Islamic Jihad

by Pat J. Merriman  
©2011  

 An Overview of the Problem

Our current American administration, like its predecessors, does not have a grasp of the current threat to our way of life posed by Islam. Witness the June, 2011, ridiculous pronouncement from the Obama Administration that Israel is one of the 36 nations which exports terrorism to the rest of the world.[i] However, any analysis of “radical”, modern Islam does not start with modern prejudice or opinion but, rather, with an understanding of the deep cultural and religious gulf between the insular, and per se anachronistic, beliefs of the modern Muslim and the current Western mind which fails to grasp where the Muslim came from. Like it or not, the modern Western mind cannot begin to grasp the thinking process (motivation) of the Muslim and, therefore, can never hope to achieve this ability, until we explore the Muslim’s history. The best example of this impasse is the kidnapping of the American Embassy personnel in Tehran, Iran in 1979. Essentially, the Iran hostage crisis (as it was dubbed by the media) occurred when 53 Americans were held hostage for 444 days from November 4, 1979 to January 20, 1981, after a group of Islamist “students” (terrorists) took over the American Embassy in support of the Iranian Revolution seeking to depose the Shaw of Iran. Never understanding that Sharia law is ancient tribal law (if one member of a tribe offends you, you make seek recompense from any other member of the same tribe), the Jimmy Carter administration never understood that mindset choosing, instead, to try to apply typical Western, intellectual, effete, naive (individual responsibility) thinking to analyze and react to the situation in diplomatic terms-a historical failure with Islam.

The episode reached a climax when, after failed attempts to negotiate a release, the United States military attempted a rescue operation, Operation Eagle Claw, on April 24, 1980, which failed miserably resulting in the destruction of two military aircraft[ii] and the deaths of eight American servicemen and one Iranian civilian. The US was a laughing stock and, the entire fiasco dragged on for another year only ending with the signing of the Algiers Accords in Algeria on January 19, 1981. The hostages were formally released into United States custody the following day, just minutes after the new American president Ronald Reagan was sworn in. Because, as one source put it, Reagan’s administration understood the Muslim mindset but, did not care and, the United States was now going to apply the dogma that the Iranians had committed an act of war and, as Commander-in- Chief, he was going to address the matter in a military (not diplomatic) manner. Applying the only historical remedy for the Muslim invasion--brute force.

Correctly stated, the crisis has been described as an entanglement of “vengeance and mutual incomprehension”. In Iran, the hostage taking was widely seen as a blow against the imperialistic, colonist United States, and its interference in Iran, its perceived attempts to undermine the Iranian Revolution, and its long-standing support of the Shah of Iran, recently overthrown by that revolution. Recall that the Shah had been restored to power, in lieu of a Sharia government, in a 1953 coup against a “democratically-elected” nationalist Iranian government organized by the CIA at the very-same American Embassy in Tehran. And, the same Shah had just recently been allowed into the United States for medical treatment of his cancer. In the United States, the hostage-taking was seen as an outrageous violation of a centuries-old principle of international law granting diplomats immunity from arrest and diplomatic compounds sovereignty in their embassies. Yet, the lesson (not learned) was that the Muslim goal of world domination, by hook or by crook, was alive and well in the 20th century.

The “crisis” was instrumental in the defeat of Jimmy Carter (a dove) by Reagan (the hawk) in 1980. Regardless, there is also no doubt that the incident strengthened both the prestige of the Ayatollah Khomeini (a fundamentalist Muslim) and that factions stranglehold on the theocracy that was Iranian Islam and its influence in the Middle East. Our economic sanctions against Iran did little more than further weaken our relationship with that government and polarize the region further against United States’ interference, what the locals believed, to be their own, internal matter which was no business of the United States. Historically, in February 1979 (less than a year before the hostage crisis), Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, had been overthrown by Muslim revolution.

This Shah (the son of Shah Reza) had been installed by Allied powers in World War II to thwart his father’s alignment of his petroleum-rich country with Nazi Germany during that war. However, Reza Shah’s “Declaration of Neutrality” and refusal to allow Iranian territory to be used to train, supply, and act as a transport corridor to ship arms to Russia for its war effort against Germany, was the strongest motive for the ultimate allied invasion and occupation of Iran. Because of its importance in the allied victory, Iran was subsequently called “The Bridge of Victory” by Winston Churchill and, had been America’s puppet ever since.

By the 1950s, the Shah was engaged in a power struggle with Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddeq, an immediate descendant of the previous monarchy, the Qajar dynasty. In 1953, the British and US spy agencies deposed the democratically-elected government of Mossaddeq in a military coup d’état codenamed Operation Ajax, and restored the Shah as an absolute monarch. This “anti-democratic” coup was viewed by the Muslim as a critical intrusion into the internal politics of a sovereign nation during the Cold War, essentially, replacing a  post- monarchic, native, and secular parliamentary democracy with a dictatorship. This was particularly offensive to the Iranian Muslim who viewed the CIA’s coup, along with its training of the hated Iranian Secret Police (SAVAK), as anathema and a Holy War against Islam. In subsequent decades this foreign intervention, along with other economic, cultural and political issues which inured under the Shah’s tight-fisted regime, ultimately, led to his overthrow and the events of November, 1979, at least as viewed by the Muslim.

Compounding this perceived US “imperialism”, shortly before the revolution, on New Year’s Day 1979, President Carter further enraged anti-Shah Iranians with a televised toast to the Shah, declaring how beloved the Shah was by his people. Little known to the American public, shortly after the revolution in February, the US Embassy had actually been occupied, and its staff held hostage, briefly by rock-throwing and armed “students” of the revolution. Rocks and bullets had actually broken enough of the embassy front- facing windows for them to be replaced with bullet-proof glass. Its staff was reduced, by Carter, to just over 60 from a high of nearly 1000 earlier in the decade. Belying the official pronouncements that the taking of the American hostages was not foreseen by American intelligence.

The Carter administration continued to step on its own feet by ignoring its own embassy personnel, in Tehran, and agreeing to allow the Shah, on October 22, 1979, to come to the US for cancer treatment. The Shah’s admission to the US simply intensified Iranian revolutionaries’ anti-Americanism and spawned rumors of another US-backed coup to reinstall the Shah in lieu of the “legitimate” government being formed by the Revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (who had been exiled by the Shah for 15 years). America became the “Great Satan” a title it has never lost in the Muslim world. Again, invoking tribal, Sharia law, the Muslim simply intones that the US had no right to complain about the 1979 hostages because we had taken their whole country hostage in 1953.

Some say that modern Islamist “student”, guerrilla tactics were honed during the events in Tehran. These “students” had observed the security procedures of the Marine Security Guards from nearby rooftops overlooking the embassy. They also used experiences from the recent revolution, during which the US embassy grounds were briefly occupied. They enlisted the support of police in charge of guarding the embassy and of Islamic Revolutionary Guards. Their success in the matter greatly enhanced the prestige of the new Jihad against the great superpower, the United States, which was impotent to do anything about it under the Carter Administration. Theocratic Islamists, as well as leftist political groups world-wide, and figures like the People’s Mujahedin of Iran, publicly supported the taking of American hostages as an attack on “American imperialism” and its alleged Iranian “tools of the West.” And, the US took no action other than diplomacy- the time-tested method of failure with Islam.

In hindsight, it did not help that CIA documents taken from the embassy, sometimes painstakingly reconstructed after shredding, actually seemed to buttress the Iranian claim that “the Great Satan” was trying to destabilize the new regime, and that Iranian moderates were in league with the US. The documents were actually published in a series of books called Documents from the US Espionage Den and were consistently used to support the Islamist claim that Jihad was actually started by the foes of Islam. In fact, by embracing the hostage-taking, under the slogan “America can’t do a thing,” Khomeini rallied support and deflected criticism from his controversial Islamic theocratic constitution, which was actually due for a referendum vote in less than one month. Following that successful referendum, both leftists and theocrats continued to use the issue of alleged pro-Americanism to suppress their opponents, the relatively moderate political forces, which included the Iranian Freedom Movement, National Front, Grand Ayatollah Shari’atmadari, and later, President Abolhassan Banisadr. In particular, carefully selected diplomatic dispatches and reports discovered at the embassy and released by the hostage-takers led to the disempowerment and resignations of moderate figures such as Premier Mehdi Bazargan. The political danger in Iran of any move seen as accommodating America, along with the failed rescue attempt, delayed a negotiated release. Of course, in purely Islamic tradition, after the hostages were released, leftists and theocrats then turned on each other, with the stronger theocratic group annihilating the left.

Iranian takhia (propaganda) stated that the hostages were “guests” treated with respect. Ibrahim Asgharzadeh cranked up the media machine described the original hostage taking plan as a “nonviolent” and symbolic action where the “gentle and respectful treatment” of the hostages would dramatize to the whole world the offended sovereignty and dignity of Iran. In America, an Iranian charge d’affairs, Ali Agha, stormed out of meeting with an American official, exclaiming “We are not mistreating the hostages. They are being very well taken care of in Tehran. They are our guests.” In Iran one guard told several hostages “We want you to feel that you are our guests,” and complained that use of the word “guard” was “too cruel.” Visiting Iranian officials asked hostages “What can I do for you? We want to make you more comfortable” and, told another surprised hostage that they, the hostages, should be grateful that Iran was protecting them from attempts by the US government to kill them. And, confused, Americans waited for their government to take some action.

After Reagan’s election victory in 1980, the popular American mythology was that Iran released the hostages solely out of fear of the new administration. In fact, pre-election talks had resulted in an agreement, whereby, the US agreed to three Iranian demands (not including an apology). And, of course, the Iraqi invasion of Iran that year (blamed on the United States too) almost “blew the deal”. However, eventually, the matter merely came down to dollars and cents with Iran (content to live and fight for Islam another day) claiming that the United States owed them $20 to $60 billion and the United States estimating it at “closer to $20 to 60 million” after the embargo. Reagan’s election year rhetoric of not paying “ransom for people who have been kidnapped by barbarians” yielded the New Years Day threat from Radio Tehran that if the US did not accept Iran’s demands the hostages would be tried as spies and executed. Regardless, on November 2, 1980, the Iranian parliament finally set forth formal conditions for the hostages’ release and eight days later Deputy Secretary of State Warren Christopher arrived in Algiers with the first US reply setting off a slow motion diplomatic shuffle between Washington, Algiers and Tehran.

These negotiations resulted in the “Algiers Accords” of January 19, 1981, which provided that Iran would immediately free the hostages, unfreezing of $7.9 billion of Iranian assets, and granting absolute immunity from foreign lawsuits that Iran might have rightly faced in American courts. More importantly, America learned its political lesson in the Middle East when the United States pledged that “it is and from now on will be the policy of the United States not to intervene, directly or indirectly, politically or militarily, in Iran’s internal affairs.” The hostages were released on the day President Carter’s term ended because the hostage-takers are thought to have wanted the release delayed as punishment for his perceived support for the Shah. Iranians insisted on payment in gold rather than US dollars so the US government transferred 50 tons of gold to Iran while simultaneously taking ownership of an equivalent quantity of Iranian gold that had been frozen at the New York Federal Reserve Bank. As bad as America’s image was tarnished by this episode, this “resolution” still fared much better for the United States than the 1829, Iranian invasion of the Russian Embassy where the Russian ambassador, Alexander Griboyedov was beheaded by his captors.

Regardless, these events graphically demonstrate the deep divide between the Muslim and Western mind, as it relates to jihad, the moral high ground and who is fighting a religious war. The Iranian hostage crisis was merely a preview of coming attractions for this country.  

Before Mohammed[iii]

The Pre-Abrahamic Arab Societies

In determining where Islam is headed in the New Millennium, an understanding of where the Arab world has been is essential. In that regard, the ancient Arab story begins before the history of the Jewish (and Arab) patriarch Abraham (circa 2018 BC)[iv]. Sheba, the Anglicized Hebrew spelling of Saba, the name of an ancient southwest Arabian kingdom roughly corresponding to the modern territory of Yemen, originally settled by Semites (from western or central Arabia) during the middle of 2000 BC. Excavations at Ma’rib, its capital, during the 20th century, have revealed an ancient, imposing temple to the moon god of the local, polytheistic pagans. The South Arabians, before Islam, were polytheists and revered a large number of deities. Most of these were astral in concept but the significance of only a few is known. It was essentially a planetary system in which the moon as a masculine deity prevailed. This, combined with the use of a star calendar by the agriculturists of certain parts, particularly the Hadramaut, indicates that there was an early reverence for the night sky. Amongst the South Arabians the worship of the moon continued, and it is almost certain that their religious calendar was also lunar and that their years were calculated by the position of the moon. The national god of each of the kingdoms or states was the Moon-god known by various names: ‘Ilumquh by the Sabaeans, ‘Amm and ‘Anbay by the Qatabanians, Wadd (love) by the Minaeans, and Sin by the Hadramis”. The term ‘God is Love’ is characteristic of “the Merciful”, the term later ascribed to Allah and, is also South Arabian.

The sun-goddess was the moon’s consort; she was perhaps best known in South Arabia as Dhat Hamym, ‘she who sends forth strong rays of benevolence’. Another dominant deity was the male god known as Athtar corresponding to Phoenician Astarte. Historian James Pritchard claims their pantheon included the moon god Sin etc., Shams (Shamash) and Athtar or Astarte as in the Semitic trinity, however, it would appear that the sun was female as the Canaanite Shapash who figures in Ugarit myth alongside Athtar. The earliest temple known is the Mahram Bilquis or Harem of the Queen of Sheba, previously called the Awwam the temple of the Moon God ‘Ilumquh which dates from around 700 BC, although its lower levels may be substantially older. Sabean moon worship extended through a long period of time to around 400 AD when it was overtaken by Judaism and Christianity around a century before Mohammed.

Bilquis was the Queen of the Sabeans (Sheba) in King Solomon’s time. Pre-Islamic poetry describes Solomon as a king of a universal kingdom of men, djinn[v] and winds with nine angels standing before him. Solomon built the castle al-Ablaq near Taima. Greek historian Diodorus Siculus (60-30 BC) notes: “This tribe [the Sabaeans] surpasses not only the neighboring Arabs but also all other men in wealth and in their several extravagances besides. For in the exchange and sale of their wares they, of all men who carry on trade for the sake of the silver they receive in exchange, obtain the highest price in return for things of the smallest weight. Consequently, since they have never, for ages, suffered the ravages of war because of their isolated position, and since an abundance of both gold and silver abounds in the country, they have embossed goblets of every description, made of silver and gold, couches and tripods with silver feet, and every other furnishing of incredible costliness, and halls encircled by large columns, some of them gilded, and others having silver figures on the capitals. Their ceilings and doors they partitioned by means of panels and coffers made of gold, set with precious stones and placed close together, and have thus made the structure of their houses in every part marvelous for its costliness; for some parts they have constructed of silver and gold, others of ivory and the most showy precious stones or of whatever else men esteem most highly”. Their sculpture and votive offerings were refined and admired.

Greek historian Strabo (64 BC-24 AD) noted that the king of Saba (Sheba) who “presides over the court of justice and other things” was not permitted to leave the palace, for if he did “the people would at once stone him, in consequence of a saying of an oracle”. While her tomb and documents of her time have yet to come to light, and remains of the tenth century BC are still largely unknown to archaeology, the recovery of a small amount of contemporary evidence together with a considerable amount of material from only three or four centuries later enables us to reconstruct a general outline of the Queen of Sheba’s culture[vi] with considerable probability. She would have lived surrounded by the accouterments of an affluent civilization: a thriving trade that brought unparalleled prosperity; an irrigation agriculture that provided ample subsistence; a distinctive architecture in stone that was second only to that of Egypt in the ancient Near East in its execution and variety of ornamentation; a richness in metallurgy and stone carving as well as an abundance of artists and artisans who pursued these vocations; a high degree of literacy among the people, who had a keen appreciation of the importance of a written language and of their beautiful alphabetic script; and an art that is representational in a symbolic archaic manner.

The great civilization of South Arabia was little known to the Arabs of Mohammed’s time, although, any of the Arab tribes of Mohammed’s day still had a tradition that they had lived in South Arabia before taking to the desert when the old civilization declined. Some tribes retained a memory of being settled there before conditions worsened, apparently connected with the Marib dam bursting[vii] and “Certainly there was a sign for Saba in their abode; two gardens on the right and the left; eat of the sustenance of your Lord and give thanks to Him: a good land and a Forgiving Lord! But they turned aside, so We sent upon them a torrent of which the rush could not be withstood, and in place of their two gardens We gave to them two gardens yielding bitter fruit and (growing) tamarisk and a few date-trees.”[viii] The Surah relates many of the episodes already found for example in the Targum Sheni, a further indication of the familiarity Mohammed had with details of Jewish literature outside the Pentateuch. Rather than being portrayed as a Jewish demon, Solomon is portrayed as a great man of God and master of the Djinn to whom Bilquis submits in acknowledgment of al-Llah (Allah).[ix]

A second prominent Arab culture had sprung up from Southern Sinai around 600 BC and from around 400 BC in the land of the Edomites in Jordan. The Nabateans had a close relationship with the Edomites as they each claim a female line of descent from Ishmael (the bastard son of the Jewish Patriarch Abraham), through Bashemath one of the three wives of Esau and her sister Nabaioth respectively. This also gave the Edomites descent from Isaac through Esau. The son of Esau and Bashemath was Ruel the Midianite father in Law of Moses. The Nabateans migrated from Arabia as shepherds and caravan traders who benefited from horse breeding and settled adaptably to form rich irrigated productive land with a prominent trade, centered on the previously unpopulated area round Petra - ‘a rose red city half as old as time’. During the time of Jesus, Nabatea was an independent Kingdom with its influence spreading to Damascus. Herod was involved in hostilities with Aretas IV (the King of Nabatea) because Herodias displaced Aretas’ daughter as Herod’s wife. Although they were annexed by the Romans they continued to be a significant Arab power to the time of Mohammed.

The Greek historian Herodotus (500 BC) says of the Arabs: “They deem no other to be gods save Dionysus and Heavenly Aphrodite … they call Dionysus Orotalt and Aphrodite Alilat”. In Sumeria Allatu, or ‘goddess’ is an epithet of Ereshkigal the chthonic goddess of the underworld. Like El and al-Llah which simply means god, al-Lat ‘goddess’ could be identified with many female deities, and indeed Allat is identified with Aphrodite-Venus. It is said that when Allat became the goddess of the Nabateans, she became al-Uzza the ‘mighty one’ as she evolved from a local deity into a patron of an expanding culture. Al-Uzza is also referred to in connection with the Bedouins at Harran, where it is said Bedouins sacrificed Christian virgins caught in battle to the Goddess.

Nabatean inscriptions in Sinai and other places display widespread references to names including Allah, El and Allat (god and goddess) , with regional references to al-Uzza, Ba’al and Manutu (Manat). Allat is also found in Sinai in South Arabian language. Allah occurs particularly as Garm-’allahi - god dedided (Greek Garamelos) and Aush-allahi - ‘gods covenant’ (Greek Ausallos). We find both Shalm-lahi ‘Allah is peace’ and Shalm-allat, ‘the peace of the goddess’. We also find Amat-allahi ‘she-servant of god’ and Halaf-llahi ‘the successor of Allah’.

A stele is dedicated to Qos-allah ‘Qos is Allah’ or ‘Qos the god’, by Qosmilk (melech - king) is found at Petra. Qos is identifiable with Kaush (Qaush) the God of the older Edomites. The stele is horned and the a seal from Edomite Tawilan near Petra identified with Kaush displays a star and crescent, both consistent with a moon deity. It is conceivable the latter could have resulted from trade with Harran. There is continuing debate about the nature of Qos (qaus - bow) who has been identified both with a hunting bow (hunting god) and a rainbow (weather god) although the crescent above is also a bow. There is no reference to Qos in the Old Testament, but Seir is one of the domains of Yahweh, suggesting a close relationship. His attributes in inscriptions include knowing, striking down, giving and light. Attempts have been made to also explain the existence of this scarab in the light of trade with Harran for which evidence has been found in cuneiform tablets.

The Nabateans had two principal gods in their pantheon, and a whole range of djinns (personal gods and spirits similar to angels). These deities were Dhu Shara, or Duchares and al-Uzza. Duchares means Lord of Shera (Seir), a local mountain and thunder god who was worshipped at a rock high place as a block of stone frequently squared, just as Hermes was the four-square god. Suidas in the tenth century AD described it as a ‘cubic’ black stone of dimension 4x2x1. All the deities male and female were represented as stones or god-blocks. Duchares was a Zeus-like mountain deity of Jebel Shara, with associations with sacred kingship whose rites took a prominent place in the scheme of worship. Notably King Obodas became Zeus Oboda. He is described on a dam inscription as ‘Dushara the god of Gaia’. He was celebrated as a god of immortality celebrated by a Dionysian tragic mask of death, in which its wearer became united with him, thus escaping the limitations of the mortal span. He is surrounded by dolphins as was Dionysus. Al-Uzza was a deity of springs and water, as befits a fertility goddess, and as such she would have been reverenced in Petra with particular devotion”. Manathu (the Manat of Islam) was the patron goddess of Petra, being Fortuna having a similar role to Semitic Gad. As Moon Goddess Tyche she was also Fortune holding a cornucopia of overflowing fruit.

The Nabateans originally were tent-dwelling shepherds renowned, like their fellow tribe the Recchabites, for eschewing houses, planted crops or wine, in their case on penalty of death, a sentiment shared by Mohammed, who looked with contempt upon the Kuryshites and Ansari “for they employ themselves with sowing seeds”. “The divine glory is among the shepherds, vanity and impudence among the agricultural peoples”. However agricultural settlement brought changes and the Greek period (331-300 BC) produced a hybrid culture. Al-Uzza became identified with Atargatis-Aphrodite and Duchares with Dionysus. Friezes, including grape vines are prominent, consistent with Dionysian rites, which historian Ian Browning concedes may have become the “pornographic pop concerts which came to debase the once-glorious cult of Dionysos.” Historian Nelson Glueck is even more forthright: “Rich food in plenty and strong wine without stint helped bring the deities and ther worshippers into fervid relationship. Bar-Hebraeus quoted Psalm 12:8 of Nabatean women “the wicked walk on every side while vileness is exalted among the sons of men”. The scope and nature of the temples supports both males and females being worshippers of the cults.

