost me right there. Just three sentences prior you made the distinction that Christianity does not do what Islam does. And then you circle around using McVeigh as the example of Christian (?) hatred, zealotry and barbarism. Where and when was it ever said by McVeigh that his actions were on BEHALF of God or Christianity? He was a sociopath.
You can spend all day intellectualizing Islam but it comes down to one of two conclusions: Either Islam is violent and seeks to submit America because we are infidels OR they are a bunch of sociopaths stoked by their religion to kill.
Yes. Timothy McVeigh was a political terrorist whose crime had absolutely nothing to do with ANY religion. Perhaps the author might have chosen to use someone like Dr. Tiller’s killer as an example instead.
..absolutely..Timothy McVeigh was a self confessed anti-Christian bigot..
…but such events are striking precisely because they are anomalous, whereas Muslim violence around the globe is almost a daily occurrence and is prescribed in the pages of the Koran.
What part of the English language do you not understand?
It is about factual precision (and also making facile analogies). Timothy McVeigh: “My religion is science.” Read & comprehend.
There is no need to analyze texts, decipher motives and to look into the minds of muslims to understand why Islam is a mortal threat to Civilization. One need only look towards the founder. He established the behavior we can expect from the followers who believe; murder, mayhem, destruction, hatred and revenge were his staples in life. We have been fighting that religion for 1400 years and we will continue to fight it until one or the other of us is dead.
That is simply the fact. Now lets adjust to this fact and move towards victory by converting the 95% of the worlds muslims, who are fantastic people, to Christianity.
Ann Coulter had it right;
We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.
If we follow your (Coulter’s) prescription, how will we be morally different from the radical Islamists who also seek to force us all to convert to Islam? I assume that you (and Coulter) have no qualms about using lethal force to “persuade” Muslims to become Christians. How confident are you that a “gunpoint conversion” will actually stick after the person holding the gun has moved on?
It’s called literary STYLE, Mr. Reardon. The statement was not a literal policy prescription. Your assumption that Coulter or (the commenter) Pierre Legrand endorse forced conversion is, quite frankly, dense.
History proves that they only “move on” away from the exposure to truth and fear of burial in pig skin garb. The source of burial garb is obvious and the most effective truth lies in the exposure of levels of caliphate involved in editing of compiled Syriac script into emerging Arabic and burning of six of seven translations along with all records borrowed from their prophet’s eleventh wife. Since doubting the authenticity of the final edition is considered unpardonable, pork skin may be a more effectively convincing tool. Strange that the blood line of caliphs may now be under threat by Osama.
Here’s the hard, brutal truth about Islam:
Read here to get a sense of the Islamic mindset and what its ascendancy might mean for the rest of us:
The Legacy of Jihad: Islamic Holy War and the Fate of Non-Muslims (Andrew Bostom)
Read here to get a sense of why and how the West’s days may be numbered. We are our own worst enemy unless we face up to the hard choices ncessary to remain free and prosperous.
The Suicide of Reason: Radical Islam’s Threat to the West (Lee Harris)
When Muslims assert that Islam is a “religion of peace” they are not engaging in al taqqiya, they are making an assertion in good faith.
The problem lies in the fact that Islam has a defective concept of peace. In semitic languages like Arabic, the consonants are the “root” of the word: islam = submission, and salam = peace have the same root, slm.
The only concept of peace in Islamic jurisprudence is the peace between the conqueror and the conquered, between master and slave. There is no concept of a negotiated peace between nations in Islamic law (and note that law is the defining property of Islam—their clerics are jurists, schools of Qu’ranic interpretation are called fiqh, a legalistic term)—Muslims may negotiate a “hudna” or armistice of limited duration with non-Muslim, but not a definitive enduring peace.
Finally, Islam is a serial murderer of entire cultures and peoples. This is what Islam has done throughout its entire 1400 year history. This is what it has done whenever it has finally gotten the upperhand in whatever culture is has opposed. Those whom Islam does not destroy, it enslaves, diminishes and impoverishes. Islam cannot be ‘reformed’ in the light of humanity and freedom. Were that so, it would no longer be Islam. For its psychopathic regard and treatment of women alone, Islam is an abomination and worthy only of extinction – to the last believer.
A CULT like ISLAM which claims its Holy Book is the “ACTUAL and UNALTERABLE word of its God” has no wriggle room left for reform nor I might add do Mohammedans think THEY need to change. But Obambi and the Moonbats want you to reach out to Muslims. What they want is for you to respect the DISRESPECTFUL, tolerate the INTOLERANT, treat equally those who if THEY were in charge would make YOU at the very least a protection tax paying Second Class Citizen, to pretend that they are not ANTISEMITIC, to pretend that they are not MISOGYNISTIC, not to burn THEIR Holy Book even though Mohammedans burn Bibles and attack Christians (and other Religions followers) and Christian Churches on a daily basis, to allow them to build Mosques wherever THEY want in the USA even though a Christian cannot even VISIT Mecca let alone construct a Church or import a Bible or display a Cross ANYWHERE in Saudi Arabia, and finally pretend that Islams Koranically stated aim is not to dominate the whole World.
And what do you get for all this Respect and Tolerance why MORE Muslim DEMANDS of course thats what you get.
It is only necessary to examine 1400 years of history to conclude that islam is only a death cult determined to destroy any culture that is in the way of establishing and brutally enforcing sharia law. Thre is no remaining doubt that our society is threatended by the greatest evil in the world. There has not been and cannot be an islamic country that establishes and sustain a democratic society. An islamic democracy is a contradiction in terms. It is necessary to severely restrict immigration from islamic countries for the American democracy to be preserved. As a Supreme Court associate justice once stated, “The Bill of Rights is not a suicide pact.”
