Islam, a Religion of Peace®? ( links, blogs, quips, quotes, aggravating pictures ) is located here- click the Picture, and scroll backwards:
Posted on 06/26/2006 11:12:54 PM PDT by Aussie Dasher
Americans and others in the West cannot comprehend why anyone would blow themselves up to kill, as often as not, other Muslims. Even if you were convinced that 72 virgins awaited you in paradise, committing suicide for the purpose of murder is so foreign to the Western mind that it remains, for most, outside the realm of any discussion.
Clearly, though, the West has witnessed and been victimized by a religion and culture for which this is a perfectly acceptable way to wage war and Islam is all about war, the conquering and reduction of an enemy to submission. The very word, Islam, translates as submission.
“Some Crusaders and Zionists, for example, doggedly accuse Islam of being the religion of the sword, claiming that it was spread by the edge of the sword,” wrote Sayyid Qutb in “Basic Principles of the Islamic Worldview” before he was executed by the Egyptian government in 1966 as a member of the Muslim Brotherhood.
“These people forget that Islam, being the last divine path for humanity, has an essential right to establish its own system on earth so that all humanity can enjoy its blessings…Establishing the ‘Islamic system’ to have beneficial sway over all humanity, those who embrace Islam and those who do not, does indeed require Jihad as does the liberty of men to follow their own beliefs.” Qutb is careful to nod in the direction of the Islamic admonition that “there is no compulsion in religion,” but Islam is all about compulsion.
Qutb (1906-1966) was an Egyptian Islamist who wrote extensively about modern civilization and, with absolute certainty, the superiority of an Islamic theocracy to all other faiths and modes of governing on earth. As such, he is widely regarded as the intellectual father of the Islamic revolution that has been in play since the late 1970s and of al Qaeda. His brother, Muhammad Qutb, moved to Saudi Arabia where he became a professor of Islamic Studies and one of his students, an ardent follower of Sayyid Qutb, was Ayman Zawahiri, the mentor of Osama bin Laden.
Thus, we can begin to connect the dots of a religion that fosters a certitude and arrogance that the Western mind cannot comprehend. It is necessary to understand, however, that Islam arrived more than 2,500 years after the existence of Judaism, and 700 years after the spread of Christianity. It was the invention of Muhammad, based on his own spotty knowledge of these earlier religions and, like Muhammad, Qutb’s regard for both is one of utter contempt.
“Judaism,” wrote Qutb, “the religion of the Children of Israel, was polluted with pagan concepts as well as racial arrogance.” Well, so much for the first and oldest monotheistic religion. Modern day Muslims are so befuddled by, not only the continued existence of Judaism, but the fact that Jews have reestablished the nation of Israel, they have waged a relentless effort to exterminate Israel’s Jews.
“Christianity was no better than Judaism,” wrote Qutb. “It was even worse.” Hinduism is dismissed in a paragraph or two and Buddhism isn’t even mentioned. Well, so much for tolerance! Despite the superficial effort to reflect some regard for the prophets that preceded Muhammad, Qutb’s view is that “Islam has served as a correction to all the chaos and confusion, to all the deviations and faults into which all the distorted religions and clashing philosophies have blindly fallen, whether before or after the emergence of Islam.”
By Qutb’s standard, anything anyone believes that is not Islamic is just confusion and deviation. The extraordinary thing about Qutb’s belief is that he clearly possessed a keen intellect. Well schooled in Islam, as a youth he moved to Cairo where he received a Western education between 1929 and 1933 before starting a career as a teacher. The turning point, ironically, was a trip Qutb took to the United States from 1948 to 1950 on a scholarship. He received a master’s degree from the Colorado State College of Education.
His contact with the West radicalized Qutb because, as far as anyone can tell, he was not merely an ascetic, but a celibate who found normal human desires and behavior deeply offensive. He never married. Just about everything in those years of American rejuvenation after WWII was an abomination to Qutb who took time to write his first theoretical work of religious exegesis which was published in 1949. Writing about America he pronounced life there as “primitive” and endlessly shocking.
Clearly, he retreated into Islam as a defense against the real world and, in particular, the dynamic world of the West. The Middle East had been in decline for hundreds of years by then after its so-called golden years of conquest and expansion. Driven from Europe by 878 C.E., suffering the Crusades from 1095 to 1291, and fading under the Ottoman Empire, the Muslims of that region were locked in ignorance, poverty, and oppression.
