At Florida Debate, Only Trump Was Correct About Islam

“Naturally, the wise men of Helm never dreamed that the world looked upon them as fools until one day Berel the Beadle left the town to journey to Shedlitz. There, for the first time, a Helmite learned what the world thought of Helm. Hardly able to believe his ears, Berel hurried home in alarm to report to Mottel the Mayor. Frantically, Mottel called a Town Meeting, and for seven days, and seven nights, the leading citizens of Helm thought and thought and thought. On the seventh night of the seventh day, when their brows were wrinkled as prunes, Mottel suddenly shot up from his seat, exclaiming, ‘Why didn’t I think of it before! It’s simple. We Helmites aren’t fools. It’s just that foolish things are always happening to us.’”  — Excerpt, The Wise Men of Helm and Their Merry Tales

Last Wednesday, the following exchange took place between CNN’s Anderson Cooper and GOP presidential contender Donald Trump (video here):

Anderson Cooper: “Do you think Islam is at war with the West?”

Donald Trump: “I think Islam hates us. There’s a tremendous hatred there. An unbelievable hatred of us. We have to get to the bottom of it.”

Cooper: “In Islam itself?”

Trump: “You’re gonna have to figure that out. You’ll get another Pulitzer. But you’re gonna have to figure that out. But there is a tremendous hatred. And we have to be very vigilant. We have to be very careful. We can’t allow people coming into the country who have this hatred of the United States … ”

Cooper: “I guess the question is … ”

Trump “ … [and hatred of] people that are NOT Muslim[s]”

Cooper: “ … I guess the questions is, is there a war between the West and radical Islam, or is there a war between the West and Islam itself?”

Trump: “I guess it is radical, but it is very hard to define … it is very hard to separate because you don’t know who is who … ”

Trump’s direct, accurate responses pierced the post-September 11, 2001 Bush/Obama-era fog of deliberate obfuscation on Islam.

His uncompromised assessment simultaneously exposed the entire sham lexicon of craven camouflage words invented to shield Islam from rational understanding and criticism: “radical Islam,” “Islamism,” “radical Islamism,” “radical jihadism,” “Islamo-fascism,” and even “violent extremism.”

During CNN’s GOP presidential debate the next evening, Trump asserted: “I will stick with exactly what I said to Anderson [Cooper],” i.e., the truthful formulation “Islam hates us,” which elicited attacks by his rivals, Senator Marco Rubio, Senator Ted Cruz, and Governor John Kasich. The responses of Rubio, Cruz, and Kasich were a depressing rehash of Washington insider “wisdom”: platitudinous, mealy-mouthed drivel employing the same tired obfuscating terms: “radical Islam” from Rubio; “Islamic radical terrorism” from Cruz; “radical Islam”/ “people who have distorted their faith” from Kasich. It was accompanied by equally tired invocations of alleged “Muslim ally” leaders or nations.

This sorry trio of “policy wonks” regurgitated their own naïve versions of the long disproven “war within Islam” narrative endlessly promoted by ostensible national security experts across the political spectrum, and reaffirmed, dutifully, in the aftermath of each major act of jihadist carnage since 9/11. Worst of all, Rubio, Cruz, and Kasich reflexively denied the veracity of Trump’s pellucid statement — “Islam hates us” — ignoring an obvious, evidence-based — or more precisely, Sharia-based — reality.

Islam’s hatred is embodied in the Sharia, which derives from Islam’s canonical texts, the Koran itself, and the “traditions” of Muhammad found in the hadith, and the earliest sacralized biographies of Islam’s prophet. It’s a liberty-crushing, dehumanizing system of “law” and overall human conduct, codified and expounded by Islam’s greatest legists, ancient, pre-modern, and contemporary.

The Sharia features: open-ended jihad warfare to subjugate the world to a totalitarian Islamic order; rejection of bedrock Western liberties — including freedom of conscience and speech — enforced by imprisonment, beating, or death; discriminatory relegation of non-Muslims to hated, outcast, vulnerable pariahs, and even Muslim women to subservient chattel; and barbaric punishments which violate human dignity, such as amputation for theft, stoning for adultery, and lashing for alcohol consumption.

