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Teaching Muslim Children Jihad and Jew-Hatred in Toronto … Correctly?

Left out of the news coverage? That the teachings were Islamically correct.

by
Andrew G. Bostom

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May 10, 2012 - 7:36 am
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A complaint filed by Friends of the Simon Wiesenthal Center has prompted an investigation of the East End Madrassah, an Islamic school which operates out of a public high school in Toronto, the David and Mary Thomson Collegiate Institute. As reported by the National Post, East End Madrassah’s level 8 curriculum was found to contain invocations for jihad warfare and Islamic Jew-hatred.

What was not discussed, almost axiomatically, is that these calls for jihad against non-Muslims and rationalizations for Muslim Jew-hatred were drawn, in appropriate context, from the Koran and Sunna (the hadith, the Muslim prophet Muhammad’s words and deeds, and sira, the earliest pious Muslim biographies of Muhammad) — Islam’s most important, sacralized canonical sources. This glaring omission — failing to identify, let alone elaborate upon, the canonical Islamic references often plainly cited in the “offending” curricular materials — is entirely consistent with the coverage of similar stories in recent years. See the incidents in New York City and Fairfax, Virginia, or indeed virtually all mainstream reporting on the education of Muslim children attending Islamic schools in the West.

Just as predictably, representatives of the Jewish community reacted with shock and indignation that their delusion of a Canadian cultural relativist paradise had been momentarily shattered. Avi Benlolo, president and CEO of the Friends of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, opined:

To think that this is happening right here in Canada, in our backyards, in our own country where we promote tolerance, diversity, understanding, human rights, and bringing those types of concepts over from the ancient world if you will, its just unbelievable.

David Spiro, Greater Toronto co-chair of the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, added in press release:

Using religion to promote hatred among youth is not just offensive and abhorrent — it shows a stunning disregard for Canada’s basic values of decency and tolerance.

The East End Madrassah issued a press release in response, noting the institution had been “in existence for almost 40 years,” and “graduated thousands of Muslim students,” ostensibly “taught to respect and value other faiths, beliefs and to uphold Canada’s basic values of decency and tolerance.” Moreover, the press release offered an “unreserved apology” to the Jewish community for the alleged “unintentional” offense caused by the so-called “item” — i.e., an entire curriculum derived, as indicated, from the Islamic Laws & Ethics series of a local Toronto imam and scholar, Sayyid Muhammad Rizvi.

Touted as a moderate champion of interfaith dialogue, Rizvi supports lethal punishment for so-called “apostates,” those who forsake Islam, and condones child marriage, i.e., at “nine lunar years,” for females. Imam Rizvi, at his best, is a public purveyor of Islamic supremacism as faux “pluralism,” arguing that non-Muslims who did not submit to Islam and its prophet’s “invitations” — certainly at the advent of the creed — were rightful targets of the aggressive jihad campaigns waged against them. The good imam also openly avowed his current anti-American and “anti-Zionist” views in a sermon which referred to both Western nations, in Koranic terms, as deliberate “corrupters” of the desired Islamic world order, invoking Koran 2:11 (“And when it is said unto them: Make not mischief in the earth, they say: We are peacemakers only”).

Despite this toxic brew of uninformed — perhaps intentionally deceitful — reporting, a willfully blind, overwrought Canadian Jewish community reaction, and Muslim community dissimulation (or “taqiyya”), the curricular materials in question are a mere straightforward rendition of mainstream Islamic teaching on the Muslim institution of jihad war and Islam’s sacralized Jew-hatred.

The curriculum prefaces its discussion of “The Purpose of Jihad” with an invocation of a verse from the second sura (chapter) of the Koran, 2:216:

Fighting (in the cause of Allah), is ordained unto you and it is hateful to you, and perchance you hate a thing whereas it is good for you, and perchance you love a thing whereas it is bad for you; and verily Allah knoweth while you know not.