The Nabateans, like the Harranians, followed a complex system of astral worship, involving the sun and moon and seven major planets, in which in her varying forms, the Goddess represented Venus and the Moon. As Moon Goddess she is identifiable with Tyche, Selene and Atargatis-Artemis of Hierapolis. Selene was worshipped in the new and full moon. She stands prima inter pares at the center of the main deities of the Nabatean pantheon the seven planets and the zodiac, although sometimes displaced by Zeus. The snake twined eagle is shown in at least one relief standing above both the sun and moon at Jebel Druze. However the fertility goddess, who was also in her aspects the dolphin-crowned Sea Goddess (Aphrodite-Mari) of seafarers and the Moon Goddess clearly dominates the sculptures at Khirbet Tannur, the outstanding Nabataean high sanctuary, archetypal of the biblical high places.

There are fewer archaeological remains of the deities of Mecca, and much of the information about them comes from Muslim historians such as al-Kalbi.[x] Pre-Islamic worship of the goddess seems to be primarily associated with Al’Lat, which simply means ‘goddess’. She is a triple goddess, similar to the Greek lunar deity Kore/Demeter/Hecate. Each aspect of this trinity corresponds to a phase of the moon. In the same way Al’Lat has three names known to the initiate: Q’re, the crescent moon or the maiden; Al’Uzza, literally ‘the strong one’ who is the full moon and the mother aspect; then Al’Menat, the waning but wise goddess of fate, prophecy and divination. Islamic tradition continue to recognize these three but labels them ‘daughters of Allah’, or banat al-Llah, firmly associating al-Llah as a pre-Islamic deity paired with the three forms of the Goddess.

According to Edward Rice[xi], as quoted in Campenhausen[xii], Al’Uzza was especially worshipped at the Ka’bah where she was served by seven priestesses. Her worshippers circled the holy stone seven times - once for each of the ancient seven planets - and did so in total nudity. Near the Ka’bah is the well, Zamzam, which cools the throats of the countless millions of pilgrims. Dawood says that Al’Lat, Al’Uzza, and Manat ‘represented the Sun, Venus, and Fortune respectively, but Allat is also described as a representation of Venus[xiii], and she once had a temple in the precinct devoted to the sun-god Shamash in Hatra, Iraq[xiv]. In early Mesopotamian art, the only heavenly bodies regularly shown as a group were the triad of Sun, Moon, and Venus, the three most important celestial lights; and in Sumer and early Babylon the sun and moon were represented mainly by a male divinity, though elsewhere in the Semitic world the moon was usually regarded as feminine.

In Islam, the moon is considered the holiest astronomical object, and moon is the guiding light of all Islamic rituals/festivals. The crescent moon and stars are the symbolic sign in the national flags of many Muslim countries, and it is present over the Mosques, in the Muslim graveyard and so on. The Moon was also male divinity in ancient Semitic religion, and the Arabic word for the moon “qamar’’ is of the masculine gender, on the other hand, the Arabic word for sun “shams” is feminine gender, reflecting the pattern in Sa’aba. But, there is also a strong chance that their form and function of these deities were influenced by the banat, the three daughters of Ba’al, the supreme deity of the Canaanites. They symbolized light, rain, and earth[xv]. In Arabian archaeology a large number of inscriptions on rocks, tablets and walls, have pointed to the worship of a family of four; one male and his three ‘daughters’ or goddesses. Those three goddesses are sometimes engraved together with Allah, represented by a crescent moon above them. But Allah was the ‘Lord of the Kaaba… Lord of Manat, al-Lat, and al-Uzza…and even as ‘Lord of Sirius’. His ‘daughters’ were his associates, helpers and were themselves worshipped, after the manner of ancient Babylonian customs and symbolized by astronomical symbols.

Every family in Mecca also had, at home, an idol which they worshipped. Whenever one of them purposed to set out on a journey, his last act before leaving the house would be to touch the idol in hope of an auspicious journey; and on his return, the first thing he would do was to touch it again in gratitude for a propitious return. The Arabs were passionately fond of worshipping idols. Some of them took unto themselves a temple around which they centered their worship, while others adopted an idol to which they offered their adoration. The person who was unable to build himself a temple or adopt an idol would erect a stone in front of the Sacred House or in front of any other temple which he might prefer, and then circle around it in the same manner in which he would circle around the Sacred House. The Arabs called these stones baetyls (ansab). Whenever these stones resembled a living form they called then’ idols (asnam) and images (awthan). The act of circumambulating them they called circumrotation (dawar).

Whenever a traveler stopped at a place or station in order to rest or spend the night, he would select for himself four stones, pick out the finest among them and adopt it as his god, and use the remaining three as supports for his cooking-pot. On his departure he would leave them behind, and would do the same on his other stops. The Arabs were wont to offer sacrifices before all these idols, baetyls, and stones. Nevertheless they were aware of the excellence and superiority of the Ka’bah, to which they went on pilgrimage and visitation. What they did on their travels was a perpetuation of what they did at the Ka’bah, because of their devotion to it. The sheep which they offered and slaughtered before their (34 idols and baetyls were called sacrifices (ata’ir, sing. atirah); the place on which they slaughtered and offered the sacrifice was called an altar, (‘itr). In this connection Zuhayr ibn-abi-Sulma[94] said: “He moved therefrom and reached a mountain top, Like a high altar sprinkled with the blood of sacrifice.” The banu-Mulayh of the Khuza’ah [tribe] (they are the kindreds of Talhat a-Talahat [or al-Talhat]) were wont to worship the jinn. In reference to them the following verse was revealed: “Truly they worship ye call on besides God, are, like yourselves, his servants.”

According to Islamic Theologians (Mullahs, Maulana, Moulavis, etc.), or Islamic teachings— Allah is the supreme God or creator who, in the manner of a revealed God acting in history, talked or introduced Himself with Prophet Mohammed through an Angel named Gabriel, disclosing the truth that it is the Allah who created everything in the universe, right from the time when Gabriel disclosed the ‘truth’ to Mohammed in the mountain cave of Hira Parvat and gave Mohammed the Koran. They believe that before this truth was revealed—pagan Arabs were in the total darkness (Andhakar Zuug) and they used to worship various puppet goddess and that the pagans were very evil people.

This picture is, however, inaccurate. “Allah” was a pre-existing deity in pagan Arabia[xvi]. In pre-Islamic days, that Muslims call the Days of ignorance, the religious background of the Arabs was pagan, and basically animistic. Through Moon, Sun, Stars, Planets, Animals, wells, trees, stones, caves, springs, and other natural objects man could make contact with the deity. At Mecca, “Allah” was the chief of the gods and the special deity of the Quraish, the prophet’s tribe. Allah had three daughters: Al Uzzah (Venus) most revered of all and pleased with human sacrifice; Manah, the goddess of destiny, and Al Lat, the goddess of vegetable life. The three daughters of Allah were considered very powerful over all things. Therefore, their intercessions on behalf of their worshippers were of great significance.

Moreover, the allegation by some historians and Islamists, such as Montgomery Watt, that the Meccan Quraysh lacked compassion for the poor or were a disintegrating society are without substance. The indications are, rather, that they remained economically buoyant and that social inequality did not lead to the disintegration of pre-Islamic society in favor of the umma. Furthermore the Muslim-inspired notion that the Arabs were originally monotheists of Abraham’s religion, who later degenerated into polytheistic paganism, and hence that the Ka’aba is the ordained house of God, has no historical, or archaeological basis. Rather, the patriarchs worshipped El at stone bethels just as the pre-Islamic Arabians. The most ancient of all these idols was Manah. The Arabs used to name their children ‘Abd-Manah and Zayd-Manah. Manah was erected on the seashore in the vicinity of al-Mushallal in Qudayd, between Medina and Mecca. All the Arabs used to venerate her and sacrifice before her. In particular, the Aws and the Khazraj, as well as the inhabitants of Medina and Mecca and their vicinities, used to venerate Manah, sacrifice before her, and bring unto her their offerings. The Aws and the Khazraj, as well as those Arabs among the people of Yathrib and other places who took to their way of life, were wont to go on pilgrimage and observe the vigil at all the appointed places, but not shave their heads. At the end of the pilgrimage, however, when they were about to return home, they would set out to the place where Manah stood, shave their heads, and stay there a while. They did not consider their pilgrimage completed until they visited Manah. Because of this veneration of Manah by the Awa and the Khazraj, ‘Abd-al-’Uzza ibn-Wadi’ah al-Muzani, or some other Arab, said: “An oath, truthful and just, I swore By Manah, at the sacred place of the Khazraj.”

The Quraysh as well as the rest of the Arabs continued to venerate Manah until Mohammed (the Apostle of God) set out from Medina in the eighth year of the Hijrah, the year in which God accorded him the victory. When he was at a distance of four or five nights from Medina, he dispatched ‘Ali to destroy her. ‘Ali demolished her, took away all her treasures and carried them back to the Prophet. They then adopted Allat as their goddess. Allat stood in al-Ta’if, and was more recent than Manah. She was a cubic rock beside which a certain Jew used to prepare his barley porridge (sawiq). Her custody was in the hands of the banu-’Attab ibn-Malik of the Thaqif, who had built an edifice over her. The Quraysh, as well as all the Arabs, were wont to venerate Allat. They also used to name their children after her, calling them Zayd-Allat and Taym-Allat. She stood in the place of the left-hand side minaret of the present-day mosque of al-Ta’if.

Allat continued to be venerated until the Thaqif embraced Islam, when Mohammed dispatched al-Mughirah ibn-Shu’bab, who destroyed her and burnt her temple to the ground. Aws ibn-Hajar, swearing by Allat, said: “By Allat and al-’Uzza and those who in them believe, And by Allah, verily He is greater than both.” She is, in point of time, more recent than either Allat or Manah. The Arabs named their children after the latter two before they named them after al-’Uzza. Her idol was situated in a valley in Nakhlat al-Sha’miyah called Hurad, alongside al-Ghumayr’ to the right of the road from Mecca to al-’Iraq. Over her Zilim ibn-As’ad built a house called Buss in which the people used to receive oracular communications. The Arabs as well as the Quraysh were wont to name their children ‘Abd-al-’Uzza. Furthermore al-’Uzza was the greatest idol among the Quraysh. They used to journey to her, offer gifts unto her, and seek her favors through sacrifice.

“Luhayy put Al-Uzza in a Nakhla Taghut. When they had finished their Ka’ba Hajj they circle around Al-Uzza. The Quraysh worshipped her. Manat was worshipped by the Aus and Khazraj in Yathrib.”[xvii] Those who prayed to Al-Uzza and Manat, “shaved their heads and completed all of the rites associated with the Hajj.” “We were in the Prophet’s company in the middle of the lunar month. He looked at the moon and said, ‘You will see your Lord as you see this moon.’”[xviii] We have been told that the Apostle of God once mentioned al-Uzza saying, “I have offered a white sheep to al-’Uzza, while I was a follower of the religion of my people.” And, thereafter, Abu-al-Mundhir said: The Quraysh as well as the other Arabs who inhabited Mecca did not offer to any of the idols anything similar to their veneration of al-’Uzza. The next in order of veneration was Allat and then Manah. The Thaqif, on the other hand, were wont to offer Manah the exclusive honor [of visitation and sacrifice], in the same way the Quraysh offered it to al-’Uzza, while the Aws and the Khazraj favored Manah therewith. All of them, though, venerated al-’Uzza. They did not, however, hold the same regard, or anything approaching it, for the five idols which were introduced by ‘Amr ibn-Luhayy. These are the five idols mentioned in the Koran, “Forsake not Wadd nor Suwa’, nor Yaghuth and Ya’us and Nasr.”

Hubal is an Aramaic word, meaning vapour or spirit. Some opinions favor an association of Hubal with Canaanite god Ba’al. Others liken it to Cybele. Bearing in mind that Q’re was also an Arabian Goddess, the influence of Greece and Anatolia through Nabatea is a natural conclusion. The Quraysh had also several idols in and around the Ka’bah. The greatest of these was Hubal. The first to set it up [for worship] was Khuzaymah ibn-Mudrikah ibn-al-Ya’s’ ibn-Mudar. Consequently it used to be called Khuzaymah’s Hubal. It stood inside the Ka’bah. In front of it were seven divination arrows (sing. qidh, pl. qidah or aqduh). On one of these arrows was written “pure” (sarih), and on another “consociated alien” (mulsag). Whenever the lineage of a new-born was doubted, they would offer a sacrifice to it [Hubal] and then shuffle the arrows and throw them. If the arrows showed the word “pure,” the child would be declared legitimate and the tribe would accept him. If, however, the arrows showed the words “consociated alien,” the child would be declared illegitimate and the tribe would reject him. The third arrow was for divination concerning the dead, while the fourth was for divination concerning marriage. The purpose of the three remaining arrows has not been explained. Whenever they disagreed concerning something, or purposed to embark upon a journey, or undertake some project, they would proceed to it [Hubal] and shuffle the divination arrows before it. Whatever result they obtained they would follow and do accordingly.

Another tradition[xix] says that the idol Hubal was called Hubal Khuzaima. It was an idol of Banu Kinana. Beside it were laid the ritual arrows of divination. On both sides of it were placed the two gold images of deers. Nearby were standing the imageries of the Prophets Abraham and Ishmael with seven divining arrows in their hands and also the idol of Virgin Mary with the baby Jesus in her affectionate embrace. Year in and year out people, were surging there to worship. Both men and women stepping out of their clothing and, rubbing shoulders with each other made seven rounds of the Ka’ba, fell prostrate before the idols and invoked their blessings and benedictions. After the episode of Abraha, the Quraish priding themselves as the people of the sanctuary imposed many a restriction on others who came to Mecca from outside for worship. The outsiders were neither allowed to bring their food inside the sacred territory nor permitted to go round the Ka’ba wearing their own clothing. The Quraish supplied them clothing but if they had none, they (the outsiders) were asked to go round the Ka’ba naked. The men circle around the Ka’ba completely naked while women were wearing a piece of cloth in front and back and having one hand in front and the other behind. Not satisfied with this numerality of idols and plurality of gods each and every family had established separately an idol in its home as its private deity. Some of them were like blooming girls, some of them were like ferocious lions and some of them were like rapacious vultures and so on. They worshipped them by whistling through their fingers and clapping their hands--the origin of the modern practice in Islam.

When they went out on a journey the last thing they did was rub against their family deity and the same immediately when they returned. They carried with them along with the articles of travel four crude stones, three to form oven and the one to worship. If they were unable to carry four they would take one of the stones used for oven and worship it with great piety and veneration. Men in every walk of life had their idols installed in the Ka’ba. The corn merchants had their idol made of flour. If there was any famine they, greatly irked by its inability to help them in their hour of stress, would break it to pieces and swallow it up. When the pilgrims did not find out any wood to feed their oven in rainy days they would break the wooden idols installed there and use them as, firewood instead to bake their bread and cook their curry.

Another divinatory tradition among the Arabs was the casting of Azlam (i.e. featherless arrows which were of three kinds: one showing ‘yes’, another ‘no’ and a third was blank) which they used to do in case of serious matters like travel, marriage and the like. If the lot showed ‘yes’, they would do, if ‘no’, they would delay for the next year. Other kinds of Azlam were cast for water, blood-money or showed ‘from you’, ‘not from you’, or ‘Mulsaq’ (consociated). In cases of doubt in filiation they would resort to the idol of Hubal, with a hundred-camel gift, for the arrow caster. Only the arrows would then decide the sort of relationship. If the arrow showed (from you), then it was decided that the child belonged to the tribe; if it showed (from others), he would then be regarded as an ally, but if (consociated) appeared, the person would retain his position but with no lineage or alliance contract.[xx] This was very much like gambling and arrow-shafting whereby they used to divide the meat of the camels they slaughtered according to this tradition.

Moreover, they used to have a deep conviction in the tidings of soothsayers, diviners and astrologers. A soothsayer used to traffic in the business of foretelling future events and claim knowledge of private secrets and having jinn subordinates who would communicate the news to him. Some soothsayers claimed that they could uncover the unknown by means of a granted power, while other diviners boasted they could divulge the secrets through a cause-and-effect-inductive process that would lead to detecting a stolen commodity, location of a theft, a stray animal, and the like. The astrologer belonged to a third category who used to observe the stars and calculate their movements and orbits whereby he would foretell the future. Lending credence to this news constituted a clue to their conviction that attached special significance to the movements of particular stars with regard to rainfall.

The belief in signs, as betokening future events, was, of course common among the Arabs. Some days and months and particular animals were regarded as ominous. They also believed that the soul of a murdered person would fly in the wilderness and would never be at rest until revenge was taken. Superstition was rampant. Should a deer or bird, when released, turn right then what they embarked on would be regarded auspicious, otherwise they would get pessimistic and withhold from pursuing it. People of the pre-Islamic period practiced devotion to the Holy Sanctuary, circumambulation, observance of pilgrimage, the vigil on ‘Arafah and offering sacrifices. Mulsim authors claim the Quraysh would refrain from going to ‘Arafah with the crowd, instead they would stop short at Muzdalifah. They would not eat dried yogurt or cooked fat, nor would they enter a tent made of camel hair or seek shade unless in a house of adobe bricks, so long as they were committed to the intention of pilgrimage. They also, out of a deeply-rooted misconception, denied pilgrims, other than Meccans, access to the food they had brought when they wanted to make pilgrimage or lesser pilgrimage.

They ordered pilgrims coming from outside Mecca to circle around Al-Ka’bah in Quraysh uniform clothes, but if they could not afford them, men were to do so in a state of nudity, and women with only some piece of cloth to hide their groins. They claimed that Allah says, “O Children of Adam! Take your adornment (by wearing your clean clothes), while praying [and going round (the Tawaf of) the Ka’bah]. If men or women were generous enough to go round Al-Ka’bah in their clothes, they had to discard them after circumambulation for good. It was before [Hubal] that ‘Abd-al-Muttalib shuffled the divination arrows [in order to find out which of his ten children he should sacrifice in fulfillment of a vow he had sworn], and the arrows pointed to his son ‘Abdullah, the father of the Prophet. Mohammed’s father’s name was “Abdullah”. Had there been no “Allah” in pre-Islamic Arab, there could be no Abdullah or slave of Allah in Arabia. When ‘Abd al-Mutallib (Mohammed’s grandfather) is described as having prayed to Allah while consulting Hubal’s arrow, it is simply that the sources balk at depicting the Prophet’s grandfather as a genuine pagan, not that Allah and Hubal were alternative names of the same god.[xxi]

Islam and the Jewish Patriarch Abraham

To the Muslim, the religion and history of Abraham belongs to the mythological period before Moses. All the references to Abraham’s God are in the form of El, such as El Shaddai, God of the Mountain sometimes also referred to as the Almighty in the heavens suggesting an astral deity, and the rituals such as dividing the animal sacrifice are of an older kind, consistent with El and the older Semitic deities rather than revealed monotheism. There is thus no valid substance to the claim that the monotheism of Abraham preceded the polytheistic deities of pre-Islamic Arab society or that the Ka’aba was founded by Abraham as the house of the one God. Abraham is said in the Christian Bible to have made a journey from Ur of the Chaldees to Harran. These were the Southern and Northern centers of worship of the ancient Moon God, Nannar or Sin. When Sir Leonard Woolley[xxii] excavated the Royal Tombs at Ur, he was surprised to find a ‘ram in a thicket’ echoing Abraham’s sacrificial offer of Isaac and the ‘scapegoat’. Many of Abraham’s relatives and ancestors lived in the vicinity of Harran. Several key names in Abraham’s family, Terah (compare Yerah Moon God of Canaan), Laban, Sarah and Milcah are all derived from worship of the Moon Deity.[xxiii] The deification of Ab-ram in the earliest documents is a synonym for Ab-Sin.

Benjaminites were nomads on the outskirts of Mari around 1760 BC who had specific associations with Harran[xxiv]. The names Abi-ram (Abraham) Yasmah-El (Ishmael) Yaqob-El (Jacob), a name also shared by a Hyksos chief and El-Laban (Laban) all appear at Mari. The root milk denoting melech (king) or in its sacrificial form, the demon Moloch, is also found. Another word at Mari in this time which will come to have significance in Islam is umma or “mother unit” of the nomadic tribes.[xxv] Jacob’s fourfold blessing is also of ‘the deep’ and ‘the breasts and womb’, hinting at the ancient ‘mother’ as well as the ‘father’ god and El Shaddai of the mountains and heavens: Even by the God of thy father, who shall help thee; and by the Almighty, who shall bless thee with blessings of heaven above, blessings of the deep that lieth under, blessings of the breasts, and of the womb.[xxvi]

Associated with this cultural complex is an older form of marriage called the Beena marriage, associated with the matriarchs at the founding of Old Testament myth. The episodes concerning Laban in Genesis, hint at a matrilineal society in which partners are subject to the wife’s family and are expected to do service in dwelling with them for years at a time. The seven years Jacob spent with Laban for each wife indicates the line of Laban was matrilocal and matrilineal in a way which gave power to the brothers of the mother. Moving to the family of the wife is consistent with the injunction in Genesis to “leave your father and mother and cleave unto your wife” and with Jewish marriage practice to go into the wife’s tent. In such a society, child-support is achieved at least partly by immediate relatives of the mother, in which uncles figure prominently thus compensating for their lack of their own paternity uncertainty by a commensurate investment in their sisters’ children with whom they share a significant genetic bond.

Arameans are any people belonging to a confederacy of tribes that migrated from the Arabian Peninsula to the Fertile Crescent in 2000 BC. The Encyclopedia Britannica notes that among them were the biblical matriarchs Leah and Rachel, wives of Jacob. They formed principalities around and including Damascus. Aramaic language and culture spread through international trade, reaching a cultural peak during the 9th–8th centuries BC. Aramaic became the universal language of commerce, culture, and government throughout the fertile crescent and remained so to the time of Yeshua (Joshua) and in some places to the 7th century AD. Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic and Akkadian all have a common origin in Afro-Asiatic. Aramaic script emerged in turn from Phoenician and old Canaanite phonetic. The family tree of the tribes of Israel illustrates a careful attempt to resolve dissonance between matrilineal and patrilineal paradigms, involving cousin or even half-sister marriage. Names like Terah and Laban are associated with the moon god, who presided at both Ur and Harran, the two towns spanning Abraham’s migration (Briffault). Abraham takes both a wife Sarah who gives birth to Isaac, and a slave concubine, Hagar who is sent away with Ishmael. Jacob is also polygymous with two wives and a slave concubine of each given to them by Laban with whom he also sires children in their mistresses stead.