This ugly living system was aptly described by the great modern scholar of Islamic law, G.H. Bousquet, as analogous to an undifferentiated cloaca (from the Latin for “sewer”), the posterior orifice that serves as the joint opening for the intestinal and urinary tracts of birds, reptiles, and amphibians. Bousquet argued that the Sharia was a “casuistic hodgepodge,” a retrogressive development compared to the evolution of clear distinctions between “ritual, the law, moral doctrine, good customs in society, etc.,” within Western European Christendom, and utterly incompatible with modern Western conceptions of universal human rights. He also warned of the “doubly totalitarian” nature intrinsic to Islam — its eternal quest to impose a global Sharia order, by jihad warfare:

“By force of arms … the first totalitarian aspect of this religion: to conquer the entire world in order to subject it to a single authority.  Moreover — and this gives it a second totalitarian aspect — it [Islam] constitutes a great theoretical ensemble: the Muslim Law (Sharia) … which has the goal of regulating even down to the smallest details the whole life of the believer and the Muslim community.”

At present, Sharia supremacism — redolent, by nature, with its hateful bellicosity and bigotry — remains the predominant mindset of the world’s Muslims. Disturbing empirical data, blithely ignored by GOP contenders Rubio, Cruz, and Kasich in their collective 3/10/16 debate burbles on Islamic societies and Muslims, validate the overwhelming popularity of the totalitarian Sharia across Islamdom, and within the so-called Muslim “diaspora”:

• 77% of Muslims from the five largest Sunni Muslim populations (i.e., Indonesia, Pakistan, Bengladesh, Egypt, and the Muslim majority of Nigeria), and 83% of Shiite Iranians want the Sharia to be the law of the land.

• 91% of U.S.-liberated Iraqi Muslims, and 99% of U.S.-liberated Afghan Muslims support making Sharia the official state law of their respective societies.

• 65% of Muslims, pooled, from Morocco, Egypt, Pakistan, and Indonesia want, the brutal, totalitarian, Sharia-based caliphate system re-created.

• Given that Islam is inherently political/ideological, the unique 57 Muslim nation member Organization of Islamic Cooperation, the largest UN voting bloc, seeks to replace human rights instruments like the U.S. Bill of Rights with the Sharia-complaint Cairo Declaration which negates U.S. First Amendment freedoms of conscience and speech, encourages hatred towards non-Muslims, and enshrines Sharia punishments which defy our conceptions of both human rights and human dignity: death for “apostasy”; imprisonment and/or death for “blasphemy”; stoning to death for adultery; amputation for theft; and gross legal inequality for non-Muslims, and women.

Perhaps the most tangible manifestation of this mass global support for Sharia-based hatred is the rampant, unparalleled Muslim persecution of Christians and Christianity.

As documented by Open Doors, Muslims in nations where they constitute the majority population (41/50 countries, or 82%) are responsible for the worst Christian persecution worldwide. Nine of the ten most egregiously offending nations, where Christians suffer “extreme persecution,” are Muslim majority countries. Also, across the global spectrum of ethnicity, nationality, language, and sociopolitical environments, Muslims are engaged, uniquely, in the persecution of Christians: U.S.-“liberated” Iraq (#2), and Afghanistan (#4); U.S. “Sunni allies” Pakistan (#6), Saudi Arabia (#14), Qatar (#21), Egypt (#22), and Jordan (#27), or Shiite jihadist enemy of the U.S., Iran (#9); Muslims from wealthy nations Qatar (#21) and Kuwait (#41), or indigent countries (Somalia #7, and Yemen #11); Muslims from putatively “moderate” nations (Malaysia #30, Indonesia #43, and Turkey #45), and those from Shiite (Iran #9), or Sunni (Afghanistan #4) “Islamic republics.”

Moreover, at present, a mere 3% of the 900,000 Jews present within Islamdom when Israel won its independence in 1948 remain in their former homelands.

Between 1948 and 1967, these Jews fled mass Muslim anti-Jewish pogroms and expropriations. Yet even such quiescent, vestigial remnant Jewish populations suffer ongoing chronic persecution, including occasional paroxysms of murderous violence. This treatment is entirely consistent with Islam’s Sharia-sanctioned Jew-hatred, and broader anti-“infidel” bigotry of more than 13 centuries, still evident today for example in Iran, Turkey, and Yemen.

