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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Muhammad</title>
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		<title>Ten Ways the Mafia and Islam Are Similar</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/raymond-ibrahim/ten-ways-the-mafia-and-islam-are-similar/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=ten-ways-the-mafia-and-islam-are-similar</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 09 Dec 2014 05:18:28 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Raymond Ibrahim]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[godfather]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[MAFIA]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[Welcome to the clan. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/GF.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-246961" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/GF-437x350.jpg" alt="GF" width="287" height="230" /></a><em>Note: The following article was published on</em><em> </em><a href="http://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/2014/12/05/10-ways-the-mafia-and-islam-are-similar/?singlepage=true"><em>PJ Media</em></a><em> </em><em>where it is supplemented with clips from various mafia-related movies like</em><em> </em><em>The Godfather <em>to help demonstrate the ten similarities.  Portions of this article were earlier serialized on</em> </em><a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/author/raymond-ibrahim/"><em>FrontPage Magazine</em></a><em>. </em></p>
<p>During <a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/other-matters/ben-affleck-portrait-of-islams-clueless-apologetics/">a debate on HBO’s <em>Real Time</em></a> last October, host Bill Maher declared that Islam is “the only religion that acts like the mafia, that will f***ing kill you if you say the wrong thing, draw the wrong picture, or write the wrong book.”</p>
<p>Maher was apparently referring to Islam’s “blasphemy” laws, which ban on pain of death any “insult”—as found in a statement, a picture, a book—to Islam and especially its prophet, Muhammad.</p>
<p>While Maher has been criticized for his “Islamophobic” assertion, he and others may be surprised to learn that the similarities between Islam and the mafia far exceed punishing those who say, draw, or write “the wrong thing.”</p>
<p>In what follows, we will examine a number of these similarities.</p>
<p>We will begin by looking at the relationship between Allah, his messenger Muhammad, and the Muslims, and note several parallels with the relationship between the godfather, his underboss, and the mafia.</p>
<p>Next, we will examine the clannish nature of the mafia and compare it to Islam’s tribalism, especially in the context of the Islamic doctrine “Loyalty and Enmity.” For example, in both Islam and the mafia, members who wish to break away, to “apostatize,” are killed.</p>
<p>We will consider how the mafia and Islam have both historically profited from the “protection” racket: Islam has demanded <em>jizya</em> from non-Muslims under its authority/territory and the mafia has demanded <em>pizzo</em> from people that fall under its jurisdiction.</p>
<p>Finally, we will consider what accounts for these many similarities between Islam and the mafia, including from an historical perspective.</p>
<p><strong>1. Allah and Muhammad/Godfather and Underboss </strong></p>
<p>The <em>padrino</em> of larger mafia organizations and families—literally, the “godfather” or “boss of bosses”—has absolute control over his subordinates and is often greatly feared by them for his ruthlessness. He has an “underboss,” a right-hand man who issues his orders and enforces his will. The godfather himself is often inaccessible; mafia members need to go through the underboss or other high ranking associates.</p>
<p>Compare this with the relationship between Allah and his “messenger” Muhammad (in Arabic, Muhammad is most commonly referred to as <em>al-rasul</em>, “the messenger”). Unlike the Judeo-Christian God—a personal God, a Father, that according to Christ is to be communed with directly (Matt 6:9)—Islam’s god, Allah, is unreachable, unknowable, untouchable. Like the godfather, he is inaccessible.   His orders are revealed by his messenger, Muhammad.</p>
<p>If the Judeo-Christian God calls on the faithful to “come now, let us reason together” (Isaiah 1:18), Allah says “Do not ask questions about things that, if made known to you, would only pain you” (Koran 5:101). Just follow orders.</p>
<p><strong>2. A “Piece of the Action” </strong></p>
<p>The godfather and his underboss always get a “piece of the action”—a “cut”—of all spoils acquired by their subordinates.</p>
<p>So do Allah and his messenger, Muhammad. Koran 8:41 informs Muslims that “one-fifth of all war-booty you acquire goes to Allah and the messenger” (followed by Muhammad’s family and finally the needy).</p>
<p><strong>3. Assassinations </strong></p>
<p>The godfather, through his underboss, regularly sends mafia men to make “hits”—to assassinate—those deemed enemies of the family.</p>
<p>So did Allah and his messenger. One <a href="http://www.sahih-bukhari.com/Pages/Bukhari_5_59.php">example</a>:  A non-Muslim poet, <a href="http://wikiislam.net/wiki/Islam_Undressed:_Muhammad%E2%80%99s_Actions,_Speaking_Louder_than_Words#The_Murder_of_Kab_Ashraf">Ka‘b ibn Ashraf</a>, insulted Muhammad, prompting the latter to exclaim, “Who will kill this man who has hurt Allah and his messenger?” A young Muslim named Ibn Maslama volunteered on condition that to get close enough to assassinate Ka‘b he be allowed to lie to the poet.</p>
<p>Allah’s messenger <a href="http://www.sacred-texts.com/isl/bukhari/bh4/bh4_274.htm">agreed</a>. Ibn Maslama traveled to Ka‘b and began to denigrate Islam and Muhammad until his disaffection became so convincing that the poet took him into his confidence. Soon thereafter, Ibn Maslama appeared with another Muslim and, while Ka‘b’s guard was down, slaughtered the poet, bringing his head to Muhammad to the usual triumphant cries of “Allahu Akbar!”</p>
<p><strong>4. Circumstance is Everything</strong></p>
<p>While the mafia adheres to a general code of conduct, the godfather issues more fluid orders according to circumstances.</p>
<p>This is reminiscent of the entire “revelation” of the Koran, where later verses/commands contradict earlier verses/commands, depending on circumstances (known in Islamic jurisprudence as <em>al-nāsikh wal-mansūkh</em>, or the <a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/islam/islamic-jihad-and-the-doctrine-of-abrogation/">doctrine of abrogation</a>).</p>
<p>Thus, whereas Allah supposedly told the prophet that “there is no compulsion in religion” (Koran 2:256), <a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/from-the-arab-world/how-circumstance-dictates-islamic-behavior/">once the messenger grew strong enough</a>, Allah issued new revelations calling for all-out war/jihad till Islam became supreme (Koran 8:39, 9:5, 9:29, etc.).</p>
<p>While other religions and scriptures may have contradictions, only Islam rationalizes them through abrogation—that is, by giving prominence to later verses which are seen as the “latest” decision of the deity.</p>
<p><strong>5. Clan Loyalty </strong></p>
<p>Loyalty is fundamental in the mafia. Following elaborate rituals of blood oaths, mafia members are expected to maintain absolute loyalty to the family, on pain of death.</p>
<p>Similarly, mafia members are expected always to be available for the family—“<a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7086716.stm">even if your wife is about to give birth</a>,” as one of the mafia’s “ten commandments” puts it—and to defend the godfather and his honor, even if it costs their lives.</p>
<p>Compare this to the widespread violence and upheavals that occur whenever Allah or his prophet is offended—whenever non-Muslim “infidels” blaspheme them. Or, as Bill Maher put it: “Its’ the only religion that acts like the mafia, that will f***ing kill you if you say the wrong thing, draw the wrong picture, or write the wrong book.”</p>
<p>Islam’s “Loyalty and Enmity” doctrine (<a href="http://quranicverse99.tripod.com/islamicways/id15.html"><em>al-wala’ wa’l bara’</em></a>)—which calls on Muslims to be loyal to one another even if they dislike each other—is especially illustrative. Koran 9:71 declares that “The believing [Muslim] men and believing [Muslim] women are allies of one another” (see also 8:72-75). And according to <a href="http://www.usc.edu/schools/college/crcc/engagement/resources/texts/muslim/hadith/muslim/032.smt.html#032.6219">Muhammad</a>, “A Muslim is the brother of a Muslim. He neither oppresses him nor humiliates him nor looks down upon him…. All things of a Muslim are inviolable for his brother in faith: his blood, his wealth, and his honor”—precisely those three things that mafia members respect among each other.   This is why Muslims like U.S. Army Major Nidal Hassan, whose “<a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/islam/nidal-hasan-and-fort-hood/">worst nightmare</a>” was to be deployed to fight fellow Muslims, often lash out.)</p>
<p><strong>6. Death to Traitors </strong></p>
<p>Once a fledging mafia member takes the oath of loyalty to the mafia—including the Omertà code of silence and secrecy—trying to leave the “family” is seen as a betrayal and punishable by death.   Any family member, great or small, is given authority to kill the traitor, the “turncoat.”</p>
<p>Compare this to Islam. To be born to a Muslim father immediately makes the newborn a Muslim—there are no oaths to be taken, much less any choice in the matter.   And, according to Islamic law, if born Muslims at any point in their lives choose to leave Islam, they are deemed “apostates”—traitors—and punished including by death.   Any zealous Muslim, not just the authorities, is justified in killing the apostate (hence why Muslim families that kill apostate children are rarely if ever prosecuted).</p>
<p>In the <a href="http://www.usc.edu/org/cmje/religious-texts/hadith/bukhari/084-sbt.php">words</a> of Muhammad—the messenger (“underboss”) of Allah (“godfather”): “Whoever leaves his Islamic faith, kill him.”</p>
<p><strong>7. Distrust and Dislike of “Outsiders”</strong></p>
<p>Aside from loyalty to the family, mafia members are also expected not to befriend or freely associate with “outsiders”—who by nature are not to be trusted, as they are not of the “family”—unless such a “friendship” helps advance the family’s position.</p>
<p>Similarly, the second half of the doctrine of Loyalty and Enmity—the enmity (<em>al-bara’</em>)—calls on Muslims to maintain distance from and bear enmity for all non-Muslims, or “infidels.”</p>
<p>Thus Koran 5:51 warns Muslims against “taking the Jews and Christians as friends and allies … whoever among you takes them for friends and allies, he is surely one of them.” According to the mainstream Islamic exegesis of al-Tabari, Koran 5:51 means that the Muslim who “allies with them [non-Muslims] and enables them against the believers, that same one is a member of their faith and community,” that is, a defector, an apostate, an enemy.</p>
<p>Similar scriptures include Koran 4:89, 5:54, 6:40, 9:23, and 58:22; the latter simply states that true Muslims do not befriend non-Muslims—“even if they be their fathers, sons, brothers, or kin.” Koran 60:1 declares, “O you who believe! Do not take my enemy and your enemy [non-believers] for friends: would you offer them love while they deny what has come to you of the truth [i.e., while they deny Islam]?” And Koran 4:144 declares “O you who believe! Do not take the infidels as allies instead of the believers. Do you wish to give Allah [“godfather”] a clear case against yourselves?”</p>
<p><strong>8. Deception and Dissimulation </strong></p>
<p>As mentioned, close relations to non-mafia individuals that prove advantageous to the family (for example, collaboration with a “crooked cop”) are permissible—as long as the mafia keeps a safe distance, keeps the outsider at arm’s length.</p>
<p>Compare this to Koran 3:28 which commands “believers not to take infidels for friends and allies instead of believers… unless you but guard yourselves against them, taking precautions.” According to the standard Koran commentary of Tabari, “taking precautions” means:</p>
<blockquote><p>If you [Muslims] are under their [non-Muslims’] authority, fearing for yourselves, behave loyally to them with your tongue while harboring inner animosity for them … [but know that] Allah has forbidden believers from being friendly or on intimate terms with the infidels rather than other believers—except when infidels are above them [in authority]. Should that be the case, let them <em>act friendly</em> towards them while preserving their religion.</p></blockquote>
<p>After interpreting Koran 3:28 as meaning that Muslims may “protect” themselves “through outward show” when under non-Muslim authority, Ibn Kathir, perhaps Islam’s most celebrated exegete, quotes Islam’s prophet (“underboss”) saying: “Truly, we smile to the faces of some people, while our hearts curse them.”</p>
<p>Similarly, a few years ago, Sheikh Muhammad Hassan—a leading Salafi cleric in Egypt—<a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/from-the-arab-world/sharias-sinister-smiles/">asserted on live television</a> that, while Muslims should never smile to the faces of non-Muslims, they should smile, however insincerely, if so doing helps empower Islam, especially in the context of <em>da‘wa</em>.</p>
<p>The idea of hating “outsiders” is apparently so ingrained in Islam that another leading Salafi cleric, Dr. Yasser al-Burhami, insists that, while Muslim men may marry Christian and Jewish women, <a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/islam/the-ultimate-source-of-islamic-hate-for-infidels/">they must hate them in their heart</a>—and show them that they hate them in the hopes that they convert to the “family” of Islam.</p>
<p>(For more on the doctrine of “Loyalty and Enmity,” including references to the exegetical sources quoted above, see al-Qaeda leader Dr. Ayman Zawahiri’s comprehensive treatise by that name in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Qaeda-Reader-Essential-Organization/dp/076792262X/ref=rec_dp_0"><em>The Al Qaeda Reader</em></a>, pgs. 63-115.)</p>
<p><strong>9. “An Offer You Can’t Refuse”</strong></p>
<p>Although the novel-turned-movie, <em>The Godfather</em>, is fictitious, it also captures much of the mafia’s modus operandi. Consider, for example, that most famous of lines—“<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SeldwfOwuL8&amp;spfreload=10">I’m going to make him an offer he can’t refuse</a>”—spoken by the Godfather to one of his “godsons,” an aspiring actor and singer. After being turned down by a studio director for a role that he desperately wanted, the godson turned to his Godfather for aid.</p>
<p>As the movie progresses, it becomes clear that the offer that can’t be refused consists of nothing less than violence and death threats: after the Godfather’s messenger to the director asking that the actor be given the role is again rejected, the director awakens the next morning to find the bloodied and decapitated head of his favorite stallion in bed with him. The godson subsequently gets the movie role.</p>
<p>Throughout the context of the entire <em>Godfather</em> trilogy (which captures well the mafia’s approach to business) making someone “an offer they can’t refuse” means “do as I say or suffer the consequences,” possibly death.</p>
<p>Compare this to Islam’s threefold choice. On Muhammad’s <a href="http://www.usc.edu/org/cmje/religious-texts/hadith/bukhari/002-sbt.php#001.002.025">orders</a>, whenever Muslims conquer a territory in the name of Islam, its non-Muslim inhabitants are given three choices: 1) convert to Islam (“join the family”), 2) keep your religious identity but pay tribute (<em>jizya</em>, see below) and live as an “outsider,” a subjugated <em>dhimmi</em> or 3) execution.</p>