Feminist Nancy Jay, in her book Throughout Your Generations Forever[xxvii], draws attention to the schism between such societies probably originating in Canaanite planter cultures and the patriarchal traditions of shepherding tribes illustrated in Jacob’s departure and many successive biblical invocations against the Queen of Heaven and her ways. The division between these two cultures cuts directly through the Gordian knot of paternity uncertainty discussed earlier. It was Rebecca who ordered Jacob to trick Isaac with a fleece, to steal hairy Esau’s blessing as firstborn: “Upon me be thy curse, my son: only obey my voice, and go fetch me them.” She did so because Esau had ‘married out’, taking two Hittite wives, Judith and Bashemath. It is Rebecca who sends Jacob to Laban: “Now therefore, my son, obey my voice; arise, flee thou to Laban my brother to Haran.” The moment he arrives, a cousin marriage is arranged with Rachel. Having served seven years with the matrilineal kin for the love of Rachel, Laban tricks Jacob into also marrying Leah, because the first-born daughter should proceed the younger in marriage, causing him to tarry another ‘week’ of seven years. When Jacob escapes Laban’s clutches as mother’s brother, to return as he promised to his father’s line, it is Rachel who hides under her menstrual skirts Laban’s stolen teraphim, suggested to be tokens of land and lineage - “Is there yet any portion or inheritance for us in our father’s house?”

Pre-Islam documents that possession of the ‘house gods’ are considered title to estate[xxviii]. This mutual deceit indicates a transfer from matriliny to patriliny in the name of El: And thy seed shall be as the dust of the earth, and thou shalt spread abroad to the west, and to the east, and to the north, and to the south: and in thee and in thy seed shall all the families of the earth be blessed.[xxix] And he brought him forth abroad, and said, Look now toward heaven, and tell the stars, if thou be able to number them: and he said unto him, So shall thy seed be.[xxx] Choosing circumcision (the only thing to which a woman is not capable) to forever, after, ban the argument of matrilyny as the lawful covenant, El/Jehovah/Jaweh establishes the divine, patriarchal plan through Abraham.

Jacob had made his pact with El at Bethel when he erected a standing stone he had slept over, just as the Arabians used three stones for a pot stand and the fourth for God, both rituals uniting Earth and Heaven. Thus too the Ka’aba, as God’s house, stands as a baetyl in the Arabic Bedouin tradition. Moreover, the name Luz which means a ‘place of refuge’ became the central sanctuary for the amphictiony of the twelve tribes of Israel[xxxi]. Notice also that Jacob’s belief in this God is conditional on the deities performance in real life, just as the polytheists of Arabia worshipped the deities for the karmic efficacy: “And Jacob rose up early in the morning, and took the stone that he had put for his pillows, and set it up for a pillar, and poured oil upon the top of it. And he called the name of that place Bethel: but the name of that city was called Luz at the first. And Jacob vowed a vow, saying, If God will be with me, and will keep me in this way that I go, and will give me bread to eat, and raiment to put on, so that I come again to my father’s house in peace; then shall the Lord be my God: And this stone, which I have set for a pillar, shall be God’s house: and of all that thou shalt give me I will surely give the tenth unto thee.”[xxxii]

Analysis of the transition between matrilineal and patrilineal lines of descent, in which sacrifice, or forgone sacrifice, and the paternal blessing were a way of recognizing the more ephemeral male line of descent through the father to the blessed son. The theme of the ‘barren’ woman in Sarah and Rachel is likewise significant. Endogamy (marriage to a woman of the same patrilineage) insures the offspring’s’ patrilineage membership, even if it is figured through the mother. Close agnatic endogamy (marriage within the patriline) is extremely rare, except in Semitic traditions. In a way reminiscent of the Patriarchs, throughout the Arab world, families have preferred men to marry their father’s brother’s daughters. The descent line of the Patriarchs continued only through endogamy: Isaac and Jacob (but not Ishmael) married endogamously in cousin marriages. Joseph married exogamously but his sons were adopted by Jacob, correcting this, and other, irregularities of their descent”.

Centrally, Abraham’s covenant with God is sexually reproductive: And I will make my covenant between me and thee, and will multiply thee exceeding...And I will make thee exceeding fruitful, and I will make nations of thee, and kings shall come out of thee...It involves circumcision of the penis as a sacrificial token of male fertility: This is my covenant, which ye shall keep, between me and you and thy seed after thee; Every man child among you shall be circumcised. And ye shall circumcise the flesh of your foreskin; and it shall be a token of the covenant betwixt me and you. Testifying was likewise, for Abraham, swearing by the testis (testis, testicle, witness) and hence the entire Old and New Testaments: “And Abraham said unto his eldest servant of his house...Put, I pray thee, thy hand under my thigh: And I will make thee swear by the Lord, the God of heaven, and the God of the earth, that thou shalt not take a wife unto my son of the daughters of the Canaanites, among whom I dwell: But thou shalt go unto my country, and to my kindred, and take a wife unto my son Isaac.”[xxxiii]

The importance of this cultural background? Ishmael (not Isaac) was the seed from Abraham that would be Allah’s chosen people and, therefore, Arab (not Jew) are the favorites of the one, true God. 

El and the Deities of Canaan

Central to the Muslim, Pre-Islamic, Semitic notion of deity is El, the old fatherly creator god and his consort, Athirat or Ashteroth. Both were primordial beings, they had been there always. El, whose name simply meant ‘god’ was the creator and procreator, overseer of conception, who sired the gods, thus being also called ‘Bull El’ in continuity with the ancient bull god of fertility. Ashteroth and El thus form a creation hieros-gamos of male and female, representing the bull and the earth goddess we see emerging from the ancient continuum at Catal Huyuk. El is supposed to have gone out to sea and asked two Goddesses, one presumably being Athirat and the other possibly Ashteroth to choose between being his spouses and being his daughters. They chose the former. Their offspring are Shaher and Shalem, the morning and evening stars, from which Lucifer, the light-bearer, takes his name.

Muslims claim that the archetypes of Yahweh/Jehovah have their origin in El. He is an original creator god - the ‘Creator of Created things’, which definitely includes fertility, but may also include the creation of Heaven and Earth as with the Mesopotamian Marduk and Tiamat, whose own mythology may be partly derived from the older Canaanite myths. El was the proberbial old man who is both a father and judge. He was a kingly and kindly figure, benevolent but not uninvolved. He was the god of decrees and the father of the reigning king. “It was his responsibility to insure that equilibrium was preserved among all the conflicting and competing powers within it.” He thus was respected by the other Gods - “Your decree El is wise, your wisdom is everlasting.” “It was not for nothing that El was called ‘the kindly and compassionate’ - a design strangely reminiscent of ‘Allah the Merciful, the Compassionate’ in Islam. Not that El was incapable of anger: transgressions in the community … could provoke him - and then he would prompt neighboring powers to invade and conquer. To avert such calamities the king had to perform rites of expiation and offer sacrifices”.

Ashteroth (Asherah)[xxxiv], the Semitic name of the Great Goddess, whose origin differs from Astarte, was “in wisdom the Mistress of the Gods”, called by the Sumerians Ashnan “the strength of all things”, a “kindly and beautiful maiden.” The Canaanites called her “She who gives birth to the Gods” and as the “Lady who traverses the Sea” she is Goddess of both the Sea and Moon. In the Old Testament she is identified with her sacred groves. Although Canaanite mythology varies from city to city, the discovery of extensive records at Ras Shamra of the city of Ugarit, gives us a uniquely detailed view of Canaanite Gods and Goddesses, dating from the author Elimelek around 1370 BC. Kings traditionally ruled as intermediaries of the Gods in maintaining the fertility of the land.

Despite siring the Gods and Goddesses, El and Ashteroth, no longer remain the only key players in the cosmic drama. As with Sumerian and many other mythologies a cosmic struggle for supremacy arises in which mortal combat occurs. This weaves themes both of maintaining the cosmic order against the turbulent waters of chaos and the barren season of death and of combat associated with new deities arising from social and political change. In the Canaanite myth, a new and possibly Akkadian outsider, whose name is Ba’al Haddad or Lord enters the situation in hated competition with Ashteroth and her children by El. He is a young, warlike god of wind and thunderstorms and thus fertility itself. Unlike El, he is not judicious, frequently figuring in situations from which he must be saved. In this respect he displays a significant parallel to Dumuzi (Tammuz) among the Mesopotamians, which will prove to be of significance. He also has the hideous attribute of devouring his own children, consistent with infanticide practices of several Semitic patron gods.[xxxv]

Initially Ba’al and Ashteroth are members of El’s court. Ba’al attacks El by surprise and castrates him, assuming the power of his fertility. In effect, Ba’al becomes the central intermediary of paternal cosmic order...”it is Ba’al’s responsibility to insure El’s benevolent intention is realized”, but he does not replace the primal creative power of El. El, who loves all the Gods, now calls on his children as chaos gods to avenge his displacement. His son Yamm, Lord of the Sea and the mythical ocean of chaos lying beyond the ordered world, terrorizes the gods into giving up Ba’al. But Ba’al refuses and conquers Yamm, Ba’al now emerging as the God who overcomes the waters of chaos.

Mot, the next offspring, who is Lord of the Underworld and the barren season then defeats Ba’al, enraging Ba’al’s consort Ashteroth (Ashteroth), who ironically in the Ugarit form of the myth enters the fray as a Death Goddess upholding the paternal order. When Mot refuses to revive Ba’al, Ashteroth kills and dismembers him, scattering his remains over the land. Ba’al, now revived, undertakes a full-scale war against all the other gods, who are now referred to as the “Sons of Ashteroth,” and is victorious. The death of Mot is conceived in a seven year cycle as representing the end of seven years of drought and famine.

In her role of Goddess of War and Death, Ashteroth’s lust for blood is unbounded: “Ashteroth kills the people living in valleys, in cities and on the seashore and in the land of sunrise, until the cut off heads of soldiers were reaching to her belt and she was wading up to her waist in blood. Violently she smites and gloats, Ashteroth cuts them down and gazes; her liver exalts in mirth … for she plunges her knees in the blood of soldiers, her loins in the gore of warriors, till she has had her fill of slaughtering in the house, of cleaving among the tables.” After which, she, the Progenetress of Nations washed her hands of the blood of the slain, in dew and rain supplied by her brother Ba’al.” “Ashteroth was fertilized by the blood of men, rather than semen, because her worship dated all the way back to the Neolithic, when fatherhood was unknown and blood was considered the only substance which could transmit life. Hecatombs of 100 men seem to have been sacrificed to Ashteroth when her image was reddened with rouge and henna for the occasion. Like the Lady of the Serpent Skirt, Ashteroth hung the shorn penises of her victims on her goatskin apron or aegis.” “Ashteroth’s capacity to curse and kill made even the Heavenly Father afraid of her. When El seemed reluctant to do her bidding, she threatened to smash his head and cover his gray hair and beard with gore. He hastily gave her everything she asked, saying ‘Whoever hinders thee will be crushed’”.

In the mythical cycle, “Mot too is [now] revived and once again challenges Ba’al to single combat. In the midst of the fighting, however, the sun-goddess, Spsi (Shapash), intervenes, advising Mot that no further combat is needed because El is now on the side of Ba’al. El, always patriarchal and judicious, has discerned that Ba’al in his defeat and resurrection has manifested a new form of order; as a patriarchal deity El must uphold this new order. The decree is made that Ba’al will rule during the seasons of fertility and Mot during the seasons of sterility and drought.” There are many implications of this mythical cycle that underlie the events of the Bible and overshadow and cast the die for the Christian heritage:[xxxvi] 

v     Firstly: “the myth forms a watershed for the understanding of myth and history throughout the Near East. “Egyptian, Hittite, Hurrian, and Ugaritic myths are present in this cycle. Moreover, Hesiod clearly made use of some of these mythological elements in his Theogony; Ba’al, Yamm, and Mot are directly related to Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades.”

v     Secondly: “although the Old Testament contains a polemic against Ba’al, Ashteroth, and Astarte, some of the elements and practices of the Hebrews are best understood within the context of Canaanite mythology.”

v     Thirdly: Ashteroth as the death twin of Mari Lady of Birth, and the destroyer of the dying and reviving Mot plays a central, if concealed role in the crucifixion psychodrama.

Ashteroth annually cast her death-curse anathema on the Canaanite god, fulfilling Mot’s slaying of Ba’al and his destruction in turn by her. Mot stood for the barren season that slew its own fertile twin Aleyin, the son of Ba’al. “In typical sacred-king style Mot-Aleyin was the son of the virgin Ashteroth and also the bridegroom of his own mother. Like Jesus the Lamb of God, Aleyin said ‘I am the lamb which is made ready with pure wheat to be sacrificed in expiation.’”. “After Aleyin’s death, Ashteroth resurrects him and sacrifices Mot, telling him he has been forsaken by his heavenly father El.” A bastardization of the crucifixion of Christ when Jesus cried “Eloi Eloi lama sabaschthani’ - El El why hast thou forsaken me?...and some said ‘Behold he calleth for Elias’ and one ran and filled a sponge with vinegar and put it on a reed and gave it to him to drink saying, ‘Let alone; let us see whether Elias will come to take him down’. And Jesus cried with a loud voice and gave up the ghost.”[xxxvii]

This “sacred” drama included a moment when Ashteroth broke Mot’s reed scepter, to signify his castration, again imitating a detail of the Christian Gospels. Of course, the god-killing Ashteroth was rightly diabolized in patriarchal legends. Abyssinian Christians called her Aynat “the evil eye of earth”. They said she was an old witch destroyed by Jesus, who commanded that she must be burned and her ashes scattered on the wind. St. Paul’s excommunication curse “If any man love not the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be Anathema Maran-atha derives from the more ancient curse of Ashteroth: Ana-tithenai: to set up, dedicate [a curse], maranatha: Our Lord [bridegroom], come.”

Another pertinent deity, because of his relationship to Sin, or Nannar, the God of Abraham is Yarikh the moon god. ‘The illuminator of myriads (of stars)’, ‘lamp of heaven’, possibly also the crescent moon and ‘lord of the sycle’ and thereby the father of the Kotharat. He is patron of the city Qart-Abilim. Like Sin, he is a dedicated courtier. After sunset he embraces Nikkal-and-Ib (Ningal) and becomes determined to marry her. He refuses the daughters of Ba’al and presents a lavish brideprice to Nikkal-and-Ib’s family and the two are wed. Ba’al-Hadad’s creatures devour his handmaidens, so he sends them to El. El tells them to go into the wilderness and there birth horned buffalo, which will distract Ba’al-Hadad. Nikkal-and-Ib ‘great lady and clear/bright/fruit’ or ‘Great goddess of fruit’. She is possibly the daughter of Dagon of Tuttul, or else of Khirkhib. She is romanced by Yarikh and marries him after Yarikh arranges a brideprice with Khirkhib and pays it to her parents.

Kotharat (was thought to be Kathirat) ‘skillful’. They are a group of goddesses associated with conception and childbirth. ‘…The swallow-like daughters of the crescent moon.’ They are also associated with the new moon. They attend Daniel for seven days to aid in the conception of Aqhat and receive his sacrifice. 

Christian influences on Muslim Theology

  From the 4th century AD, Catholic Bishops made notable conversions of the Kings of Himyar, Aksum and of Ethiopia. Narjan, an ancient pagan pilgrimage spot in a fertile valley on the trade route became a Christian stronghold, Medina became a center of Jewish influence. And, ultimately, both Christianity and Judaism entered into competition in Arabia, encouraged by the Persians. In 522, King Dhu Nawas Yusaf “Lord of Curls” became the last elected Himyar king, descendent of a Jewish hero, who made war on the Christians. He offered the citizens of Naryan the choice of Jewry or death. When they refused he burned them all in a great trench. Afterwards Narjan was named “the trench”. In response the Ethiopians overcame them and Abraham made San’a a Christian pilgrimage point which rivaled Mecca. This led to an expeditionary force of Christians to try to destroy the Ka’aba. In turn Persia invaded and for a short time the country became a Persian satrapy. This confused situation laid the seeds for the emergence of Islam.

Mohammed left Mecca under a cloud, because the Meccans remained faithful to al-Uzza and their iconic deities and rejected his exclusive monotheism which branded their deities false icons, but his brand of Abrahamic monotheism struck a stronger chord in Medina and, although he was derided by the Jews there for his religion, and turned from bowing to Jerusalem to Mecca as the nexus of God’s dwelling (even in spite of the genocide of the Jewish men after the siege of Medina), it was the greater attraction of monotheism in the environment of Medina which made the growth of Islam possible. Historian Patricia Crone (1987) has pointed out that Mohammed, in combining the monotheism which had already found a natural ground swell in Medina with a strong strategic emphasis on tribal law guaranteed the sweeping popularity of the religion. This however means that large sections of the Koran and Sharia are simply recitations of tribal law of the 6th-9th century AD and not the revealed word of Allah.

Moreover recent finds of old Koranic writings in Yemen[xxxviii] with overlaid redactions confirm that like the Bible, the Koran is a collection of anecdotal sayings later compiled into a canonical version and not a text revealed in one clear rendition by God. Gerd Puin who has researched these, comments: “My idea is that the Koran is a kind of cocktail of texts that were not all understood even at the time of Mohammed. Many of them may even be a hundred years older than Islam itself. Even within the Islamic traditions there is a huge body of contradictory information, including a significant Christian substrate; one can derive a whole Islamic anti-history from them if one wants. The Koran claims for itself that it is ‘mubeen,’ or clear, but if you look at it, you will notice that every fifth sentence or so simply doesn’t make sense. Many Muslims will tell you otherwise, of course, but the fact is that a fifth of the Koranic text is just incomprehensible. This is what has caused the traditional anxiety regarding translation. If the Koran is not comprehensible, if it can’t even be understood in Arabic, then it’s not translatable into any language. That is why Muslims are afraid. Since the Koran claims repeatedly to be clear but is not—there is an obvious and serious contradiction. Something else must be going on.”

Other Islamic commentaries on this phase of Arab history document that the migration of the Jews from Palestine to Arabia passed through two phases: first, as a result of the pressure to which they were exposed, the destruction of the their temple, and taking most of them as captives to Babylon, at the hand of the King Bukhtanassar. In the year 587 BC, some Jews left Palestine for Hijaz and settled in the northern areas whereof. The second phase started with the Roman occupation of Palestine in 70 A.D. This resulted in a tidal wave of Jewish migration into Hijaz, and Yathrib, Khaibar and Taima’, in particular. Here, they made proselytes of several tribes, built forts and castles, and lived in villages. Judaism managed to play an important role in the pre-Islam political life. When Islam dawned on that land, there had already been several famous Jewish tribes — Khabeer, Al-Mustaliq, An-Nadeer, Quraizah and Qainuqa’. In some versions, the Jewish tribes counted as many as twenty.

Judaism was introduced into Yemen by someone called As’ad Abi Karb. He had gone to fight in Yathrib and there he embraced Judaism and then went back taking with him two rabbis from Bani Quraizah to instruct the people of Yemen in this new religion. Judaism found a fertile soil there to propagate and gain adherents. After his death, his son Yusuf Dhu Nawas rose to power, attacked the Christian community in Najran and ordered them to embrace Judaism. When they refused, he ordered that a pit of fire be dug and all the Christians indiscriminately be dropped to burn therein. Estimates say that between 20-40 thousand Christians were killed in that human massacre.

Christianity had first made its appearance in Arabia following the entry of the Abyssinian (Ethiopian) and Roman colonists into that country. The Abyssinian (Ethiopian) colonization forces in league with Christian missions entered Yemen as a retaliatory reaction for the iniquities of Dhu Nawas, and started vehemently to propagate their faith ardently. They even built a church and called it Yemeni Al-Ka’bah with the aim of directing the Arab pilgrimage caravans towards Yemen, and then made an attempt to demolish the Sacred House in Mecca. Allah, the Almighty, however did punish them and made an example of them – here and hereafter.[xxxix] 

Biography of Mohammed[xl]

MOHAMMED (Arab. “the Praised”), the name taken at a later period by the founder of Islam. He was originally called Halabi. He was born about the year 570, A.D., at Mecca, and was the son of Abdallah, of the family of Hashini; and of Amina, of the family of Zuhra, both of the powerful tribe of Koreish, but of a side branch only, and therefore of little or no importance. His father, a poor merchant, died either before or shortly after Mohammed’s birth. When six years old he also lost his mother. His grandfather, Abd-Al-Mutallib, adopted the boy; and when, two years later, he too died, Mohammed’s uncle, Abu Talib, though poor himself, took him into his house, and remained his best friend and protector throughout his whole life. The accounts which have survived of the time of his youth are of too legendary a nature to deserve credit; certain, however, it seems to be, that he at first gained a scanty livelihood by tending the flocks of the Meccans, and that he once or twice accompanied his uncle on his journeys to Southern Arabia and Syria.

In his 25th year, Mohammed entered the service of a rich widow named Khadija (Chadjda), likewise descended from the Koreish, and accompanied her caravans to the fairs. Up to that time, his circumstances were poor. Suddenly his fortune changed. The wealthy, but much older, and twice widowed, Khadija offered him her hand which he accepted. Mohammed continued his merchant trade at Mecca, but without much energy, spending most of his time in solitary contemplation. He was 40 years of age when he is said to have received the first divine communication in the solitude of the mountain Hira, near Mecca. He said that Gabriel appeared to him, and in the name of God commanded him to “read” - that is, to preach the true religion, and to spread it abroad by committing it to writing. The writings are contained in the “Koran.” Waraka, one of his wife’s relatives, who had embraced Judaism, spoke to him of the Jewish doctrine, and told him the story of the patriarchs of Israel.

The fundamental doctrine of the Koran is contained in the two articles of belief: “There is no God but Allah; and Mohammed is his prophet.” The Islamic doctrine of God’s nature and attributes coincides with the Christian, insofar as he is by both taught to be the Creator of all things in heaven and earth, who rules and preserves all things, without beginning, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, and full of mercy. But it differs in that Jesus is only a prophet and apostle, although his birth is said to be due to a miraculous, divine operation.

Mohammed’s first revelation he communicated to no one it would appear, except to Khadija, his daughters, his stepson Ali, his favorite slave Zaid, and to his friend, the prudent and honest Abu Beker. In the fourth year of his mission, however, he made forty proselytes, chiefly slaves and people from the lower ranks; and now some verses were revealed to him, commanding him to come forward publicly as a preacher, and to defy the scorn of the unbelievers. The Meccans did not object to his doings; they considered him a common poet or soothsayer, who, moreover, was not in his right senses, or simply a liar. Gradually, however, as the number of his converts increased, they began to pay more and more attention to his proceedings; and finally, fearing mostly for the sacredness of Mecca, which the new doctrine might abolish, thus depriving them of their chief glory, and the ample revenues of the pilgrimages, they rose in fierce opposition against the new prophet and his adherents who dared “to call their ancient gods idols, and their ancestors fools.”

At last it became necessary that he should be put beyond the reach of his persecutors, and Abu Talib hid him in a fortified castle of his own in the country. Mohammed now conceived the plan to seek refuge in the friendly city of Medina, and about 622 AD (10, 13, or 15 years, according to the different traditions, after his first assuming the sacred office) he fled thither, about one hundred families of his faithful having preceded him some time before, accompanied by Abu Bekr, and reached, not without danger, the town, called the “City of the Prophet” by way of eminence; and from this flight or rather from the next month of the Arabic year, dates the Muslim Era (Hegira).