A mainstream exegesis (interpretation) on this verse from the most respected and widely used single volume Koranic tafsir (commentary), Tafsir al-Jalalayn, elucidates the unequivocally aggressive bellicosity 2:216 is meant to inspire:

Fighting against the unbelievers is prescribed and hereby made obligatory for you even if it is hateful to you and it is disliked because it entails hardship. It may be that you hate a thing when it is good for you and it may be that you love a thing when it is bad for you. … So it is you may dislike fighting, but it is good for you: either through winning victory and gaining booty or by gaining martyrdom and its reward.

The great Muslim jurist and polymath Ibn Rushd, known in the West as Averroes (d. 1198), confirmed that after Muhammad emigrated to Medina, he [Muhammad] “imposed fighting [on] them [the Muslims],” as per Koran 2:216 specifically, stating:

According to the majority of scholars, the compulsory nature of the jihad is founded on Koran 2:216.

Under the heading “The Purpose of Jihad,” the curriculum states plainly, in accord with classical, mainstream Islamic doctrine the global designs and totalitarian nature of jihad, driven by Islamic law, Sharia, and seeking to impose this oppressive religio-political system universally, by force if required:

Islam is a dynamic, comprehensive school that aims at the rectification of the social and economic systems of the world in a special manner. Unlike the beliefs of the ancient Romans, the Jews, and the Nazis, Islam is not restricted to a certain community of a certain race, but is for all human beings and aims at human prosperity and salvation. This divine faith requires all Muslims, guided by the holy precepts and instructions of Islam, to endeavor to rescue the oppressed masses to establish peace and justice, and to acquaint the unaware people of the whole world with Islam and Islamic rules and regulations. Did Islam prevail by the force of the sword? As a matter of fact, through jihad, the Muslims have mainly meant to establish connections with the people who are under the oppressive rule of tyrants, so the oppressed masses would become acquainted with Islamic rules and precepts and so they would comprehend the glory and genuineness of independence and salvation.

Notwithstanding the curriculum’s propagandistic language characterizing as “liberation” Islam’s brutal jihad conquests — punctuated by massacre, pillage, enslavement, deportation, and subsequent imposition of the Sharia — the great Belgian scholar of jihad doctrine, Armand Abel, provided this apt assessment of Islam’s “universal mission” in 1958:

Together with the duty of the “war in the way of God” (or jihad),this universalistic aspiration would lead the Muslims to see the world as being divided fundamentally into two parts. On the one hand there was that part of the world where Islam prevailed, where salvation had been announced, where the religion that ought to reign was practiced; this was the Dar al Islam. On the other hand, there was the part which still awaited the establishment of the saving religion and which constituted, by definition, the object of the holy war. This was the Dar al Harb. The latter, in the view of the Muslim jurists, was not populated by people who had a natural right not to practice Islam, but rather by people destined to become Muslims who, through impiousness and rebellion, refused to accept this great benefit.

Since they were destined sooner or later to be converted at the approach of the victorious armies of the Prophet’s successor, or else killed for their rebelliousness, they were the rebel subjects of the Caliph. Their kings were nothing but odious tyrants who, by opposing the progress of the saving religion together with their armies, were following a Satanic inspiration and rising up against the designs of Providence. And so no respite should be granted them, no truce: perpetual war should be their lot, waged in the course of the winter and summer ghazu [razzias]. If the sovereign of the country thus attacked desired peace, it was possible for him, just like for any other tributary or community, to pay the tribute for himself and for his subjects. Thus the [Byzantine] Empress Irene [d. 803] “purchased peace at the price of her humiliation”, according to the formula stated in the dhimma contract itself, by paying 70,000 pounds in gold annually to the Caliph of Baghdad. Many other princes agreed in this way to become tributaries — often after long struggles — and to see their dominions pass from the status of dar al Harb to that of dar al Sulh. In this way, those of their subjects who lived within the boundaries of the territory ruled by the Caliphate were spared the uncertainty of being exposed arbitrarily, without any guarantee, to the military operations of the summer ghazu and the winter ghazu: indeed, anything within the reach of the Muslim armies as they advanced, being property of impious men and rebels, was legitimately considered their booty; their men, seized by armed soldiers, were mercilessly consigned to the lot specified in the Koranic verse about the sword,and their women and children were treated like things.

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