Regardless of how well, how logically this argument is laid out, it is useless if the majority of society deliberately ignores it. Who are the instigators, and why do they ignore historical reality? They are left/liberal/progressives, aided and abetted by a host of useful idiots, including a multitude of self-styled Conservatives such as Roger L. Simon on these PJM pages. The left’s internal narratives do not allow for anything except cultural Marxism, by which they must drag down anything deemed “unfairly” successful, and elevate that which they view as “oppressed”. (I would note that even Mr. Solway has bought into at least one of these narratives, specifically that Timothy McVeigh was a Christian as the basis for his actions, in spite of the fact that he specifically and repeatedly denounced Christianity). Until & unless left/liberal/progressivism is rooted out and destroyed in every nook and cranny of our society, we can expect little else but an acceleration to national suicide. Unfortunately, at this late date, I see little cause for hope.
Perhaps you can see hope when white washing media rats begin to leave a sinking ship and calling it what it is. But that’s highly unlikely since they have failed to call vote buying with tax money what it is for 46 continuous years.
#7 Charles Stevens. I totally agree with you that “regardless of how well, how logically this argument is laid out, it is useless if the majority of society ignores it.” What I find interesting is that those who consider themselves highly educated and well read and sophisticated seem to have never read the Bible or the Koran. They thus can claim that there are valid comparisons between the words of the Bible and those of the Koran, when nothing could be further from the truth. I believe that this is is feigned ignorance rather than real ignorance, because the elites are unable to reconcile the harsh reality that Islam is 100% evil with their religion of political correctness and its doctrine that all religions are essentially alike.
I once came across a quote on the internet that read,
“the radical muslim will cut your head off while the moderate muslim will be holding your feet and telling you that this is a fate you deserve for your islamophobia.”
There certainly are moderate Muslims I know quite a few but it is THEY who are the misunderstanders of Islam what does not exist is moderate ISLAM.
“There must obviously be something inherent in Islam which allows for large numbers of believers to kill and maim without compunction while sacrificing their own lives in the process”
Actually, it’s rather simple. Christianity attests to a merciful God who paid the ultimate price to save His people; we, as Christians, need only believe in order to be made right with Him. Jews also believe in a merciful God who saves them. Even Buddhists and Hindus believe that if they do the right things they will be freed from the wheel of life. Islam offers no comfort at all. Allah is arbitrary and capricious, all powerful and bound by nothing, including his own word. While a Muslim must follow the prescribed duties – the 5 pillars of Islam – doing so does not guarantee paradise! The only way that is guaranteed in the Quran is jihad. Islam is unique in that it is, as far as I know, the only religion in the world that mandates continual and regular warfare upon nonbelievers.
References: Jihad Watch and, for that matter, any book by Robert Spencer.
“The Arab Mind” by Raphael Patai.
“In Islam, God demands that you send your son to die for him. In Christianity, God sends His Son to die for you.” — John Ashcroft.
May God help us. While we idiotically wait for the 12 or 14 moderate Muslims to begin Islam’s reformation, the other 1,499,999,983 Muslims continues to spread Islam and it’s inevitable sedition, mayhem and murder in the world. This is the main reason I am so fueled with contempt for the syncretistic “reformed” types such as Irshad Manji, or the extremely bizarre Steven “Sulieman” Schwartz (the Jewish Sufi Muslim!), or a Salim Mansur.
The Daniel Pipes of the world are also extremely dangerous, for they assert the existence of the impossible unicorn of Moderate Islam, and have served to feed, with their ludicrous blindness, much of the ignorance viz. Islam which feeds our moronic elites. Using the lies and gullible trash these apologists for Islam retail, Presidents from Carter, Bush1, Clinton, Bush2, and worst of all, Obama trot out such debacles as Winning Their Hearts And Minds ™, Religion of Peace ™, and Great World Religion Hijacked By Extremists ™. This, coupled with the colossal mistake of allowing millions of Muslims into the West where they spread like cancer and corrode our civilization from within, assure our civilization is at the very least going to continue to suffer Jihad atrocities far into the future.
At the very worst, like Priam did in Troy, we have taken in the Gift of Moderate Islam into our sanctuary, but it is filled with warriors who intend to butcher and subjugate us while we sleep.
How can it be that nine years after 9/11 so many of my fellows in the West have not yet clues in to the mortal existential threat which Muslims embody!? The fact we must still fight to try and stop the Ground Zero triumphal mosque is testament to our profoundest folly ever: the invitation for millions of Muslims to arrive in our homelands to wage Jihad utterly unopposed. It may already be too late for us.
It’s mostly ostrich behavior, Morton. Combine that with our national conviction — don’t ask me where it came from — that we have an obligation to make nice even toward our sworn enemies, and you have just about all of it.
I agree with both of you, but would claim that the elites you mention are not merely brainwashed and in denial. Some of them are willfully corrupt.
I also agree with other posters that McVeigh was not any sort of believing Christian. Beyond this, the image of Baruch Goldstein leaves out the fact that he was an ER doctor who saw the bodies of his friends who had been murdered by Arab terrorists. That doesn’t make his actions right, but in fact he was provoked to revenge by clear sight at what Muslim terrorists do to kafir civilians.
Thank you for this article examining what so many in the media choose to ignore.
While watching the coverage of the “Reverend Jones” in Florida and hearing the reactions of National Leaders, I was reminded of a scene from a Raquel Welch movie; Hannie Caulder.