Now everything was changed to the advantage of the prophet and his religion; and if formerly the incidents of his life are shrouded in comparative obscurity, they are from this date, known often to their most insignificant details. Formerly a despised “madman or impostor,” he now assumed at once the position of highest judge, law-giver, and ruler of the city and two most powerful tribes. The most important act in the first year of the Hegira, was his permission to go to war with the enemies of Islam in the name of God - a kind of manifesto chiefly directed against the Meccans. A battle, the first, between 314 Muslims and about 600 Meccans, was fought at Badr, in the second year of the Hegira; the former gained the victory and made many prisoners. A large number of adventurers now flocked to Mohammed’s colors, and his power increased so rapidly that in the sixth year of the Hegira he was able to proclaim a public pilgrimage to Mecca. His missionaries at this time began to carry his doctrines abroad, to Chosroes, to Heraclius, to the King of Abyssinia, the Viceroy of Egypt, and the chiefs of several Arabic provinces. Some received the new gospel; but Chosru Parvis, the King of Persia, and Amru, the Ghassanide, rejected his proposals with scorn, and the latter had the messenger executed. This was the cause of the first war between the Christians and the Moslems, in which the latter were beaten with great loss by Amru. The Meccans, now thought the long desired moment of revenge at hand, and broke the peace by committing several acts of violence against the Chuzaites, the allies of Mohammed. The latter, however, marched at the head of 10,000 men against Mecca, before its inhabitants had time to prepare for the siege, took it, and was publicly recognized by them as chief and prophet. With this the victory of the new religion was secured in Arabia.

Towards the close of the 10th year of the Hegira he undertook, at the head of at least 40,000 Muslims, his last solemn pilgrimage to Mecca, and there (on the Mount Arafat[xli]) instructed them in all the important laws and ordinances, chiefly of the pilgrimage; and the ceremonies observed by him on that occasion were fixed for all time. He again solemnly exhorted his believers to righteousness and piety, and chiefly recommended them to protect the weak, the poor, and the women, and to abstain from usury.

Returned from Mecca, he occupied himself again with the carrying out of his expedition against Syria, but fell dangerously ill very soon after his return, and died about noon of Monday the 12th of the third month, in the year 11 of the Hegira (June 8, 632 AD). 

Birth of Islam[xlii]

The Official Muslim Version

What happened in the cave between Mohammed and the spiritual entity who appeared to him circa 610 AD? On a day towards the end of the month of Ramadan, the “prophet” set off for the hills, and spent his time fasting and praying in his usual place. The Muslim tells us, in one version of the myth, that he was so involved with his thoughts, he did not notice the time passing.  At the darkest time of the night, just before the dawn, he heard a voice.  The voice grew louder and louder, it seemed to come from all directions.  It filled the cave where he was sitting, but it also came from somewhere outside in the night - and from inside Mohammed himself. Suddenly, before him was an entity holding a cloth of green brocade bearing the legend embroidered on it. “Read,” said the spirit. “I cannot read!” The spirit “squeezed” Mohammed, “Read!” “I cannot read” Mohammed whined louder. The creature squeezed him tighter, “Read!” “I cannot read?” “Read” said the entity, “in the name of thy Lord who created man from a clot of blood: read in the name of the Almighty God who taught man the use of the pen and taught him what he knew not before!” Allegedly, Mohammed recited the verse and knew it perfectly, word for word, and, the spirit was gone.

Suddenly Mohammed felt worried.  He began to panic. Was the cave haunted? Was he ill? Trembling, he stood up, left the cave, and began to walk, shakily, down the mountain path.  He was very confused.  And, here the story of the prophet changes radically. The Muslim would have you believe that the same voice, called to him, “Oh Mohammed!  Truly you are the messenger of God. And I am his angel, Gabriel.” Looking up the Muslim intones that Mohammed saw the angel again, like a human, but so enormous that his two feet straddled the horizon. Mohammed returned to his home in Mecca awe-struck that he had been contacted by the Archangel of the Jews.

Some believe that Mohammed’s revelation was actually demonic. In fact, this was not Mohammed’s first contact with the supernatural. In fact, when he was a child, he was nursed by a Bedouin woman and “two men in white raiment” appeared[xliii], “...two men in white clothes came to me with a golden basin full of snow.  They took me and split open my body, then they took my heart and split it open and took out from it a black clot which they flung away.  Then they washed my heart and my body with that snow until they made them pure.” In fact, this event so deeply disturbed the Bedouins that they returned Mohammed to his mother when the infant’s wet-nurse stated that, “His [Mohammed’s friend’s] father said to me, ‘I am afraid that this child has had a stroke, so take him back to his family before the result appears...She [Mohammed’s mother] asked me what happened and gave me no peace until I told her.  When she asked if I feared a demon had possessed him, I replied that I did.’”[xliv]

Thus, Mohammed’s experience in the cave, his call to “prophethood”, becomes just another step in that same direction. Muslim scholars[xlv] claim that “the commencement of the divine inspiration to Allah’s new Apostle was in the form of good righteous (true) dreams in his sleep. He never had a dream but that it came true like bright day light. He used to go in seclusion, to the cave of Hira, where he communed with Allah alone, continuously, for many days and nights. He used to take with him the journey food for that stay and, then, come back to his wife Khadija to take his food like-wise again for another period to stay. Until, suddenly, the Truth descended upon him while he was in the cave of Hira. The angel came to him in it and asked him to read. The Prophet replied, “I do not know how to read.” The Prophet added, “The angel caught me forcefully and pressed me so hard that I could not bear it anymore. He then released me and again asked me to read, and I replied, “I do not know how to read,” whereupon he caught me again and pressed me a second time till I could not bear it anymore.  He then released me and asked me again to read, but again I replied, “I do not know how to read or, what shall I read?.” Thereupon he caught me for the third time and pressed me and then released me and said, “Read: In the Name of your Lord, Who has created all that exists. Has created man from a clot. Read and Your Lord is Most Generous up to that which he knew not.”

The Hadith of Bukhari then notes that the Apostle returned with the Inspiration, his neck muscles twitching with terror until he entered upon Khadija and said, “Cover me! Cover me!” They covered him until his fear was over and then he said, “O Khadija, what is wrong with me?” Then he told her everything that had happened and said, ‘I fear that something may happen to me.” Khadija said, ‘Never! But have the glad tidings, for by Allah, Allah will never disgrace you as you keep good relations with your Kith and kin, speak the truth, help the poor and the destitute, serve your guest generously and assist the deserving, calamity-afflicted ones.”

But after a few days Waraqa died and the Divine Inspiration was also paused for a while and the Prophet became so sad as we have heard that he intended several times to throw himself from the tops of high mountains and every time he went up the top of a mountain in order to throw himself down, Gabriel would appear before him and say, “O Mohammed! You are indeed Allah’s Apostle in truth” whereupon his heart would become quiet and he would calm down and would return home.  And whenever the period of the coming of the inspiration used to become long, he would do as before, but when he used to reach the top of a mountain, Gabriel would appear before him and say to him what he had said before. (Ibn ‘Abbas said regarding the meaning of: “He it is that Cleaves the daybreak from the darkness”; that Al-Asbah means the light of the sun during the day and the light of the moon at night.

So, there are a number of slight variations to this story, related by different people, describing Mohammed’s visitation by a spirit identifying himself as the angel Gabriel.  These stories do not always agree with each other in perfect detail, but on the whole a composite picture can be drawn of Mohammed’s initial experience with the spirit and his subsequent reactions. Here are additional details from Guillaume’s The Life of Mohammed, “So I [Mohammed] read it, and he [Gabriel] departed from me.  And I awoke from my sleep, and it was though these words were written on my heart.  (Tabari:  Now none of God’s creatures was more hateful to me than an (ecstatic) poet or a man possessed:  I could not even look at them.  I thought, Woe is me poet or possessed - Never shall Quraysh say this of me!  I will go to the top of the mountain and throw myself down that I may kill myself and gain rest.  So I went forth to do so and then) when I was midway on the mountain, I heard a voice from heaven saying “O Mohammed! thou are the apostle of God and I am Gabriel.”[xlvi] Again, the fundamental issue is that Mohammed was illiterate so, allegory (interpretation) of these events becomes necessary and, that always leads to personal agendas as stated below.

Muslims claim that these visitations from the spirit continued.  Then, they stopped for a time believed to have been 6 months to 3 years. When this happened, “The inspiration ceased to come to the messenger of God for a while, and he was deeply grieved.  He began to go to the tops of mountain crags, in order to fling himself from them; but every time he reached the summit of a mountain, Gabriel appeared to him and said to him, “You are the Prophet of God.”  Thereupon, his anxiety would subside and he would come back to himself.[xlvii] The pre-Islamic Arabs believed in the demon of poetry, and they thought that a great poet was directly inspired by demons.[xlviii] Thus, Mohammed (himself) believed that he was either demon possessed, or influenced by demons, and was suicidal from these visions.[xlix] And, even in the Koran, there are references that other people believed that Mohammed was possessed or influenced by demons:[l] (1) “No, your compatriot Mohammed is not mad. He saw him (Gabriel) on the clear horizon.  He does not grudge the secrets of the unseen, nor is this the utterance of an accursed devil.”; (2) “It (the Koran)  is no poet’s speech. Scant is your faith!  It is no soothsayer’s divination:  how little you reflect!  It is revelation from the Lord of the Universe.” In the latter, comment, Mohammed is saying to his critics that he really saw an angel, and his words are not from a devil, or from his own imagination. It is obvious that his contemporary critics believed, at least, that he was inspired by a demon, so Mohammed is answering these charges in a form of self-defense.

Regardless, the simple, clean version which has been disseminated for public consumption in the United States actually raises more questions than it allays. Thus, it is of great importance to identify the spirit who squeezed Mohammed at the cave of Hira. The reality is that after his encounter with the spirit, Mohammed was actually afraid that what happened to him was from a Jinni (not Major Nelson’s friendly Genie but, a demon from Arab, pagan lore). It was only after discussing the matter with his wife and friends that he later declared in the Koran that the spirit who squeezed him was the angel Gabriel.[li] And, that raises some other, peculiar discrepancies.  

The Religious Problems with Islam

The foregoing, official claims in the Koran (and its commentaries) create serious problems both with its Jewish connection from which, as described above, the Muslim borrows heavily; and, the ignorant who opine that Allah, the Jewish Yahweh and the Catholic Holy Trinity are one and the same. Recall that the Muslim believes one simple thing--Abraham was the father of both the Jew and the Muslim. In essence, the Jew stole the true story of the “chosen people” from the Arab. It was Ishmael (the father of the Arab and Muslim) who was cast-out at the urging of Sara (Abraham’s wife) with Ishmael’s mother, the Egyptian concubine Hagar. And, of course, Abraham, who had impregnated Hagar, at the urging of Sara when (presumably) Gabriel appeared to Abraham and announced that he would (in his 90’s) father a child with Sara (also in her 90’s and barren) to be the father of the “chosen people”. It was Sara’s unbelief in Gabriel’s message and Abraham’s failure to obey that caused the birth of rival stepsons who would forever bear enmity towards each other.[lii]

In fact, it can be argued that much of the Old Testament is concerned with the story of enmity between these two families of Abraham. And, it is the commentaries that (paraphrasing) “I will take the children of Israel from among the nations...and will bring them to their own land; and I will make them one nation in the land, upon the mountains of Israel; and one king shall be king over them all”[liii]; “To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the river Euphrates”[liv]; “I will gather all nations against Jerusalem to battle… Then the Lord will go forth and fight against those nations”[lv];     “Out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem”[lvi]; “In that day there will be a highway from Egypt and Assyria...in that day Israel will be a third with Egypt and Assyria, a blessing in the midst of the earth”[lvii]; which give rise to the argument that Israel and the Arab world will never know peace.

Regardless, Mohammed’s experience with his Gabriel is radically different from other accounts inextricably connected between the Koran and Old Testament. Recall that in Jewish lore, and Old Testament recordings, Moses dictates that the Archangel Gabriel (“God Speaks”, “Hero of God”, or “Messenger of God”) was one of the four, mighty Archangels who (although lesser in status that the Cherubim and Seraphim) control the four directions of the wind and the natural world and carry-out specific tasks for the Hebrew Yahweh and the Catholic (Christian) Trinity in this corporeal world. In fact, only two Archangels Michael (Captain of the Heavenly Host) and Gabriel (God’s messenger) are actually named in the Bible. And, of the two, Gabriel is the most prolific visitor appearing to many people before his alleged visit to Mohammed in the cave outside Mecca thousands of years later. And, each time that Gabriel did appear in Jewish and Christian lore, the first thing He did was to allay that person’s fear and calm them. Gabriel appeared to the prophet Daniel. Daniel was afraid but Gabriel touched him, he did not squeeze him, he only touched him.[lviii] Gabriel appeared to Zacharias, the father of John the Baptist (called Yihia in the Koran), He identified Himself and said to Zacharias, “Do not be afraid, Zacharias... I am Gabriel that stand in the presence of God.”[lix] Gabriel appeared to the blessed virgin Mary and, she was greatly troubled but Gabriel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary”.[lx] Yet, in the cave, that spirit squeezed Mohammed leaving him terrified and in great fear of death.

Simply put, Mohammed’s experience with his “angel” is totally incompatible with others who have had the same contact with any type of Angel: (1) Adam in Genesis Chapters 3 & 4; (2) Noah in Genesis Chapter 6; (3) Abraham in Genesis Chapters 12-18; (4) Moses in Exodus  Chapters 3-34; (5) King David; (6) Isaiah in Isaiah Chapter 6; (7) the Blessed Virgin Mary in Luke Chapter 2; and (8) the Apostle Paul in Acts Chapter 9. In fact, this author’s review of both the King James and Catholic versions of the Old and New Testament reveals nothing of people in the Bible having an experience with God’s Messengers that resembles Mohammed’s experience at all. Each Jew who experienced this phenomenon can best be described as claiming to be filled with a reverent fear, but never became depressed/suicidal as a result of their experience.  These people fellowshipped with their God, walked with Him, spoke with Him, but, none of them ever contemplated suicide. Yet, several times, Mohammed attempted suicide after contact with his god, and each time his “spirit” stopped him. In retaliation to Mohammed’s claims, Christian commentators have stated that, first, as stated above, had the spirit actually been Gabriel, the Jewish Pentateuch (the first 5 books of the Old Testament) tells us that he would have calmed Mohammed and relieved his fear. But Mohammed’s spirit left him in extreme distress.

Second, Mohammed’s Gabriel, contradicted his former revelations, over the preceding six hundred years, when the self-same Gabriel said to the blessed Virgin Mary, when he appeared to her,  “The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called Son of God”.[lxi] But, the spirit who appeared to Mohammed said to him, “...and the Christians say that The Messiah is the son of Allah. That is their saying with their mouths. They imitate the saying of those who disbelieved (infidels) of old. Allah (personally) fighteth against them. How perverse are they.[lxii] Gabriel said to the Blessed Virgin that Jesus would be called the “Son of God”. The spirit who gave the revelations to Mohammed said that this is the saying of the infidels, and declares that Allah Himself fights against the Christians who confess that Jesus is the Son of God. Ignoring the religious overtones of the instant discussion, i.e., Islam vs. Christianity as the one, true religion; the issue is simply one of credibility. For over 10,000 years, both Christian and Muslim agree that Gabriel, heralded the coming of a Messiah. However, Mohammed’s mentor Gabriel revokes that prior testimony and announces, only to Mohammed, that these prior pronouncements were simply wrong.

Third, had the spirit actually been Gabriel, critics argue that Khadija (Mohammed’s wife) would have instantly believed Mohammed’s testimony and would not have tested the spirit the way she did. Or, something less pornographic or immodest would have been used as a litmus test for Gabriel’s identification. Yet, we are told by Ibn Hesham (circa 833 AD), the author of Mohammed’s biography, that Khadija tested the spirit who squeezed Mohammed. She said to Mohammed, “Would you please tell me when the spirit comes to you?” When Mohammed told her, Khadija said “Mohammed, sit on my left thigh.” Mohammed sat on her left thigh and she asked, “Do you see the spirit?”. “Yes.” “Then sit on my right thigh.” Mohammed sat on her right thigh. “Do you see the spirit?” He answered, “Yes.” “Then sit on my lap.” Mohammed sat on her lap and she asked, “Do you see the spirit?” “Yes”. Khadija unveiled, and exposed, her body inquiring, “Do you see the spirit?” “No,” he answered. Then Khadija said, “That spirit is good because he doesn’t want to see my feminine part. You are the prophet of Allah.” And, by that, Mohammed came to be convinced that spirit who was talking to him was the angel Gabriel, and a good spirit, because when he saw his wife almost naked, he didn’t stay to see the uncovered a feminine part of her body while Mohammed was sitting on her lap.[lxiii]

Fourth, critics question why Mohammed’s spirit gave false revelation to his prophet. The spirit said, “Read, in the name of thy Lord who Createth. Createth man from a (blood) clot”.[lxiv] These words contradict not only other, contemporary religious teaching (man was created from the slime/dust of the earth) but, also, even the Koran’s teaching which states that, “Behold, thy Lord said to the angels, ‘I am about to create man from clay. When I have fashioned him and breathed into him of My spirit, fall ye down in prostration unto him’”.[lxv] The logical inquiry must be, “Should the Koran contradict itself if it is to be the basis for world domination?” 

Fifth, if the spirit had been Gabriel, why did he not simply teach Mohammed to read and write. The Koran, itself, declares that Allah taught Jesus how to read and write. “It is said concerning Jesus: And Allah will teach him the book and wisdom, the Torah and the Gospel.”[lxvi] Ibn Katheir in his exposition on the Koran[lxvii] says, “’The book’ mentioned here means ‘writing’”, i.e., Allah will teach Jesus how to “write”. It is logical to expect that Mohammed, the seal of the prophets, would need to, at least, be as literate as one of his minions. Mohammed’s Gabriel said, “Read; and thy Lord the Most Bounteous, who teaches by the pen, teacheth man that which he knew not.”[lxviii] Thus, if Allah teaches man that (which he knew not) by the pen, why did he not teach Mohammed how to read and write, instead of leaving him illiterate all his life? In fact, even Mohammed came to doubt the revelations he received from the spirit. The Koran states, “If thou wert in doubt as to what we have revealed unto thee, then ask those who have been reading the Book from before thee, ‘The truth hath indeed come to thee from thy Lord; so be in no wise of those in doubt’”[lxix] The “Book”, or course, is the then existent Talmud, Torah and the Catholic Apostle’s letters in existence at that time. These were the final authority for Mohammed even when he was in doubt. Thus, if Mohammed had been lettered, he would have known the truth directly from these sources. Yet, the spirit left him illiterate and ignorant of the book (other extent religious writings of the Christians and Jews). Recall that the Koran was “spoken” until it was finally compiled after Mohammed’s death.

Sixth, Mohammed’s other contacts with evil spirits, magic and angels is also unique. It is claimed[lxx] that magic was worked on Mohammed so that he used to think that he had sexual relations with his wives while he actually had not.  Then one day he said, “O ‘Aisha do you know that Allah has instructed me concerning the matter I asked Him about?  Two men came to me and one of them sat near my head and the other sat near my feet.  The one near my head asked the other, “What is wrong with this man?”  The latter replied, “He is under the effect of magic.”  The first one asked, “Who has worked magic on him?”  The other replied, “Labid bin Al-A’sam, a man from Bani Zuraiq who was an ally of the Jews and was a hypocrite.”  The first one asked, “What material did he use?”  The other replied, “A comb and the hair stuck to it.”  The first one asked, “Where is that?”  The other replied, “In a skin of pollen of a male date palm tree kept under a stone in the well of Dharwan.”  So, the Prophet went to that well and took out those things and said, “That was the well which was shown to me (in a dream).  Its water looked like the infusion of Henna leaves and its date-palm trees looked like the heads of devils.”  The Prophet added, “Then that thing was taken out.” I said to the Prophet, “Why do you not treat yourself with Nashra?”  He said, “Allah has cured me; I dislike to let evil spread among my people.”

This Tradition is also found in other interpretations and commentaries on the Koran.[lxxi] Muslim expert Alfred Guillaume notes that a Muslim scholar says that the spell lasted for a year.  In other words, for one year, Mohammed thought that he was having sexual relations with his wives when he was not. The dichotomy for the Muslim is clear, i.e., if Mohammed is supposed to be God’s greatest and last prophet, he only receiving the divine revelations from Allah, how is the prophet so bewitched and befuddled that for one year he thought he was having sexual relations with his wives, when he actually was not. “The apostle of Allah fell ill.  He was bewitched about women and food...There were eleven knots [in the hair from the comb].  The two Surahs no. 113, and 114 were revealed to him.  No sooner did the apostle of Allah recite a verse than a knot loosened.  When all of them were loosened, he regained his urge for food and women.”[lxxii] Exactly the opposite of Samson’s experience with Delilah, where, his hair only pertained to his physical prowess not his ability to discern the mind of God.

Seventh, Mohammed’s experience with Satan is also unique. At one point in time, Mohammed admitted that Satan put words in his mouth to actually compromise with the rampant idol worship of the time.  Later, Mohammed claimed that Allah showed him he was wrong, and the Koran’s recital was actually changed.  The quote from The Life of Mohammed reads as follows: 

Tabari.  Now the apostle was anxious for the welfare of his people, wishing to attract them as far as he could.  It has been mentioned that he longed for a way to attract them and the method he adopted is... “When the apostle saw that his people turned their backs on him and he was pained by their estrangement from what he brought them from God he longed that there should come to him from God a message that would reconcile his people to him.  Because of his love for his people and his anxiety over them it would delight him if the obstacle that made his task to difficult could be removed; so that he meditated on the project and longed for it and it was dear to him.  The God sent down, “By the star when it sets your comrade errs not and is not deceived, he speaks not from his own desire, “ and when he reached His words, “Have you thought of al-Lat and al-Uzza and Manat the third, the other”, Satan, when he was meditating upon it, and desiring to bring it (reconciliation) to his people put upon his tongue, “these are the exalted Gharaniq whose intercession is approved.”  Gharaniq is a bird that flies very high.

