Posted on 05/26/2013 11:53:42 PM PDT by Bratch
Author’s note: This was originally published in Dec. 2011 in Front Page Magazine and it was the most popular piece I’ve written until this piece of mine. I’m a cartoonist, so the only essays I write are ones that I cannot express in any other way but words, and here- in light of the latest Jihad attack in London, and the latest “Islam vs “Islamism”” debate going on- is what I think is my most comprehensive piece on Islam, Muslims & Jihad.
My name is Bosch and I’m a recovered Muslim.
That is, if Muslims don’t kill me for leaving Islam, which it requires them to do. That’s just one of the reasons I’ve been writing and drawing against Islam and its Jihad for a number of years now. But fortunately for us, Islam hasn’t been able to make every Muslim its slave, just as Nazism wasn’t able to turn every German into a Nazi. So there is Islam and there are Muslims. Muslims who take Islam seriously are at war with us and Muslims who don’t aren’t.
But that doesn’t mean we should consider these reluctant Muslims allies against Jihad. I’ve been around Muslims my entire life and most of them truly don’t care about Islam. The problem I have with many of these essentially non-Muslim Muslims, especially in the middle of this war being waged on us by their more consistent co-religionists, is that they give the enemy cover. They force us to play a game of Muslim Roulette since we can’t tell which Muslim is going to blow himself up until he does. And their indifference about the evil being committed in the name of their religion is a big reason why their reputation is where it is.
So while I understand that most Muslims are not at war with us, they’ve proven in their silence and inaction against jihad that they’re not on our side either, and there’s nothing we can say or do to change that. We just have to finally accept it and stop expecting them to come around, while doing our best to kill those who are trying to kill us.
Another problem with Muslims who aren’t very Muslim is that they lead some among us to conclude that they must be practicing a more enlightened form of Islam. They’re not. They’re “practicing” life in non-Muslim countries, where they are free to live as they choose. But their “Islam” is not the Islam. There’s no separate ideology apart from Islam that’s being practiced by these Muslims in name only, there’s no such thing as “Western Islam”.
Non-observant Muslims are not our problem, but neither are they the solution to our problem. Our problem is Islam and its most consistent practitioners. There is nothing in Islam that stays the hand of Muslims who want to kill non-Muslims. If an individual Muslim is personally peaceful, it’s not because of Islam, it’s because of his individual choice, which is why I often say that your average Muslim is morally superior to Mohammad, to their own religion. The very rare Muslim who helps us against Jihad is acting against his religion, but that doesn’t stop some among us from thinking that his existence somehow means that he represents more than himself.
The only reason we’re talking about Islam is because it doesn’t mean peace. Islam wasn’t hijacked by a “small minority of extremists” on 9/11, it was hijacked by a very small minority of moderates whose embarrassment in being associated with such an immoderate religion leads them to engage in moderate truth telling about it, proving their irrelevance as allies.
In addition to these politically active moderates, when you see well-assimilated Muslims in the West, you’re not seeing Islam in action, you’re seeing individuals living up to the old adage, when in Rome, do as the Romans do. They’re essentially post-Islamic Muslims who have rejected Islamic values and have embraced Western ones. But since the process of their assimilation was implicit – as it happened naturally by their exposure to Western, i.e., pro-life, values – both Muslims and non-Muslims alike prefer to generously give Islam some credit for it. But a good Muslim, by our standards is a bad Muslim by Islamic standards. Objectively good human beings, who identify themselves as Muslim, give Islam a good face, one far better then it deserves. This only gives us a false impression about what it is we’re facing, with just another excuse not to face it. And this leads to our acceptance into our culture of stealth jihadists who have figured out how to say what we want to hear, while they scheme behind the scenes to further Islamize the West.
In the name of distinguishing the enemy from Muslims who mean us no harm, far too many Western commentators have avoided using the name “Islam” for the enemy’s ideology, and instead have decided to create their very own terms for the threat we’re facing, terms that are alien to the enemy. Terms such as:
Islamic Fundamentalism.
Islamic Extremism.
Totalitarian Islam.
Islamofascism.
Islamonazism.
Political Islam.
Bin Ladenism.
Radical Islam.