Fomented by both mainstream Sunni and Shiite Islam’s most prestigious religious teaching institutions, traditional Islamic Jew-hatred is the ultimate source for the global epidemic of strongly bigoted Muslim attitudes towards Jews documented by unprecedented Anti-Defamation League (ADL) surveys conducted in 2014, and updated in 2015. “Scaling” conspiratorial Jew-hatred, based upon an index of eleven anti-Semitic stereotypes, 50% of the world’s Muslims harbored the most intense animus (affirming ≥ 6/11 stereotypes), a rate 2 to 3-fold higher than among any other major faith (i.e., Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism), or among those professing no religion. Fully 75% of Middle East and North Africa Muslims overall expressed this level of Jew-hating intensity, ranging between 92%-93% in Gaza/the West Bank and Iraq to 74%-75% in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, respectively.

Finally, these harrowing data from the Muslim “diaspora” living within Western Europe and the U.S. underscore the overwhelming, shared support for hateful Sharia supremacism amongst contemporary Muslims living outside Islamdom:

• Sixty-five percent of Muslims from Germany, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Austria and Sweden acknowledged,“The rules of the Koran [i.e., the core of Sharia] are more important to me than the laws of [my country].”

• 2015 ADL data from Western European Muslims (an oversample of the Belgian, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and UK Muslim populations) revealed that 55% harbored an intense level of Jew-hatred (affirming ≥ 6/11 Jew-hating stereotypes). These Western European ADL findings are consistent with prior analyses of the indoctrination of Muslim European youth and adults with textual Islamic Jew-hatred and European Union data that acts of overt anti-Semitic violence are at least ~25-fold more likely to be committed by Muslims.

• Per respected pollster Kellyanne Conway, 51% of U.S. Muslims want Sharia applied in the U.S. in whole or part (while 25% believe violent jihad against Americans is justifiable.)

The specific 3/10/16 GOP debate comments of Rubio, Cruz, and Kasich, regarding Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Turkey merit examination in light of the findings elucidated above, and additional evidence.

Senator Rubio praised the “Saudis” and the “Jordanian Kingdom” as examples of societies whose Muslim denizens are “not radicals.” But for nearly a century, Saudi Arabia (currently #14 of the world’s 50 worst Christian-persecuting nations), fueled by oil wealth, has been the engine driving global Sunni jihad hatred and violence via proselytism and overt military provisions.

The cataclysmic 9/11 jihad terror attacks were committed predominantly (15/19 of the hijackers) by Saudi nationals. Jordan (currently #27 of the world’s 50 worst Christian-persecuting nations) remains a hotbed of Sharia supremacism, jihadism, and virulent Islamic Jew-hatred. Just this past November 10, 2015, a Jordanian Muslim policeman assassinated two American military contractors at a police training facility in Jordan. The funeral of “pious” Muslim murderer Anwar Abu Zaid was attended by thousands of Jordanian Muslims chanting “Death to America, Death to Israel,” and his family insisted that he was both a “victim” and a “martyr” for killing Americans.

Senator Cruz extolled Egyptian military despot el-Sisi, and Egypt overall, as “a president of a Muslim country who is targeting radical Islamic terrorists.” Yet Egypt (currently #22 of the world’s 50 worst Christian-persecuting nations), also remains a font of traditional Islam’s jihadism, Jewish, and broader non-Muslim infidel hatred, inculcated by the Cairo-based Vatican of Sunni Islamic religious education, Al Azhar University. Sisi, whom elsewhere Senator Cruz recently deified for “calling out” what the senator deems “the terrible perversion of his [Sisi’s] own faith [Islam],” allegedly causing Muslim “violence,” wrote a 2006 U.S. War College “mini-thesis” Cruz has clearly never read.

I analyzed this work in August 2013, which required a FOIA request to obtain given Sisi’s wish that it not be made available. Circa 2006, Sisi was a full-throated Sharia supremacist and romantic supporter of Islam’s caliphate system. He virulently rejected Western secularism and human rights constructs like the U.S. Bill of Rights.

This Sharia-based worldview is manifest in Sisi’s current authoritarian governance, punctuated by a state sponsored Islamic campaign to “extirpate the scourge of atheism,” ongoing vigorous prosecutions of “blasphemers,” especially Coptic Christians, and harsh restrictions on all free expression, in particular criticism of his government via print and television media.