Sheriff: “You know, you’d be doing me one very big favor if you’d just get the hell out of my town!”
Hannie: “It’s a wonder you didn’t say the same thing to the Clemmons.”
Sheriff: “They wasn’t botherin’ nobody. They was just walking around town being wanted. You’re the one started them Shooting.”
Cowardice is cowardice, no matter how you dress it up.
As Muhammad said, “war is deceit,” and us ill-informed, timorous, naïve, and easily fooled “unbelievers” have had sand thrown in our eyes, our hopes and fears are being played on like a cheap Chinese violin and, buffeted, blinded and disoriented, we are constantly being turned around, mislead and deceived by Muslims, by Islam and by their agents and allies and partisans in the West; we are being very carefully led down the path to our own destruction.
As has already been said, while there may be “moderate Muslims” there is no “moderate Islam,” and the fact of the matter is that, as the writer says, a la Mao and his “Peoples War,” the sea of “moderate Muslims” is where the Jihadis swim, and get their oxygen, their food, and their concealing cover. If it were not for the absolutely essential cover and support they receive from “moderate Muslims,” the Jihadis would not be able to operate with anywhere near the freedom that they currently have; Muslim solidarity against us hated “unbelievers,” and the law of Muslim “Omerta” have served the Jihadis extremely well.
The Jihadis are not “Islamists” or “radicals,” or “fundamentalist” Muslims, nor are they a “fringe group” but rather, they are very much mainstream Muslims for, from what they say, from the passages of the Qur’an, from the sayings and incidents in Muhammad’s career, from the precedents from Muslim history they cite as justifications for their actions, they are grounded in, embody, and are acting out the fundamental viewpoint, tenets and goal of the conversion, enslavement, or killing of all unbelievers and of the world’s conquest by Islam that is the central thrust of the Qur’an, of Muhammad’s life, and of Islam itself.
In my view, the billion or so “moderate Muslims” are ominously silent spectators, gathered on the sidelines of the current battlefield where their more activist coreligionists, the Jihadis, attack and fight and kill us unclean, hated “unbelievers” (including those Muslims who the Jihadis find insufficiently orthodox in viewpoint, or those Muslims who unfortunately happen to be “collateral damage” when the Jihadis are just trying to “get ‘er done”). I view the silence of these “moderate Muslims” and their inaction—no statements or demonstrations of any kind or size against Jihad and Muslim violence and terror, no proposed major excision of the violent parts from the Qur’an, or popular centers, leaders, or movements pushing this idea–as acquiescence, not disapproval, for, after all, the Qur’an tells them that any spoils wrested from the unbelievers will be their legitimate war booty. They are not our saviors; they are Islam’s reserve battalions, which will come in on the side of the Jihadis for the final kill.
The writer is correct in his diagnosis and correct in the treatment he recommends, although he sees way too many shades of gray here. Islam is not a religion but a violent, supremacist, totalitarian military and political ideology cloaked in the thinnest of religious disguise, an ideology that has been very carefully created to be impervious to reform, and any real and thorough reform would take the heart out of Islam and destroy it. While “containment” of Islam might be possible, compromise with Islam is not; Islam is not built for compromise.
There really are only one of two possible outcomes here, either the “unbeliever” democracies of the West recover their “civilizational confidence,” and their clear moral vision, we decide that us unbelievers and our civilization and ideals are, indeed, worth defending and fighting for, and after a very long or a very short and incredibly bloody struggle involving nuclear weapons, Islam is decisively defeated, or Islam wins its war of deceit, subversion and violence, the West and all its nations and peoples are conquered and enslaved, and we enter a new Dark Ages.
So far, given the “evidence on the ground,” the possibility of a new Dark Age seems much more likely.
Can’t you take anything you want from the collection of jumbled & contradictory verses known as the Koran ?
For outcasts and Salafists like al Zawahiri and his sidekick and all their minions working to enlist unstable souls into the glories of martyrdom, the only good Muslims are those who strive in the way of jihad to kill or enslave the unbelievers and extend the Ummah.
“Peaceful” Muslims are bad Muslims according to how those individuals choose to interpret the Koran.
Surah 9:29, for example, is unambiguous: “Fight those of the People of the Book who do not truly believe in God and the Last Day, who do not forbid what God and his Messenger have forbidden, who do not obey the rule of justice, until they pay the tax and agree to submit.” Surah 9:5 enjoins the believer to “Fight and slay the Pagans wherever you may find them.”
Wasn’t Sura 9 the last one “received” ? As such, does it not supercede earlier verses ?
The Koran itself tells us not to trust Islamic scholars, so, 14 centuries later, isn’t “interpretation” kind of a crapshoot ? The current plethora of Islamic scholars, it seems to me, will continue to offer differing interpretations as a function of their differing personal agendas.
It should be enough to know that, in the name of Islam, individuals all over the world are being brainwashed (as we speak) to smile in the unbeliever’s face one minute and behead him the next.
Which, for the record, is idiotic and barbaric.
Interestingly, Robert Lewis, editor of the Canadian journal Arts & Opinion, believes the war may already be won, thanks to “the world-transforming revolution in communications” and “the introduction of the Internet,” which injects the lifestyle temptations of the West into the once-inoculated Muslim mind. “Once exposed to the ways of the West,” he writes, “there’s no going back home.”