<p>Throughout history, converting to Islam has been an “offer” that countless non-Muslims could not refuse. In fact, this “offer” is responsible for transforming much of the Middle East and North Africa, which were Christian-majority in the 7<sup>th</sup> century when the jihad burst forth from Arabia, into the “Muslim world.”</p>
<p>And this <a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/islam/western-ignorance-of-the-conditions-of-omar/">offer is still alive and well today</a>. For example, several older and disabled Christians who were not able to join the exodus out of Islamic State controlled territories <a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/muslim-persecution-of-christians/world-ignores-christian-exodus-from-islamic-world/">opted to convert to Islam rather than die</a>.</p>
<p>Like the mafia, then, Islam’s offer to conquered non-Muslims (“outsiders”) is basically “join our ‘family,’ help us and we will help you; refuse and we hurt you.”</p>
<p><strong>10. The “Protection” Racket</strong></p>
<p>Once the mafia takes over a territory, one of the primary ways it profits is by collecting “protection money” from its inhabitants. While the protection racket has several aspects, one in particular is akin to an Islamic practice: coercing people in the mafia’s territory to pay money for “protection,” ostensibly against outside elements; in fact, the protection bought is from the mafia itself—that is, extortion money, or <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizzo_(extortion)"><em>pizzo</em></a>.   Potential “clients” who refuse to pay for the mafia’s “protection” often have their property vandalized and are routinely threatened and harassed.</p>
<p>Compare the collection of <em>pizzo</em> with the Islamic concept of <em>jizya</em>: The word <em>jizya</em> appears in Koran 9:29: “Fight those among the People of the Book [Christians and Jews] who do not believe in Allah nor the Last Day, nor forbid what Allah and his Messenger have forbidden, nor embrace the religion of truth, <em>until they pay the jizya with willing submission and feel themselves subdued</em> (emphasis added).”</p>
<p>In the <a href="http://www.usc.edu/org/cmje/religious-texts/hadith/muslim/019-smt.php#019.4294">hadith</a>, the Messenger of Allah, Muhammad—in our analogy, the “underboss”—regularly calls on Muslims to demand <em>jizya</em> from non-Muslims:  “If they refuse to accept Islam,” said the prophet, “demand from them the <em>jizya</em>. If they agree to pay, accept it from them and hold off your hands. If they refuse to pay <em>jizya</em>, seek Allah’s help and fight them.”</p>
<p>The root meaning of the Arabic word “jizya” is simply to “repay” or “recompense,” basically to “compensate” for something.  According to the <em>Hans Wehr Dictionary</em>, the standard Arabic-English dictionary, <em>jizya</em> is something that “takes the place” of something else, or “serves instead.”</p>
<p>Simply put, conquered non-Muslims were to <em>purchase their lives</em><em>,</em> which were otherwise forfeit to their Muslim conquerors, with money.  As one medieval jurist succinctly puts it, “their lives and their possessions are only protected by reason of payment of <em>jizya</em>” (<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1621570258/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;creativeASIN=1621570258&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=uhurnetw-20"><em>Crucified Again</em></a>, p. 22).</p>
<p>And to top it off, just as the mafia rationalizes its collection of “protection money” by portraying it as money that buys mafia protection against “outsiders”—when, as mentioned, the money/tribute serves only to protect the client from the mafia itself—so too do <a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/islam/islamic-jizya-protection-from-whom/">Islam’s apologists portray the collection of jizya</a> as money meant to buy Muslim protection from outsiders, when in fact the money/jizya buys protection from Muslims themselves.</p>
<p><strong>Conclusion: Mafia—What’s In a Word?</strong></p>
<p>What accounts for all these similarities between Islam and the mafia? One clue is found in the fact that the very word “mafia,”which means “hostility to the law, boldness,” is derived from an Arabic word, <a href="http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/mafia?s=t"><em>mahya</em></a>, which in translation means “bragging, boasting, bravado, and swaggering.”</p>
<p>This etymology is a reminder that Sicily, birthplace of the mafia, was under Arab/Islamic domination for over 200 years. Aside from a borrowed etymology, could some of the mafia’s modus operandi also have been borrowed from Islam? Isolated on their island, could native Sicilians have co-opted the techniques of social controls that they had lived under and learned from their former overlords—albeit without their Islamic veneer?</p>
<p>The mafia is not the only historical example of a non-Muslim criminal organization to be influenced by Islam. For example, the Thuggees — whence we get the word “thug” — were a brotherhood of allied bandits and assassins who waylaid and savagely murdered travelers in India, often by first feigning friendship. Although they were later associated with the Hindu cult of Kali, the original Thuggees were all Muslim. As late as the 19<sup>th</sup> century, a large number of Thuggees captured and convicted by the British were Muslim.</p>
<p>The similarities are clear: Along with assassinating his opponents, including, as seen, through treachery, Muhammad also personally engaged in banditry, ransacking the caravans of enemy tribes.</p>
<p>And if the words “mafia” and “thug” have Arabic/Islamic etymologies, the words “assassinate” and “assassin” are derived from a Medieval Islamic sect: the <a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/from-the-arab-world/islamic-assassination-silencing-freedom-fighters/"><em>Hashashin</em></a>, who pioneered the use of political assassination—with <a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/islam/was-marco-polo-an-islamophobe/">promises of a hedonistic paradise</a> for the assassin who almost certainly died—in the name of Islam.</p>
<p>At any rate, when HBO personality Bill Maher recently proclaimed that Islam is “the only religion that acts like the mafia, that will f***ing kill you if you say the wrong thing, draw the wrong picture, or write the wrong book,” he was barely touching on the similarities between the mafia and other criminal organizations, and Islam.</p>
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		<title>Lifting the Veil &#8212; on The Glazov Gang</title>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 27 Nov 2014 05:05:54 +0000</pubDate>
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		<description><![CDATA[Scholar of Islam I.Q. Al-Rassooli reveals the true faces of Muhammad and Islam.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/lv.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-246190" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/lv-450x253.jpg" alt="lv" width="276" height="155" /></a><strong><strong>[<a href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf">Subscribe</a></strong><strong> to <em>The Glazov Gang</em> and </strong><strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang">LIKE</a></strong><strong> it on </strong><strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang">Facebook.]</a></strong></strong></p>
<p>This week&#8217;s <em>Glazov Gang</em> was joined by <strong>I.Q. Al-Rassooli,</strong> a scholar of Islam who was born in Iraq. He is the author of the trilogy, “<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Lifting-Veil-Faces-Muhammad-Islam/dp/1434392023"><em>Lifting the Veil: The True Faces of Muhammad and Islam</em></a>.” The book is based on his YouTube series, &#8220;<em>Idiot’s Guide to Islam</em>.&#8221;</p>
<p style="text-align: left;">Mr. Al-Rassooli joined the show to discuss <strong>Lifting the Veil</strong>, analyzing the true faces of Muhammad and Islam. The discussion occurred within the context of Mr. Al-Rassooli&#8217;s focus on the question: “<strong>Is Allah the Same as the God of the Bible?</strong>”</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/2J-tLLrbkSo" width="460" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p>Don&#8217;t miss this week&#8217;s second episode with<strong> Daniel Greenfield, </strong>a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He writes the blog, “<a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/the-point/">The Point</a>,” on Frontpagemag.com.</p>
<p>Daniel came on the show to discuss <span id="fbPhotoSnowliftCaption" class="fbPhotosPhotoCaption" tabindex="0" data-ft="{&quot;tn&quot;:&quot;K&quot;}"><span class="hasCaption"><strong>Obama&#8217;s Fantasies about Un-Islamic Jihad</strong>, analyzing the Radical-in-Chief&#8217;s responses to the Jerusalem synagogue massacre, the Islamic State&#8217;s beheading of Peter Kassig, and much, much more:</span></span></p>
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<p style="text-align: left;"><strong><br />
<strong>To watch previous <em>Glazov Gang</em> episodes, </strong><a href="http://jamieglazov.com/"><strong>Click Here</strong></a><strong>.</strong></strong></p>
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		<title>Is Allah the Same as the God of the Bible? &#8212; on The Glazov Gang</title>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 24 Nov 2014 05:00:39 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Frontpagemag.com]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Scholar of Islam I.Q. Al-Rassooli lifts the veil and reveals the true faces of Muhammad and Islam.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/ar1.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-246013" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/ar1-450x282.jpg" alt="ar" width="288" height="180" /></a><strong><strong>[<a href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf">Subscribe</a></strong><strong> to <em>The Glazov Gang</em> and </strong><strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang">LIKE</a></strong><strong> it on </strong><strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang">Facebook.]</a></strong></strong></p>
<p>This week&#8217;s <em>Glazov Gang</em> was joined by <strong>I.Q. Al-Rassooli,</strong> a scholar of Islam who was born in Iraq. He is the author of the trilogy, “<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Lifting-Veil-Faces-Muhammad-Islam/dp/1434392023"><em>Lifting the Veil: The True Faces of Muhammad and Islam</em></a>.” The book is based on his YouTube series, &#8220;<em>Idiot’s Guide to Islam</em>.&#8221;</p>
<p style="text-align: left;">Mr. Al-Rassooli joined the show to discuss<strong> “Is Allah the Same as the God of the Bible?”</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/2J-tLLrbkSo" width="460" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p>Don&#8217;t miss this week&#8217;s second episode with<strong> Daniel Greenfield, </strong>a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He writes the blog, “<a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/the-point/">The Point</a>,” on Frontpagemag.com.</p>
<p>Daniel came on the show to discuss <span id="fbPhotoSnowliftCaption" class="fbPhotosPhotoCaption" tabindex="0" data-ft="{&quot;tn&quot;:&quot;K&quot;}"><span class="hasCaption"><strong>Obama&#8217;s Fantasies about Un-Islamic Jihad</strong>, analyzing the Radical-in-Chief&#8217;s responses to the Jerusalem synagogue massacre, the Islamic State&#8217;s beheading of Peter Kassig, and much, much more:</span></span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/28J1kYbaqbc" width="460" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><strong><br />
<strong>To watch previous <em>Glazov Gang</em> episodes, </strong><a href="http://jamieglazov.com/"><strong>Click Here</strong></a><strong>.</strong></strong></p>
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		<title>Remembering the Battle of Tours</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/mark-tapson/remembering-the-battle-of-tours/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=remembering-the-battle-of-tours</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 10 Oct 2014 04:18:14 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Mark Tapson]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[The anniversary of one of the most important battles in history.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/bot.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-242789" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/bot.jpg" alt="bot" width="249" height="203" /></a>The month of October marks the anniversary of an epic event that unfortunately is no longer widely known but which nonetheless shaped the future of the Western world, and which may still hold inspiration for the West today.</p>
<p>After the death of the Muslim prophet Muhammad in 632, Islam spread like a bloody tide throughout the Arabian peninsula, north to the Caspian Sea and east through Persia and beyond, westward through Egypt and across North Africa all the way to the Atlantic Ocean. From there it crossed the Straits of Gibraltar and consumed all of the Iberian peninsula, or al-Andalus as the Saracens called it. In a mere one hundred years, Muhammad’s aggressive legacy was an empire larger than Rome’s had ever been.</p>
<p>By 732 that fallen Roman empire had devolved into a patchwork of warring barbarian tribes. When Abd-ar-Rahman, the governor of al-Andalus, crossed the Pyrenees with the world’s most successful fighting force and began sweeping through the south of what would become France toward Paris, there was no nation, no central power, no professional army capable of stopping them.</p>
<p>No army except one – led by the Frankish duke Charles, the eventual grandfather of Charlemagne. His infantrymen, as Victor Davis Hanson puts it in a fascinating chapter of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Carnage-Culture-Landmark-Battles-Western/dp/0385720386/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1286949193&amp;sr=1-1"><em>Carnage and Culture</em></a>, were “hardened veterans of nearly twenty years of constant combat against a variety of Frankish, German, and Islamic enemies.” Hanson writes that the Roman legions had crumbled “because of the dearth of free citizens who were willing to fight for their own freedom and the values of their civilization.” But Charles had spirited, free warriors under his command who <em>were</em> willing.</p>
<p>Sometime in October (the exact date is disputed), on the road between Poitiers and Tours (and so it is sometimes called the Battle of Poitiers) less than 175 miles from Paris, Abd-ar-Rahman arrayed his cavalry against Charles’ solid block of Frankish footsoldiers, which at 30,000 was by some estimates half the size of the Arab and Berber army (Hanson speculates that the armies were more evenly matched).</p>
<p>The opposing forces sized each other up for a full week. And then on Saturday morning Abd-ar-Rahman ordered the charge. But his cavalry, which counted on speed, mobility, and terror to defeat dying empires and undisciplined tribes, could not splinter the better-trained and better-armed Frankish phalanx. At the end of the day’s carnage, both sides regrouped for the next day’s assault.</p>
<p>But at dawn, Charles and his men discovered that the Muslim army had vanished, leaving the booty stolen from ransacked churches behind, as well as 10,000 of their dead – including Abd-ar-Rahman himself. It was not the last Muslim incursion into Europe, but it was the beginning of the end.</p>