Governor Kasich interjected his wisdom on Turkey (currently #45 of the world’s 50 worst Christian-persecuting nations), claiming “the Europeans went in the wrong direction when they rejected Turkey from joining into the economic sphere of Europe.” Rational European rejection of Turkey’s entry into the European Union hinges upon longstanding repressive behaviors of the modern, brutally autocratic Turkish Republic and its past-as-prologue Sharia-based Ottoman Muslim legacy, which includes a thorough re-Islamization that began just a decade after Ataturk’s death in 1938. Kasich’s glib, uninformed assessment even ignores the current behaviors of Turkey’s Erdogan government, an openly Neo-Ottoman, jihad-abetting, Islamic Jew-hating regime. The good Governor might also benefit from viewing this “man on the street” video evidence of Turkish Muslim hatred for non-Muslims, inspired by specific Koranic motifs (see Koran 8:55; 2:191; 4:89, and 9:5) mainstream Islam espouses.

Over two decades ago, the late Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington dispassionately addressed Anderson Cooper’s 3/9/16 question to Donald Trump: “Do you think Islam is at war with the West?” Huntington’s seminal 1996 The Clash of Civilizations adduces convincing data in support of his contention that “[w]herever one looks along the perimeter of Islam, Muslims have problems living peaceably with their neighbors.” He provides these germane observations which have been confirmed (one could argue even amplified), subsequently in the wake of the September 11, 2001 jihad carnage in the U.S. and its aftermath, marked by an additional (at least) 27,985 jihadist attacks since 9/11:

The overwhelming majority of fault line conflicts … have taken place along the boundary looping across Eurasia and Africa that separates Muslims from non-Muslims. … Intense antagonisms and violent conflicts are pervasive between local Muslim and non-Muslim peoples. … Muslims make up about one-fifth of the world’s population, but in the 1990s they have been far more involved in inter-group violence than the people of any other civilization. The evidence is overwhelming.

There were, in short, three times as many inter-civilizational conflicts involving Muslims as there were between non-Muslim civilizations. … Muslim states also have had a high propensity to resort to violence in international crises, employing it to resolve 76 crises out of a total of 142 in which they were involved between 1928 and 1979 … When they did use violence, Muslim states used high-intensity violence, resorting to full-scale war in 41 percent of the cases where violence was used and engaging in major clashes in another 39 percent of the cases. While Muslim states resorted to violence in 53.5 percent, violence was used the United Kingdom in only 1.5 percent, by the United States in 17.9 percent, and by the Soviet Union in 28.5 percent of the crises in which they were involved … Muslim bellicosity and violence are late-twentieth-century facts which neither Muslims nor non-Muslims can deny.

Huntington concluded, without equivocation, that the problem for the West, and indeed all other non-Muslim societies, victimized by Islam’s jihad bellicosity, was Islam itself, not any “radical variant” of the creed: 

The underlying problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture.

A survey of 1,000 Likely Voters nationwide conducted on May 10-11, 2012 by Rasmussen Reports revealed that the preponderance of ordinary Americans shared Huntington’s sadly rare academic insights:

• 63% total — 80% of Republicans and 62% of Independents, but only (or even?) 46% of Democrats — believed there was a conflict between Islamdom and Western civilization. What the report termed the “political class,” a group held in low esteem by “mainstream voters,” remained “evenly divided on the question” and “more supportive of U.S. efforts to encourage democracy in the Islamic world” compared to the mainstream. However,73% of the latter, i.e., mainstream voters, recognized the conflict.

• A mere 26% believed the United States should be aggressive in encouraging “the growth of democracy in the Islamic world,” while 58% maintained the U.S. should leave matters alone, and 16% were undecided.

• Moreover, a scant 10% of voters predicted that America’s relationship with the Muslim world would improve a year from then, while 29% believed that relationship would deteriorate further, and 50% expected it to remain unchanged.

• Lastly, those who served in the military, past or present (circa 2012), or family members of those then serving, were more pessimistic than those who lacked this background.

Donald Trump, who wrote presciently in 2000 about the threat posed by 9/11 jihadist mass murderer Osama Bin Laden, clearly shares and reflects the commonsense wisdom of these “Mainstream Voters” regarding Islam. Dispensing with the prevailing pseudo-academic, cultural relativist blather on Islam, Trump’s blunt April 2011 utterance that “the Koran teaches a very negative vibe,” his October 20, 2016 suggestion that U.S. mosques actively involved with jihad terrorism be shuttered, his December 7, 2015 call for a temporary moratorium on Muslim immigration, and his irrefragable 3/9/16 statement “Islam hates us” further illustrate his innate understanding of the Muslim creed, and deep, overriding concern for the basic safety of all Americans.

The bowdlerized, Helm-ite views on Islam expressed by Trump’s GOP contender rivals should remind us that the times are too fraught with danger for their dilettantism and impressionism.