Anything modern, anything secular, including the rise of Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, the leading proponent of Arab nationalism, was an anathema to Qutb. He was not ignorant of the West, but he was utterly contemptuous of it. Despite his having read widely of Western philosophers and, apparently, science and other topics reflecting the long road to modernity made since the Enlightenment, the only truth to be found anywhere, so far as Qutb was concerned, was in the Koran.
“First and foremost,” wrote Qutb, “the verses of the Koran were revealed in order to establish the correct criteria on which God wishes the concepts of humans as well as their life to be based.” Everything that preceded the Koran was the “accumulated debris; beliefs, concepts, philosophies, myths, thoughts, doubts, superstitions, customs and traditions.”
Prior to Islam, humans were “unable to find certitude.”
The one thing Islam does provide to those born into it and to those who convert to Islam is certitude. And with certitude comes the human affliction of an arrogant belief that no other religion or form of government other than that imposed by Islamic law has any right to exist. The punishment for leaving Islam is death. The enemies of Islam are to be beheaded.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you al Qaeda, Wahhabism, and the Islamic revolution that is your obligation to resist for the sake of all mankind.
Ancient irrationalism that will never tolerate nor be tolerated.
Kill or be killed.
That all enemies should be so clearly understood.
Just about everything in those years of American rejuvenation after WWII was an abomination to Qutb who took time to write his first theoretical work of religious exegesis which was published in 1949. Writing about America he pronounced life there as “primitive” and endlessly shocking.
I had read that Qutb had been horrified by his stay in America, but I didn't realize his visit was that long ago. Think about it: life in post-war America, that period looked back on by ageing leftists as repressive, bourgeois and stifling -- the age of comparative innocence before the vaunted sexual revolution -- is what horrified Qutb. It's not our decadence that so disturbs Islam, it's our freedom.
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The one thing Islam does provide to those born into it and to those who convert to Islam is certitude. And with certitude comes the human affliction of an arrogant belief that no other religion or form of government other than that imposed by Islamic law has any right to exist. The punishment for leaving Islam is death. The enemies of Islam are to be beheaded.
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I don't recognize this author, but he's very "un-PC". Islam is a religion of peace, and the Jihadists are "radical", not the routine, run of the mill, normal Muslims. Everyone knows that to be true, because the U.S. Government and virtually every national and international media outlet states this over and over.
And they do this without substantiation or facts.
As a "person of faith" (i.e. a Christian) and with a passing knowledge about the major tenets of Islam and Islamic doctrine based upon the Quran, I take exception to the idea that the Islamic moral certitude is foreign to most Western minds. It is only "foreign" to most Western secular minds. I can quite understand and accept their certitude.
In fact, I would go so far as to say that if I were a Muslim, I'd be a Jihandists myself. I seek to live my Christian faith, and if the Bible directed Christians to treat "unbelievers" the same way the Quran directs Muslims to treat the dhimmitude, I'd be beheading quite a few liberals in the U.S.A..
But, in fact, my Lord directs me to love my enemies, so He and I have quite a deal to talk about daily as I seek to understand how to love those who reject my Lord, Biblical morality, and in the case of Muslims, my very right to exist.
My point is that the "radical" Islamicists are radical only in the sense that they are actually living their faith, consistent with the Quran. As persons of faith, they put the average "religious" or "moral" Western person to shame. They are willing to sacrifice their lives, their children's lives, and (of course), their wives lives (the least of their "possessions") for the growth and dominance of Islam.
But, Muslims, please excuse me ....
I will die first - no, let me correct that, my enemy will die first before I surrender my life, and my family to their tender mercies. I am willing to resist to the life of the last Muslim on the face of the earth.
Oh..oh. I was "un-PC", too. Yes, I see no distinction between the faithful Muslims who claim to be "peaceful" and the "radical" types who kill wantonly. I will continue to make no distinction until a substantial majority of Muslims distinguish themselves from the "radicals" by their words and deeds. I will trust not one Muslim until I see them renounce major tenets of their faith, until they take the lead in turning in, prosecuting, and punishing those who murder in Islam's name.
But these "peace loving" Muslims will do no more than repeat platitudes, always stressing the "but..." exception which proves the rule, of why the radicals are misunderstood, or they have no choice, or because it's Israel's fault, or ... because of 100 other excuses, "Americans must come to understand why the Jahadists hate them so much..".
No, I will not submit, and I will not call Islam anything other than a religion of hate and terrorism, until Muslims themselves change, and make war no more upon who they consider to be the dhimmitude. Our war is with Islam, the war was declared upon us by Muslims, and the West will either win this war or be forced into submission to sharia law and Islamic tyranny by the sword.