<p>Some contemporary historians downplay the magnitude of the Muslim threat, claiming that Abd-ar-Rahman’s force was only a raiding party. They minimize the significance of the battle’s outcome, too; at least <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Gods-Crucible-Making-Europe-570-1215/dp/0393333566/ref=pd_sim_b_27">one historian even claims</a> that Europe would have been better off if Islam <em>had</em> conquered it. But Hanson notes that “most of the renowned historians of the 18<sup>th</sup> and 19<sup>th</sup> centuries… saw Poitiers as a landmark battle that signaled the high-water mark of Islamic advance into Europe.” Edward Creasey included it among his <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Fifteen-Decisive-Battles-World/dp/B000KU9BBO/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1287994745&amp;sr=1-2"><em>The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World</em></a>. Many believe that if Charles – whom the Pope afterward dubbed Martel, or “the Hammer” – had not stopped Abd-ar-Rahman at Tours, there would have been nothing to prevent Europe from ultimately becoming Islamic. Edward Gibbon called Charles “the savior of Christendom” and wrote in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/History-Decline-Empire-Penguin-Classics/dp/0140437649/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1287994860&amp;sr=1-1"><em>The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire</em></a> in 1776 that if not for Charles’ victory, “perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford.”</p>
<p>If only Gibbon could see Oxford now. Not only <em>is</em> the interpretation of the Koran taught there, but <a href="http://www.oxcis.ac.uk/">Islam thrives in Oxford</a>, thanks partly to the patronage of dhimmi Prince Charles. In his essay “<a href="http://www.ijtihad.org/islamox.htm">Islam in Oxford</a>,” <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2010/06/28/voice-of-hate/">faux moderate</a> Muslim scholar Muqtadar Khan writes smugly that “Gibbon would have been surprised to learn the lesson that military defeats do not stop the advance of civilizations and the globalization of Islam is unimpeded by the material and military weaknesses of the Muslim world.”</p>
<p>Apart from his dubious suggestion that Islam has anything to do with the advance of civilization, Khan is right. Today the Islamic invasion of Europe and the rest of the West is of the demographic, not military, sort. The continent faces an immigration crisis from at least one generation of young Muslims, many of whom not only are willfully unassimilated, but who are waging cultural and physical aggression against their hosts, establishing parallel communities ruled by sharia and “no-go” zones of violence toward infidels. “Nothing can stop the spread of Islam,” <a href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/2010/10/-reza-delivered-a-whitewashed.html">insists Islamic apologist Reza Aslan</a>. “There are those who would try, but it simply will not happen. Absolutely nothing can stop the spread of Islam.”</p>
<p>But Charles Martel begged to differ in 732. The tide was turned back then, and if necessary it can be turned back again, by new Martels. The conflict is different now – it’s far from being as straightforward and elemental as two armies facing off – and so those new Martels won’t necessarily be soldiers. They will also be culture warriors and activists and ordinary citizens willing to put themselves on the front lines against this new incursion. We need “free citizens willing to fight for their own freedom and the values of their civilization” – as Charles Martel and his warriors once were.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p><em>Don&#8217;t miss Shillman Journalism Fellow <strong>Mark Tapson</strong> on this week&#8217;s <strong>Glazov Gang</strong> discussing<strong> Fighting the Culture War</strong>:</em></p>
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		<title>Beheading Infidels: How Allah ‘Heals the Hearts of Believers’</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/raymond-ibrahim/beheading-infidels-how-allah-heals-the-hearts-of-believers/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=beheading-infidels-how-allah-heals-the-hearts-of-believers</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 12 Sep 2014 04:42:46 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Raymond Ibrahim]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[The Islamic State traces its most gory and sadistic practices straight to Allah and Muhammad.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/taliban-sword-11052007.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-240748" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/taliban-sword-11052007.jpg" alt="taliban-sword-11052007" width="282" height="229" /></a>To understand why the Islamic State not only decapitates its “infidel” captives, but also mutilates and mocks their corpses—and all to sadistic laughter—one need only turn to the Koran and deeds of Islamic prophet Muhammad.</p>
<p>The Koran exhorts believers to “Fight them [those who oppose Islam], Allah will torment them with your hands, humiliate them, empower you over them, and heal the hearts of the believers, removing the rage from their hearts” (Koran 9:14-15).</p>
<p>As usual, to understand the significance of any Koran verse, one must turn to the <i>sira</i> and <i>hadith</i>—the biography and anecdotes of Muhammad, respectively—for context.</p>
<p>Thus we come to the following account concerning the slaughter of ‘Amr bin Hisham, a pagan Arab chieftain originally  known as “Abu Hakim” (Father of Wisdom) until Muhammad dubbed him “Abu Jahl” (Father of Stupidity) for his staunch opposition to Islam.</p>
<p>After ‘Amr was mortally wounded by a new convert to Islam during the Battle of Badr, Abdullah ibn Mas‘ud, a close companion of Muhammad, saw the “infidel” chieftain collapsed on the ground.  So he went to him and started abusing him.  Among other things, Abdullah grabbed and pulled ‘Amr’s beard and stood in triumph on the dying man’s chest.</p>
<p>According to <i>Al-Bidaya wa Al-Nihaya</i> (“The Beginning and the End”), Ibn Kathir’s authoritiative history of Islam, “<span style="color: #0433ff;">After</span> that, he [Abdullah] cut his [‘Amr’s] head off and bore it till he placed it between the hands of the Prophet. <i>Thus did Allah heal the hearts of the believers with it</i>.”</p>
<p>This, then, is the true significance of Koran 9:14-15: “Fight them, Allah will torment them with your hands [mortally wounding and eventually decapitating ‘Amr], humiliate them [pulling his beard], empower you over them [standing atop him], and heal the hearts of the believers, removing the rage from their hearts [at the sight of his decapitated head].”</p>
<p>The logic here is that, pious Muslims are so full of zeal for Allah’s cause that the only way their inflamed hearts can be at rest is to see those who oppose Allah and his prophet utterly crushed—humiliated, mutilated, decapitated.  Then the hearts of the believers can be at ease and “healed.”</p>
<p>This is surely one of the reasons behind the Islamic State’s dissemination of gory videos and pictures of its victims: the new “caliphate” is trying to heal the hearts of every believer inflamed for the cause of Allah.</p>
<p>If this sounds too farfetched, consider the following picture of a decapitated “infidel” from the Islamic State’s websites.  The Arabic caption to the left says “healing for hearts”—a clear reference to the aforementioned Koran verse:</p>
<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/unnamed1.png"><img class="size-medium wp-image-240734 aligncenter" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/unnamed1-450x258.png" alt="unnamed1" width="450" height="258" /></a></p>
<p>Koran 96:15-16 also alludes to the fate of ‘Amr and offers more context applicable to the Islamic State: “No! If he does not desist, we will surely drag him by the forelock—a lying, sinning forelock.”</p>
<p>According to al-Alusi’s <i>tafsir</i>, or exegesis, after Abdullah placed his foot on the dying foe of Islam, ‘Amr opened his eyes and recognized him.  The once proud chieftain lamented that he was being killed by a common “goat herder,” to which Abdullah replied, “Islam elevates and nothing is elevated above it.”  He then sheared his head off.  “But he could not carry it, so he made holes in the ears and put thread through them and dragged the head to the prophet.  Then Gabriel, peace be upon him, came laughing and saying, “O prophet, you got an ear and an ear—and the head between for a bonus!”</p>
<p>Based, then, on the treatment of ‘Amr bin Hisham (AKA “Abu Jahl”) as recorded in Islam’s core texts—Koran, hadith, sira, and tafsirs—all sadistic acts being carried out by the Islamic State were in fact committed by the earliest Muslims and all to the complete approval of Muhammad (and apparently the “angel” Gabriel, too).  They include:</p>
<p>•Beheadings and mutilations (e.g., holes in ears of ‘Amr)</p>
<p>•Humiliation and gestures of triumph (feet on chest of fallen victim, dragging his body, or head, on the ground)</p>
<p>•Laughter, mockery, and celebration (for the hearts of the believers are now “healed”)</p>
<p>Indeed, along with the “healing for hearts” image above, consider some other pictures taken from the Islamic State’s websites and how well they conform to the above accounts describing the slaughter of ‘Amr#:</p>
<p>Note how in the following four pictures, to demonstrate that the enemies of Islam have been brought low, as Koran 9:14-15 promised, Islamic State members make it a point to place their feet atop their fallen corpses, most of which were first decapitated.  Note also how the ubiquitous black flag of Islam is always raised above the fallen “infidels”—a reminder that “Islam elevates and nothing is elevated above it,” as Abdullah told ‘Amr, with his foot on his chest, before beheading him.</p>
<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/unnamed2.jpg"><img class="size-medium wp-image-240735 aligncenter" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/unnamed2-450x271.jpg" alt="unnamed2" width="450" height="271" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/unnamed31.jpg"><img class="size-medium wp-image-240739 aligncenter" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/unnamed31-450x274.jpg" alt="unnamed3" width="450" height="274" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/unnamed4.jpg"><img class="size-medium wp-image-240740 aligncenter" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/unnamed4-450x241.jpg" alt="unnamed4" width="450" height="241" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/unnamed5.jpg"><img class="size-medium wp-image-240741 aligncenter" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/unnamed5-450x301.jpg" alt="unnamed5" width="450" height="301" /></a></p>
<p>Note the jocularity in the following picture—reminiscent of the “angel” Gabriel laughing and joking about the mutilated head of ‘Amr.  (If Allah’s angel finds such human carnage amusing, shouldn’t Allah’s jihadi servants as well?)</p>
<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/unnamed9.jpg"><img class="size-medium wp-image-240742 aligncenter" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/unnamed9-262x350.jpg" alt="unnamed9" width="262" height="350" /></a></p>
<p>The following picture is reminiscent of how ‘Amr’s head was treated: mutilated and dragged on the ground.  In this case, it is a decapitated body that is being degraded:</p>
<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/unnamed8.jpg"><img class="size-medium wp-image-240743 aligncenter" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/unnamed8-450x315.jpg" alt="unnamed8" width="450" height="315" /></a></p>
<p>The next two pictures are of especial interest because they actually use the relatively arcane Arabic word <i>haz </i>(bottom left-hand corner), which literally means “to make an incision,” to describe the beheading of Islam’s enemies.  The standard Arabic word for “cut” generally used to describe a beheading is <i>qata‘</i>.  That the word used (<i>haz</i>) is the same word found in the early jihad literature is no coincidence and indicative of the source of inspiration: Islam’s scriptures.</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/unnamed6.jpg"><img class="size-medium wp-image-240744 aligncenter" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/unnamed6-450x259.jpg" alt="unnamed6" width="450" height="259" /></a></p>
<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/unnamed7.jpg"><img class="size-medium wp-image-240745 aligncenter" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/unnamed7-450x248.jpg" alt="unnamed7" width="450" height="248" /></a></p>
<p>In short, not only are the members of the Islamic State closely patterning themselves after Muhammad—whom Koran 33:21 exhorts believers to emulate in all ways—but even in the most sadistic of details are they finding support in their prophet.</p>
<p>Nor should it come as any surprise that Muslims are aware of these accounts from early Islamic history.  After all, the near hagiographic Battle of Badr, including the story of ‘Amr’s slaughter, is routinely glorified worldwide in mosque sermons, on Islamic satellite stations, and in Islamic texts.  It is a source of great pride.</p>
<p>Thus when young Muslims express their anger and frustration at the state of affairs of the Islamic world, their clerics council them to go to the jihad in Iraq and Syria and decapitate themselves an infidel—which, according to the Koran, should “heal their hearts.”</p>
<p>(Perhaps that’s why one former British rock star and convert to Islam <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2739006/Revealed-How-middle-aged-mother-two-Kent-used-girl-rock-band-reinvented-jihadi-threatening-behead-Christians-blunt-knife.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">is so eager to decapitate Christians</span></a>?  Perhap that’s why a jihadi savagely pulled out and <a href="http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2013/05/13/303319/syria-rebel-cuts-eats-soldiers-heart/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">bit into the heart</span></a> of a fallen Syrian soldier—to heal his own heart by sating his rage against Allah’s “enemies”?)</p>
<p>Such Muslims join the jihad, and not only do they decapitate, but they mutilate, humiliate, and laugh at the disgraced enemies of Allah—in perfect emulation of the Islamic glory/gory stories they grew up on.</p>
<p>This is the true cult of jihad which few non-Muslims can begin to comprehend—and little wonder, considering that their political leaders, professors, and media continue to babble foolishly about how Islam is the “religion of peace.”</p>
<p><em>Don&#8217;t miss <strong>Raymond Ibrahim</strong> on <strong>The Glazov Gang</strong> discussing</em><span id="eow-title" class="watch-title long-title " dir="ltr" title="The Glazov Gang-Raymond Ibrahim on ISIS's Islamic Inspirations."><em><strong> ISIS&#8217;s Islamic Inspirations</strong>:</em> </span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/bFkGgNsqQ_4" width="460" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
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		<title>The Islamic Tactic of Terror and Lure</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/nonie-darwish/the-islamic-tactic-of-terror-and-lure/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-islamic-tactic-of-terror-and-lure</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 30 Jun 2014 04:50:28 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Nonie Darwish]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[lure]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Muhammad]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[taqiyya]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Terror]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=235206</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A look at a Muslim doctrine that employs two polar opposite weapons against unbelievers. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/taqiyya.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-235227" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/taqiyya.jpg" alt="taqiyya" width="307" height="215" /></a>There is more bad news for moderate Muslims who deny any connection between Islam and terror and who insist on convincing the West that no one should interpret Quranic commandments to kill, behead, torture, terrorize, humiliate, belittle and never befriend the non-believer, as violent.</p>