Robert Lewis may be on to something. Theodore Dalrymple asserted in a recent article that he had encountered a number of active dating sites for lonely Muslims in Europe; apparently, these sites and the pictures posted on them looked very secular. Perhaps we are seeing yet another situation where the oppressive restrictions of a religion chafe away at individuals who find themselves in more open societies and those individuals eventually renounce those restrictions and join the broader society around them.
Another comparable situation may give us some basis for hope too. Until the 1960s in Quebec, French-speakers were almost universally under the thumb of their Catholic clergy. Whatever the private views of individual Quebeckers, they almost universally kept quiet and endured the various stresses that they felt the English-speaking minority inflicted on them. Then, somehow, and rather suddenly, they had a sort of Awakening and left the Catholic church in droves to adopt much more secular positions. That led to a number of new conflicts in Quebec and Canada as a whole but that need not concern us here.
The point is that a highly-indoctrinated culture that had very high adherence to their clergy very largely abandoned that tradition in rather short order. As far as I can tell, they never went back either.
Perhaps these phenomenon justify at least some hope that the Muslims among us might find their way to our side in any conflict between Islam and Western Civilization.
One can hope. But keep in mind that Western secular society is a secularized form of a basically Christian worldview. Christianity, which comes closer than any other faith to minimizing the difference between God and man, which claims as its central imperative to maximize human reciprocity (it prefigures the modern free market), is in some ways built for secularization. For Muslims to embrace our secular world will require not just a conversion from ritualized to secular practices, but a move towards a secularism that is still residually Christian.
Robert Lewis may be on to something. Theodore Dalrymple asserted in a recent article that he had encountered a number of active dating sites for lonely Muslims in Europe; apparently, these sites and the pictures posted on them looked very secular. Perhaps we are seeing yet another situation where the oppressive restrictions of a religion chafe away at individuals who find themselves in more open societies and those individuals eventually renounce those restrictions and join the broader society around them.
Or, more likely, we’re just seeing slick advertising.
Robert Lewis is, I think, wrong. Internet, cell phones and other gadgets are just that – gadgets and the means of communications. They can be used for lifestyle change or they can be used as a tools for Islamic/anti-western propaganda. There are many dating sites for Muslims in the West but there are also many jihadist sites on the Internet in the West. The fact that Muslims have dating sites, that many Muslims view porno-sites, and that some Muslims resent restrictions in their countries does not necessarily mean that they want to join Western society. It may mean that they want to join broader society but broader society does not equal Western society. Internet communication allowed many Muslims to see that majority of their co-religionists are poorer, have worse, more corrupt governments and for that condition many blame the West and “demokracy” (= many in Muslim countries believe that democracy is something bad, not good). Therefore their acceptance of western technology does not mean an acceptance of western culture, on the contrary, it may mean a rejection of western culture – like the trends recently seen in Turkey or in Egypt.
Well done, Mr. Solway! Perspective is everything in this regard. It would seem that the canon of Political Correctness is the very thing that prevents us from confronting or even describing the method of Islamic expansion. It’s the long march through the institutions, writ large with an, perhaps unintended, inevitable outcome “progressives” are unable to face. Fallow ground and a refusal to recognize a need for weeding will produce some kind of crop, that’s for sure. It took four hundred years for jihad, an Islamic tenet, to beget it’s equal and opposite reaction in Crusade. However, Crusade can considered as a direct result of jihad and a need for self-preservation, rather than a result of Christian beliefs. I’m not calling for Crusade but a little common sense and acceptance of reality would be nice. Either that or be prepared to pray to Mecca or pay the jhiza. Or die.
This is an excellent and honest essay, Mr. Solway.
I think there is always a reluctance to admit there is a serious problem when we know it has no good or feasible solution.
How can we be the pagans, when it is Islam that prays to Hubal, Sin, or Allah? Take your pick, they are all names for the false moon god who can not hear, or see.
Mohammad’s family worshiped one of 360 gods at the kabba. It’s name was Hubal the moon god. Mohammad simply made it the only god to worship, or elce!
Religion of peace my arse.
I’m sorry, but this argument is ridiculous! Anyone with a little knowledge of semitic languages can see the link between Arabic “Allah” (which is also the name used for God in Arabic translations of the Bible) and the Hebrew Eli. Mohammed is accredited with unifying the polytheistic tribes of his day, teaching them to believe in one God. I am a Christian and not a muslim, but please, let’s get the facts straight!
This is an excellent essay of the question that has been on many minds. I’m not sure I’ve read a better synopsis. I recommend we all bookmark and propagate.
However, there are always things that might be worth a quibble:
But when Abu Zaid proceeds to assert, without the slightest wisp of either evidence or ordinary perceptiveness, that “the Prophet’s invitation to the people to follow him in their faith is based upon the assumption of their freedom to choose,” he has left the real world far behind and wafted off to Cloud Cuckoo Land on the wings of a radiant fantasia that neither the Koran, the history of Islam, nor the current evolution of the faith can sustain.
But isn’t freedom always something that emerges from necessity? Why deny that freedom is ever but reducible to the choice one faces when we are told “submit or die”? Freedom may be the choice to say “no” and all that unpredictably emerges from that moment if we survive it, or to say “yes” if the submission seems truly to offer a new way of ordering the community to defer its own internal violence and thus to create a new degree of freedom within. (Let’s not forget that archeology now tells us that about half of the men in early tribal societies died violent deaths – Islam proposes itself, at least in part, as a solution to that problem howevermuch this solution reaches, sooner or later, its own violent historical limits.) Thus, one who says “submit or die” is in fact forcing the possibility of freedom on people, though many won’t take it.
But no doubt I’m missing some aspect of Abu Zaid’s argument that may be unrealistic.