Militant Islam.
Islamism.
Jihadism.
We didn’t use terms such as “Radical Nazism”, “Extremist Shinto” and “Militant Communism” in the past. “Militant Islam”, Political Islam”, etc., are redundant terms. Our pretending otherwise has proven disastrous. Thousands of American lives, both civilian and military, have been sacrificed because of policies predicated on the myth that “Islam means peace.” We didn’t try to reform Shinto or Nazism during World War II; the major changes in those cultures took place only after we thoroughly de-militarized them.
And it’s no accident that Western analysts of Islam who are most informed about Islam are also most critical of it, while those least informed are least critical. But then there are those who, in their study of Islam, have become so enamored with their subject that, instead of sticking to what Islam is, they often write about what it isn’t, what they hope it might be. They seem preoccupied with doing their part to save Islam from those who have allegedly corrupted it.
The Muslim world is where the true meaning of Islam can be found in practice. Islam – not any alleged deviant form of it – means misogyny, censorship, anti-Semitism, homophobia, wife-beatings, beheadings, honor killings, pedophilia/“child marriages”, murdering infidels, etc. This is evil, and Islam sanctions every bit of it, but we’ve been told that we must respect “one of the world’s great religions” because it’s a religion. Following 9/11, the only thing George W. Bush knew about Islam was that it was a religion, and that apparently was a good enough reason for him to exonerate it as he did. And his advisor on Islam, David Forte, told Bush exactly what he wanted to hear, that “Nothing this evil could come from religion.” But 9/11 did come from a religion. Whatever else 9/11 was, it was an act of faith.
And Bush saying “Islam is peace” shortly after 9/11 gave the enemy a gift they couldn’t have foreseen. Here was the one man who was charged to defend America from their attack and here he was defending the very ideology that motivated the attackers. Honesty is the best policy in general, and when it comes to war, it’s a moral imperative to find out the truth, to tell the truth and to act on the truth, no matter what sacred cow is killed in the process. And so a big part of why nearly 3,000 victims of jihad on 9/11 haven’t been avenged is because of respect for religion, even for a religion that calls for our destruction.
Muslims who really care about Islam are part of an organized effort to spread Islam, and I sometimes refer to this collective effort by Muslims as “Organized Islam.” No matter the means involved, Muslims working towards a more Islamic world want the same thing the jihadists want. This organized effort includes Mosques, Muslim organizations, Muslim individuals writing books, blog posts, etc. And they all invariably engage in anti-Western, Anti-Israeli propaganda, at the very least.
I often hear that we should be working with the Muslim world. Working towards what? As Ayn Rand writes, “In any collaboration between two men (or two groups) who hold different basic principles, it is the more evil or irrational one who wins.” Any time we spend “working” with a culture that calls for our destruction, we are working towards our own destruction, consciously or not.
While it’s true that jihadists don’t represent most Muslims, they do represent Islam. But then why don’t most Muslims engage in jihad? Like in any culture, heroes are a small minority, and that goes for Islamic culture as well. The jihadists are Islam’s heroes; they are the ones most dedicated to following Allah’s commands and they’re celebrated in the Muslim world for it. They are also the only ones to whom Islam guarantees paradise. And their rarity was made even clearer when we learned that only the pilots of 9/11 knew it was a suicide mission. Our enemy knows that it’s tough to get even hardcore Muslims to sacrifice their lives for Islam, but they don’t want us to know that. Just as they don’t want us to know that behind their boast that they love death is the fact that they hate life.
And while Muslims who blow themselves up in order to kill non-Muslims are a small minority, Muslims who would explicitly condemn them are an even smaller minority. And while I think that Muslims are mere sheep to their Jihadist wolves, there are also too many Muslim cheerleaders for jihad. How many Muslims celebrated 9/11? Far too many. Even in my own lax Muslim upbringing in America, there was an omnipresent anti-Semitism and misogyny. Some members of my family admired Adolph Hitler, who I refer to as “Islam’s Favorite Infidel.” Regarding misogyny, the birth of a girl became a day of mourning for Muslim women in my family; they understood the suffering this girl would endure under Islam, even in America.