When Quraysh heard that they were delighted and greatly pleased at the way in which he spoke of their gods and they listened to him; while the believers were holding that what their prophet brought them from their Lord was true, not suspecting a mistake or a vain desire or a slip, and when he reached the prostration and the end of the Sura in which he prostrated himself the Muslims prostrated themselves when their prophet prostrated confirming what he brought and obeying his command, and the polytheists of Quraysh and other who were in the mosque prostrated when they heard the mention of their gods, so that everyone in the mosque believer and unbeliever prostrated...Then the people dispersed and Quraysh went out, delighted at what had been said about their gods, saying “Mohammed has spoken of our gods in splendid fashion.  He alleged in what he read that they are the exalted Gharaniq who’s intercession is approved.

Then Gabriel came to the apostle and said, “What have you done, Mohammed?  You have read to these people something I did not bring you from God and you have said what He did not say to you.  The apostle was bitterly grieved and was greatly in fear of God.  So God sent down  (a revelation), for He was merciful to him, comforting him and making light of the affair and telling him that every prophet and apostle before him desired as he desired and wanted what he wanted and Satan interjected something into his desires as he had on his tongue.

Eighth, Mohammed’s non-Muslim, Arab contemporaries certainly had problems with both his revelations and his mentor Gabriel. They called Mohammed’s Gabriel “Satan”, “...Gabriel did not come to the Prophet (for some time) and so one of the Quraish women said, ‘His Satan has deserted him.’”[lxxiii] Curiously, Islam seems to incorporate the concept of the Catholic Holy Spirit in claiming that Mohammed’s Gabriel is, in fact, the Holy Spirit, “O Abu- Huraira! I beseech you by Allah (to tell me). Did you hear Allah’s Apostle saying’ ‘O Hassan ! Reply on behalf of Allah’s Apostle. O Allah ! Support him (Hassan) with the Holy Spirit (Gabriel).’?” Abu Huraira said, “Yes.”[lxxiv] Mohammed’s family could not see his Gabriel. “Aisha said that the Prophet said to her ‘O Aisha, This is Gabriel and he sends his (greetings) salutations to you.’ Aisha said, ‘”Salutations...and addressing the Prophet she said, ‘You see what I don’t see.’”[lxxv] Curiously, Mohammed’s Gabriel “won’t go into a house with a dog or a picture.”[lxxvi] In fact, once Gabriel promised the Prophet that he would visit him, but Gabriel did not come and, later, stated “We, angels, do not enter a house which contains a picture or a dog.”

Ninth, another unique aspect of Mohammed’s Gabriel was his documented lack of genetic knowledge. “When Abdullah bin Salam heard the arrival of the Prophet at Medina, he came to him and said, ‘I am going to ask you about three things which nobody knows except a prophet: What is the first portent of the Hour? What will be the first meal taken by the people of Paradise? Why does a child resemble its father, and why does it resemble its maternal uncle’ Allah’s Apostle said, “Gabriel has just now told me of their answers. As for the resemblance of the child to its parents: If a man has sexual intercourse with his wife and gets discharge first, the child will resemble the father, and if the woman gets discharge first, the child will resemble her.”[lxxvii] Tenth, other Arabs recognized Gabriel as someone they already knew, “Gabriel started talking (to the Prophet and then left. The Prophet said to Um Salama, ‘(Do you know) who it was?’ (or a similar question). She said, ‘It was Dihya (a handsome person amongst the companions of the Prophet ).’ Later on Um Salama said, ‘By Allah! I thought he was none but Dihya, till I heard the Prophet talking about Gabriel in his sermon.”[lxxviii]

Eleventh, one particular claim by Mohammed that Gabriel was responsible for the massacre and enslavement of a Jewish tribe also caused even other Muslims to take pause. Mohammed claimed that Gabriel urged him to go and attack the Jews of Bani Quraiza. This action ended with about 800 prisoners of war being massacred, and thousands of Jewish women and children being enslaved by Mohammed. Islam proclaims, “When the Prophet returned from the (battle) of Al-Khandaq (i.e. Trench) and laid down his arms and took a bath Gabriel came to him while he (i.e. Gabriel) was shaking the dust off his head, and said, ‘You have laid down the arms?’ By Allah, I have not laid them down.  Go out to them (to attack them).’  The Prophet said, ‘Where?’ Gabriel pointed towards Bani Quraiza. So Allah’s Apostle went to them (i.e. Banu Quraiza) (i.e. besieged them).  They then surrendered to the Prophet’s judgment but he directed them to Sad to give his verdict concerning them.  Sad said, ‘I give my judgment that their warriors should be killed, their women and children should be taken as captives, and their properties distributed.’”[lxxix]

In response to this story, Mohammed argued that, “According to what al-Zuhri told me, at the time of the noon prayers Gabriel came to the apostle wearing an embroidered turban and riding on a mule with a saddle covered with a piece of brocade.  ..... The apostle passed by a number of his companions in al-Saurayn before he got to the B. Qurayza and asked if anyone had passed them.  They replied that Dihya b. Khalifa al-Kalbi had passed upon a white mule with a saddle covered with a piece of brocade.  He said, “That was Gabriel who has been sent to B. Qurayza to shake their castles and strike terror to their hearts.”[lxxx] So, Mohammed’s cohorts believed Gabriel to either simply be a fellow traveler or were simply misinformed.

Twelfth, contrary to the mythology of Angels, i.e., they were infallible agents of Allah, Gabriel could not heal his prophet either. Gabriel prayed for Mohammed to be healed, but Mohammed wasn’t healed. The apostle of Allah fell ill and he i.e. Gabriel, chanted on him, saying, “In the name of Allah I chant on to ward off from you every thing that harms you and (to ward off you) against every envier and from every evil eye and Allah will heal you.” The prayer went unanswered[lxxxi]

Finally, the issue of “free will” enters into any analysis of Islam. An illiterate, pedophilic[lxxxii], murderous, suicidal merchant is selected by Islam’s Gabriel as the Muslim  prophet to violently overthrow the infidel (by divine fiat) and impose Islam on all the corporeal world. At no time does Gabriel enlighten Mohammed as to perfecting his character or, any other means to this end. The Pentateuch instructs us that “Abraham believed, and his believing was counted for righteousness.”[lxxxiii] Belief is an act of Free Will. And, if it was necessary for the original Father of both the Jew and Muslim to use his free will to “choose” to obey and perfect his nature, then what changed for Islam? Even the Blessed Virgin exhibited the free will of the woman, “And Mary said, ‘Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word.’”[lxxxiv] No squeezing, no violence on the part of the messenger and the voluntary acceptance of that message. Yet, in direct opposition to this mandate, the Islamic Archangel Gabriel swoops down on Mohammed and demands that Mohammed proclaim Islam or he will squeeze the life out of him. The same marching orders of the modern follower of Mohammed--the Muslim. 

Islam vs The World

The next relevant issue in analyzing the status of the Islamic state is its relationship to the rest of the world. We are in a Holy War! A Muslim’s perception of his reality is his reality; our opinion notwithstanding. As demonstrated, quite plainly, those who are pagan (as defined by Mohammed, the prophet, through his Koran) or simply non-religious are infidels. And, in Islam, an adherent to those false doctrines would either be ignorant, an apostate, or an infidel and, deserve mere extermination. And, none of those designations bodes well for the non-Muslim. Ever since early Islam, persecution of indigenous Eastern Coptic Catholics has been continuous and deadly. The remainders, living in predominantly Islamic countries, are quite few--estimated to be 2-3%. Muslim countries, following the Sharia Law, such as Yemen, Hijaz,(North and East of Saudi Arabia), Jordan, Syria, Mesopotamia, Israel, Turkey, North Africa, and Ethiopia, commit these atrocities daily. Recall that, originally, each were inhabited with majority of Christians with a good number of Jews, until the conquest of Islam by Christendom which started around 640 AD. Since, then, the persecution of Christians and Jews has been systematic in these same regions.

Both the Koran and the Hadith (the essential commentaries on Mohammed’s life and the Koran) record that, initially, Mohammed had some good things to say about Catholics, but as time wore on, his attitude towards Christianity darkened.  Note that Suras 5 and 9 were some of the last Suras to be spoken by Mohammed and the following quotes are most telling: 

Believers take neither the Jews nor the Christians for your friends.[lxxxv]

Fight against such of those to whom the Scriptures were given as believe neither in God nor the last days, who do not forbid what God and His apostle have forbidden, and do not embrace the true Faith, until they pay tribute out of hand and are utterly subdued.  The Jews say Ezra is the son of God, while the Christians say the Messiah is the Son of God.  Such are their assertions by which they imitate the infidels of old.  God confound them!  How perverse they are![lxxxvi]

Narrated Ali, “Whenever I tell you a narration from Allah’s messenger, by Allah, I would rather fall down from the sky, then ascribe a false statement to him, but if I tell you something between me and you, (not a Hadith), then it was indeed a trick  (i.e., I may say things just to cheat my enemy).  No doubt I heard Allah’s messenger saying, “During the last days there will appear some young foolish people, who will say the best words, but their faith will not go beyond their throats (i.e. they will leave the faith) and will go out from their religion as an arrow goes out of the game.  So, wherever you find them, kill them, for whoever kills them shall have reward on the Day of Resurrection.”[lxxxvii]

Narrated ‘Aisha and ‘Abdullah bin ‘Abbas: When the last moment of the life of Allah’s Apostle came he started putting his ‘Khamisa’ on his face and when he felt hot and short of breath he took it off his face and said, “May Allah curse the Jews and Christians for they built the places of worship at the graves of their Prophets.[lxxxviii]

Modern Persecution of Christians & Fellow Muslims

Relying on the foregoing statements, modern, recent Muslin atrocities continue to be documented in the name of Allah and his apostate Islam all as documented by this author’s shameless plagiarism of his Internet research: 

AFGHANISTAN: According to Human Rights Watch, Taliban and Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin forces have “sharply escalated bombing and other attacks” against civilians since 2006. In 2006, “at least 669 Afghan civilians were killed in at least 350 armed attacks, most of which appear to have been intentionally launched at civilians or civilian objects. From the International Christian Concern website, www.persecution.org/: A decade ago, it was not uncommon for beheadings captured on video to be released by the Taliban, usually a warning to the West to stay out of Afghanistan’s internal affairs. The now-too-familiar executions began with a recitation of Koran verses, then a jolt to the victim’s neck and a slow severing of the head with a small and sometimes dull knife, and finally ended with a chant of “Allah Akbar” or “God is great” while blood flowed from the decapitated corpse. Recently, President Obama announced a pullout plan that will begin reducing troops this year, just one indication that the US mission in Afghanistan is closer to completion and the ability for the Taliban to carry out their brutal beheadings has been somewhat constrained. Yet, all the while, Afghan Christians have been warning ICC that without a US presence inside Afghanistan, they will be left defenseless and slaughtered if their religious identity becomes known. Their pleas for protection took on new urgency in early April, 2011, when another video, this time a blatant warning to Afghan converts to Christianity, was smuggled out of the country by an Afghan Christian and immediately sent to ICC. “Please watch this and forward it to the world so they know how serious it is in Afghanistan to be a Christian,” a leader of the Afghan Christian refugee community in Delhi wrote to ICC. In the two-minute video, believed to be filmed early this year, four Afghan militants who claim to be the Taliban behead a Christian man named Abdul Latif in Enjeel, a village south of the town Herat. The men, wearing explosive belts and kaffiya head scarves to cover their faces, pin Latif to the ground under their feet while he cries for mercy. “For God’s sake, I have children,” Latif pleads. The militants go on to announce his fate. “Your sentence [is] to be beheaded. Whoever changes his religion should be executed.” A blade is then thrust into Latif’s neck. Once decapitated, his head rests on top of his chest while the militants proclaim “Allah Akbar.” The extremely graphic video may be viewed here: http://www.persecution.org/crossingthebridge/2011/07/08/graphic-video-brutal-beheading-in-afghanistan/. In addition, at a time when Arabs protest Israeli attrocities, recall the following death count of Muslim vs Muslim in this region: 1-1 1/2 million dead during the Soviet occupation, another 1 million during their civil war.

ALGERIA: The Armed Islamic Group, active in Algeria between 1992 and 1998, was one of the most violent Islamic terrorist groups, and is thought to have takfir’ed the Muslim population of Algeria. Its campaign to overthrow the Algerian government included civilian massacres, sometimes wiping out entire villages in its area of operation. It also targeted foreigners living in Algeria, killing more than 100 expatriates in the country. In recent years it has been eclipsed by a splinter group, the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), now called Al-Qaeda Organization in the Islamic Maghreb. Muslim vs Muslim, reports indicate 400-500,000 killed in the Algerian War of Independence with another estimated 100,000 killed in the resulting Civil War. In Algeria, thousands have died in an on-going insurgency by Muslim fundamentalists against the secular government.

ARMENIA: In 1894, Sultan Abdul Hamid II instituted a pogrom against Orthodox Armenians who refused to abide by a massive increase in taxes that the Turkish government levied upon them. Between 1894-1896, between 100-150,000 Armenians were killed by either the sword or starvation. Between 1915-1918, the Turks carried out wholesale genocide against the Armenians. Families were torn apart, the men being taken out and shot, and the women and children forced to march until they died of exhaustion or starvation. In this time, a quarter of a million Armenians were able to escape to Russia, while another 200,000 saved themselves by converting to Islam. However, the best estimates say that more than one and a half million Armenians were killed by this Muslim atrocity. Turkish Armenia ceased to exist.

BANGLADESH: In Bangladesh the group Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh was formed sometime in 1998 and gained prominence in 2001. The organization was officially banned in February 2005 after attacks on NGOs, but struck back in August when 300 bombs were detonated almost simultaneously throughout Bangladesh, targeting Shahjalal International Airport, government buildings and major hotels. Muslim vs Muslim: 1.4-2 million killed after Pakistan’s invasion.

BRITAIN: On July 7, 2005 London jihadist bombings of public transportation  killed 52 commuters. In 2011, the Bishop of Rochester complained that certain areas in British cities were virtual “no go” zones for non-Muslims. For pointing this out, the bishop has received numerous death threats, and Muslim commentators issue dire, thinly-veiled threats of “what might happen” if British society continues to be so racist and Islamophobic. On September 16, 2010, Britain’s MI5 Head, Johnathon Evans, warned that Britain is facing a wave of terrorist attacks on two fronts from a new generation of al-Qaeda extremists and Irish Republican militants who could strike on the mainland. In his first public speech on the national security threat for three years, Mr. Evans said on Thursday that his officers are engaged in an “intense struggle” against Muslim radicals. It is only “a matter of time” before Britain is the victim of an attack from extremists based in Somalia, the director-general of the security service added. The percentage of “priority” plots linked to al-Qaeda in the tribal areas of Pakistan had dropped from 75 per cent two years ago to 50 per cent now. The threat had increased from Somalia and Yemen. Mr. Evans said a “significant number” of British residents are training in camps run by the al-Qaeda-linked group al-Shabaab. As many as 100 Britons of Pakistani, Bangladeshi and West African backgrounds are said to have traveled to Somalia. The country “shows many of the characteristics that made Afghanistan so dangerous as a seedbed for terrorism in the period before the fall of the Taliban,” he said. “I am concerned that it is only a matter of time before we see terrorism on our streets inspired by those fighting alongside al-Shabaab.” Only, 2 weeks later, on September 29, 2010, a combined operation involving US, UK, French and German intelligence agencies thwarted a Mumbai-style attack on London with the Allied forces attacking the militants in Pakistan.

EGYPT: Christian churches are frequently attacked and destroyed by the Muslims in Egypt.  Christians are targeted by Muslims and killed.  Last year about 70 Christians were murdered by the Muslims in Egypt.  Muslims are now attacking Christians in their churches and shooting them. Muslim anger is ignited by unfounded accusations that Egyptian Christians were aligned with Israel and stockpiling weapons in preparation for war against Muslims. The Barnabas Fund noted that Egyptian authorities have been accused of complicity for political reasons in the escalating sectarian crisis. In 1981, Muslim fanatics rioted in Cairo against the Coptic Christian population, murdering over 100 people. Copts in Egypt suffer from a continual campaign of systematic discrimination, oppression, and violence by the Muslim majority. In Egypt, the plight of the Coptic Christian minority appears to be worsening. Just this week, the Egyptian security forces killed a Coptic Christian man and wounded scores of others who were protesting against the government’s intention to demolish a Christian-owned structure. Hardly a day passes without reports of violence against members of the Coptic Christian community in various parts of Egypt. Most of the attacks are carried out by Muslim fundamentalists. According to the Barnabas Fund, an advocacy and charitable organization based in the United Kingdom, “Fears for the safety of Egyptian Christians are growing after a series of false allegations, violent threats and mass demonstrations against Christians in Egypt.”

FRANCE: In the winter of 2005, two Muslim criminals who were fleeing from the police took refuge in an electrical substation and were electrocuted. The country was subsequently wracked by weeks of riots and arson by its large Muslim population, because the deaths of these two youths were “obviously” the fault of the racist, Islamophobic French police for trying to bring them to justice, and not the fault of the Muslim fugitives themselves for committing crimes. This ignores the 1995 Paris Metro bombings.

GERMANY: On March 3, 2001, German prosecutors said that date’s attack on U.S. Air Force security personnel aboard a bus outside Germany’s Frankfurt Airport appears to be motivated by Islamic extremism. Two U.S. airmen were shot and killed in the attack. Two others were wounded. Eyewitnesses said the terrorist shouted “jihad, jihad” as he began firing. The shooter was identified as a 21-year-old legal German resident who worked at the airport. Officials said the shooter was a Muslim immigrant from Kosovo. The military said the airmen were traveling to Ramstein Air Base, where they were to be deployed to support an overseas operation. At least 12 U.S. military personnel were on board the bus, parked just outside the international terminals. On July 7, 2001, journalist David Rising reported that Germany’s top security official said that the terrorist threat to the country hasn’t decreased and the number of radicals continues to grow, even with the death of Osama bin Laden. Security officials saw no reason to lower Germany’s threat level following the death of the al-Qaida leader, said Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich, presenting the annual report by Germany’s domestic intelligence agency. “The Islamist terrorist threat is widely varied and has not concentrated on a single leader of al-Qaida for a long time,” he said. “We have had a general threat situation in Germany and Europe that has not changed for two years, but there are no concrete dangers.” Though there have been several unsuccessful or foiled attacks by Islamic radicals in Germany, the first fatalities attributed to a Muslim extremist came in the Frankfurt Airport shootings referenced above. Overall, the number of people in Germany linked to radical Islamic groups rose to 37,470 in Germany in 2010, up from 36,270 the year before, according to the report from the Office for the Protection of the Constitution. Most of those—31,370—were connected to Turkish groups, nearly all of them in Milli Gorus, a group whose founder advocates creating an Islamic state in Turkey. Recently, a Moroccan immigrant attempted to rob a 20-year old German, and was killed when the German (rightly) defended himself. As a result, Muslims in Germany have used this opportunity to condemn the racist, Islamophobic German society and to threaten violence and rioting, rather than condemning one of their own who attempted to commit a violent crime. And, the recent foiled suitcase bomb plot in Germany which was related to Islamist terror.

GREECE: The Greeks have also suffered holocaust at the hands of Muslims. In an effort to complete the Islamization of Turkish dominions, efforts to destroy or drive out the mostly Orthodox Greek populations were begun in 1913. That year, 16,000 Greeks were murdered in Eastern Thrace (on the European side of the Dardanelles). In 1914, Greeks were ordered to vacate the city of Pergamum, and were massacred in Erythrea and Phocaia. That same year, 400,000 Greeks died from malnourishment and mistreatment in forced-labor battalions, and 120,000 Greeks were driven from their homes in Eastern Thrace, fleeing as refugees to the Kingdom of Greece. In 1917, 23,000 Greeks were deported from Cydoniae, and in 1918, another 8,000 Greek families were expelled from southwestern Asia Minor. In 1922, 300,000 more Greeks were forced out of Eastern Thrace, and at Smyrna, 150,000 Greeks and Armenians were massacred by Turkish forces. After World War II, the secular regime resumed the teaching of Islamic religion in the public schools, opened state schools for the training of religious functionaries and taken such measures for the promotion of religion as putting religious programs on the state radio. Turkish aggression against the Greeks was displayed once again in 1974, when Turkey invaded Cyprus and waged war on the Greeks, who were ostensibly Turkey’s NATO ally.

INDIA: Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed are militant groups seeking accession of Kashmir to Pakistan. The Lashkar leadership describes Indian and Israeli regimes as the main enemies of Islam and Pakistan. Lashkar-e-Toiba, along with Jaish-e-Mohammed, another militant group active in Kashmir are on the United States’ foreign terrorist organizations list, and are also designated as terrorist groups by the United Kingdom, India, Australia and Pakistan. Jaish-e-Mohammed was formed in 1994 and has carried out a series of attacks all over India. The group was formed after the supporters of Maulana Masood Azhar split from another Islamic militant organization, jarkat-ul- Mujahideen. Jaish-e-Mohammed is viewed by some as the “deadliest” and “the principal terrorist organization in Jammu and Kashmir”. The group was also implicated in the kidnapping and murder of American journalist Daniel Pearl. The history of jihadist violence in this poor country is grotesque. There have even been many bombings in Mumbai since the 13 coordinated bomb explosions that killed 257 people and injured 700 on 12 March 1993. The 1993 attacks are believed to have been in retaliation for the Babri Mosque demolition. On December 6, 2002, a blast in a BEST bus near Ghatkopar station killed two people and injured 28. The bombing occurred on the tenth anniversary of the demolition of the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya. A bicycle bomb exploded near the Vile Parle station in Mumbai, killing one person and injuring 25 on January 27, 2003, a day before the visit of the Prime Minister of India Atal Bihari Vajpayee to the city. On March 13, 2003, a day after the tenth anniversary of the 1993 Bombay bombings, a bomb exploded in a train compartment near the Mulund station, killing 10 people and injuring 70. On July 28, 2003, a blast in a BEST bus in Ghatkopar killed 4 people and injured 32. On August 25, 2003, two bombs exploded in South Mumbai, one near the Gateway of India and the other at Zaveri Bazaar in Kalbadevi. At least 44 people were killed and 150 injured. On July 11, 2006, seven bombs exploded within 11 minutes on the Suburban Railway in Mumbai. 209 people were killed, including 22 foreigners and over 700 injured. According to the Mumbai Police, the bombings were carried out by Lashkar-e-Taiba and Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI). The November 26, 2008, attacks in Mumbai, Indiana (often referred to as 26/11) were more than 10 coordinated shooting and bombing attacks across Mumbai, India’s largest city, by terrorists who invaded from Pakistan. The terrorists who carried out the reconnaissance before the attacks later stated that the attacks were conducted with the support of Pakistan’s secret service, the ISI. The attacks, which drew widespread global condemnation, began on Wednesday, 26 November 2008 and lasted until Saturday, 29 November, killing 164 people and wounding at least 308 in the grenade and automatic, indiscriminate murders. Ajmal Kasab, the only attacker who was captured alive, disclosed that the attackers were members of Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Pakistan-based militant organization, considered a terrorist organization by India, Pakistan, the United States, the United Kingdom, and the United Nations, among others.