SFS
Islam, a Religion of Peace®? ( links, blogs, quips, quotes, aggravating pictures ) is located here- click the Picture, and scroll backwards:
Actually, the Spainish expelled Muslims and Jews in 1492, the same year they sent Columbus to the New World. The Balkans remained under the Muslim Ottoman empire, in fact the Ottoman army besieged Vienna in the 1680's. The Greeks only gained independence from the Muslims in 1821.
During the run up to the Iraq battle in the Anti-Jihad War, I had to keep telling my "antiwar" friends, that this action was the soft option. If the soft option failed, that wouldn't mean the end of the war, with the US picking up its marbles and coming home. It would mean a wider and bigger war. The only question was and is, how many Muslims will have to be killed before they admit defeat and reform.
If Iraq fails, it will mean IMHO tens of millions of Muslim dead, use of nuclear weapons, the re-expelling of Muslims from Europe, India, the Phillipines, mass conversion of Muslims in Africa and quarantining of what remains of the Muslim world. So, if you are "antiwar", I told my friends, you ought to be backing Bush far more actively than conservatives do. That's the way to save lives, limit world disruption and prevent nuclear war. Did they listen? Hell, no.
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That IS indeed the bottom line. The last 9/11 was a brief "disruptive influence" to most leftist & anti-war Americans. It shook their world view a bit, and at least shut them up for a few months while they reevaluated the important things in their life (i.e. in the words of Bill Clinton and John Kerry, "political viability").
But that did not last long; they were back at it by the 2004 election. The news media seems to have lost every single copy of 9/11 news coverage that shows average Americans hurling themselves off buildings 100 floors up rather than suffer the agony of burning to death. The propaganda war against the war has been in full force since early 2002. (But of course, not a single American soldier's death in "Bush's war" goes uncovered, and re-covered. It's about focus and priorities for the press, reminding American's not of why we are at war, but that we should never have been at war.)
"Hit Bravo" (a.k.a. the "next 9/11") will involve more than one city and a few thousand innocents. It'll likely involved hundreds of thousands or even millions of Americans. The reason the Muslims have not effectively struck America since 9/11, contrary to the opinions of the foolish American left (i.e. that there was never a threat to begin with), is that the Muslims are thinking big. "9/11" and the current war has taught the Muslims that simply killing a few thousand American civilians or troops is something America can tolerate. They won't waste their time or limited resources with another "pin-prick" strike again. The current war should inform us of their resolve; they're not giving up. The Muslims will kill million's of Americans next time they strike on American soil.
After "hit Bravo", all the "anti-war" platitudes and "Bush died; < fill in the blanks here > died" chants will not disuade Americans that their lives and very future are at stake. Muslims in America will be rounded up and put into camps, or deported. Mosques WILL be closed. And the nations that have hosted and supported the terrorists, including Iran, Syria, and Pakistan, but certainly not other Arab countries, will experience Nuclear war first hand on their own soil.
This is because, when there are perhaps a million Americans dead and dying horrible deaths, the news media won't be able to look the other way, and Americans will not forgive or forget the Muslims and their enablers here in the USA, the Democrats and their leftist allies. Pain and death and starvation have an ironic way of focusing a mind on causation, and the American mind will be entirely focused at eliminating the cause of their suffering.
They will know that the cause wasn't George Bush, after all.
SFS
Islam is violence cloaked in the guise of a "religion". It is an ideology, not a religion. It is the only "religion" on the planet, that has no vision of peaceful relations with other peoples (and dominance over them doesn't count). Summed up perfectly by Rushdie....The Satanic Verses.
Bingo!
Then it is like excrement, whose only benefit would be derived from its removal..
"O you who believe! do not take the Jews and the Christians for friends; they are friends of each other; and whoever amongst you takes for them a friend, then surely he is one of them; surely Allah does not guide the unjust people." - Koran, Surah V: 51
"And the Jews say: Uzair is the son of Allah; and the Christians say: The Messiah is the son of Allah; these are the words of their mouths; they imitate the saying of those who disbelieved before; may Allah destroy them; how they are turned away!" - Koran, Surah IX:30
"Praise be to Allah, who revealed the Book, controls the clouds, defeats factionalism, and says in His Book: 'But when the forbidden months are past, then fight and slay the pagans wherever ye find them, seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem (of war)'; and peace be upon our Prophet, Muhammad Bin-'Abdallah, who said: I have been sent with the sword between my hands to ensure that no one but Allah is worshipped, Allah who put my livelihood under the shadow of my spear and who inflicts humiliation and scorn on those who disobey my orders." - Shaykh Usamah Bin-Muhammad Bin-Ladin, “Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders,” World Islamic Front Statement, 23 February 1998.
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