#12, JD:
Yes, well, that’s the Terrorist’s lament, isn’t it? “Look at what you made us do.”
The question that I would ask any moderate Islamist is “Which Surah of the Koran do you repudiate or do you believe in the inerrancy of the Koran?” The fact is that there are about 50 Surahs and verses that would qualify as hate speech. I also believe that the same question can be asked of any Jew or Christian with respect to the Bible. There is some awful stuff in Chronicles but no-one preaches that today.
“What, exactly, is the difference?”
To an Islamist, there is no difference between a moderate muslim and an infidel, either. A non-muslim is in danger from the Islamist crazies across the ocean. A moderate muslim is in danger from the Islamist crazies next door.
I admire the moderates who are trying to wrest their religion away from the nutjobs, but not only do I doubt there’s a baby in that bathwater, but I don’t think they’re going to succeed. At least not for a few hundred years. They are a looooong way from their Reformation. I wish them all the best, but I think that like the abused wife who first makes excuses for her husband beating the snot out of her and tries to negotiate with him before finally bailing, they are only in the first stages of admitting, “Oh eff it, this is not workable.”
And just like the abused wife, they will need a safe place to run to … which means keeping the western countries free and clear of Islamists and sharia garbage. Acting “open” to that nightmare nonsense will not do moderate muslims any favors, much less everyone else!
Can anyone supplement this highly informative article with a succinct history or reference to a source for same, of Islamic conquest and wars from the time of Muhammed through present? Thanks!
The Legacy of Jihad: Islamic Holy War and the Fate of Non-Muslims, by Andrew Boston.
Islamic Jihad: A Legacy of Forced Conversion, Imperialism, and Slavery, by M. A. Khan.
Just two among many.
JEWISH terrorist? OR MEDIA MYTH?? as you read consider the ways you have been deceived about OTHER stories regarding Fakestinian and anything regarding ISLAM.
http://www.thebarrychamishwebsite.com/newsletters/new.evidence.htm
http://vaam.tripod.com/Aug2198.html
in any version premediatated murder is out of the question as Baruch was called up to serve on a night he was not assigned- you don’t plan to kill people in place you never intended to be…..
test. i have had problems in the past.
THE DESTRUCTION OF ISLAM AS A HUMAN RIGHTS IMPERATIVE
This is the 21st century, not the 7th century. The richness and diversity of the worlds peoples and cultures should be shared and celebrated, not terrorized and subjugated.
There is no place in the modern world for Islamic Sharia law, with it’s segregation, amputation, whipping, decapitation, stoning, intolerance and violence.
No one wants war, but Islam is leading the world into a global war of catastrophic dimensions – THE ISLAMIC WORLD WAR. Islam is forcing every great culture in the world into a corner, into an existential fight for survival.
To avert this seemingly inevitable world war WE MUST DESTROY ISLAM BEFORE ISLAM DESTROYS US. But we don’t need guns, bombs or tanks. We just need the truth.
We can destroy Islam simply by exposing the truth about Muhammad, the doctrine of Islamic Jihad, and the savage 1,400 year history of Islam to the light of day.
There is no need to fabricate, inflate or embellish – we simply need to use Islamic sources, the Koran, the Ahadith, the Sirah Rasul Allah, the preachings of the mullahs, imams and ayatollahs. The savagery and barbarity of Islam is recorded in these texts for the whole world to see, and espoused by Islamic clerics every Friday in the mosques.
We must simply open our eyes and see, tune in our ears and hear, then expose it and challenge Muslims to defend the indefensible.
Never before has a single totalitarian ideology affected the entire global population: 5 billion non-Muslims terrorized daily by Muhammadan Islamic Jihad, and 1.2 billion Muslims enslaved by Muhammadan Islamic doctrine of submission.
The ideological destruction of Islam is nothing less than the greatest HUMAN RIGHTS IMPERATIVE in the history of humanity.
It is the only way we can free 5 billion non-Muslims from Islamic terror, and liberate 1.2 billion Muslims from Islamic slavery.
~ The Infidel Alliance
Here is what we must expose:
MUHAMMED AS SADISTIC SOCIOPATH, NOT A ‘HOLY’ PROPHET
The great lie that Muhammed was some kind of holy man, a moral role model with a direct connection to God is the biggest fraud ever perpetrated upon humanity. It is a massive lie that is propagated by Islam’s power to repress inquiry, dissent and the truth by fear, intimidation and violence.
But the truth about Muhammed cannot be suppressed, because the truth can be found in the Islamic ‘holy’ texts, the Koran, Ahadith and Surah Rasul Allah, recorded in black and white for the whole world to discover.
The Koran 68:4 upholds Muhammed as “…an exalted [standard of] character.” Islamic tradition upholds Muhammed as ‘al-insan al-kamil’ or ‘the perfect man’, to be emulated by all Muslims.
But the hard truth about Muhammed, as recorded in the Islamic ‘holy’ texts, is that far from being a a ‘holy prophet’ Muhammed was a sadistic sociopath, a 7th century Arabian Hitler – only worse, a successful Charles Manson, only creepier and more evil.
Muhammed was a murderer, torturer, amputator, decapitator, mutilator, slaver, looting stealing thief, rapist, human trafficker, sex trafficker, child rapist, sexual deviant, misogynist, perfidious liar, genocidist and self proclaimed terrorist.
By any objective standard, Muhammed was one of the most vile and disgusting men in the pantheon of human history, a brutal barbarian, a self important narcissistic consumed by unquenchable sexual lust, greed and power.