INDONESIA:  Muslim mobs have destroyed over 50 churches in the last few years. Several Christians have been killed in these attacks. Muslim vs Muslim violence: 400,000 killed by Hag’i Mohammed So’hato’s death squads, 100-200,000 killed in East Timor by Indonesia’s invasion. Indonesia, long viewed as a “moderate” and “tolerant” Muslim country, has actually seen Islamic extremism become more prevalent. Indonesia was the country where the infamous Bali bombings occurred, an attack directed against the country’s premier tourist center on October 12, 2002. In the attack, 202 people were killed, including 164 Australian and other foreign vacationers. Bali was also the site of a second, less deadly attack on October 12, 2005. The attacks were part of an ongoing campaign of violence by Jemaah Islamiyah, an Islamic terror group in Indonesia. In addition to these high profile bombings, Indonesia has also seen a string of violent attacks against the Christian minority in the country - attacks that have included the rape, murder, and beheadings of Christian schoolgirls. In East Timor, a country which obtained its independence from Portugal in 1975 only to be invaded and occupied by Muslim Indonesia later that same year, Muslim militias murdered and displaced hundreds of thousands of Roman Catholics before the UN intervened with Australian troops.

IRAN:  A number of Christians, including Pastors, have been murdered by Muslims in Iran. Muslim vs Muslim violence=450-970,000 killed in the Iran- Iraq War. After gaining complete control of Iran, the Islamist revolutionaries under the Ayatollah Khomeini in 1981 began the systematic oppression of Iran’s Ba’hai minority, murdering them and taking their property too.

IRAQ: IRAQ: This area that has seen some of the worst terror attacks in modern history as part of the Iraq War. In 2005, there were 400 incidents of one type of attack (suicide bombing), killing more than 2,000 people – many if not most of them civilians. In 2006, almost half of all reported terrorist attacks in the world (6,600), and more than half of all terrorist fatalities (13,000), occurred in Iraq, according to the National Counterterrorism Center of the United States. Along with nationalist groups and criminal, non-political attacks, the Iraqi insurgency includes Islamist insurgent groups, such as Al-Qaeda in Iraq, who favor suicide attacks far more than non-Islamist groups. At least some of the terrorism has a transnational character in that some foreign Islamic jihadists have joined the insurgency. Dozens of Arab Christians in Iraq have been killed in recent months in what seems to be well-planned campaign to drive them out of the country. Many Christian families have already begun fleeing Iraq out of fear for their lives. Some have chosen to start new lives in Jordan, while many others are expressing hope that they could be resettled in North America or Europe. This country also adheres to the ritual beheading of infidels, most noticeably, US defense contractor Nick Berg in 2004. Muslim vs Muslim violence=450-650,000 killed in the Iran-Iraq War, 200-300,000 Kurds exterminated, 100,000 killed in Sunni vs Shiite violence. The Assyrian Christian population in Iraq endures daily violence and persecution from Islamic extremists.

ISRAEL: Hamas (“zeal” in Arabic and an acronym for Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya) began support for attacks on military and civilian targets in Israel at the beginning of the First Intifada in 1987. The 1988 charter of Hamas calls for the destruction of Israel, and it still states its goal to be the elimination of Israel. Its “military wing” has claimed responsibility for numerous attacks in Israel, principally suicide bombings and rocket attacks. Hamas has also been accused of sabotaging the Israeli-Palestine peace process by launching attacks on civilians during Israeli elections to anger Israeli voters and facilitate the election of harder-line Israeli candidates. Hamas has been designated as a terrorist group by the European Union, Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Israel, Australia, Japan, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights and Human Rights Watch. It is banned in Jordan. Russia does not consider Hamas a terrorist group as it was “democratically elected”. During the second Intifada (September 2000 through August 2005) 39.9 percent of the suicide attacks were carried out by Hamas. The first Hamas suicide attack was the Mehola Junction bombing in 1993. Hamas justifies these attacks as necessary in fighting the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory, and as responses to Israeli attacks on Palestinian targets. The wider movement also serves as a charity organization and provides services to Palestinians. Islamic Jihad Movement in Palestine is a Palestinian Islamist group based in the Syrian capital, Damascus, and dedicated to waging jihad to eliminate the state of Israel. It was formed by Egyptian Fathi Shaqaqi in the Gaza Strip following the Iranian Revolution which inspired its members. From 1983 onward, it engaged in “a succession of violent, high-profile attacks” on Israeli targets. The Intifada which “it eventually sparked” was quickly taken over by the much larger Palestine Liberation Organization and Hamas. Beginning in September 2000, it started a campaign of suicide bombing attacks against Israeli civilians. The PLO’s armed wing, the Al-Quds brigades, has claimed responsibility for numerous militant attacks in Israel, including suicide bombings. The group has been designated as a terrorist organization by several Western countries. Because of the continual Intifada which the Palestinians continue to carry out, thousands of Israelis have been killed or maimed through cowardly Palestinian terror bombings. Many of these bombs have been specifically targeted at children, as have rifle and mortar attacks on schools and homes in Israel. Perhaps the most notorious Arab crime against Israel was the murder of eleven Israeli athletes taken hostage by Fatah terrorists (Yassir Arafat’s terror organization) at the 1972 Olympics in Münich, Germany. Muslim jihad has also launched five wars against Israel, that have all failed to drive the Jews from the Holy Land.

ITALY: In 2009, Armando Spataro summed up his experiences as an Italian prosecutor working for almost 30 years in fighting organized crime and terrorism. He was actually the coordinator of the specialized group of anti-terrorism prosecutors at the District Attorney’s office in Milan. His analysis of the Islamic terrorist threat to his country included some valuations on funding and possible connections with the internal terrorism and common organized crime. Until March 11 of 2004, despite the threats from some important terrorist organizations, international experts saw Europe as a backwater for logistic operations, a place to be used for proselytism, to dispatch militants into war zones with false documents, and to obtain money and resources in order to finance and support terrorist activity.  However, the March 11th tragedy in Madrid was a rude awakening for everyone, justifying those who had asked to invest in new instruments to fight international terrorism. Naturally, the London July, 2005, bombings reinforced the urgency of the situation. In fact, the problem of Islamic terrorism manifested itself in Italy after the retreat of Soviet troops from Afghanistan in 1989.  The Afghan conflict had served as a catalyst to the response of the Jihad in defense of dar al-islam (the land of Islam), which according to their vision was being threatened from the Soviet invasion. This, brought a move to the area and to nearby Pakistan of Islamic fundamentalism and hence, through the creation of numerous training camps, a coming together of many energies in defense of the cause of the “Afghan brothers”. The eventual Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989 was celebrated by Osama bin Laden and his cohorts as a triumph, and as proof of the real possibility of taking the fight against the enemies of Islam to every part of the world. It was, then, in Afghanistan that the hard core of Al Qaeda concentrated and organized itself: a concentration of leadership, volunteers and infrastructures of militant Islam (further intensified after 1996) that ceased to exist only with the military operation in late 2001. By the beginning of 2002, the material assets were destroyed, the personnel dispersed, and it was clear that a new phase of Islamic militancy was starting.  From then on “Al Qaeda” became the designation for a general program to attack the West and the governments, including Islamic ones, accused of being its instruments including Italy. The danger to Italians in such a project is not exclusively determined by the number of victims or the destructiveness of terrorist acts, but by the degree of penetration of the jihad ideology.  It tends to turn pieces of territory – especially the urban periphery where the presence of Muslim immigrants is more intense – into appendices of the fundamental version of dar al-islam. The threat is therefore present in our own territory. The phenomenon of Islamic terrorism in Italy : general considerations on its structure, origins, logistical support, cover-up activities, behavioral rules, financing, possible connections with organized crime and internal terrorism. Sparto stated, “It is clear that Italian investigators are faced by a network of Islamic cells, which are not rigidly structured under one single hierarchical organization and which cannot be grouped under one single denomination.  Actually, more recently, the ethnic and national identity of the members of the various groups has become less important, whereas for various years it had been the main distinguishing factor (however, we will return to this point later).  An informal confederation of cells seems to have formed, all interconnected and it is not always certain, despite what the press often implies, that Bin Laden is their leader or that they are members of Al-Qaeda.”

JAPAN: On Tuesday May 17, 2011, it was reported that Muslims were suing Japan over its police terror probe into their personal lives. The fourteen Muslim plaintiffs say the so-called anti-terrorism investigations were illegal and violated their freedom of faith. They are now each demanding 11 million Japanese Yen (USD 135,000) in compensation for damages. In November 2010, more than 100 documents dated 2004 to 2010 were leaked online, giving private details on alleged Muslim terror suspects and police informants in Japan. The documents, which came from the Tokyo Police Department, included not only names, photos, and addresses, but also details about routine activities of the Muslim individuals such as visits to mosques and Internet habits. Muslims are considered a minority religious sect in Japan, mainly consisting of foreigners. However, Islam is a growing faith in the Asian country and the 14 Japanese involved in the recent lawsuit include some converts. The investigation began as part of the post-9/11 concerns that revealed that Al-Qaeda operating in at least 60 countries, some far removed from the organization’s major spheres of influence in the Middle East and Southeast Asia. While these warnings had most-often fallen on deaf ears, evidence in 2004 suggested that Osama Bin Laden’s henchmen were indeed active in parts of the world whose largely homogenous, non-Muslim populations would seem to make them precarious destinations for Islamic terrorist cells. Such as authorities in the Baltic republic of Latvia arrested 10 Pakistani nationals believed to be planning an attack on a visiting Israeli soccer team. Likewise, Bolivian authorities arrested nine Bangladeshis who were allegedly plotting to hijack an airplane and hit U.S. interests in Argentina. These incidents showed that Al-Qaeda was now bent on expanding its operations into countries previously unaffected by Islamic terrorism. It comes as no surprise, then, that South Korea and Japan-two longtime U.S. allies nestled deep in Northeast Asia-had entered the organization’s sights. Potential terrorist targets abound in both countries and, two Al-Qaeda “near-misses” hastened Japan’s investigation into its own, home-grown Islamic threat. However, following 9/11, Japan-like many countries-revised its approach to the gathering terrorist threat and decided to monitor its small Muslim presence, which is estimated to be only 0.1 % of the general population and is comprised mainly of immigrants from Pakistan and Southeast Asia. Shortly after the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, Japan’s National Police Agency ordered its regional offices to keep mosques under surveillance, alleging that some had been used as “meeting places for Islamic fundamentalists.” This heightened attention led to a string of arrests throughout the country, most notably in November of 2001, when police uncovered an illegal bank operated by a group of Pakistanis who were funneling money to Islamic militant groups in Pakistan. Other Pakistani nationals linked to terrorism have since been either detained on immigration charges or prevented from entering Japan. In addition, Japanese authorities have identified a mosque in the sleepy Tokyo suburb of Ebina City as a weekly meeting place for Islamic radicals.

JORDAN: Our ally King Hussein of Jordan massacred 10-25,000 “Palestinian”, fellow Muslims during the 1970-71 purging of their refugee camps.

KOREA : In November, 2009, South Korean diplomats in Afghanistan were evacuated after South Korea’s embassy in Kabul received threats by Al-Qaeda. In October, South Korean police-acting on tips from the U.S.-investigated a Greek-owned cargo ship suspected of carrying Al- Qaeda members that landed in the port of Kunsan. This apparent false alarm (nothing suspicious was found aboard the ship, and it was subsequently released) did little to ease South Korean fears of an impending terrorist attack; nor did the recent revelation that Al-Qaeda operatives have visited South Korea numerous times in the past several years in order to scout targets. According to the National Intelligence Service, an Al-Qaeda operative entered South Korea last year from Southeast Asia to evaluate and collect information about potential U.S. targets in the country. The man was later arrested in Pakistan and is currently in U.S. custody. In addition, a man known only as “Omar” suspected of being involved in the 1998 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi has visited South Korea at least three times since 1999 to scout U.S. military bases. The number of native South Korean Muslims is estimated at anywhere between 20,000 and 40,000. The country is also host to as many as 200,000 foreign-born Muslims hailing mainly from Pakistan, Indonesia and Bangladesh. But South Korean intelligence confirms that Al-Qaeda members are attempting to enter the country with increasing frequency. Luckily, many have been detained and deported by immigration officials, usually within 10 hours after their arrival. Still, the continued efforts of Al-Qaeda operatives to penetrate South Korea are deeply troubling to both South Korean intelligence officials and lawmakers.

LEBANON: 130,000 Christians killed in its Civil War. It should be noted that Israel killed only 18,000 soldiers in their war with Lebanon. Further, Hezbollah first emerged in 1982 as a militia during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, also known as Operation Peace for Galilee. Its leaders were inspired by the ayatollah Khomeini, and its forces were trained and organized by a contingent of Iranian Revolutionary Guards. Hezbollah’s 1985 manifesto listed its three main goals as “putting an end to any colonialist entity” in Lebanon, bringing the Phalangists to justice for “the crimes they (had) perpetrated,” and the establishment of an Islamic regime in Lebanon.  Hezbollah leaders have also made numerous statements calling for the destruction of Israel, which they refer to as a “Zionist entity... built on lands wrested from their owners.” Hezbollah, which started with only a small militia, has grown to an organization with seats in the Lebanese government, a radio and a satellite television-station, and programs for social development. Hezbollah maintains strong support among Lebanon’s Shi’a population, and gained a surge of support from Lebanon’s broader population (Sunni, Christian, Druze) immediately following the 2006 Lebanon War, and is able to mobilize demonstrations of hundreds of thousands. Hezbollah alongside with some other groups began the 2006–2008 Lebanese political protests in opposition to the government of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora. A later dispute over Hezbollah preservation of its telecoms network led to clashes and Hezbollah-led opposition fighters seized control of several West Beirut neighborhoods from Future Movement militiamen loyal to Fouad Siniora. These areas were then handed over to the Lebanese Army. A national unity government was formed in 2008, giving Hezbollah and its opposition allies control of 11 of 30 cabinets seats; effectively veto power. Hezbollah receives its financial support from the governments of Iran and Syria, as well as donations from Lebanese people and foreign Shi’as. It has also gained significantly in military strength in the 2000s. Despite a June 2008 certification by the United Nations that Israel had withdrawn from all Lebanese territory, in August, Lebanon’s new Cabinet unanimously approved a draft policy statement which secures Hezbollah’s existence as an armed organization and guarantees its right to “liberate or recover occupied lands.” Since 1992, the organization has been headed by Hassan Nasrallah, its Secretary-General. The United States, Canada, Israel and the Netherlands regard Hezbollah as a “terrorist” organization, while the United Kingdom and Australia consider only Hezbollah’s external security organization to be a terrorist organization. Many consider it, or a part of it, to be a terrorist group responsible for blowing up the American embassy and later its annex, as well as the barracks of American and French peacekeeping troops and a dozens of kidnappings of foreigners in Beirut. It is also accused of being the recipient of massive aid from Iran, and of serving “Iranian foreign policy calculations and interests,” or serving as a “subcontractor of Iranian initiatives”. Hezbollah denies any involvement or dependence on Iran. In the Arab and Muslim worlds, on the other hand, Hezbollah is regarded as a legitimate and successful resistance movement that drove both Western powers and Israel out of Lebanon. In 2005, the Lebanese Prime Minister said of Hezbollah, it “is not a militia. It’s a resistance.” Fatah al-Islam is an Islamist group operating out of the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp in northern Lebanon. It was formed in November 2006 by fighters who broke off from the pro-Syrian Fatah al-Intifada, itself a splinter group of the Palestinian Fatah movement, and is led by a Palestinian fugitive militant named Shaker al-Abssi. The group’s members have been described as militant jihadists, and the group itself has been described as a terrorist movement that draws inspiration from al-Qaeda. Its stated goal is to reform the Palestinian refugee camps under Islamic Sharia law, and its primary targets are Israel and the United States.

MALAYSIA: From the Front Page Magazine website (dated 07-12-2011), frontpagemag.com/2011/06/22/islam’s-persecution-of-christians-in-malaysia/ : the pernicious invasion of Islam into this country, as well as the United States and Europe, has rendered any opposition to Malaysia’s official Islamic government moot. Malaysian terrorist Azahari Husin had his hero’s sendoff near Kuala Lumpur in 2005 at the same time the Malaysian Christian convert Lina Joy was told by this nation’s highest court that she was not allowed to become a Christian, despite the fact that religious freedom is supposedly guaranteed by Malaysia’s constitution. In Malaysia, the Internal Security Act sums up this country’s absolute intolerance for anything non-Muslim. NOTE: for more information about the official Muslim “tolerance” of the infidel, see below.

MUARITANIA: In Mauritania, over 70,000 “Afro-Mauritanians” have been murdered or expelled by Islamist radicals who have instituted Sharia law in that nation, and Mauritania has the highest percentage of its population living in slavery of any nation on earth (close to 30%). According to one source, Mauritania is described as an “austere, almost medieval nation, powered by Islam, driven by racial hatred, and flayed by drought”.

NIGERIA: Muslims in northern Nigeria continue their effort to establish Sharia Islamic law over non-Muslims resulting in the same violence and bloodshed already experienced by the other nations victimized by Islam.

PAKISTAN: Pakistan has laws that forbid blaspheming Mohammed.  In early 2000, a Protestant Christian was under the death sentence because of a trumped up charge of “blasphemy” of Mohammed.  In 1999, a mob of 30,000 Muslims attacked the only predominately Christian village in Pakistan, and destroyed churches, robbed and destroyed businesses, kidnapped and raped Christian girls, and destroyed many people’s homes. And, in 2002, the beheading of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was broadcast from this nation--our “ally” in the War on Terror who harbored Osama bin Laden. Pakistani mujahedeen and terror bombers seek to force the Indians out of Kashmir and unite that province with Pakistan, and have killed tens of thousands in a campaign of violence that has lasted for decades. Violence by Muslims is also endemic within India proper, and many Indians have been killed by bombings. In 1947, after the splitting of the Indian subcontinent between Muslim Pakistan and Hindu India, Muslims instituted a reign of terror against Christian, Hindu, and Buddhist minorities in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). People were killed, property was confiscated, refugees left penniless, and Hindu women were taken and given to Muslim men for the purposes of polygamy. The wickedness of the Muslim actions led one Indian observer, S.K. Bhattacharyya, to invent an acronym for Islam - “Intolerance, Slaughter, Loot, Arson and Molestation”. In 1950, half a million more Hindus were butchered, and in 1971, during Bangladesh’s war for independence from Pakistan, Pakistani soldiers murdered between 1.25 and 3 million Hindus and other religious minorities.

PALESTINE: Although there is no such country, the so-called Palestinian Christians have also been feeling the heat, although they their conditions remain much better than those of their brothers and sisters in Iraq and Egypt. Last week, the Western-funded Palestinian Authority in the West Bank of Israel arrested a Christian journalist who reported about differences between Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and senior Fatah operative Mohammed Dahlan. The journalist, George Qanawati, manager of Radio Bethlehem 2000, was freed five days later. In the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, the tiny Christian community is also living in fear following a spate of attacks by radical Islamic groups. The failure of the international community to pay enough attention to the dangers facing the Christians encouraged radical Muslims and corrupt dictatorships to step up their assaults on Christian individuals and institutions. In areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority, the Islamic terrorist organizations such as Fatah and Islamic Jihad continue to perpetrate a systematic campaign of oppression and murder against the dwindling Christian population of Bethlehem and other towns scattered across the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

PHILIPPINES: The Abu Sayyaf Group, also known as al-Harakat al-Islamiyya, is one of several militant Islamic-separatist groups based in and around the southern islands of the Philippines, in Bangsamoro (Jolo, Basilan, and Mindanao) where for almost 30 years various Muslim groups have been engaged in an insurgency for a state, independent of the predominantly Christian Philippines. The name of the group is derived from the Arabic  abu (“father of”) and sayyaf (“Swordsmith”). Since its inception in the early 1990s, the group has carried out bombings, assassinations, kidnappings and extortion in their fight for an independent Islamic state in western Mindanao and the Sulu Archipelago with the stated goal of creating a pan-Islamic superstate across southeast Asia, spanning from east to west; the island of Mindanao, the Sulu Archipelago, the island of Borneo (Malaysia, Indonesia), the South China Sea, and the Malay Peninsula (Peninsular Malaysia, Thailand and Myanmar). The U.S. Department of State has branded the group a terrorist entity by adding it to the list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations. In Mindanao, the large southern island of the Philippine chain, Muslims are murdering Roman Catholics and Christians in an effort to establish an Islamic state on the island. Spearheaded by the terrorist organization Abu Sayyaf, Filipino Muslims have waged a terrorist war of shootings and bombings against both civilian and military targets. For example, one such attack was made against a shopping mall in Manila on October 9, 2007 in which eight people were killed. Abu Sayyaf has also engaged in assassinations against Filipino leaders who oppose their movement. On November 13, 2007, a bomb killed Wahab Akbar, a member of the Filipino Congress and former Muslim radical who turned from violence and began to lead the charge against Abu Sayyaf’s violence. In all, over 400 civilians have been killed by Muslim terrorist violence in the Philippines since 2000.

RUSSIA: Politically and religiously motivated attacks on civilians in Russia have been traced to Islamic separatist sentiment among the largely Muslim population of its North Caucasus region, particularly in Chechnya, where the central government of the Russian Federation has waged two bloody wars against the local secular separatist government since 1994. In the Moscow theater hostage crisis in October 2002, three Chechen separatist groups took an estimated 850 people hostage in the Russian capital; at least 129 hostages died during the storming by Russian special forces, all but one killed by the chemicals used to subdue the attackers. In the September 2004 Beslan school hostage crisis more than 1,000 people were taken hostage after a school in the Russian republic of North Ossetia-Alania was seized by a pro-Chechen multi-ethnic group aligned to Riyad-us Saliheen Brigade of Martyrs. Hundreds of people died during the storming by Russian forces. Since 2000, Russia has also experienced a string of suicide bombings that killed hundreds of people in the Caucasian republics of Chechnya, Dagestan and Ingushetia, as well as in Russia proper including Moscow. Responsibility for most of these attacks were claimed by either Shamil Basayev’s Islamic-nationalist rebel faction or, later, by Dokka Umarov’s pan-Islamist movement Caucasus Emirate which is aiming to unite most of Russia’s North Caucasus as an emirate since its creation in 2007. In 2011, the U.S. Department of State included the Caucasus Emirate on its list of terrorist organizations.