<p>As I was watching an <a href="http://aljazeera.net/programs/religionandlife/2008/5/11/%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AF%D8%B9%D9%88%D8%A9-%D8%A8%D9%8A%D9%86-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AA%D8%B1%D8%BA%D9%8A%D8%A8-%D9%88%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AA%D8%B1%D9%87%D9%8A%D8%A8">Arabic Aljazeerah TV show</a>, which did not have a date, called “Sharia and Hayaa,” meaning Islamic law and life, the topic was “Dawaa Baina Al Tarhib Wal Targhib,” Arabic for “Preaching between Terror and Lure.” The word &#8220;dawaa&#8221; means preaching or spreading Islam. &#8220;Tarhib&#8221; is derived from the word &#8220;irhab&#8221; or terror, and &#8220;tarhib&#8221; means to instill terror. Incidentally, the Quran encourages Muslims to “instill terror through the hearts of unbelievers.” The word &#8220;targhib&#8221; means luring or making something attractive. I am sure Islamic apologists will dispute the interpretation since they never admit that the word &#8220;kill&#8221; in the Quran means &#8220;kill&#8221; anyway.</p>
<p>&#8220;Tarhib Wal TarghibI&#8221; is an Islamic doctrine that the West and many Muslims are unfamiliar with but that demonstrates yet another clear connection between Islam and terror. This doctrine promotes the use of two extreme tools to bring people and nations to submit to Islam. Such polar opposite and extreme techniques penetrate Islamic society from top to bottom; they are encouraged in child rearing, in the relationship between men and women, leaders and citizens, mosque preachers and the congregation, Arab media and the public, and even between Islamic nations and the West &#8212; the nations they wish to conquer or lure to Islam.</p>
<p>A Quranic verse (The Rock 49-50) was mentioned at the beginning of the show stating that Allah said: “tell my worshippers that I am the beneficent the merciful and my torture [Athab] is a painful one”; two opposite extreme descriptions of Allah, or more accurately Mohammed himself, that became the foundation of the contradictory doctrine of Islam.</p>
<p>It must be noted that Arabic Aljazeerah discusses Islam in a totally different light from English Aljazeerah, which is designed to lure Westerners to the idea that Islam is peaceful while defending terror as freedom fighting.</p>
<p>This doctrine is a summation of what the Quran is all about, terror and lure, and promotes such extremely but powerful and raw cultural attributes of Muslim society; shame and pride. Such a doctrine has also evolved from Mohammed&#8217;s character when he failed to peacefully evangelize through persuasion and &#8220;lure&#8221; and therefore had to flip tactics, going straight to pure terror. Thus his famous saying &#8220;I have been victorious through terror.&#8221;</p>
<p>The show&#8217;s questions were more interesting than the answers. The host, Othman Othman, was trying to bring the guest, Islamic Dawah “preaching” expert Dr. Salman Alawda, to state that Islam equally balances the two extreme tools of terror and peaceful teaching. These were some of his questions: Many say terror and bullying are necessary. How do we achieve balance regarding the names of Allah between punishment and forgiveness? Why is it that the agony side often prevails over the mercy side? Are hardship and pain required for their own sake when it comes to Islamic legislation? Why does the discussion of the torment of the grave, death and the afterlife turn into a terrifying discussion? Why are Salafis more inclined to use fear/terror factor regarding global advocacy? Some ask, shouldn’t we [Muslims] be judged as imperfect humans anyway?</p>
<p>The host, while exalting Islam, the Quran and Mohammed, was desperately trying to get a glimmer of hope with his questions to bring out any trace of joy and hope for Muslims who want to enjoy life right here on Earth, but are not getting such a message from Islamic teachings. Unfortunately the guest provided very little hope when he skillfully spinned that Islam does have a balance. But what failed the guest was the fact that values of joy, life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, and making the world a better place, do not exist in the Quran. The guest could not give the host the good news, when he asserted that seeking pleasure and happiness on earth is equal to death. The guest’s discussion of the good life for Muslims was narrowed down to the after life in the Islamic jannah, heaven. Thus the Islamic promise of virgins and carnal pleasure became the infamous lure Islam uses on the jihadis, pushing them into waging Allah’s war of terror on his enemies: the unbelievers.</p>
<p>The lesson America needs to learn and get united under is that we, the West, right now are under assault by the good old Islamic doctrine of Terror and Lure; two sides of the polar opposite and deceptive face of Islam.</p>
<p>If the West continues to believe that Islam is a religion of peace, then unfortunately for the West they will suffer irrevocable consequences.</p>
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		<title>Allah’s Sword of Terror</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/raymond-ibrahim/allahs-sword-of-terror/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=allahs-sword-of-terror</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 18 Mar 2014 04:14:10 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Raymond Ibrahim]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[7th century]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jihad]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Khalid bin al-Walid]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Muhammad]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=221129</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A 7th century jihadi sheds light on his 21st century counterparts.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Khalid-ib-Walid.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-221165" alt="Khalid-ib-Walid" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Khalid-ib-Walid.jpg" width="260" height="300" /></a>The first time I heard about Khalid bin al-Walid—the 7<sup>th</sup> century Muslim jihadi affectionately known in Islamic history as “The Sword of Allah”—was when I was in college researching for my MA thesis on the Battle of Yarmuk, when the Muslims, under Khalid’s generalship, defeated the Byzantines in 636, opening the way for <a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/islam/the-historical-reality-of-the-muslim-conquests/">the historic Islamic conquests</a>.</p>
<p>Nearly a decade and a half later, Khalid, that jihadi par excellence, has come to personify a dichotomy for me—how the jihad is understood in the West and how it really is: officially, Western academia, media, and politicians portray it as defensive war to protect Muslim honor and territory; in reality, however, jihad is all too often little more than a byword to justify the most primitive and barbaric passions of its potential recruits and practitioners.</p>
<p>Based on the English language sources I perused in college, Khalid was a heroic, no-nonsense kind of jihadi—fierce but fair, stern but just.  He was the champion of the <a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/islam/the-double-edged-sword-of-jihad/">Apostasy Wars</a>, when he slaughtered countless Arabs for trying to leave Islam after the death of Muhammad.</p>
<p>Modern day Muslims writing about Khalid—see for example Pakistani army lieutenant-general A.I Akram’s <a href="https://ia601605.us.archive.org/0/items/KhalidBinAl-waleedSwordOfAllah.pdf/KhalidBinAl-waleedSwordOfAllah.pdf"><i>The </i><i>Sword of Allah</i></a>—had naught but praise for him, the scourge of infidels and apostates.</p>
<p>But as years went by, I came across more arcane and Arabic sources telling of the “darker side” of The Sword—a depraved and sadistic side.</p>
<p>For example, only recently I came across a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQ0GsyLnsxM">video</a> of a modern-day Egyptian Salafi explaining how Khalid raped Layla, the wife of Malik bin Nuwayra—but only after he severed her husband’s head, lit it on fire, and cooked his dinner on it.</p>
<p>Khalid was recalled and questioned by the caliph—not because he killed and dined on an apostate’s head and “married” his wife, but because some believed that Malik was still Muslim, not an apostate to be treated so, and that Khalid killed him on the accusation of apostasy only as a pretext to take possession of his wife, whose beauty was renowned.</p>
<p>In the words of Ibn Kathir’s authoritative historical tome, <i>The Beginning and the End </i>(<i>al-bidaya we al-nihaya</i>), “And he [Khalid] ordered his [Malik’s] head and he combined it with two stones and cooked a pot over them.  And Khalid ate from it that night to terrify the apostate Arab tribes and others.  And it was said that Malik’s hair created such a blaze that the meat was so thoroughly cooked.”</p>
<p>More eye-opening is the way the videotaped Egyptian cleric recounts this whole narrative with awe and admiration—boasting, for example, how that when Khalid entered the caliph’s tent for questioning he was “wearing armor all soaked and rusted from blood [of his enemies], with arrows sticking out of his turban.”</p>
<p>As for the near-cannibalistic meal that the Sword of Allah ate, the cleric complained that “People wonder how our lord Khalid could have eaten from such meat?  Oh yes—he ate from it! Our lord Khalid had a very strong character, a great appetite, and everything!  All to terrorize the desert Arabs [apostates].  The matter requires determination; these matters require strength—terrorism.”</p>
<p>Of course, all this accords with the Koran’s many commands to “strike terror” into the hearts of disbelievers, be they born infidels or apostates (see Koran 3:151, 8:12, 8:60).</p>
<p>Now, let us fast-forward to the modern era’s “Arab Spring” and U.S. support for “freedom-fighters” trying to “liberate” Syria (the official, Western narrative of the jihad), and let us reflect on its true nature—from a jihadi (ironically <a href="http://www.syrianews.cc/syria-cannibal-sakkar-threatens-commit-worse-crimes/">named “Khalid”</a>) <a href="http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2013/05/13/303319/syria-rebel-cuts-eats-soldiers-heart/">biting into the heart of a soldier</a> (and thus striking terror into the hearts of Assad’s “apostate” regime) to Islamic clerics <a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/from-the-arab-world/islamic-doctrines-justify-sex-jihad-with-video/">justifying</a> <a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/from-the-arab-world/new-fatwa-permits-rape-of-non-sunni-women-in-syria/">rape</a> and <a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/from-the-arab-world/sex-jihad-and-western-disbelief/">prostitution</a> to <a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/from-the-arab-world/aids-and-pregnant-tunisian-girl-recounts-her-sex-jihad-in-syria/">gratify</a> the many swords of Allah.</p>
<p>And at last, let us understand that the heartbeat of the jihad—sex, violence, and rapine—has scarcely changed in nearly fourteen centuries.</p>
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		<title>Swedish Archbishop: Why Pick Jesus over Muhammed?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-bawer/swedish-archbishop-why-pick-jesus-over-muhammed/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=swedish-archbishop-why-pick-jesus-over-muhammed</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 05 Nov 2013 04:05:56 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Bawer]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Antje Jackelén]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Christian]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Church]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jesus]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Lutheran]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Muhammad]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=209506</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[What's the difference?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/AntjeJackelen_990114c.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-209519" alt="AntjeJackelen_990114c" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/AntjeJackelen_990114c-450x298.jpg" width="270" height="179" /></a>Sweden is the gift that keeps on giving – to Islam. In recent weeks, for those of you who are keeping score at home, Swedish feminists mounted a nationwide <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-bawer/feminist-hijab-solidarity/">&#8220;hijab campaign&#8221;</a> in &#8220;solidarity&#8221; with a Muslim woman whose veil may or may not have been yanked off her head in a parking garage, and the government <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-bawer/the-coming-flood-of-syrian-refugees-to-sweden/">announced</a> its intention to grant automatic permanent residency to refugees from Syria. Now comes the news that the Church of Sweden has chosen as its new leader a woman who, judging from recent statements, does not care to recognize much of a difference between Jesus Christ and Muhammed.</p>
<p>But first a little background. Unlike the Church of Norway and the Church of Denmark, the Church of Sweden is no longer an official state church, having been cut loose in the year 2000 (a fate which will probably befall its sister Scandinavian churches before too long). But although its pews, like those in Norway and Denmark, are pretty empty most of the time (while most Swedes are church members, only 2% attend services regularly), the church in Sweden continues, like its Norwegian and Danish counterparts, to receive generous cash subsidies from the government, and still enjoys a high public profile. Scandinavians may not go to church, and most of them may not be devout believers in much of anything, but that doesn&#8217;t necessarily mean that they don&#8217;t identify, perhaps even strongly, as Christians – or, more specifically, Lutherans.</p>
