“War is deceit,” said Muhammad, and Ased Abdur-Raheem, the would-be jihad terrorist about whom I wrote last week, took his words to heart. Formerly (and currently in the mainstream media, ever anxious to protect the image of Islam) known as Nicholas Teausant, Abdur-Raheem, 20, was a member of the Army National Guard who called for respect for the military uniform just three days before he was arrested. This was almost a year after he wrote on Instagram:
don’t get me wrong I despise america and want its down fall but yeah haha. Lol I been a part of the army for two years now and I would love to join Allah’s army but I don’t even know how to start.
But he wasn’t always so deceitful. Last January, Abdur-Raheem kept a blog for twenty days, consisting of all of six posts, entitled “Just a Muslim Man Looking for answers in a Lost world.” It is refreshingly honest and direct, containing a wealth of information that the earnest young convert wanted you to know about Islam. Some of the highlights:
5. “Allah sent His Messenger with guidance and the true religion so that it might prevail over all other religions…”
This is from a Muslim denunciation of Valentine’s Day that has widely circulated on the Internet for several years, and was the last entry Abdur-Raheem posted on his blog. It is a reflection of Qur’anic teaching: “It is Allah who sent his messenger with guidance and a true religion that will prevail over all other religions, even though the pagans may dislike it” (9:33).
The Islam that young Nicholas Teausant embraced was frankly and openly supremacist, with no interest whatsoever in the “peaceful coexistence” and “pluralism” of the multiculturalist West. That Western intelligentsia, however, has taken little notice of the existence of this Islam, generally condemning such concerns as “Islamophobia,” and basing numerous domestic and foreign policies on the proposition that all Muslims in Western countries are secular-minded, benign pluralists. Meanwhile, this Valentine’s Day condemnation keeps circulating among English-speaking Muslims, year after year. Those Muslims can read the Qur’an, too.
4. “Undoubtedly it is haraam [forbidden] to love the kaafirs [unbelievers].”
This also is from the Valentine’s Day piece, and also is precisely Qur’anic. Says the Qur’an: “You will not find a people who believe in Allah and the Last Day having affection for those who oppose Allah and His Messenger, even if they were their fathers or their sons or their brothers or their kindred” (58:22), and “O you who have believed, do not take the Jews and the Christians as allies. They are allies of one another. And whoever is an ally to them among you, then indeed, he is of them. Indeed, Allah guides not the wrongdoing people” (5:51).
But the idea of any Muslims in the West taking such passages seriously today is preposterous, as far as Western government and media elites are concerned.
3. “Well with the help of a Turkish exchange student i had learned all about these proofs [of Islam] and well it helped that she was quite Attractive,lol.”
Muslims in Western countries are making extensive efforts to convert young Europeans and Americans to Islam, reaching out to them with their most attractive foot (and other aspects) forward. This effort is not even on the radar screen of parents, schools, or churches, despite the fact that not a few converts (such as al Qaeda’s Adam Gadahn and the Taliban’s John Walker Lindh) have ended up in jihad groups. No doubt most right-thinking Americans think that to show concern about Islamic proselytizing, much less to teach young people to counter it, would be “Islamophobic.”
This indifference is ultimately self-defeating, for as numbers four and five above demonstrate, the religion for which people like Abdur-Raheem’s attractive Turkish exchange student are proselytizing is not interested in according to non-Muslims the same generosity.
2. “i took the Shahaddah for numerous reasons one of which was because i read a book called ‘Misquoting Jesus’ written by Bart D. Ehrman.”
The “Shahaddah” is the Islamic profession of faith: “There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet.” For decades now, Islamic apologists have made skillful use of books purporting to debunk and deconstruct the Christian understanding of Jesus Christ, such as Ehrman’s and those of other liberal scholars, to promote Islam to confused young Christians.
The churches (Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant) for their part generally either embrace such scholarship and disdain traditional Christianity, or ignore such explorations altogether – in both cases leaving their young people utterly unequipped to deal with challenges from Muslim apologists. First and foremost among such challenges is the simple question: If what the New Testament teaches about Jesus is not true, why remain in your church? Why, indeed. As a result of the churches’ general refusal to engage Islam (or anything else) on intellectual, rational grounds, in part because of a post-modern embarrassment with the idea that anything at all is true or false, young Christians like Nicholas Teausant are turning to the mosque – where they get all the answers they’re seeking, and have no way to discern whether what they’re being told is accurate or not.
This is paradoxical: young people are leaving the faith that tells believers that they should “always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have” (I Peter 3:15) for the one that tells them “do not ask about things which, if they are shown to you, will distress you….A people asked such questions before you; then they became thereby disbelievers” (Qur’an 5:101-102).
If all too many of the new converts did not, like Teausant/Abdur-Raheem, conclude that their new religion commanded them to become an enemy of their country and its people, this indifference to Islamic proselytizing might not be of any concern; but Abdur-Raheem is by no means the only one.
1. “I promote Jihad, Not terrorism and yes there is a difference.”
Abdur-Raheem no doubt thought he was engaging in jihad, not terrorism, when he attempted to join al Qaeda in Syria and plotted to blow up the Los Angeles subways (such as they are). “Terrorism”? For a true believer like Abdur-Raheem, that’s what the Israelis do in Gaza and the Americans do in Afghanistan. Muslims waging jihad are not engaged in “terrorism,” in this view; they’re engaged in a work for justice.
The “justice” envisioned in Islamic law institutionalizes discrimination against women and non-Muslims, denies the freedom of speech, and mandates death for those who leave Islam. That’s why the adults around Nicholas Teausant when he began considering converting to Islam should have made an effort to try to dissuade him. But that, of course, would have been “Islamophobic.”
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