SAUDI ARABIA: The US military sent forces to Saudi Arabia in 1990 after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. After the US-led coalition won the 1991 Gulf War, it moved most of its forces from Saudi Arabia to bases elsewhere but several thousand, mostly associated with Operation Southern Watch, remained. Since Saudi Arabia houses the holiest sites in Islam: Mecca (where the prophet Mohammed was born) and Medina (where he is buried); many Muslims were upset at the U.S. presence. It is believed this is one of, if not the main reason Osama bin Laden called for jihad against the United States. Attacks against American forces and Westerners in the country were few until 1995. After the September 11, 2001 attacks, there was continued world pressure for the Saudi government to crack down on the radical imams preaching anti-American rhetoric in Saudi mosques. These calls grew as it turned out that 15 of the 19 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia. Saudi officials pledged to make efforts to crack down on these imams, yet preaching continued. On November 17, 2000, in central Riyadh at the junction of Oruba/Olaya road, a car bomb killed British engineer Christopher Rodway and injured his wife Jane. The bomb was placed underneath his vehicle and detonated as it approached a traffic signal. The following week on November 22, 2000, in Riyadh, close to the RSAF HQ, a car bomb detonated on a vehicle driven by Briton Mark Payne. Although the driver and his three passengers were injured, all survived the attack. Less than one month later on December 15, 2000, in Al Khobar, a small IED in a juice carton left on the vehicle of British national David Brown exploded as he attempted to remove it. Brown survived but lost his sight and part of his right hand. In March, 2001, a bomb placed in a waste bin outside a Saudi bookstore injured British national Ron Jones. Jones, American Charles Bayar, and Canadian David Soni , all employees of Saudi Basic Industries Corporation ( SABI C), were taken from the hospital and arrested by Saudi authorities. During detention, Jones was subjected to torture to extract a ‘confession’ before being released without charge after 67 days. Unable to work due to their harsh treatment in detention, Jones and Soni left Saudi Arabia soon thereafter. Bayar was held in solitary confinement, was closely interrogated but not tortured, did not sign any confession, and was released after 11 days without charge after the U.S. State Department (through the behind-the-scenes efforts of Bayar’s wife Julia, a former Washington DC lobbyist, which secured the intercession of Bayar’s local U.S. congressman and U.S. Senator Jack Reed (D-RI), a West Point classmate of Bayar’s) issued a formal demarche to the Saudi Government demanding consular access to Bayar. He returned to work at SABIC but left Saudi Arabia without authorization in January 2002 to resume his law practice in New York. Attacks on American and Western European citizens has continued unabated with Saudi misinformation rampant in attempts to cover-up Muslim acts of violence and blame them on westerners. Attacks have included a Sudanese national’s attempt to shoot down a U.S. fighter jet taking off from the Prince Sultan Air Base, attacks on the US consulate in Jeddah, car bombs, assassinations, bombings and shoot-outs with local authorities. Recently, the Saudi’s have arrested many Christians who meet in small house churches.  These people are jailed, tortured, and some are executed.  Saudi law dictates the death penalty for anyone converting to a faith other than Islam. This country, which produces or finances the lion’s share of Islamic terrorists in this world, is our ally in the Middle East.

SCOTLAND: On August 21, 2009, journalist Debbie Schlussel was outraged in writing that one of the masterminds of the bombing of Pan Am flight 103, on December 21, 1988, Abdel Basset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi had been released from prison. Recall that flight 103 was chosen by the Muslims because it had Jewish Americans on board. In fact, the plane was chosen because terrorists knew many Americans would be on board, a good number of them American Jews, with surnames like Cohen and Bernstein. A group of 35 students from Syracuse University were on the flight. Some federal officials apparently knew about the likelihood the plane would be attacked, as they canceled their own reservations on that flight. Yet, not a word of it was breathed to innocent civilians who were sacrificed in jihad and in the U.S. government’s silence about it. The bombing of Pan Am 103 was planned and staged by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command. The attack has a Michigan connection, which betrays the claim that Muslim-Americans haven’t attacked Americans in terrorist attacks. Schlussel stated, “A Muslim drug dealer, Khalid Nazir Jaafar, of Dearbornistan, at the last minute, changed his flight to get on Pan Am 103. It’s believed a bomb inside his Walkman in his gym bag blew up the plane. Jaafar was a Shi’ite whose family came from Hezbollah-stronghold Ba’albek in the Bekaa Valley. That story, however, was covered up and swept under the rug in succeeding years and the trial of Abdel Basset Al-Megrahi, the Libyan intelligence officer also in on the plan.” Also significant is that the last minute booking and ticket change for Jaafar was done by a travel agency owned by Mahmoud “Mike” Younis, whose wife, Dr. Jouhaineh Maleh, is at the center of a Muslim illegal alien Medicaid fraud and birthright citizenship scam in Dearborn, Michigan. Mr. Younis was, not long ago, convicted of defrauding the Department of Education’s job training program, using the same travel agency and a computer school. Mr. Younis and his businesses have been on the radar of federal counterterrorism agents for years. “Also outrageous is that the Dearbornistan family of Jaafar apparently was among those collecting millions in the Libyan settlement. A recent Detroit mainstream media story reported that Michigan’s U.S. Senator Carl Levin was trying to negotiate away from legislation and agreements that said only U.S. citizens could collect the millions from Libya. I believe he was intervening for drug dealer Jaafar’s Muslim parents and family. They live in Michigan, so they are his constituents. The other Michigan families of the victims are U.S. citizens. And, oddly, Levin wouldn’t say for whom he was intervening.  Wonder why?”

SOMALIA: In his column entitled Inside Islam, Somali Pirates and the Islamist Jihad, on April 20, 2009, journalist Joshua E. London reports that, “As the news of the successful US Navy SEALS rescue of Captain Richard Phillips, who was taken hostage by Muslim pirates off the coast of Somalia last week, slides off the headlines into oblivion, we can begin to look more deeply into the matter of piracy off the East African coast. What is clear is that US government is treating the matter as a criminal case because officials have ‘found no direct ties’ between the East African pirates and regional or international terror groups. But in fact, those labeled as mere “criminals” are actually Jihadist Muslim pirates, and they make that clear to anyone who will listen. To begin, Somali pirates do not think of themselves as “pirates,” but instead consider themselves devout Muslims protecting Somalia against the infidel West. As one pirate put it to a Reuters journalist just days ago, “We are Muslims. We are marines, coastguards -- not pirates.” According to a recent report on Radio Garowe, the Puntland community radio station in northern Somalia, Muslim pirates have been praised for “protecting the coast against the enemies of Allah” by Sheikh Mukhtar Robow (“Abu Mansur”), a terrorist leader and spokesman of the radical Islamist and al-Qaeda linked al-Shabaab al-Mujahedeen group (designated by the US State Department as a Global Terrorist Organization). On April 12, Sheikh Hassan Abdullah Hersi al-Turki leader of the al-Shabaab-linked Mu’askar Ras Kamboni (also designated by the US State Department as a terrorist) said on Somali radio: “I can say the pirates are part of the Mujahedeen [religious fighters], because they are in a war with Christian countries who want to misuse the Somali coast.” “According to a Reuters interview last summer with Andrew Mwangura, head of the East African Seafarers’ Assistance Program, “the entire Somali coastline is now under control of the Islamists…According to our information, the money they make from piracy and ransoms goes to support al-Shabaab activities onshore.” In other words, the actions of Muslim pirates off the coast of Somalia help support the larger Jihad taking place in East Africa. Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in his March 19, 2009 audio tape to the people of Somalia praised the efforts of insurgent Somali Jihadist groups, saying that they are engaged in “a war between Islam and the international Crusade,” and he described the Somali Jihadists as “one of the important armies in the Mujahidin Islamic battalion, and are the first line of defense for the Islamic world in its southwestern part.” The transcript of the audio has just been released by the NEFA Foundation.Muslim vs Muslim violence=400-550,000 killed during their Civil War.

SPAIN: The traditional bastion against Muslim aggression since the 15th Century, Spain has all but ceded its nation to Muslim extremists. As noted by journalist James Phillips in his March 16, 2004, column, mounting evidence indicates that Al Qaeda may have been behind the March 11, 2004,  bombings in Madrid (191 dead). Whether this is the case or not, however, it is clear that the bombings contributed greatly to the Socialist Party’s surprise victory at the polls three days later and the election of a new Prime Minister, Socialist Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero. Already, Zapatero has promised to withdraw Spanish troops from duty in Iraq. This is, unfortunately, a political triumph for radical Islamic terrorism and may well embolden Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups to strike similarly in the future.” Phillips notes that after the 2004 bombings, the Spanish government propelled their opposition Socialist Party to an upset victory over the conservative government of Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar, a staunch U.S. ally, in the general elections held three days later. As a result of the bombings, Aznar’s government, which initially sought to lay the blame on Basque separatists who have conducted a terrorist campaign against the Spanish government for more than 20 years, was swept out of office by a voter backlash. “This Spanish retreat will be perceived as a huge political triumph for Al Qaeda and like-minded Islamic radicals -- probably their most important achievement since September 11, 2001. Zapatero’s act of appeasement has handed Osama bin Laden a major victory. This will only encourage further attacks, from Al Qaeda or from other terrorist groups emboldened by the successful operation in Spain, targeting other members of the coalition involved in liberating Iraq from Saddam’s brutal regime. Spain’s cave-in on Iraq after the bombing will particularly heighten the threat of copycat attacks on other countries that have contributed peacekeeping troops to Iraq, such as Britain, Poland, Italy, Ukraine, South Korea, and Japan.” Phillips also noted that a 500-Year War between Al Qaeda and Western ideas, ideals, and societies, and not just with states. The Islamic extremists who support Al Qaeda consider southern Spain to be occupied Muslim land that deserves to be liberated from the “crusaders” who drove out Muslim rulers in 1492. Osama bin Laden’s chief lieutenant, Ayman al Zawahiri, referred to this loss of “Andalusia” in the first Al Qaeda videotape released after September 11, long before Spanish support for the war in Iraq was an issue. The misguided and unfortunate Spanish reaction to the Madrid bombings therefore is likely to pave the way for much more terrorist bloodshed, inside Iraq and throughout the Western world. Winston Churchill once said that: ‘An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.’ It appears that Spain’s new Zapatero government has fed a voracious crocodile a substantial meal that will only enlarge its future appetite.”

SUDAN: 2.6-3 million killed by Muslims in the name of Islam. Presently, Sudanese Muslims are waging a war of jihad against Christians and animists in the southern part of that country, killing thousands, and taking thousands as slaves, who are then sold to the Arab Muslims of the north. Sudan was also the location of the recent “Teddy Bear Jihad”, in which thousands of Sudanese Muslims rioted and called for the execution of a British teacher in Sudan - all for the crime of allowing some little children to name a teddy bear after Mohammed.

SWEDEN: This country has seen an epidemic of sexual assaults upon native-born Swedish women (by Muslim immigrants) in what is being called the “rape jihad”, yet the fault for this behavior always seems to be blamed on the Swedes themselves, for their “racism” and “Islamophobia”.

THAILAND: Since the beginning of the concerted effort by Muslims in the southern provinces to break away, thousands have been killed in the violence. The violence, however, is disturbing because it does not just consist of attacks on the Thai military, or even simple indiscriminate bombings (though those happen as well). In Thailand, Muslim terrorists have made a point of kidnapping and murdering civilians who are of the wrong religion - primarily Buddhists. For instance, on July 24, 2007, two elderly Thais riding on a motorcycle were stopped by armed gunmen, doused with benzene, and lit on fire. The murder of civilians by Muslim “separatists” in Thailand is commonplace, and the previous example is only one of hundreds. Many Muslims who work with or for the Thai government suffer as well, including one Muslim man who was crucified by the terrorists, while his two Buddhist companions were “merely” beheaded.

TURKEY: Turkish Hezbollah is a Sunni terrorist group accused of a series of attacks, including the November 2003 bombings of two synagogues, the British consulate in Istanbul and HSBC bank headquarters that killed 58. A major exporter of terrorism and historical Muslim base, Turkey is more well-known for its atrocities against ethnic Albanians and other non-Muslims than its status as a victim of Islam.

UNITED STATES: An FBI report has shown that between 1993 and 2001, all of the major attacks or attempts against US interests stemmed from militant Islamic jihad except for the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. In 2001 nearly 3,000 people were killed in the massive September 11 attacks organized by al-Qaeda and perpetrated by Saudi nationals, sparking the War on Terror. Former CIA Director Michael Hayden considers homegrown terrorism to be the most dangerous threat and concern faced by American citizens today. As of July 2011, there have been 51 homegrown Muslim jihadist plots or attacks in the United States since the September 11 attacks including the Ft. Hood shootings.

In particular, the continued plight of the Eastern Orthodox Christians living under Islamic Sharia, worldwide, is the most conclusive evidence which shatters the myth that Islam is a tolerant religion. To recite just a few rules of interaction between Muslim and Infidel:

P      They can not pass on the right of a Muslim but, rather, only on the left.

P      They can not testify against a Muslim in a court of law.

P      They can not ride a horse or a camel but only a donkey or a mule.

P      They should wear special costumes to be identified when walking in the streets.

P      They should wear a tag in their neck as prove that they have paid their Taxes (Jizyah).

P      They can not own any weapon to defend themselves.

P      They are not allowed to defend themselves, i.e., if they were beaten by a Muslim, they must accept it gratefully.

P      Religious celebrations or religious icons in public places are not allowed.

P      Their Houses and Shops should not be higher than a Muslim’s.

P      Preaching their beliefs is not allowed, touching the Koran or reading it, is prohibited.

P      They should pay yearly Jizyah (non-Muslim special tax) and, if they forget to pay, Muslims should remind them that they are infidels, subject to the Jizyah and slap them on their necks as a reminder.

P      Their jobs should always be more lowly than a Muslim’s.

P      Children of Muslims are encouraged to throw stones at them when they walk in the streets.

P      They are not allowed to build new churches or restore an old one.

P      A Muslim should not be punished, at all, for killing Non-Muslims.

P      If any of these Laws are broken by a non-Muslim, they are subject to slavery, jail, execution and their wives taken as concubines, and their children as slaves.

In Muslim Genocide of Christians Throughout Middle East, by Khaled Abu Toameh (2010), that author makes the observation that a non-Muslim in a Muslim country is an “endangered species.” In fact, the level of hostility has escalated from mere persecution to outright slaughter. Now it is clear to all that these complaints of genocide were not “Jewish propaganda” but, rather, the truth. The war of genocide against Christians in the Middle East is no longer an “internal affair” but, rather, radical Islam has declared jihad not only against Jews, but also against Christians. In Iraq, Egypt and the Palestinian territories, Christians are being targeted almost on a daily basis by Muslim fundamentalists and secular dictators.

What is in Store for the Rest of Us?

Again, as summed up by frontpagemag.com’s 2011 interview with a confidential Muslim spokesman (who has decried the new Muslim Jihad), there is a concise analysis and threat assessment from this Muslim invasion of eastern and western civilization. Particularly, the experience of modern Malaysia is a preview of coming attractions for the United States and Western Europe (where the Muslims have not yet completely taken over). As the spokesman states: As I grew older, I began to notice differences between what I heard the government say or what was taught in school (as Malaysia was Islamicized), and what was really happening in the world, but I learned to keep such thoughts to myself in order to get along. Then 9-11 happened and it turned the world upside down, my own perception of it in particular. I wanted to be surprised that Muslims had carried out mass murder explicitly in the name of Islam, but I wasn’t. Another shock for me was when I found out that the Muslims — jihadists, Al Qaeda members and others — who planned the attacks in New York and Washington had a big planned meeting right here in Kuala Lumpur (the capital and biggest city in Malaysia) in early 2000. And the conspiracy theories about 9-11, the increased appearance of anti-Semitic diatribes in Malaysian bookshops (one tome by Henry Ford is popular here) were things that I simply could not turn a blind eye to anymore. Lastly, Malaysian terrorist Azahari Husin had his hero’s sendoff near Kuala Lumpur in 2005, and about the same time the Malaysian Christian convert Lina Joy was told by this nation’s highest court that she was not allowed to become a Christian, despite the fact that religious freedom is supposedly guaranteed by Malaysia’s constitution. By then, I could no longer hold back my pent-up disgust and outrage at what was happening.

I don’t want your readers to have the impression that I am now, or ever was, a Muslim. While I am not a Muslim, I have indeed been asked to become one, on more than one occasion and with varying degrees of seriousness. ‘Dawah’, or Islamic prosetylization, is never too far away in Malaysia. Deciding that Islam as an ideology (and not Muslims per se) was my enemy was a personal Rubicon for me, a step that, once taken, could never be retracted. I understood how serious this was, from my own studies of Islam, from my knowledge of what’s happened to other critics of Islam, and from the repeated warnings here in Malaysia regarding ‘insults’ to Islam — i.e. being too truthful about it.  And the pointed Malaysian warnings about being ‘respectful’ of all religions (‘respect’ for Islam is all the government here really cares about) make it very clear that criticism of Islam is a big, big red line that should never be crossed.  Furthermore, in Malaysia it’s quite legal for anyone to be arrested and held indefinitely without charge, trial or access to legal council.  It’s a law called the ‘Internal Security Act’ or ‘ISA’ for short and it’s positively medieval. ISA is one of the reasons that you rarely hear criticism of Islam from anyone in this country, in public and even in private, no matter how outrageous things get...

I live in Malaysia, and Malaysians will typically tell foreigners that all members of all religions are treated ‘equally’ and get along amicably. That’s the image sold overseas, at any rate. The reality is quite different. Islam is the official state religion, so it enjoys all sorts of official and unofficial privileges, such as lavish state-built mosques, massive taxpayer-funded proselytization programs for Muslims (but not for other belief systems), sprawling Government-run Islamic universities, a distinct pro-Islamic and pro-jihad tilt in the state-owned and influenced media, and more. On a more personal level, Muslims in Malaysia have on numerous occasions destroyed churches, sometimes with official backing on the flimsiest of pretexts (like for supposed ‘code violations’). The same has also happened to Hindu and Buddhist temples. Bibles are sometimes seized in carload lots by the (Muslim) authorities on one technicality or another. New church construction is heavily discouraged, and it takes years if not decades for new churches to be approved and built. And they must be built in a ‘low profile’ manner if they are allowed to be built at all.

All of these restrictions and the drip-drip-drip of discrimination, or worse, creates a tense and foreboding atmosphere for Christians. It’s pointless for Christians — who are mostly Indians and Chinese — to petition the Malay (Muslim) government for any sort of redress of grievances, because the police, courts and judges here are all owned and operated by Muslims.  So increasingly, the ‘infidels’ are leaving — permanently.  The same sort of Islamic repression of Christians that has played out in Lebanon, Iraq, Egypt, Pakistan and virtually every other Muslim-ruled country is also playing out here.

Islam is an ideological system which forever cleaves the world into two parts–believers (i.e. Muslims) and the unbelievers (non Muslims), separate and very much unequal. No matter how much Muslims may huff and puff otherwise, unbelievers are never and can never be treated as the equal of any believer...Suffice it to say that violence and intolerance is hard-coded into Islam’s ‘software’; it’s not a ‘bug’, but a feature.  Any honest appraisal of the Koran, Hadith and Sira (Islam’s core texts) will bear this out. In Malaysia, the Muslim-controlled government goes to strenuous lengths to make it appear that this country is a ‘harmonious’ mixture of various belief systems.  The key word is ‘appear’. Malaysia is indeed a mix of different religions, but it is kept ‘harmonious’ only through Islamic coercion — official and otherwise — and the threat (sometimes actual acts) of violence. ‘Harmonious’ also is a code word in Malaysian political discourse for ‘Islam must remain culturally and politically dominant’. Malaysian Muslims are also never willing to state for the record that a Hindu, Buddhist or Christian is the equal of a Muslim.  They cannot — their belief system specifically forbids it, and if a Muslim believes otherwise, he is automatically an apostate — a traitor to Islam.

Malaysia is also becoming more ‘Islamified’ as the years go by — Muslims are become more pious, or at least make more of a show of it more by wearing hijabs, tudongs and other Islamic garb, attending mosque more often, and in other, less obvious but more sinister ways (hatred of America, of Jews and so on). Additionally, and more importantly, the growing Islamification is increasing the numbers of Muslims in Malaysia through procreation, conversion and immigration, and compelling the non Muslims to leave. The departing non-Muslims — mostly Christians, but also Buddhists and Hindus — tend to be the most educated, entrepreneurial and productive Malaysians.  This has the makings of a long term economic catastrophe for Malaysia, if the Muslims and their government could but clear the fog of Islam from their minds and come to honest grips with the problem.  This ‘brain drain’ issue is well known inside Malaysia, but the real causes (Islamic-inspired bigotry, persecution, enforcement of Sharia) are not discussed, or allowed to be discussed openly.

Why is the world silent?  Well, for many of the same reason that the views commonly expressed in FrontPage Magazine are, regrettably, probably not (yet) the views of the majority of Americans. The silence is, as I see it, a combination of many factors: a sincere misunderstanding of Islam, willful blindness, leftist slash Muslim misdirection (‘taqiyya’), and a dash of NIMBY-ism (‘not in my back yard’) thrown in for good measure. Who cares about Christians in Malaysia getting their Bibles seized or their churches bulldozed or blocked from construction?  Certainly not the Europeans — they barely care when Jews and Christians in their own streets are terrorized by Muslim thugs, and Europeans (at least the non Muslim ones) are increasingly turning away from Christianity.

As for the Americans, they and their media seem to care vastly more about, say, Sarah Palin ‘s email, or the reality TV show of the week, or their own economic meltdown, then about a bunch of Christians in a far away corner of Asia. The US Government is hardly better — discussion of Muslim persecution of Christians, which is tantamount to criticizing Islam, is heavily discouraged in US government circles, to the best of my knowledge. Who does that leave? The U.N.? Forget about them — anyone criticizing Islam is not even going to get their foot in the door at Turtle Bay, let alone be heard. The Chinese? The Russians?  Last I checked with Freedom House, those two countries are not exactly beacons of freedom either. So for the foreseeable future, the Christians of Malaysia and critics of Islam everywhere are on their own. Which is something I’ve pretty much known since the beginning.