<p>How does this work? As follows. To live under a highly statist system is to assume, as if it were the way of nature itself, that the state will take care of all kinds of things that people in other, not-so-statist countries would never think of expecting the government to do for them. In Scandinavia, at least, this habit of thought can extend even to the realm of religion. Meaning what? That under such regimes, the idea of a personal faith, to say nothing of a personal commitment to go to church, can easily fall away. One doesn&#8217;t <i>have </i>to go to church, or give much thought to what one does or doesn&#8217;t believe; what matters is knowing that the church is there, and that one&#8217;s tax money is helping to keep it up and running and staffed with clergy who <i>have </i>given thought to questions of belief, and who are continuing to hold the right services and say the right prayers – even though there&#8217;s barely enough parishioners in some churches on a Sunday morning to get a bridge game going.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s not, after all, as if most Scandinavians never set foot in a church. They may or may not believe in God, but they believe in church baptisms, church weddings, and church funerals. Confirmation, especially, remains a major rite of passage – so much so that kids from families that are actively hostile to religion have the option of taking part in a mass &#8220;civil confirmation,&#8221; a thoroughly secular ceremony that is held once a year in city halls and other non-ecclesiastical settings. In all three Scandinavian countries, moreover, certain Christian feasts are still observed in a traditional manner – notably <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2011/bruce-bawer/candles-in-the-dark/">Saint Lucy&#8217;s Day</a> on December 13, when many children and teenagers participate in processions wearing white robes, carrying candles, and singing <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Lucia">&#8220;Santa Lucia.&#8221;</a> The Norwegian cabinet includes a Minister of Culture and Church Affairs; the Danish cabinet includes a Minister for Equality, Church, and Nordic Cooperation. In all three countries, most of the official holidays are Christian holy days; Norway&#8217;s list includes no fewer than eight of them: Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Easter Monday, Ascension Day, Pentecost, Whit Monday, Christmas, and St. Stephen&#8217;s Day. (The only secular days off are New Year&#8217;s Day, May Day, and Constitution Day.)</p>
<p>So it was of more than minor significance when the Church of Swedish announced a couple of weeks ago that its new boss, who will assume the title of Archbishop of Uppsala next June upon the retirement of the current primate, Anders Wejryd, is a woman named Antje Jackelén, the present Bishop of Lund. Born in Germany in 1955, she moved to Sweden in 1978, married a Swede in 1979 (he&#8217;s a priest, too), and became a member of the clergy in 1980. She will be the first female archbishop in the Church of Sweden, which has been ordaining women for more than half a century. But no, that&#8217;s not the big news. Nor is it news, big or otherwise, that the bishop who ordained her back in 1980, Lars Carlzon, was at the time head of a Communist front group, the Swedish-East German “Friendship Association.” (Let&#8217;s face it: given the Swedish establishment&#8217;s weakness for totalitarianism, that&#8217;s scarcely a footnote.)</p>
<p>No, the big news – or one part of it, anyway – is that Jackelén, who after her ordination worked in parishes in Stockholm and Lund and then spent several years teaching systematic theology at the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago, has as her episcopal motto (yes, bishops have mottoes) the simple statement “God is greater.” As Ingeborg Olsson <a href="http://www.d-intl.com/2013/10/15/swedish-archbishop-prefers-allah/?lang=en">wrote</a> in <i>Dispatch International: </i>“If that sounds familiar, it may be due to the fact that an Arabic translation renders it as &#8216;Allahu akbar.&#8217;”</p>
<p>Coincidence? Not bloody likely. On October 1, when Jackelén and the other three candidates for the church&#8217;s top job were interviewed by church officials in front of the media, they were asked – and here comes the rest of the big news – “Does Jesus provide a truer picture of God than Muhammed?” Only one of the candidates, Ragnar Persenius, the Bishop of Uppsala, answered with a flat-out yes. (He ended up coming in second.) The other candidates “seemed uncertain,” <a href="http://www.friatider.se/antje-jackelen-ny-arkebiskop-i-svenska-kyrkan">according</a> to <i>Fria Tider</i>. Jackelén&#8217;s answer was as follows: “One cannot reduce the whole of religious theology, that is to say the question of how different religions relate to one another, to a yes-and-no question. It amounts to doing violence to a wealth of knowledge and experience that can be found there.”</p>
<p>This wishy-washiness was too much for Eva Hamberg, a prominent theologian who has been a priest in the Church of Sweden for thirty years. Back when she was ordained, said Hamberg, such a question would never even have been asked – and if it had been, the idea that any candidate for the priesthood would have so much as hesitated to say “yes” would have been absolutely unthinkable. Even before Jackelén was selected as archbishop, Hamberg publicly announced that she was quitting the Church of Sweden, saying she could no longer associate herself with a body that had become, in her view, altogether too secularized, politicized, and intolerant of dissident (i.e. traditional) voices.</p>
<p>Since Jackelén&#8217;s election, her supporters and her critics have been doing battle in the op-ed columns – not only about the Jesus/Muhammed dodge, but about Jackelén&#8217;s views of the Virgin Birth and the existence of Hell, among other things. As it happens, I agree with much of what she and her supporters have to say – about, for example, the fact that some parts of the Bible are plainly intended to be read metaphorically or symbolically, not literally, and that there&#8217;s room for honest disagreement among Christians about various aspects of scripture and theology. But to refuse to provide a straightforward answer to the simple question of whether Jesus provides a truer picture of God than Muhammed is a whole different ball of wax. It&#8217;s not about being a liberal Christian as opposed to a conservative Christian; it&#8217;s about being any kind of Christian at all. For that one question sums up what everything else comes down to – it brings you face to face with the utter contrast between, on the one hand, the story of Jesus&#8217; life and ministry, which is to say the message of the gospel, and, on the other, the story of Muhammed&#8217;s life, which is to say the message of the Koran. Between these two things – Jesus&#8217; message of love, and Muhammed&#8217;s message of brutal conquest and control – there could hardly be a greater, starker divergence. For a Christian body to install as its superintendent someone who refuses to pronounce clearly upon that divergence is sheer absurdity.</p>
<p>But you ain&#8217;t heard nothing yet. On October 27, Anna Ekström, who writes regularly in <i>Expressen, </i><a href="http://www.expressen.se/kvp/kultur/tala-klarsprak-i-kyrkan-nu-antje-jackelen/">reminded</a> readers of her <a href="http://www.expressen.se/kvp/kultur/pavedivisioner/">criticism</a> last December of Jackelén&#8217;s <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcQ-oXxPgq4">videotaped</a> Christmas greeting to her diocese, which can still be viewed on You Tube. (Watch it: even if you don&#8217;t understand Swedish, the visual, and the tone of voice, speak volumes.) In the video, Jackelén launched right into an oh-so-gently-voiced lament about Israel&#8217;s security barrier, and by way of illustration held up a small nativity that she purchased some years ago at a shop in Bethlehem. It was a very special kind of nativity – Jesus and two of the Wise Men were separated by a wall. Get it? Get it? She purred on about this separation wall, observing that the two Wise Men who were separated from Jesus looked as if they were praying to the wall. (The implicit reference to Jews at the Wailing Wall was obvious.) And she showed her audience that, while the separation wall obstructed one&#8217;s view of Jesus, there was an opening in the stable wall behind the crib, symbolizing the fact that (and here she claimed to be quoting the shopkeeper who sold her the nativity) “God always creates an opening” that lets us see Christ. “Fear builds walls,” she said in English, reading aloud the words written on the nativity wall. “Hope builds bridges.” Christmas, she stressed, is all about the elimination of walls between God and man. And with that, she removed the wall separating the stable from those two Wise Men.</p>
<p>Jackelén&#8217;s “Christmas message” was a remarkable piece of work – a hand grenade, as it were, wrapped in several thick, soft layers of purple cotton. How smoothly and neatly she managed to suggest, without quite saying so, that Israeli Jews have separated themselves from God by denying the message of Christ, that when they pray at the Wailing Wall they are praying to a false god, and that the Israeli wall is nothing less than an offense to Christian belief. Very slick stuff.</p>
<p>To be sure, Jackelén did not come up with this nasty line of argument herself: every ugly, silken word of her little homily is standard-issue “Palestinian liberation theology,” as developed over the last few decades by Palestinian Christians like Naim Ateek (an Anglican priest who runs a Jerusalem-based outfit called the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center) and as obediently taken up, in recent years, by more and more fatuous leftist clergy in Europe and North America. Ateek&#8217;s “theology,” which teaches that Zionists are motivated by (in his words) “a narrow and exclusive concept of a tribal God,” and which drips with smarmily sanctimonious language and overwrought symbolism of the sort Jackelen employed in her “Christmas message” (“In this season of Lent,” wrote Ateek during the run-up to Easter 2001, “it seems to many of us that Jesus is on the cross again with thousands of crucified Palestinians around him&#8230;.Palestine has become one huge golgotha”), is in fact a cleverly calculated means of manipulating naïve Christians in the Western world into thinking that their faith requires them not only to condemn Israel&#8217;s security barrier, and its supposed mistreatment of Palestinians, but to reject the very legitimacy of the Jewish state itself.</p>
<p>Watching Jackelén&#8217;s “Christmas message,” and recognizing at once the slippery rhetoric of “Palestinian liberation theology,”  I wondered if she had any direct connection to Ateek and his organization – which is, after all, the Ground Zero of that “theology.” Sure enough, a quick Google search turned up an <a href="http://www.svenskakyrkan.se/default.aspx?id=654224">article</a> on her diocesan website singing Ateek&#8217;s praises and recounting a conversation that she and Ateek had at his office. (As a bonus, the article features a lovely picture of Jackelén celebrating mass with one Munib Younan, who, in addition to being head of the Lutheran World Federation, has been <a href="http://www.friendsofsabeel.org.uk/news/christians-hold-mass-to-mark-nakba-day-15th-may/">identified by Sabeel itself</a>, with which he is associated, as a Fatah leader.)</p>
<p>Ekström, in her comments about Jackelén&#8217;s “Christmas message,”  noted that while Jackelén made good use of the opportunity to malign Israel&#8217;s security defenses, she had nothing whatsoever to say about the ongoing slaughter and persecution of Christians throughout the Muslim world – a kind of violence that, as Ekström pointed out, “requires more robust protection of the kind Antje Jackelén wants to tear down.” As Ekström put it: during a holiday season “when Jews through the ages have been subjected to pogroms,” and in a time “when Christians in our time are being murdered, [Jackelén] chose to meditate about an Arabized Jesus and stir resentment toward Israeli Jews.” In short, she “used the timeless Christmas story to throw a dark shadow over the Jews in all times, in all places.” That was last Christmas – ten months ago. Has Jackelén, Ekström asked the other day, changed since then? Well, if her crafty reply to the question about Jesus and Muhammed is any indication – and nothing could be <i>more</i> of an indication – she hasn&#8217;t changed at all.</p>
<p>It will be interesting to see what she has to say to her flock on You Tube this Christmas.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>How Islamic Doctrines Justify Sex Jihad</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/raymond-ibrahim/how-islamic-doctrines-justify-sex-jihad/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=how-islamic-doctrines-justify-sex-jihad</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 18 Oct 2013 04:30:52 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Raymond Ibrahim]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Muhammad]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Muslim]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Sex Jihad]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Syria]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Women]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Following the example of Muhammad.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/5897620602068754133.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-207802" alt="5897620602068754133" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/5897620602068754133-450x337.jpg" width="270" height="202" /></a>As news of the <a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/from-the-arab-world/sex-jihad-and-western-disbelief/">sex jihad</a> continues to <a href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/2013/10/sex-jihad-of-tunisian-girl-in-syria-they-promised-me-paradise-so-i-gave-myself-to-152-men.html">proliferate in Mideast media</a>, and as the <a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/islam/foreign-policy-magazine-covers-up-syrian-sex-jihad/">West continues to bury its head in the sand</a>—here for example is <a href="http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/assad-regime-wages-pr-campaign-to-discredit-rebels-a-926479.html">Der Spiegel’s</a> attempt to portray as “false” the “tales of rebels engaging in ‘sex jihad’ and massacring Christians”—it is instructive to note that even the practice of sex jihad has specific doctrinal validation in Islam (which should not be surprising, considering that so too do things like “<a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/from-the-arab-world/islamic-adult-breastfeeding-fatwas-return/">adult breastfeeding</a>”).</span></b></p>
<p>First there is the general justification for sex jihad, namely that, because Muslim men waging jihad have become sexually frustrated in their camps, losing morale and quitting the theatre of war, it is permissible, indeed laudable, for Muslim women to volunteer to give up their bodies to these men so that they can continue the jihad to empower Islam, in accordance with the Koran: “Allah has purchased of the believers their persons and their goods; for theirs (in return) is the garden (of Paradise): they fight in His cause, and slay and are slain” (Yusuf Ali trans. 9:111).</p>
<p>While this verse has traditionally been understood as Muslim men selling “their persons,” that is, their bodies, in the jihad in exchange for paradise, in the context of sex jihad, Muslim women are also selling “their persons” (their bodies to be used for sex) to help empower the jihad, in exchange for paradise.</p>
<p>Aside from this logic which involves intention (<i>niyya</i>) and the idea that the ends justify the means—this is the same rationale, for example, used to justify Islamic suicide attacks (“martyrdom operations”)—in the hadith and teachings of early Islam, precedents exist that Islam’s <i>ulema</i> use to justify the sex jihad.</p>
<p>Recorded in <i>Sahih Bukhari</i>—for most Sunni Muslims, the second textual authority after the Koran itself—is an anecdote of one Muslim giving another Muslim one of his wives for sexual purposes.  The story is as follows: When some of Muhammad’s followers from Mecca migrated to Medina, a complaint was raised that the people of Medina had better profited from following Muhammad than his original Meccan followers who had suffered more deprivations.  In this context, Muhammad paired up the Meccan Abdul Rahman bin Awf with Sa‘ad bin Rabi‘a of Medina, for the latter to share some of his possessions with the former. So Rabi‘a offered to Rahman half of all his possessions, adding, “Look at my two wives, and whichever of them you desire, I will divorce her so you can have her” (<a href="http://islam.paramegsoft.com/alboukhari/saheh39.html"><i>Sahih Bukhari</i>: 118, 1943</a>)</p>