Though we say we’ve been at war for over ten years, we haven’t even begun to fight the war the way we should be fighting it. And those calling for a change within Islam during this war would be surprised at how much Islam can be changed through an honest war on our behalf. You can’t make a violent religion like Islam non-violent by argument, only by greater retaliatory force against state sponsors of jihad terrorism.
The future of Islam and the well-being of Muslims is said to be of importance to us. Post – 9/11, the defense of our culture, our values, our very lives has been optional, but our defense of Islam has been absolute. It began with Bush’s “Islam is peace” and it continues with Obama, who said in his Submission Speech in Egypt in 2009, in front of members of The Muslim Brotherhood, “I consider it part of my responsibility as president of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.” If only he felt the same about America.
We can’t be both for Islam and for ourselves. This enemy is fully on their own side and fully against us and they’ve made themselves believe that they’re the good guys and that we’re the bad guys, and our actions have done nothing but turn their hatred of us into an ever-deepening contempt. Before we see the enemy for what it is, we need to see ourselves for what we are. Only then can we, with full moral conviction, make them pay for what they’ve done and move us towards victory.
Our problem is not “Islamophobia”, but Islamophilia. It is this uncritical, uninformed, absolute defense of Islam by Western elites after 9/11 that I refer to as Islamgate. It’s a scandal for the ages that few involved would ever admit to being part of.
I care about the truth. I care about Western Civilization. I care about myself, my loved ones and my friends. I care about Iife. And that’s why I don’t care about Islam.
Our altruistic concern for the future and well being of the Muslim world has come at the expense of American lives and treasure. We’ve placed the well being of “The Muslim World” above our own self-defense. We’ve placed today’s Big Lie, “Islam means peace”, above the truth we need to act on. We’ve placed the lives of Muslim civilians above the lives of our soldiers, placing them in absolutely unnecessary danger in order to protect innocent (or even guilty) civilians. Our Rules of Engagement might as well be renamed the Golden Rules of Engagement, as our soldiers have been forced to treat the enemy the way we’d like to be treated. And the enemy takes full advantage of that, as they do of all of the policies our morally vain politicians have concocted. We need to shift the focus onto our own well-being at the enemy’s expense for a change.
We’ve tried everything since 9/11 except real war. War is the answer to Jihad.
So who cares about Islam? Muslims, Jihadists, Islamophiles, Leftists who naturally side with anti-American ideologies, guilt-ridden fellow travelers who think America is usually in the wrong, and religionists who believe any religion is better than none. But since Leftists and Islamophiles usually know very little about Islam, who truly cares about Islam? Those who are at war with us.
In the end, I care about Islam and the Muslim world as much as the Muslim world cares about America and the West. This is war. We can’t be on both sides. I’m not rooting for Islam or the Muslim world.
I’m rooting for us.
Plus it iS lies, the lies of a power mad Pedophile named Muhammad who at the age of 53 married a 6 year old girl named Aisha. Ask Muslims why did he marry a 6 year old girl. I go to forums and watch Muslims go crazy with hate against me lol as I tell them this and other things.
Oh yes the Muslim will smile to y our face mention anything like this truth about Islam and the Muslim will turn into a beast .just do this from the safety of the Internet !
Plus it iS lies, the lies of a power mad Pedophile named Muhammad who at the age of 53 married a 6 year old girl named Aisha. Ask Muslims why did he marry a 6 year old girl. I go to forums and watch Muslims go crazy with hate against me lol as I tell them this and other things.
Oh yes the Muslim will smile to your face mention anything like this truth about Islam and the Muslim will turn into a beast .just do this from the safety of the Internet !
IMHO, there is something going on deeper than Islam.
I concur with the article, a great read, but it doesn’t explain the behavior of so many Christians and Jews who only identify Islamic terrorism with extreme criminal minorities of the Muslim community.
It’s as though they all are on the same side in antiChristian thinking.
I’ve wondered if there isn’t a significant amount of overt spiritual warfare ongoing, with overt demon possession, which we don’t recognize.
IMHO, it’s completely irrational, but something is driving these people in their lunatic rage.
Islam is a war plan.
“Hello my name is Bosch and I’m a recovering distributor cap”
Down south you won’t find many Christians pollyanna about Islam
I fart in the direction of Mecca 12 times a day.