Muhammed should have been incarcerated not venerated, and he should be reviled not revered.
Every pathology that afflicts Islam comes directly from this sick man, Muhammed, and the world suffers because of him.
Yet this is the man who set the moral standard for Islam. This is the man who inspires 1.5 billion Muslims.
Allah’s Apostle Muhammed said “I have been made victorious with terror” – Bukhari(52:220)
Of consequence, Osama bin Laden’s full name is Osama bin MOHAMMED bin Awad bin Laden.
These men are also named after the ‘holy prophet’ of Islam:
1) MOHAMMED Atta, 9/11 airline jihadist
2) Abdulhakim Mujahid MUHAMMED, Little Rock recruiting center assasin
3) MOHAMMED Reza Taheri-azar, UNC SUV jihadist
4) MOHAMMED Ajmal Amir Kasab, Mumbai jihadist
5) Husayn MUHAMMED al-Umari, Pan Am Flight 830 bomber
6) Fahd MOHAMMED Ahmed al-Quso, USS Cole bomber
7) Khalid Sheikh MOHAMMED, beheader of Daniel Pearl
8) MOHAMMED Sidique Khan, London Tube suicide jihadist
9) Ramzi MOHAMMED, convicted London Tube jihadist
10) Whabi MOHAMMED, London Tube ‘5th’ bomber
11) Fazul Abdullah MOHAMMED, Tanzanian embassy bomber
12) MAHMOUD Ahmadinejad, despotic Shia leader of Islamic Republic of Iran
13) MOHAMMED Bouyeri, savage Islamist killer of Theo Van Gogh
14) MOHAMMED Ali Hamadei, airline hijacker
15) MOHAMMED Safady, Munich Olympics terrorist
16) AHMAD Marrouf al-Assadi, Achille Lauro hijacker
17) MEHMET Ali Ağca, Islamist who attempted to assasinate Pope John Paul
18) MOHAMMED Atif Siddique, Scottish terrorist conspiritor
19) Kafeel AHMED, Glasgow Airport bomber
20) Abdulla AHMED, ‘Liquid’ bomber
21) John Allen MUHAMMED, mass murdering sniper
23) MOHAMMED Haydar Zammar, al-Qaeda recruiter who assembled the Hamburg cell
24) Jaish-e-MOHAMMED, Pakistani jihadist terror organization
You see, Osama bin Laden is part of the problem, but the real problem is ISLAM
Mohammed…..Muhammed….Mahmoud….Mehmet….Ahmed…..and on and on and on…. All killing and terrorizing in the name of their namesake ‘holy’ prophet, following his vile personal examples and executing his evil mandates.
~ The Infidel Alliance
Custom first, and theology second. This is, as far as I can tell, a repetition of mistakes being made by Muslims, which were made by others.
What is custom based upon, other than all that is going on in life? So, a custom does not have the strength to endure the test of time.
As long as Satanists and Muslims are neck and neck in being opposed to the Christian faith tradition, the battle will rage until one side backs off.
ISLAMIC IMPERIALISM AND THE SAVAGE HISTORY OF ISLAM
We must expose the savage history of Islam and recognize that Islamic imperialism is the inevitable result of a sadistic sociopath ‘holy prophet’ preaching a totalitarian, supremecist, militant dogma.
Islam, the barbarian religion of a barbarian warlord, has wiped out many great and powerful civilizations.
The once relatively peaceful and tolerant Arabian peninsula was the original ground zero, where all non-Islamic peoples and religion were forcibly subjugated and wiped out. The ancient homeland of many Jews, Christians, pagans is now a religious apartheid state where peoples are segregated, subjugated and denied their basic human rights.
Persia, home to one of the world’s oldest continuous major civilizations was unified in 625 BC. Under Cyrus the Great and Darius the Great, the Persian Empire eventually became the largest and most powerful empire in human history up until that point, and gave humanity some of the first functional human rights laws. 1200 years later, in 651 AD, The Islamists conquered Persia and Islamized it, wiping out a great civilization and the monotheistic religion of Zoroastrianism.
Buddhist Afghanistan also fell to the Islamic scourge.
Greater India also fell to the Islamic scourge.
Egypt and North Africa also fell to the Islamic scourge.
Spain also fell to the Islamic scourge.
The prosperous, powerful seat of Eastern Christianity, Byzantium also fell to the Islamic scourge.
East Africa also fell to the Islamic scourge.
Eastern Europe also fell to the Islamic scourge.
Central Asia also fell to the Islamic scourge.
South Asia also fell to the Islamic scourge.
All the result of Muhammeds Islamic Jihad ‘theology’.
Please look at this site: http://www.oic-oci.org/
Note that there are 2 Islamic countries in South America.
Do we really want to live in an Islamicized world?
THE IDEOLOGICAL DESTRUCTION OF ISLAM AS A HUMAN RIGHTS IMPERATIVE:
1) EXPOSE MUHAMMED
2) EXPOSE ISLAMIC JIHAD
3) EXPOSE ISLAMIC IMPERIALISM
4) CHALLENGE MUSLIMS TO DEFEND THE INDEFENSIBLE
~ The Infidel Alliance
Overriding the historical, political and pragmatic failings of Islam is the spiritual debacle of which it consists.
Islam denies that Jesus Christ is the only way to the Father; that He died on the cross; that He is the Son of God; that we must obey Him to be saved- all points made crystal clear in the NT. Ergo, no one in Islam can be saved. One cannot have mohammed and Jesus Christ, too. No man can serve two masters.
Islam requires murder for many crazy reasons. Murderers are damned.
