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[Article] As Osama bin Laden noted in 1998, Muslims have an obligation to kill Americans, albeit most Muslims do not accept his argument. "The ruling to kill all Americans and their allies -- civilian and military -- is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it." In addition, there is the belief among radical Islamists that the infidels, namely Christians and Jews, must be forced to submit to Islam or die. "Our struggle is not about land or water," the late Ayatollah Khomeini said in 1980, "it is about bringing by force if necessary, the whole of mankind onto the right path."

I have a problem with arguments that give any countenance to the Islamofascists at all, or any statements such as "(all) Islam is violent, anti-Christian, a religion of rapists," et cetera -- and with comments about Mohammed. We don't need commentary like that -- it's like the barber shop rule, just don't start any religious arguments if you can avoid them.

Rather than conceding, as the quoted passage above seems to do, that Osama and his fellow Wahhabists represent some "true face of Islam," which actually corroborates Bin Laden's propaganda, it should be a punctilious observance for every person engaging Islamofascism to point out that Wahhabists are a tiny minority, and that their inerrantist, literalist interpretations of the Koran are no more authoritative than those of any other Moslem -- that is one of the fundamental precepts of Islam, that there is no priesthood and no person endowed with the right to say what is canon and what is heresy. For a final authority, there is only the Koran (enlarged by some sideworks and commentaries), and its guidance is various. Indonesia was proselytized by Moslems through personal example and personal contact; it was carried forward by Moslem merchants, not warriors, and it was a moderate a peaceful strain of Islam that was propagated through the hitherto mostly Buddhist Indies.

The example of the various Moslem slayers who waged holy war incessantly on the Hindus is by no means incontestably "orthodox" Islam, and we shouldn't be encouraging people to think that it was, or that the Bin Ladens and Abu Aymans, who slaughter men and women, including Moslems, indiscriminately, are somehow the "true heirs" of Mohammed. They aren't, and there are a lot, just a hell of a lot, of Moslems who, if we'd shut up a minute, might be willing to stand up and say so.

Remember that the Mahdi was killed after Omdurman by his own troops, who decided, after that great defeat, that the Mahdi was a false prophet, and shown to be one by the successes of the British against him and them; and that, as a false prophet, he was guilty of shirk, the greatest haraam (wrong, sin) in all of Islam.