Pinging myself for later reading.
Great piece, a keeper. Other past keepers to bear in like mind include this one which, seemingly having disappeared from the web, is retained by our FR:
An extract:
The rule is, "every gun should be treated as if it were loaded." What is the meaning of this rule? An unloaded gun is merely a heavy blunt object and as much a weapon as a baseball bat, table leg or tire iron. An unloaded gun retains the same properties as any heavy, oddly shaped piece of metal, and could be used as a paperweight, doorstop or crude hammer. Yet place a cartridge into the gun and it becomes an all new different object with inherited and unique characteristics.
Where as an unloaded gun is at best a crude weapon, a loaded gun is an effective deadly weapon, lethal with one shot. A loaded weapon can kill a loved one, an innocent, cause damage, or terrify those in its presence. Because a loaded gun is so powerful, and wields such creditable force, all guns should be treated with the same respect as if it were loaded, that is, until cleared. Guns shouldn't be left around children or any individual unknowledgeable of such an instrument. Guns are prohibited from being around certain people and banned from certain areas and buildings.
Knowing this rule, all Muslims and Arabs should be treated as if they were terrorists, until checked and cleared. A Muslim that is not a terrorist is simply a human being, capable of feelings and desires. Wanting nothing more than to live and be happy. A human being like any other, able to make his own decisions and strive to live a successful and fruitful life. The non-terrorist could be an architect, doctor, lawyer, ditch digger or burger flipper. The non-terrorist is a human being that may not be entirely content with the way things are, but for the most part accepts the world and lives within the laws. The non-terrorist as any human being chooses to enact change through a civilized method and procedure. Yet, if a bullet of Jihad and hatred is inserted into a Muslim then a very different being is created, a being that ceases to be human and becomes a terrorist.
The Muslim terrorist is lethal weapon, deadly with one explosion. Terrorists strike fear into the masses, and is a vehicle of death and sorrow. Muslims have destroyed buses, pizzerias, naval ships, embassies and skyscrapers. These same terrorists, highjack airliners, and kill Olympic athletes. They blow up nightclubs, military barracks, mosques, synagogues, desecrate burial sites, and randomly kill women, men, young and old. These terrorists kill anyone who does not completely agree their ideology, and destroys anything that may be an obstacle to his hate filled movement. Possessing such power of destruction makes a terrorist a serious concern. Because Muslims have been the most successful and prolific of all terrorists, all Muslims should be treated as terrorists, until proven otherwise.
Until checked and cleared, all Muslims should be kept away from Jews, Israel, mass transportation, media outlets, political bodies, and governing councils. It is all to well known that those safety measures are not in place. Tenacity and sure will alone has not made Arab Muslims effective terrorists. Arabs are cowards, and are absent a backbone. One Arab Muslim man will not fight one Jew, nor will two Arab Muslims fight two Jews however, a pack of 10 Arab Muslims will gang up on one Black Hatter, or on one Jewish girl. This absence of a backbone necessitates a need for support, of which they do not simply gain from themselves but gain from the media, left-wing organizations and the international body politic.
Powerful writing...
bump for later
Agree, but this...
"We’ve tried everything since 9/11 except real war. War is the answer to Jihad."
...is utter nonsense. War is not the answer, freedom is. Economic freedom. OUR economic freedom. Lift the regulations from our energy industry and Islam will lose its juice very quickly.
"We've tried everything" except unleashing our energy resources.
Bump for later
You darn skippy we Southerners are wary about Islam. Must be them Bibles & AR-15s we’re always totin’ about (semi-sarc).
There’s a mosque in our city. The local muzzies stay vewy vewy quiet. We have huge guns shows every couple months it seems like. No muzzies attend although no one would bother them if they did. Churches are everywhere you look & since a mosque is basically a training compound with weapons storage, the muzzies can’t help but think the same about our churches (and synagogues) and they must feel very outnumbered.
Muzzies refuse to assimilate generally but around here that also means being tactically isolated. Not good when one is surrounded by heavily armed rednecks who are Iraq vets or know those who are.
The only ones I’ve met who have such tendencies have been RCC.
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