<p>Based on this, divorcing one’s wife for the use of another Muslim became acceptable—indeed, laudable and generous behavior.  Indeed, <i>Sahih Bukhari</i> has an entire chapter (<i>bab</i>) on the jurisprudence of this practice. Nor should it be forgotten that, recorded in the Koran itself, one man divorced his wife and gave her to Muhammad simply <a href="http://www.answering-islam.org/Responses/Menj/zaynab.htm">because the prophet desired her</a>.</p>
<p>In several of the videos that interview people involved with the Syrian sex jihad, this very same logic plays out.  <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1waYYiwgxQ">In this video</a> for instance, one Muslim man explains how he was told that, since he had three wives, he should divorce one of them so she can wage sex jihad with the “freedom fighters” in Syria.  This, both he and his wives were told, was laudable, and so they complied.</p>
<p>Then there is the whole idea of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikah_mut%E2%80%98ah#cite_note-13"><i>mut‘a</i> marriage</a>.  Often translated as “temporary” marriage, the word <i>mut‘a</i> simply means  “pleasure”—i.e., a marriage for the sole purpose of “pleasure.”  These “marriage” contracts are made between a Muslim man and woman for a temporary duration and often for the sole purpose of legitimizing otherwise banned sexual relations—basically a legalized form of prostitution.  Koran 4:24 exonerates pleasure marriage, as many Muslim doctrinaires hold:</p>
<blockquote><p>And [also prohibited to you are all] married women except those your right hands possess [sex slaves]. [This is] the decree of Allah upon you. And lawful to you are [all others] beyond these, [provided] that you seek them [in marriage] with [gifts from] your property, desiring chastity, not unlawful sexual intercourse. <i>So whatever you enjoy of them, give them their due compensation as an obligation. And there is no blame upon you for what you mutually agree to beyond the obligation</i>. Indeed, Allah is ever Knowing and Wise.</p></blockquote>
<p>Although the practice of <i>mut‘a</i> marriage is often pinned on the Shias, it—as with <i>taqiyya</i>, which is also often treated as a Shia phenomenon—often manifests itself among Sunnis, <a href="http://www.al-islam.org/muta-temporary-marriage-in-islamic-law-sachiko-murata/legitimacy-muta#opinions-four-sunny-schools-law">especially in the context of sexually-deprived men waging jihad</a>.  Moreover, it is well known that Muhammad and his followers used to have sex with the women of conquered tribes, hence the recent <a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/from-the-arab-world/new-fatwa-permits-rape-of-non-sunni-women-in-syria/">rape fatwa in Syria</a>.</p>
<p>In light of all this, it is amazing that some in the West are still trying to exonerate the jihadis in Syria from the practice of sex jihad, since, apparently, those “noble freedom fighters” would never stoop to such a level (the rampant beheadings, church bombings, and Christian persecution is all a “myth,” too, according to Der Spiegel).</p>
<p>Finally, below is a 15-minute video of several people, men and women from various nations, discussing their experiences with the sex jihad in Syria, translated from Arabic to English by some of my colleagues (you may need to click on “CC” (closed caption) for the English subtitles to appear).</p>
<p><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/Sb0AocFumRE" height="315" width="420" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Middle East Peace Process</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/middle-east-peace-process-5/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=middle-east-peace-process-5</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 23 Jul 2013 04:06:19 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Frontpagemag.com]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[anti-semitic]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jews]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Muhammad]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[palestinians]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Palestinian Authority cartoons: educating children on the scheming, demonic Jews. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em>Editor’s note: Below is the latest installment of the FrontPage series “Middle East Peace Process” exposing the true genocidal intent of the Arab Palestinians, Israel’s so-called “peace partners.” The translated video below was produced by the <a href="http://www.memritv.org/clip/en/3917.htm">Middle East Media Research Institute</a>. <a href="http://palwatch.org/main.aspx?fi=157&amp;doc_id=9308"><br />
</a></em></p>
<p><iframe src="http://www.memritv.org/embedded_player/index.php?clip_id=3917" width="404" height="356" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>Other posts in this series:</strong></p>
<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/middle-east-peace-process/"><strong>Palestinian Official Threatens Nuclear Attack on Israel. </strong></a></p>
<p><strong><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/middle-east-peace-process-2/">Palestinian Official Calls Jews “Satans” at Public Event to Cheering Crowd. </a></strong></p>
<p><strong><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/middle-east-peace-process-3/">Palestinian TV Praises Man Who Murdered 84-year-old Israeli as a ‘Hero’.</a></strong></p>
<p><strong><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/middle-east-peace-process-4/">Palestinian Schoolgirls Recite: Jews &#8216;Most Evil Among Creations&#8217;; &#8216;Barbaric Monkeys, Wretched Pigs&#8217;.</a></strong></p>
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		<title>The Media’s Muhammad Blackout Defers Again to Islam</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/andrew-harrod/the-medias-muhammad-blackout-defers-again-to-islam/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-medias-muhammad-blackout-defers-again-to-islam</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 10 May 2013 04:20:37 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Andrew Harrod]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[cartoon]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Charlie Hebdo]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Muhammad]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[violence]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[French magazine Charlie Hebdo shows it won't back down to Islamic violence. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/charlie-hebdo_1.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-188957" alt="charlie-hebdo_1" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/charlie-hebdo_1-450x340.jpg" width="270" height="204" /></a>Yet again depictions of Islam’s prophet Muhammad are causing controversy.  The French satire magazine <a href="http://www.charliehebdo.fr/"><i>Charlie Hebdo</i></a> has published a special edition released in January 2013 entitled <a href="http://boutique.charliehebdo.fr/presse-livres/charlie-hebdo/la-vie-de-mahomet-1ere-partie-les-debuts-d-un-prophete.html"><i>La Vie de Mahomet, 1ère partie:  Les débuts d&#8217;un prophète</i></a> (“<i>The Life of Muhammad, Part One:  The Debut of a Prophet</i>”; part two will follow in June 2013).  Press reaction in both France and Germany, however, has not been uniformly welcoming, demonstrating once more a media aversion to open examination of Islam.</span></b></p>
<p><i>Charlie Hebdo</i> has <a href="http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/charlie-hebdo-editor-in-chief-on-muhammad-cartoons-a-856891.html">previously published</a> cartoons involving <a href="http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=Charlie+Hebdo+Muhammad+Mohammed+Cartoons&amp;Form=IQFRDR">Muhammad</a> and <a href="http://www.lemonde.fr/actualite-medias/portfolio/2011/11/02/les-caricatures-publiees-dans-charia-hebdo_1597283_3236.html"><i>sharia</i> Islamic law</a>, with the weekly magazine’s offices becoming in the process the victim of a firebombing attack.  <i>Charlie Hebdo</i> describes online its latest presentation of Muhammad as a factual transposition of “Muhammad’s life as told by Muslim chroniclers into images.” “In the West,” the magazine explained, “everyone is able to cite episodes from the life of Jesus, but who is able to cite episodes from the life of Muhammad?  Is this normal in a country like France, where Islam is presented as the second religion?” “If the form appears to some blasphemous,” <i>Charlie Hebdo</i> argued, “the substance is perfectly <i>halal</i>.”</p>
<p>Other publications, though, reacted with reservation towards this latest rendering of Muhammad.  An <a href="http://www.zeit.de/2013/15/comic-das-leben-mohammeds/seite-1">April 17, 2013, online article</a> about the Muhammad special edition in Germany’s <a href="http://www.zeit.de/index"><i>Die Zeit</i></a> weekly newspaper pictured a battle scene cartoon from the booklet, but with Muhammad himself hidden under a black square.  While conceding a free speech right to depict Muhammad, the article author <a href="http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gero_von_Randow">Gero von Randow</a> justified this blacking out with the “suspicion” that the <i>Charlie Hebdo</i> authors only wanted “to provoke the followers of a religious community.  And indeed one that is discriminated against in France.” Yet the remaining article discussed various interpretations of Islam allowing for depictions of, among others, Muhammad.</p>
<p><i>L’Express</i>’s Didier Houth similarly in France had called on January 2, 2013 for a “<a href="http://www.lexpress.fr/actualite/medias/la-vie-de-mahomet-stop-aux-provocations-de-charlie-hebdo_1204054.html">stop to <i>Charlie Hebdo</i>’s provocations</a>” following the appearance of its Muhammad special edition.  Houth thereby attributed to the “press an important role to play in a democracy,” namely giving “support to the understanding between citizens so that democracy can live, live in peace.” Although <i>Charlie Hebdo</i> might have had a “noble goal” of showing journalistic solidarity when the magazine <a href="http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/danish-caricatures-on-trial-in-france-cartoons-1-muhammad-0-a-466403.html">republished the Danish Muhammad cartoons in 2006</a>, since then the magazine had led a “crusade against the Muslim religion.” <i>Charlie Hebdo</i>’s repeated Muhammad caricatures raised the suspicion of being an “appeal to hate towards the practitioners of a religion,” something prohibited by the French penal code.</p>
<p>Some viewed <i>Charlie Hebdo</i>’s Muhammad cartoons a “sane struggle against a religion whose practices are incompatible with French democracy.” Yet, Houth asked, “up to what point does the editorial board of a journal have the right to declare religious practices incompatible with our democracy.” Houth instead entrusted political and legal authorities with “weighing religious practices according to the canon of our democracy.”</p>
<p>Neither Randow nor Houth make much sense, and their arguments are all the more depressing coming from members of the media.  Randow never explained how <i>Charlie Hebdo</i> was any more provocative towards Muslims than the numerous other groups satirized by the magazine in the past, as discussed by Randow.  Nor did Randow explain how Muslims in France face more discrimination than other groups such as, for example, Jews.  Whether Randow, described by his <a href="http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gero_von_Randow"><i>Wikipedia</i> page</a> as a “confessing atheist,” and others will themselves never engage in speech deemed provocative by, say, Catholics, meanwhile, remains to be seen.</p>
<p>Houth likewise did not substantiate his claim of a <i>Charlie Hebdo</i> “crusade” against Islam.  As the magazine itself indicated, any emphasis on Islam could be due to other factors, like this religion’s relative obscurity or present newsworthiness.  Nor did Houth explain why any campaign against a given faith or faith in general is wrong, other than to dismiss such a campaign as a matter of “hate” and not enlightenment.</p>
<p>Houth’s conceptions of the media are also rather strange.  His demand that the press serve an undefined “calm dialogue” and “understanding between citizens” is at variance with traditional views of the media as an unfettered intellectual forum.  Houth’s indicated attribution of the third-party bloodshed to media criticism of a given belief like Islam would similarly eviscerate free speech with a “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heckler's_veto">heckler’s veto</a>.” Houth’s reservation of “weighing religious practices” to governmental authorities, meanwhile, completely ignores the press’s fundamental informational and oversight roles.</p>
<p><i>Die Zeit</i>’s black box Muhammad and Houth’s <i>Charlie Hebdo</i> condemnation are just the latest examples of how media outlets around the world uniquely defer to Islamic sensibilities.  Yet such deference calls into question the sometimes unwarranted expectation of free societies that the media be an objective observer of the world.  A media fully fulfilling its mission of shining a light on the truth simply cannot darken out Muhammad.</p>
<p><strong>This article was sponsored by <a href="http://www.legal-project.org/">The Legal Project</a>, an activity of the <a href="http://www.meforum.org/">Middle East Forum</a>.</strong></p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Mishandling Morsi</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/adam-turner/mishandling-morsi/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=mishandling-morsi</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 10 Dec 2012 04:35:54 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Adam Turner]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[egypt]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Morsi]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Muhammad]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Revolution]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=168246</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Obama's irretrievable mistakes. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/adam-turner/mishandling-morsi/mis/" rel="attachment wp-att-168248"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-168248" title="mis" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/mis.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="212" /></a>Only a week after being praised by the Obama Administration for his supposed helpfulness in ending the fighting in Gaza between Palestinian Hamas terrorists and Israel, Muslim Brotherhood (MB) Member and Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi apparently decided to cash in his praise “chips” early.  Most prominently, President Morsi made himself immune from the Egyptian Supreme Constitutional Court’s oversight, thereby essentially assuming dictatorial powers over his nation.  Less prominently, one of his <a href="http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2012/11/morsis_sharia_justice_death_penalties_for_expatriate_innocence_of_muslims_producers.html">appointed</a> judges convicted eight persons, including seven Americans, for their “blasphemy” towards Islam.  Included in this group were well-known Florida Pastor Terry Jones, who has burned several Korans in the United States, and Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, one of the people behind the controversial American film “Innocence of Muslims.”  So far, the Obama Administration has lodged <a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/zekejmiller/obama-administration-treads-carefully-on-morsi-pow">no complaints</a> (and <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Peace/2012/11/28/Egypt-Condemns-Coptic-Christian-YouTube-Video-Filmmakers-To-Death">here</a>) with the Egyptian regime over either action.</p>