If we hope to save the islamites we must convert them. And since they are committed to fight us, we better be ready for that, too.
Dear ‘white tiger’,
It is clear that Islam is antithetical to almost everyones ideal of religion and government. And it is clear that in every way, physically, mentally and spiritually, Muhammed was an anti-Christ.
Whatever our beliefs, we should focus our battle against Islam primarily (primarily, not totally) on the ‘historical, political and pragmatic failings of Islam’ as you so lucidly describe it.
Spiritual issues are a matter of faith which are subjective and may serve to divide us. Factual issues which can be proven, however, like the sadistic barbarity of Muhammed and the doctrine of Islamic Jihad, are not subjective and should be the thing that unites us.
We, the victims of Islam, are of many different faiths. While many will agree with you, we should stay focused on the 4 points I outlined, issues which we ALL can relate to.
We, the atheist, the Catholic, the Hindu, the Buddhist, the Sikh, the Jew, the Copt, the Chaldean, the Protestant, the Baha’i, the Islamic apostate….all non-Islamic peoples and cultures must unite as THE INFIDEL ALLIANCE to defeat our common threat, Islam.
There are 5 billion of us, and only 1.2 – 1.5 billion potential Islamists. They cannot subjugate us if we join together with a common purpose. Islamic ideology cannot survive with 5 billion voices of love and reason pounding the fiction of Muhammed and his Islamic Jihad theology into dust.
This is what we must do.
Best regards,
~ The Infidel Alliance
Suppose Hitler had prefaced Mein Kampf with a description of a visit from an angel of God who had inspired him. Suppose he had called his party a religion instead.
Would we be giving tax-exempt status to 1000+ National Socialist churches? (I suppose we might, actually.)
Step #1: Recognize that Islam is not a religion; it is a political/ideological manifesto started by a guy who said, “Allah told me this.”
I prefer Geert Wilder’s recommendations, which includes banning Muhammadan immigration, putting a moratorium on new mosque building until the Islamic world reciprocates, closing down all Madrassas because they are inherently fascist, making Muhammadan immigrants signed pledges of assimilation and loyalty, and deporting all Muhammadans that advocate Islamic supremacism, Sharia, or resort to jihad, both the violent type and the stealth and deceptive non-violent type.
Bravo and thank you David. I have one possibly useful thought, having nothing to do with textual exegesis. I’m a cultural historian, and i have yet to see anything, whether a religious or legislative code, a mass movement, a form of government–whatever, as we now say in summary–that does not change. We change, they change, it changes. That’s why there’s history, not just the study of doctrines and institutions. Islam has been very resistant to change, but it’s history contains many changes. The Khomeini heresy now rules Iran, for example. I think we can fight to change Islam, or at least Muslims. Many of them are, as you say, “objective heretics” already. So we need to fight. As you rightly say.
“As long as the West becomes continually weaker and more contemptible in its attempts to placate Islam, the conflict will just intensify … it is our weakness that is fueling the growth of Islamofacism.” But we Westerners are intent on aggressively defending our weakness. We persist in dreaming in Islamocolor.
The PC nonsense that has invaded the American psyche for decades now is, truly, the Islamist’s greatest weapon.
Allah is truly great to have turned the infidels’ minds to such mush !
The advance of Wahhabism at the Washington DC Islamic Center
As Howard Bloom suggests in The Lucifer Principle, “To allow a faith or ideology to be overthrown would be to abandon a massive neural fabric into which you’ve invested an entire life, a network that cannot be easily replaced, perhaps that cannot be replaced at all.”
A perfect description of why Barack Obama will not and cannot abandon his Dreams of Redistributive Socialism.
Dhimmitude is pretty close to what American Socialists dream as the ideal position for we the bitter clingers.
Taqiyya is a very potent weapon to bring us into submission.
A Muslim is a Muslim. The koran is the koran and we know what they read and live by don’t we?
David – great piece as usual. Furball @ #31 has summarized everything in a nutshell. The religion called Islam is a veneer for a sociopathic political ideology that is out for world conquest, just as the Commies were and as the Nazis were. The only thing the Commies and Nazis forgot to do was to call themselves a religion. The Infidel Alliance @ #s 27 & 29 has provided the empirical work. All those places he cites did not convert voluntarily. It was convert, die or be very second-class citizens. One is amazed that any Christians, Jews, Hindus, etc., actually survived.
David Solway says “Even a cursory reading of the Koran will reveal that, like most scriptures, it is rife with contradictions.” That’s true, but the problem isn’t merely one of contradictory scriptures. The problem is one of dangerous, belligerent, barbaric actions all in the name of Islam.
Other religions have managed to move on from their unsavoury mediaeval pasts (e.g. kill all the Albigensians, burn heretics etc), but (with the notable exception of the Ismailis) most of Islam is stuck there like a broken record. Sure it changes – from one mediaeval viewpoint to another. Sure it has many different sects but they’re like the Hatfields and McCoys. We are not living in the eighth, eleventh, or the fifteenth century and we can’t let ourselves be bullied by a religion that is.
Speaking of the Ismailis, why is it they never come up in most discussions of Islam? Are they just keeping their heads down?
Couple massive efforts by the the administration and the elites to sugarcoat Islam, and the absence of of anti-Islamic violence nationwide and you have to wonder why national antipathy to Islam continues to mount.
Christiana Amanpour blames rising distrust and dislike of Islam on the influence of “certain political forces,” confidently assuming her listeners well know the identities of the racist Islamophobics unnamed. Amanpour is a third world propagandist speaking in support of a third world president.