One part of the European mindset that I have read about is their consistent anti-Semitism, a factor in their thinking that’s appeared at one point or another in virtually every European country and culture and goes back centuries to the medieval era and earlier.  Even an event as immense and horrifying as the Holocaust or ‘Shoah’ only put this attitude into stasis — it didn’t kill it off. Now the level of violence against Jews shows us that the anti-Semitic ghosts of Europe are returning again to haunt us all. And speaking of the Holocaust, remember that Hitler had to have gotten his ideas from somewhere; Vienna around the turn of the century — when and where Hitler spent his youth — was, according to authoritative sources I’ve studied, a veritable cesspool of Jew-hatred. And a few decades later, when Hitler sent European Jewry off to the ovens, or into mass graves, it’s pertinent to remember that the Fuhrer had an awful lot of help from his fellow Europeans, and not just the Germans. From the French to the Poles and beyond, Herr Hitler had a great number of very willing executioners. There is, in fact, a book that discusses this aspect of the Holocaust and goes under that very title.  So Europe’s persecution of the Jews, and Europeans who happily tolerate Muslims doing the same, are in fact a harkening back to a tragic, well-worn and time-tested European tradition.

Europe’s increasingly shabby treatment towards Christians and Christianity is a bit more mystifying, at least on the surface. I think, overall, the situation has less in common with deliberate persecution and more in line with mass apathy. Europe is becoming less devout and Europeans are becoming less pious. In short, they just don’t care as much about conventional religion as much as previous centuries, in particular towards Christianity.  Of course there are localized exceptions — the Poles and their continued devotion towards Catholicism immediately spring to mind. If any religion is popular in Europe nowadays, other than Islam (a political movement pretending to be a religion), it’s Marxism slash environmentalism (a religion pretending to be a political movement). Political correctness and leftist-inspired atheism are much more politically potent in Europe than they are in the US, at least for now, and that could be changing in America as we speak. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the churches of Europe started to empty out at about the same time that mosques started to spring up everywhere across Europe and become filled to overflowing. Islam is taking advantage of the power vacuum, the lack of a strong competing belief system, and of course, the leftist-Marxist PC school of thought is a proven enabler and ally of Islam. All of this added together explains, I believe to a large degree, the very passive European attitude and lack of response to the degradation and growing persecution of Christians in Europe and beyond.

I was raised as a Christian and I’ve held true to what I was taught, although I must admit that I times I’ve had my doubts. One of my ‘beefs’ with many Christians is their relative pacifism in the face of aggression. For example, when I open up to other Christians about what Muslims are doing to other Christians both here in Malaysia and in other Muslim countries, the usual response isn’t outrage, but a sort of dhimmified sadness: “oh how horrible — I shall pray for them.”  And other than that, they do nothing.  I know that Christians are taught to ‘turn the other cheek’ when provoked as this is taught in the Bible, but I also know about the narrative of Christ in the temple with the money changers. Christ wasn’t a wimp, and Christians shouldn’t be either...

My studies of Islam have brought me up close and personal with evil, unspeakable evil that maims and destroys everything standing in its way. I thought 9-11 was the ultimate inhumanity that was possible, with office workers crushed, burned, asphyxiated and flung out of burning sky-scraping towers to their deaths. The past nine years or so have dramatically and forever disabused me of that notion. We know that devout Muslims (I prefer this to calling them ‘radical’ or ‘militant’ Muslims) will stop at absolutely nothing. No barbaric act is too wanton to commit, like gouging out the eyes of women, or deliberating beating very young children, or stabbing infants to death. No wonder so many people, Americans and others, would just prefer to shut it out and gossip about celebrities, watch sports or reality shows, and remain blissfully ignorant of the terrible, ugly realities running loose in our world. But ignorance is not an option anymore, if it ever was, not if the free people of the world want to remain that way.  Nor is it an option if non-Muslims want to retain their equality and human rights. We must not only be educated, but we must also maintain faith in our own Judeo-Christian heritage if we are to survive...

On the negative side, that is to say, favoring Islam, are the forces of mass migration and procreation that threaten to permanently throw demographics wildly out of whack, particularly in Europe. The talented blogging duo over at Gates of Vienna would call this the Camp of the Saints effect, after the work of fiction that prophesied this almost 40 years ago. It’s not only mass migration from across the Mediterranean, but also the number of babies being born to Muslims already in Europe. The most popular baby name in many places in Europe already is ‘Mohammed’. And the fact that non-Muslims in Europe have more or less stopped having children magnifies this troubling demographic trend substantially. Given a few more decades, and these Muslims, who can be relied upon to maintain their pernicious culture in spite of their European surroundings, will be at or near majority status.

The second powerful advantage Islam has is the current Western policy regimen, combined with the unofficial ruling doctrine of ‘Political Correctness’ in both Europe and the US — Islam’s two chief opponents. Muslims, under current laws, are free to move anywhere in North America or Europe, buy property anywhere, and build mosques and madrassas at virtually any location they please (the Ground Zero mosque has proven to be a notable exception). In the US, Islam enjoys undisputed 1st Amendment (‘Freedom of Religion’) constitutional protections. Muslims can and have gained access to trusted positions within corporations and government, including but not limited to the military, intelligence agencies, and law enforcement. Muslims in the West can and do congregate in sizable numbers over large areas. These Muslim areas are invariably transformed into ‘no-go’ areas, de facto Sharia-ruled enclaves off limits to police, and can be found blighting most major urban areas in Europe and increasingly in the US as well (Dearborn et al). The situation in fact in Europe has already deteriorated to the point where Muslims rule virtually entire cities and run riots, unchecked by any infidel authority, such as in Malmö, Sweden. To make matters worse, spineless, opportunist Western politicians play for short term political gains by pandering to Muslims for votes. Political correctness muzzles and mutes much (but not all) opposition to Muslim expansion.

On the positive side of the ledger are the facts that speak to us from history, especially about fascistic movements. History teaches us that totalitarian forces have almost always, eventually, overextended and overreached. Tyranny usually overplays its hand. Remember that Herr Hitler, had he stopped after seizing all of Czechoslovakia in early 1939, could have probably avoided war with the USSR and the Allies, and Nazi Germany could still have still existed up to this day. For another, perhaps more pertinent example, the Palestinian Arabs were offered half of what is now Israel in 1948 from the UN absolutely ‘free of charge’, and a few decades of demographic expansion and immigration after that would have most likely peaceably won all of ‘Palestine’ for the Muslims without firing a shot.  Instead the Arabs, acting on their own Islamic-inspired hatreds, opted for war. More than 60 years of intermittent war and constant terrorism against a small band of Jews has won them nothing, except perhaps the sympathies of the international media, not to mention a lot of Muslims and their leftist friends. And we know full well how dysfunctional Muslim cultures are. Islam and Muslims are very good at growing their numbers and influence, both politically and culturally, especially in the West, but at everything else they are a miserable failure. Societies with psychopathic tendencies writ large are societies that inevitably fail — it’s just a question of when. One can only hope that it’s soon enough.

In spite of ourselves, it is not too late to act. It is merely a question of political will, which of course and as many readers will know all too well, is sadly lacking at this time. The West needs an eloquent, rhetorical powerhouse and nonpareil visionary like Churchill to lead us out of this darkness, and here we are stuck with Barack Hussein Obama . But with a presidential election next year, there’s always hope. As to what should be done beyond winning presidential elections, I think many pundits have already outlined excellent courses of action in a comprehensive fashion (here are some great ideas, and here’s some more). So there’s plenty of awareness out there already as to what needs to be done. Policies and doctrines are not set in stone and need to be changed now, from top to bottom. The current American regime is flatly unwilling to do anything productive or in the best interests of their (non Muslim) constituents, except perhaps by accident. Replacing that regime is, of course, in the hands of American voters.

And Christians need to shed their pacifistic leanings and become a lot more pro-active in their defense. The Vatican needs to stop mouthing pleasantries towards Muslims and understand that Muslims are not and can never be genuine allies of the Catholic Church or of any other group of Christians. Interfaith ‘dialogues’ with Muslims are not only pointless, but dangerous, for they offer a vector for dissembling taqiyya-spouting Muslims to continue confusing and misleading otherwise well-meaning Christians.

The squabbling factions of the West, be they atheists, or Christians, or Jews, or whomever — need to put aside their differences, gather under a big proverbial political tent, and unite against Islamofascism. If the Allies could unite with the Soviet Union against Hitler 70 years ago and be victorious, then we can do something like it again. Sure, it could be well-nigh impossible, but if we don’t, the alternative is extermination.

Islam is nothing more than an ideology, a collection of ideas, and the best way to fight a belief system is with another, superior belief system. Superior ideas are something the West has in spades. But thanks to Political Correctness, the West never argues in favor of its own superior culture. The West has intentionally and wrongly ceded the initiative in the critical war of ideas to Muslims, who are of course never restricted from disseminating the false or imaginary advantages of Islam, Muslim culture, Sharia, etc. The West has intentionally kneecapped itself, and this must stop. 

Islam is NOT a Peaceful Religion

Intolerance, Slaughter, Loot, Arson and Molestation

“Islam stands for Intolerance, Slaughter, Loot, Arson and Molestation” says an author who lived through the Islamification of his country[lxxxix]. Regardless, for the modern American or European, the statement that “Islam is a religion of peace and tolerance” is simply a lie propagated for decades, particularly, since September 11, 2001. Muslim leaders in the United States and other Western nations had to push their efforts at hiding Islam’s true nature into high gear, trying to counterbalance the impact that was made by the sight of Palestinians and other Muslims (some in this very nation) cheering and celebrating the destruction of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Unfortunately, many theologically liberal and compromising people in most of the mainline Christian denominations have gone right along with these attempts at whitewashing Islam’s image, either out of blind ignorance or unthinking sympathy for Mohammed’s religion. Even in many traditionally conservative Protestant churches, pastors have invited false teachers from Islam to present that religion to their congregants, and the image given is invariably that of a peaceful, loving, tender-hearted faith whose members are absolutely appalled at the violence committed by “a few fringe radicals”.

Islam is a religion which was born out of violence, spread through violence, and which is maintained (even today) through violence. Whether by reviewing Islam through the Koran (and its commentaries) or, the manner and methodology by which the “faithful” (liberal, moderate, conservative, or radical) Muslim practices his religion, Islam is violence per se. Though violence towards those of other faiths is certainly not unknown among other of the world’s religions, particularly Christianity in the Dark and Middle Ages, Islam goes further than any other religion in both its holy texts, interpretations and religiously-motivated violence against unbelievers. It is not just a matter of tolerating it or of turning a blind eye. Rather, the Koran and the ahadith support and encourage the faithful (under pain of death) to press violent jihad against non-Muslims. There can be no other logical, objective conclusion.

The model is quite simple: immigrate, refuse to assimilate, form religious enclaves that are actively hostile to the surrounding native populations, commit criminal acts and exploit welfare programs, followed by threatened or actual violence and civil strife when the Muslims are “offended” by the native population who are actually defending themselves. This is all shielded by cries of “racism” and “Islamophobia” that are designed to generate sympathy and the fear of lawsuits or legal prosecution by left-leaning governments against those who challenge this state of affairs. The moderate or liberal Muslim will simply say they are not the radical element of their faith. But, truth be told, the radical furthers the cause of Islam (convert, submit or die) and all Muslims benefit thereby.

At its core, Islam is a religious mission to convert, enslave or annihilate all humanity. All Muslims are religiously obliged to disseminate the Islamic faith throughout the world by whatever means necessary. Infidels who stand in the way, creating obstacles for the da’wa, are blamed for this state of war (jihad). In other words, those who resist Islam cause wars and are responsible for them. Only when Muslim power is weak is “temporary truce” (hudna) allowed (Islamic jurists differ on the definition of “temporary”).” Even modern Islamic authorities from the Indian subcontinent agree with their Middle Eastern and Western brethren on this issue. The division of Islamic Jihad into “offensive” and “defensive” is not permissible. Islamic Jihad is both offensive and defensive at one and the same time. It is offensive because the Muslim party attacks the rule of an opposing ideology, and it is defensive because the Muslim Party is constrained to capture state power in order to protect the principles of Islam in space-time forces. Hence, “defense” is defined as destroying any system not in agreement with Islam. Under this ideology, “defense” then becomes not just an option, but an act of piety. Nu’mani demonstrates this redefinition in his justification of jihad as a noble and spotless act,

Because it is the duty of good Muslims to “liberate” the rest of the world from the tyranny and oppression of their native, non-Islamic political, religious, and philosophical systems, the ends justifies the means. Violence is also the prescribed suggestion for dealing with “hypocrites” - those members of the Islamic community who are insufficiently Islamic in their approach to the religion.[xc] Essentially, whatever force is deemed necessary to induce Muslims who are insufficiently pious to get with the program may be used to coerce them into religious piety and at least outward conformity with the strictures of the Sharia law.

This has long been the mission of Islam. On May 29, 1453, a civilization was wiped out irrevocably by this ideology and the same threat exists today. The Eastern Catholic Coptic Church had left a glorious legacy in learning and in art; it had raised whole countries from barbarism and had given refinement to others; its strength and its intelligence for centuries had been the protection of Christendom. For eleven centuries, Constantinople had been the center of the world of light. The quick brilliance, the interest and the aestheticism of the Greek, the proud stability and the administrative competence of the Roman, the transcendental intensity of the Christian from the East, welded together into a fluid, sensitive mass, were now put to sleep. Constantinople was to now become the seat of brutal force, ignorance, and magnificent tastelessness courtesy of Islam.

After gaining this beach head, the Muslim Turks moved further up into the Balkans and Central Europe until finally being turned back, in their inexorable spread of their poison, at the gates of Vienna in 1683. During their time of domination over the Balkan peoples, the Muslim laid many heavy oppressions upon these conquered peoples. One particularly despicable practice, still hailed by the Koran today, known as devsirme, was that of taking “infidel” children from their parents as slaves. Once every five years, the Muslims would take every Orthodox and Catholic child they could get their hands on from among the unconverted Balkan peoples, and bring them as slaves to the Sultan. The girls usually were destined to serve as concubines (prostitutes) in the harems of Turkish leaders. The boys were forcibly converted to Islam, and then thoroughly indoctrinated in Muslim fanaticism and Turkish nationalism. After their “education” was finished, these were then highly trained in the arts of war and made into warrior-slaves, known as Janissaries. The Janissaries served as the Sultan’s police force and military elite throughout the Ottoman Empire, many of them enforcing his decrees back in the very homelands from which they had been stolen. Ruthless, fanatical and willing to die for their cause, these young men became the prototype of the 21st century Muslim jihadist.

Muslim nastiness towards the conquered peoples of the Balkans still plays a role in the politics of that region today. The Albanians and Bosnians are both Muslim groups whose ancestors originally converted to avoid the child-conscription and religion tax. The Serbs and Croats hate the Bosnians and Albanians with a passion because of the historical legacy of the atrocities that the Turkish overlords perpetrated against their Slavic underlings. The enmity today between the Greeks and Turks derives from the brutality of Muslim rule in Greece, and the barbarity of the Turkish attempts to put down the Greek war for independence (from 1821-1827). We are all aware of the atrocities of the Bosnian War in the 1990’s. 

The Violence of Islam in the Modern Era

If the reader has not gleaned that violence is still very much a tool of the Islamist, observe that it is objectively evident that every place in which the modern Muslim makes up a significant portion of the population, efforts are made to subjugate or drive out all non-Muslims. The only conclusion is that Islam is most certainly NOT the peaceful, tolerant, loving religion which its apologists claim it to be. And, the only peaceful, non-violent Muslims appear to be those who do not take Islam very seriously. Still, the record of Islam itself, as a religio-political system, on violence and forcible conversion is unrivaled in sheer magnitude, even by both 20th-century communist, neo-pagan or ancient European medieval state-religionism with all of its inquisitions, conquistadors, and counter-reformations. The problem is not presented by individual Muslims themselves, but by the Islamic system, and especially its power to brainwash impressionable people into a structure which, when applied literally, encourages them into violence and hatred. Those Muslims who take their religious at its most literal have demonstrated time and again that they do not seek peaceful coexistence, but instead to put the Koranic injunctions to violence and subjugation into practice. This shows us that the problem is with Islam itself, as a system of thought and action.

Even when violence is not a practical option, orthodox Muslims still seek the subjugation of opposing belief systems. As a former Muslim tells us, “Ah,” the scoffer might say, “What about the crusades, or the inquisitions, or the conquistadors and the subjugations of natives all over the world, or even what about the abortion clinic violence?!” Some would posit that the simple answer is that not a single one of these has the least bit to do with “Bible-believing Christianity” ignoring the pogroms of the Protestant Reformation, French Revolution and American Know-Nothings as if they had never happened. Suffice it to say that Islam is a violent religion because of the teachings of the Koran and the ahadith which both, verbatim, dictate that violence. The Muslims who perpetrate the acts of violence and terrorism in this world are those who take these texts the most literally, who try the most scrupulously to live by them and emulate their hero Mohammed. The modern Catholic and Protestant may be judged by the same measure. Even those latter who take a literal approach to the Bible (even the most strident, in their ignorance and superstition) do not conduct Jihad (a Holy War) to attain the after-life or to change the world to their brand of Christianity.

Do fundamentalist, traditionalist or evangelical Catholics or Protestants commit terrorist bombings? Do they shoot infidels and wage holy war? Do they seek to oppress non-believers and submit them to slavery? Jesus said that His kingdom is not of this world and, yet, the Muslim imposes exactly the opposite view. Enough said! The many alleged “atrocities” committed in the name of Catholic Christendom must be judged in the context of their historical era. The Muslim simply continues to live in the 7th-13th century and refuses to move forward. Therefore, the Catholic Church need make no apology to its Protestant brethren, nor anyone else, for the Crusades, Inquisitions, executions and other persecution of heretics. The same can be said for the Protestant inquisitions, witch- burnings,  persecutions or racism. But, we live in the 21st century, ostensibly, living under the rule of rationale, compassionate law. What place is there at the table for the Muslim under his medieval, Sharia law? 

The Catholic Crusades

In fact, it is disingenuous for the Muslim to attempt to use the ancient crusades, in particular, as justification for jihad. The Crusades, first and foremost, were defensive wars fought by Catholic Christians to defend Catholic Europe from the advancing, murderous Muslim fanatic. They were not fought by an expansionistic, imperialistic Christendom, but rather by a Christendom that was at that time shrinking, being slowly, but surely, overwhelmed by the advancing Islamic empires. The crusades were in every way a defensive war. They were the West’s belated response to the Muslim conquest of fully two-thirds of Christendom. While the Arabs were busy, in the seventh through the tenth centuries, winning an opulent and sophisticated empire, Europe was defending itself against outside invaders and then digging out from the mess they left behind. Only in the eleventh century were Europeans able to take much notice of the East. The event that led to the crusades was the Turkish conquest of most of Christian Asia Minor (modern Turkey). The Christian emperor in Constantinople, faced with the loss of half of his empire, appealed for help to the rude but energetic Europeans. He got it. More than he wanted, in fact.

Recall that Pope Urban II did not call the First Crusade until 1095 some 400+ years after the Muslim horde first threatened Christendom. Despite modern laments about medieval colonialism, the crusade’s real purpose was to turn back Muslim conquests and restore formerly Christian lands to Christian control. The entire history of the crusades is one of Western reaction to Muslim advances. The crusades were no more offensive than was the American invasion of Normandy. As it happened, the First Crusade was amazingly, almost miraculously, successful. The crusaders marched hundreds of miles deep into enemy territory and recaptured not only the lost cities of Nicaea and Antioch, but in 1099 Jerusalem itself. Simply put, the Crusades were a response to Muslim aggression. If the Muslims had not waged offensive war and continued in their plans to conquer the known world, the Crusades would never have happened. In a sense, blame for the Crusades lies at the feet of the Muslims themselves. It is doubtful, lacking the impetus provided by Emperor Alexius’ appeal and Pope Urban’s oration, that it would ever have occurred to the feudal nobles of Western Europe to even go adventuring thousands of miles away from home in the first place.

And, what of the Muslim contention that the Bible was somehow an impetus for the Catholic Crusaders to go pillaging across the Levant? Well, there is no real evidence that the Crusaders or those calling for crusade relied on the Bible as justification. For example, when one looks at the actual text of the great Pope Urban II’s call for crusade, at the Church’s Council of Clermont in 1095, we see exactly three references to passages from the Bible: two of them from the Gospel of Matthew, one of them from the Gospel of Luke, and none of them in any way used in the actual call to crusade-all are used to reprove the “Christians” for being blind and careless.

In fact, in Pope Urban II’s speech on November 27, 1095 AD, he discussed Cluniac reforms of the Church, and also extended the excommunication of Philip I of France for his adulterous remarriage to Bertrade of Montfort. And, he spoke for the first time about the problems in the East, as he urged Western Christians to fight against the Muslims who had occupied the Holy Land and were attacking the Eastern Roman Empire, “Freshly quickened by the divine correction, you must apply the strength of your righteousness to another matter which concerns you as well as God. For your brethren who live in the East are in urgent need of your help, and you must hasten to give them the aid which has often been promised them. For, as the most of you have heard, the Turks and Arabs have attacked them and have conquered the territory of Romania (the Greek empire) as far west as the shore of the Mediterranean and the Hellespont, which is called the Arm of St. George. They have occupied more and more of the lands of those Christians, and have overcome them in seven battles. They have killed and captured many, and have destroyed the churches and devastated the empire. If you permit them to continue thus for awhile with impurity, the faithful of God will be much more widely attacked by them. On this account I, or rather the Lord, beseech you as Christ’s heralds to publish this everywhere and to persuade all people of whatever rank, foot-soldiers and knights, poor and rich, to carry aid promptly to those Christians and to destroy that vile race from the lands of our friends.”[xci]

“Let those who have been accustomed unjustly to wage private warfare against the faithful now go against the infidels and end with victory this war which should have been begun long ago. Let those who for a long time, have been robbers, now become knights. Let those who have been fighting against their brothers and relatives now fight in a proper way against the barbarians. Let those who have been serving as mercenaries for small pay now obtain the eternal reward. Let those who have been wearing themselves out in both body and soul now work for a double honor.” Please note that the Pope does not even mention Jerusalem at all but, rather, the Muslim attack against the Byzantine Empire. On the last day of the council, a general call was sent out to the knights and nobles of France to take up the crusade.

Pope Urban’s own letter, addressed to the faithful “waiting in Flanders,” does lament the fact that Turks, in addition to ravaging the “churches of God in the eastern regions,” have seized “the Holy City of Christ, embellished by his passion and resurrection—and blasphemy to say it—have sold her and her churches into abominable slavery.” Yet he does not explicitly call for the re-conquest of Jerusalem. Rather he explicitly calls for the military “liberation” of the Eastern Churches, and appoints Adhemar of Le Puy to lead the Crusade, to set out on the day of the Assumption of Mary, August 15, 1096.

Thus, there is nothing which, in any way, suggests that Pope Urban pointed to the Bible to justify or encourage the crusading. Instead, he lays out the political situation as it existed at that time, and warns that unless the Muslim aggression is stopped, more “Christians” will be conquered and enslaved. A message that Catholic and non-Catholic alike should take to heart in the United States today. 

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