<p>It should be shocking to the Obama Administration, and Americans, that a foreign nation can sentence our citizens to death for the “crime” of free speech.  Free speech, and the First Amendment, is supposed to be sacrosanct in the US.  Our Founding Fathers were certainly very supportive of it.  President George Washington said, “If the freedom of speech is taken away then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.”  Benjamin Franklin understood that, “(i)n those wretched countries where a man cannot call his tongue his own, he can scarce call anything his own.  Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech.”  And prominent Supreme Court Justices have continued to praise free speech over the years.  Justice William O. Douglas stated, “Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions.  It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us.”  Justice Louis Brandeis believed, “Fear of serious injury cannot alone justify suppression of free speech and assembly.  Men feared witches and burned women.  It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fear.”<strong> </strong></p>
<p>Based on the strong historical support for freedom of speech evidence by these quotes, you could be forgiven for thinking that any<strong> </strong>attempts by foreigners to infringe upon American speech in our own country would prompt our nation to do something about it.  But, apparently, we are living in new times.  President Obama has already said at the UN that “(t)he future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.” Perhaps he believes that a little thing like the First Amendment in the US Constitution should not be allowed to get in the way.</p>
<p>In fact, instead of objecting to this kind of Egyptian bad behavior, the US continues to reward it.  The American foreign aid money keeps flowing to Egypt.  Roughly $1.5 billion a year, most of it military aid.  Over $50 billion total since 1979.  There are new proposals by President Obama for $1billion in debt relief for Egypt.  And through international organizations like the IMF, even more American aid is coming.</p>
<p>Technically, much of this aid is conditioned on good behavior by the Egyptian regime, but the dirty little secret is that the Obama Administration always waives these restrictions when they aren’t met by President Morsi.  And no bad behavior stops them.  When President Morsi first won his term, he immediately demanded the release of convicted terrorist Omar Abdel-Rahman, i.e., the “Blind Sheikh,” the spiritual and terrorist leader for the first Islamist attack against the World Trade Center that killed six U.S. citizens.  Silence from the Obama Administration.   Morsi allowed Islamist protestors to overrun the US Embassy in Cairo – sovereign US territory – and raise the black flag of the Islamists.  President Obama did nothing.  The Morsi regime continues to suppress protests by ordinary Egyptians, most horrifically <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2241374/Muslim-Brotherhood-paying-gangs-rape-women-beat-men-protesting-Egypt-thousands-demonstrators-pour-streets.html">by paying gangs</a> to go out and rape women and beat men who are demonstrating in opposition to Morsi’s new judicial immunity and new dictatorship.  No objections for the US.  The MB-led Egypt is rushing to institute Sharia law, a barbaric code of law which requires that raped women be put to death for adultery.  No complaints came from Secretary of State Hilary Clinton.  Morsi’s Administration has presided over a regime that slaughters and discriminates against Egyptian Copts.  The crickets are chirping in the US government.  Figures in the MB <a href="http://www.jewishpost.com/news/Simon-Wiesenthal-Center-Condemns-Muslim-Brotherhood-Genocidal-Calls-Against-Jews-Yesterdays-Rants-May-Be-Tomorrows-Official-Policy.html">call</a> for another genocide against Jews.  “Never mind,” the Administration says, rather than “never again.”</p>
<p>“Don’t worry,” the foreign policy experts assure us, countless times, “US money provides us with great influence over the new Egyptian rulers.”  The MB is a “moderate, secular organization.” “If we keep funding them, we will get a seat at the table.”</p>
<p>Of course, President Obama only sits silently at that table.   This isn’t too surprising, since we already know from his UN speech that he doesn’t always value speech.  So what good is that seat anyway?</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Yusuf Qaradawi: &#8216;Obey the Prophet, Even If He Tells You to Kill&#8217;</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/raymond-ibrahim/yusuf-qaradawi-obey-the-prophet-even-if-he-tells-you-to-kill/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=yusuf-qaradawi-obey-the-prophet-even-if-he-tells-you-to-kill</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 04 Dec 2012 04:35:55 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Raymond Ibrahim]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Muhammad]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[muslim brotherhood]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Muslims]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[reformer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Yusuf Qaradawi]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=167662</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[What one of the most influential Muslims has to say about Islamic doctrine. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: left;"><em><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/raymond-ibrahim/yusuf-qaradawi-obey-the-prophet-even-if-he-tells-you-to-kill/43_large/" rel="attachment wp-att-167664"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-167664" title="43_large" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/43_large.jpg" alt="" width="264" height="234" /></a>Originally published by the </em><em><a href="http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3461/qaradawi-murder">Gatestone Institute</a>.</em></p>
<p>Dr. Yusuf al-Qaradawi—one of the most influential Islamic clerics in the world, author of over 100 books on Muslim doctrine, head of the International Union of Muslim Scholars, and spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood—maintains that Muslims must obey the commands of Islam’s prophet Muhammad, even unto murder.  This would be the same Dr. Qaradawi that American academics like Georgetown professor <a href="http://www.bostonreview.net/BR28.2/esposito.html">John Esposito </a>praise for engaging in a “reformist interpretation of Islam and its relationship to democracy, pluralism, and human rights.”</p>
<p>Missed in the West, Qaradawi made this declaration two years ago on his popular Arabic program, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&amp;v=aRH21S0-7i8"><em>Al-Sharia wa Al-Haya </em></a>(“Sharia and Life”), broadcast by al-Jazeera to an estimated audience of 60 million worldwide.</p>
<p>Towards the end of the show, the host asked Qaradawi what he thought about the fact that Sheikh Ahmad Hassoun, the grand mufti of Syria, had earlier said to an American delegation:  “If [Muslim prophet] Muhammad asked me to reject Christianity or Judaism, I would have rejected him.” Visibly agitated, Qaradawi erupted as follows:</p>
<blockquote><p>No scholar of Islam or even average Muslim would ever say such words.  If you believe that Muhammad is the messenger of Allah, then you must obey him—for he does not command except that which is good.  So, even if he tells you to kill, you must— … The story about our prophet Musa [Moses], when al-Khidr killed the boy and Musa said “you killed and you did!” But then he [Khidr] revealed why he killed the boy, and why he punctured the boat.  So we cannot distort the facts in order to please the people.  Let the people be satisfied with the Truth [Sharia teachings], not the false.</p></blockquote>
<p>Syria’s grand mufti said many other things concerning goodwill for Christians that roused Qaradawi’s ire. For instance, before a large Christian gathering in Syria, where he was a guest speaker, he insisted that there were no differences between Christians and Muslims:</p>
<blockquote><p>If Christianity is about believing in one God, so I believe in one God; if Christianity is about believing in Jesus, so I believe in Jesus; if Christianity is about believing in the New Testament, so I believe in the New Testament; if Christianity is about believing in the Old Testament, so I believe in the Old Testament; if Christianity is about believing that Mary was a pure virgin, so I believe she was a pure virgin, untouched by man; and if Christianity is about believing in the resurrection, so I believe in the resurrection—so what is the difference between me and Christians?</p></blockquote>
<p>Qaradawi offered correct Muslim doctrine in response to this otherwise egalitarian talk, confirming that, yes, Islam believes all these things—but according to its own narratives, not the ones recorded in the Bible, which, as the Quran teaches, have been distorted.  Hence, if Muslims believe all those things that the Syrian grand mufti mentioned, they do not believe in the <em>fundamentals </em>of Christianity—including the Trinity, Christ’s divinity or resurrection, and atonement of sins—hence they reject Christianity, as understood and practiced by over a billion Christians.</p>
<p>As for believing in the Old and New Testaments, the Quran claims that, once upon a time there were “true”  versions, but that the current texts which we possess—and which are many centuries older than the Quran itself—were “corrupted”  (to include, for instance, the aforementioned fundamentals of Christianity).  Thus the only “authentic” remnants of Christianity and Judaism are the ones Muhammad narrated in the Quran—where we meet many doppelgangers, like Isa, a very different “Jesus” who was never crucified and will return to break all Christian crucifixes and kill all pigs.</p>
<p>Indeed, it is this Muslim proclivity to create “parallel” characters based on biblical figures that explains Qaradawi’s justification to murder people in blind obedience to the prophet.  His reference to “Musa,” based on the Hebrew Moses, is a reference to a story—possibly rooted in the 3<sup>rd </sup>century <em>Alexander Romance </em>and popularized by the 1970s martial arts movie, <em>Circle of Iron</em>—which, nonetheless, occurs in Quran, and so must be accepted literally.</p>
<p>According to the Quran’s narrative (18:65-82), Musa seeks out al-Khidr—“the Green Man,” who possesses powers of sight—and asks if he may follow and learn from him.  Al-Khidr reluctantly agrees, on condition that Musa not question anything he, the Green Man, does, until such time as the latter chooses to reveal the significance of his actions.</p>
<p>However, the Green Man does strange things—randomly killing a young boy and destroying the boat of people who helped give them passage—to which Musa demands immediate answers.  The Green Man eventually explains that he killed the boy because his parents were good Muslims, while the boy was an infidel who would have burdened them with his transgressions; and he destroyed the boat of the good people because a king was about to seize it anyway.</p>
<p>Such is the alternate worldview and value system of Islam.  Just as Islam introduced parallel characters based on Christian and Jewish figures, so did it introduce a parallel system of ethics and morality—one not to be questioned, for, as the Quran’s Green Man shows, who are we mortals to know what good these ostensibly bizarre or murderous actions will lead to? Only the prophet of Allah knows—hence why he must be blindly obeyed, even if he commands you to murder.</p>
<p>Which leads to another parallel, one lethal in its implications: Just as a Western general’s orders—including to kill—are not open to question by his soldiers, in Islam, the orders of “general” Muhammad are not open to question by the world’s 1 billion plus Muslims, all of whom become, according to top Islamic scholar Qaradawi, Islam’s “soldiers,” ever ready to kill for their prophet-general.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Muhammad and the Birth of Islamic Supremacism</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/jamie-glazov/muhammad-and-the-birth-of-islamic-supremacism/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=muhammad-and-the-birth-of-islamic-supremacism</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 21 Nov 2012 04:44:04 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jamie Glazov]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jews]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jihad]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Muhammad]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[prophet]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=165983</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A new book reveals how the Islamic prophet's war on the Jews spawned the birth of jihad. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/jamie-glazov/muhammad-and-the-birth-of-islamic-supremacism/muhammad-3/" rel="attachment wp-att-165987"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-165987" title="Muhammad" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Muhammad.jpg" alt="" width="244" height="348" /></a>Frontpage Interview&#8217;s guest today is David Hayden, the author of the new book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Muhammad-Birth-Islamic-Supremacism-622-628/dp/1937668975/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1352369466&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=Muhammad+and+the+Birth+of+Islamic+Supremacism%3A+The+War+With+the+Jews+622-628+A.D." target="_blank"><em>Muhammad and the Birth of Islamic Supremacism: The War With the Jews 622-628 A.D.</em></a><em>  </em></p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> David Hayden, welcome to Frontpage Interview.</p>
<p>Let’s begin with what motivated you to write this book.</p>
<p><strong>Hayden: </strong>I&#8217;ve always had a keen interest in history, but my knowledge of Muslim history was quite deficient until the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, and the failed attack on the White House on Sept. 11, 2001.  I wanted to understand the ideas and motivations of the attackers.  Powerful ideas had to support such a brazen attack on civilian populations.  All of the suicide attackers were Muslims.  What was it in their belief system that persuaded them that such heinous acts were the moral thing to do?  To answer such questions I began a search to learn everything I could about Islam.  I read well over 100 books about Islam including 14 biographies of Muhammad, the <em>Qur&#8217;an</em>, numerous hadith (especially Bukhari, Muslim, and Dawud), several tafsir (commentaries on the <em>Qur&#8217;an)</em>, Muslim and non-Muslim historians and commentators, and countless articles from both print and online sources.<strong>   </strong></p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> So what did you learn and what is your book primarily about?</p>
<p><strong>Hayden: </strong>The research led me to focus on Allah&#8217;s revelations and Muhammad as the messenger and enforcer of those revelations.  Without both the revelations and the messenger the idea of Islamic supremacism would not exist.  A detailed study of the<em> Qur&#8217;an, </em>hadith (collected sayings and actions of Muhammad, and sira (early biographies of Muhamad) led me to this conclusion. I focused on Muhammad&#8217;s contentious relationship with the Jews of Medina and the Hejaz region of Arabia because this relationship brings into focus the birth of the idea of Islamic supremacism.<strong> </strong></p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> What is different about your book from other books on the subject?</p>