A more likely reason for the growing popular dislike of Islam is that to know Islam is to hate it. Gradually, despite their natural civility, generosity and openness, more and more Americans are being forced to admit that Islam is an absolutist, predatory creed not to be confused with any other religion or belief system.
Several additional points:
Renan is on the money regarding the utterly derivative nature of Islam. The Muslims call Jews monkeys and pigs but it is the Muslims who play monkey-see-monkey-do and abstain from pork in imitation of Jews. Halal is an imitation of kosher, Ramadan is an imitation of Yom Kippur—the list of religious borrowings from both Christians and Jews accounts for most of muslim beliefs and practices. Muslim morality patterns Judeo-Christian morality albeit with frequent inversions of vice and virtue.
Before he looted the Jews of Medina, Mohamed was an ordinary desert brigand whose charming ways got him expelled from Mecca. Were it not for his ripping off the Jews of Medina, Mohamed would be unknown. Stolen Jewish money provided Mohamed with funds to buy followers and put his murderous show on the road. Borrowed and modified Christian and Jewish religious beliefs and practices insured that his followers remain forever loyal.
The Hebrew prophets at whose head Mohamed’s followers place him are not remembered for their perfect characters as is the the Muslim paragon of paragons. Nor are they remembered as Mohamed is for their martial skills, sexual prowess and multitudinous followers. They are remembered for their verses which are literary treasures. They were poets and Mohamed was an illiterate.
That, exactly, would be none.
Muslims, moderate or otherwise, do not assimilate or integrate.
The refusal to integrate combined with the very high birthrate of muslims will mean that unless Western countries follow Wilders suggestions they will end up either Islamic or engaged in civil wars and that makes the moderate Muslim far more dangerous to the West than the radical.
The hope that injecting “the lifestyle temptations of the West into the once-inoculated Muslim mind” via the internet will win the war is ludicrous. “Once exposed to the ways of the West,” he writes, “there’s no going back home.” That exposure to the West – especially the ‘decadent’ West is what tips so many Muslims into violent jihad. They are strongly attracted to what the West has to offer but is forbidden in Islam and the end result is not to renounce Islam but to blow themselves up along with as many infidels as they can so they can have the promised 72 virgins in the next life – such is the strength of their indoctrination.
Wow, too much to respond to.
Although I should point out that the author’s statistics on 2008 hate crimes are incorrect.
He writes: “In fact, the 2008 FBI “Hate Crime Statistics” report shows that 61.1% of hate crime victims were Jews; only 7.7 % were Muslims.”
It should read: “In fact, the 2008 FBI “Hate Crime Statistics” report shows that 61.1% of ALL RELIGIOUSLY MOTIVATED hate crime victims were Jews; only 7.7 % were Muslims.”
If you check his source, you’ll notice that in terms of the total of hate crimes (religious+ethnic+racial+sexuality), the percentiles of Jews and Muslims amount to much less than he claims: African Americans are still getting it worse than anyone. But either way, this point does not undermine the author’s intent to show that more Jews are being criminalized according to their religion in comparison to Muslims… which I think is a rather dumb point, as if it’s a victim contest between Jews and Muslims. That seems quite cynical to me. Furthermore, if the author was genuinely interested in exploring the plight of Muslim Americans in order to evaluate the claims of Islamophobia, then he has a large body of sociological literature to chose from. Had he read any of it, he would have noted that hate-crimes are only one of the many religiously-motivated venues for anti-Muslim discrimination… Or if he disagreed with this popular claim, he could have explained why… but I don’t think he even read any of this literature in the first place. For this reason, and so many more, it’s really hard to take this kind of writing seriously, despite all of his big words.
I agree with much of what has been said here about the nature of islam and the agenda of radical muslims. But let us now put the matter in a wider perspective: The Arabs are descendents of Ishmael, who was the son of Abraham’s slave woman, Hagar, and not the promised child, Isaac, from whence come the Jews. This is common knowledge. God loved Ishmael, promised to protect him and make him a great people. He did that! Unfortunately, jealousy has raged ever since, as God sent his prophets to the Jews, and His own Son, for the Jews first, and also for the Gentile (including the Arabs)! I believe there was a deep, underlying spiritual jealousy behind the so-called “revelation” to a certain Arab, Mohammed. Why should God send all his prophets, (which the muslims revere) to the Jews, only to set aside that lineage and send his final and greatest prophet to the Ishmaelites?
When countering islamization, we have to bear in mind certain things. 1.God positively LOVES these people! They are chosen to receive the grace of God in Jesus Christ just like any other tribe on earth! You will not truly turn them away from islam without addressing this underlying jealousy and need for the love of God, expressed by western Christians whom they see as their enemies. Jesus taught us to love our enemies for this very reason! No other method works (of course it’s more than a method, but in this respect we can call it such).People are jealous because they think others are more favoured. Only the gospel can show that they are equally loved and included!
2. You will never destory militant islam unless you have a something that completely fills the void and brings a satisfactorary replacement. It has to be powerful!
3. People are leaving islam in their droves (and it is worrying Saudis for example who for this reason are funding the building of mosques in Algeria where very many have become Christians). They will be open for our message if we “build bridges” of understanding and respect. Swallow whatever camels you may have to, but you will never win people’s hearts without meeting them half way.
Whatever steps may be necessary for western democracies politically, let us not fight with the same weapons as the muslims. We must show peace, tolerance and respect. Otherwise, forget peace!
A broad stroke for any religious group is not fair. They all have their normal sector and some have extreme groups as well. No one should lump them all together.