<p><strong>Hayden: </strong>I have not encountered another source which has covered Muhammad&#8217;s war with the Jews with the same thorough depth and breadth as I have.  The book is filled with the voices of Allah, Muhammad and his companions, commentators on the <em>Qur&#8217;an</em>, poets, warrior/jihadists, Muslim and non-Muslim historians and commentators.  A variety of points of view are presented throughout the book as well as my interpretation of these differing views.</p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> Tell us about your research. What are some of the sources you drew most heavily from?</p>
<p><strong>Hayden: </strong>As stated above, I relied heavily on the <em>Qur&#8217;an</em><em>, </em>the hadith (especially Bukhari, Muslim, and Dawud; the three most respected collectors of the hadith); and the biographies of Muhammad (especially Ibn Ishaq, Martin Lings, Muhammad Husayn Haykal, al-Mubarakpuri,  Ibn Sa&#8217;d, Maulana Muhammad Ali,  Maxime Rodinson, W. Montgomery Watt, Robert Spencer, Karen Armstrong, Sir John Glubb,  M.J. Kister, and Gordon Darnell Newby).<strong>  </strong></p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>Crystallize for us the foundations of Islam.</p>
<p><strong>Hayden: </strong>Islam&#8217;s foundations begin with Allah&#8217;s revelations to his messenger.  According to Orthodox Islam the <em>Qur&#8217;an</em> has always existed and can never be changed.  Islamic law, the Sharia, has to conform with the <em>Qur&#8217;an</em> and the Sunna (the hadith and sira, both of which must conform to the <em>Qur&#8217;an).</em>  Support for the idea of Islamic supremacism can be found in all three of these documents.  Pious Muslims involved in violent jihad base their beliefs and behavior on these documents.<strong>  <em> </em></strong></p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>Share with us how you recovered the historical truth of Mohammad&#8217;s war on the Jews and how it marked his rise to power.</p>
<p><strong>Hayden: </strong>I tried to find the historical truth of Muhammad&#8217;s war with the Jews through persistent research of the sources.  In each of the major points of contention during the 622-628 years, Allah through revelations and Muhammad through his words and actions tend to place the blame on the hypocrites, poets, pagans and infidels in general, but the Jews primarily received the brunt of Muslim attacks on its enemies.</p>
<p>Jewish poets, Asma Marwan, Abu Afak, and Ka&#8217;b Ibn al-Ashraf, criticized Muhammad for causing the battle of Badr by his failed attempt to raid a wealth-laden caravan returning from Syria; Muhammad had them assassinated. The Jewish Banu Qaynuqa tribe was accused of treachery and mockery of Muhammad; he had them exiled and their wealth confiscated after they surrendered.  The Jewish Banu Nadir tribe was accused of plotting to kill Muhammad (with flimsy evidence); Muhammad commanded them to leave &#8220;his country.&#8221;  They refused but surrendered after their castles were besieged by the Muslims.  They, too, were exiled and their wealth confiscated.  The Jewish Banu Qurayza tribe tried to remain neutral during the Battle of the Ditch between the Muslims and the Meccan-Jewish-Ghatafan confederation, but reluctantly agreed to help due to the persistent urging of a Banu Nadir leader.  But the sources show no evidence that they actually aided those who were trying to defeat the Muslims. After a Muslim victory, Muhammad had the adult males of the Qurayza Jews beheaded and their women and children enslaved, plus all of their land and wealth were confiscated.</p>
<p>A year later, Muhammad attacked the Jewish settlements at Khaybar, defeated them, confiscated their land and wealth, and effectively began the system of dhimmitude with the Jews who remained to work the land for the new owners.  In each of these episodes, the Jews were always the &#8220;treacherous&#8221; ones according to the Muslims who told the story. At no time, however, did a Jewish tribe attack the Muslims; the reverse was true in every case. Some Jews were reportedly involved in helping defeat Muhammad, but no evidence could be found that a Jewish tribe, as a collective group, ever attacked the Muslims.</p>
<p>The pattern goes like this:  the treacherous Jews are accused of some misdeed which has little factual support; the Jews are given a chance to accept Allah and his messenger; the Jews refuse and are attacked by the Muslims who further accuse the Jews of starting a war; after several weeks of trying to defend their property and lives the Jews surrender; the Muslims either exile the surviving tribe, or in the case of the Qurayza Jews, behead the males and enslave the women and children and confiscate all their land and wealth.</p>
<p>In every case the Muslims view the Jews as the aggressors and Muhammad and his companions as victims of such aggression.</p>
<p>Supporting this Muslim point of view is the Qur&#8217;an.  Numerous verses are sharply critical of the Jews, including Allah&#8217;s talk of terrorizing them himself and leading the charge in battle such as at Badr.  Muhammad had to be quite smug knowing that Allah supported his efforts to take on the Jews.  Likewise, the hadith and sira provide evidence for the aggressive behavior of Muhammad in each of these cases. Islamic supremacism for the sake of Allah permeates the early Islamic literature.  A belief in this supremacy undergirds Muhammad&#8217;s rise to power.<strong> </strong></p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> So, what motivated the jihadists for the 9-11 attack?</p>
<p><strong>Hayden: </strong>The 9-11 jihadists believe in the idea of Islamic supremacism.  They are quite serious and sincere about their faith.  In their hearts and minds, they believe they are truly following in the footsteps of Muhammad, the perfect man, who simply carried out the commands of Allah through revelation.</p>
<p>Today&#8217;s jihadists consistently refer to the Qur&#8217;an, hadith, sira, commentaries on the Qur&#8217;an (tafsir), the shari&#8217;a (Islamic law) and the military success of the first 1000 years of Islamic history to support the idea that Islam will eventually triumph over the infidel.  They believe in the long view of history.  September 11, 1683, is a pivotal date in Islamic history.  Osama bin Laden referred to it soon after the attacks on America on 9-11.  On September 11, 1683, Ottoman Muslim forces were repulsed from taking over Vienna, Austria.  The attack on the World Trade Center was a Muslim jihadist way of saying, &#8220;We&#8217;re back.&#8221;  To repeat: today&#8217;s jihadists are motivated because of Allah&#8217;s revelations and his messenger&#8217;s words and actions.<strong>    </strong></p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> Why does our mainstream media and higher literary culture never speak a word on the things your book talks about? What are the consequences of this denial and ignorance in our culture?</p>
<p><strong>Hayden:</strong> Both the mainstream media and higher literary culture in the United States seem to have a penchant for believing Islam is a religion of peace. While it is probably true that a good percentage of Muslims in America are law-abiding and peaceful, my research has led me to understand that the Qur&#8217;an,  hadith, sira, tafsir, and 1400 years of Islamic history can be interpreted to support the idea of Islamic supremacism and violent jihad as core Islamic beliefs.</p>
<p>So why do the mainstream media and literary elites tend to ignore this interpretation and focus on the peaceful side of Islam?  Fear is one explanation.  The jihadists&#8217; use of terror against the West has succeeded in silencing many in the media who might otherwise try to report the truth honestly.  Journalists, professors, and politicians tend to bend over backwards not to criticize the basic tenets of Islam which present the religion in a bad light.  Some of Allah&#8217;s revelations reveal the Muslim belief in the divine use of terror.  After the Muslim victory over the Quraysh (Meccans) at the Battle of Badr, Allah revealed this verse:</p>
<p>&#8220;When the Lord inspired the angels [saying to them], &#8216;I am with you; so make those who believe stand firm.  I will throw FEAR into the hearts of those who disbelieve.  Then [you angels] smite their necks and smite of them each finger&#8217;&#8221; (Qur&#8217;an 8: 12).</p>
<p>In another verse dealing with a battle against the Qaynuqa Jews of Medina, Allah said: &#8220;So if you gain the mastery over them in war, punish them severely in order to disperse [create terror in] those who are behind them, so that they may learn a lesson&#8221; (Qur&#8217;an 8: 57).</p>
<p>Allah also revealed how he cast terror into the hearts of the Qurayza Jews:</p>
<p>&#8220;And those of the Book who aided them&#8211;Allah did take them down from their strongholds and cast terror into their hearts, (so that) some ye slew, and some ye made prisoners&#8221; (Qur&#8217;an 33: 27).</p>
<p>As terror worked against the Jews in the 7th century, so has it worked with our mainstream media, politicians, and cultural elites.</p>
<p>Some liberals and progressives tend to not have fear of Islamic terror; they actually support the goals of jihad.  In an exchange with an editor of a progressive book publishing company, I was told that the thesis of my book was &#8220;strange.&#8221;  He went on to make this revealing statement:</p>
<p>&#8220;We now believe that all cultures in spite of their differences have &#8216;human dignity.&#8217;  There is no war of Muslims against Jews now. What we have is the last gasps of a dying Euro/America which seems determined to kill as many people of the world as it can while it still has any breath remaining.  The era of Euro/American hegemony is passing but it is not going out peacefully. There is no rationale for our current wars other than pure viciousness.  Jews are Europeans.  That&#8217;s what makes them enemies.&#8221;</p>
<p>He says America/Israel are the causes of the world&#8217;s problems; Islamic jihadists are simply fighting to make social justice a reality.  The left&#8217;s romance with social justice makes them bedfellows with the jihadists.  Both of them are totalitarian, against free market capitalism, and anti-liberty in their stated goals.  It is easy to understand why &#8220;they never speak a word&#8221; about the contents of my book.  But eventually, they too may well be in the crosshairs of the supremacists.</p>
<p>Our culture cannot afford to remain ignorant of Islamic supremacism. The jihadists have declared America enemy #1 for Islam.  Knowledge precedes understanding.</p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> What are your main conclusions and what is your advice and warning for the West and its leaders?</p>
<p><strong>Hayden:</strong> My research of Muhammad&#8217;s relationship with the Jews of the Hejaz has convinced me that modern-day jihadists have a better understanding of Muhammad than do those who see his schtick as a man of peace.  Muslim supremacists do, however, believe in peace, but they say true peace will not reign until after Islam has become supreme and Allah&#8217;s law, the sharia, is accepted all over the world.  In the meantime, jihadists have the green light to create violent mayhem both in the lands of the disbelievers and against the disbelievers in Islamic lands.  They use terror or a tactic to intimidate the infidel; that includes all non-Muslims and those in the Islamic fold they consider to be heretics.  This presents an existential problem for peaceful Muslims.  As perceived enemies of Islam and Muhammad, they too are in the crosshairs of the jihadists who recognize them as apostates from the true faith.  Our political and military leaders, plus the wonks who implement U.S. foreign policy, need to drop all the political correctness and take an Islamo-Realist approach.  In order to do that, they have to understand the nature of Islam starting with the birth of Islamic supremacism which began with Allah&#8217;s revelations and Muhammad&#8217;s role as messenger/enforcer of them.</p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> David Hayden, thank you for joining Frontpage Interview.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>The Legacy of Islamic Totalitarianism</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/bruce-thornton/the-legacy-of-islamic-totalitarianism/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-legacy-of-islamic-totalitarianism</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/bruce-thornton/the-legacy-of-islamic-totalitarianism/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 02 Nov 2012 04:45:12 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Andrew G. Bostom]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[book]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[infidel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[John Esposito]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[koran]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Muhammad]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Peace]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Sharia Versus Freedom: The Legacy of Islamic Totalitarianism]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=163391</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Andrew G. Bostom masterfully unveils the true story of the "religion of peace" and its war on human freedom. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/bruce-thornton/the-legacy-of-islamic-totalitarianism/picture-1-50/" rel="attachment wp-att-163416"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-163416" title="Picture-1" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Picture-1-415x350.gif" alt="" width="291" height="245" /></a>The murder of four Americans in Benghazi on the anniversary of 9/11, and the subsequent attempts by the Obama administration to blame the attacks on a YouTube video critical of Islam, exposed the delusional assumptions of Obama’s foreign policy. This notion that Western bad behavior––whether colonialism, support for Israel, or insults to Islam and Muhammad––is responsible for jihadist violence, however, has vitiated our approach to Islamist terrorism for over a decade now. Our main mistake has been the belief that al Qaeda and other jihadist groups are outliers among Muslims, a tiny minority of fanatics who have “hijacked” the faith that under both Republican and Democratic administrations has been called the “religion of peace,” and so we must reach out to that majority of moderate Muslims and convince them how much we admire and respect their religion. But this desperate search for these moderates has lead to dangerous policies, such as considering the Muslim Brotherhood “moderate Islamists,” an oxymoron that blinds us to the Brotherhood’s long-term goal to recover the global dominance that is Islam’s divinely sanctioned birthright.</p>
<p>Andrew Bostom, a professor of medicine at Brown University, has for a decade relentlessly exposed the distortions of history and Islamic theology that have accompanied these policies. In <em>The Legacy of Islamic Jihad</em>, he exposed the lie that jihad is merely a spiritual struggle to be a good Muslim, amassing evidence from Islamic theology, scripture, and jurisprudence to show that jihad has in fact predominantly denoted the use of violence to subject unbelievers to Muslim hegemony. In <em>The Legacy of Islamic Anti-Semitism</em>, he swept away the rationalizations for widespread Jew-hatred among Muslims that blamed it on imported Western anti-Semitism, once more letting Islamic texts speak for themselves to show that since the 7<sup>th</sup> century, Jews have been hated, despised, massacred, and subjugated in both Islamic theology and practice. Now Bostom, in the 43 essays collected in his new book, <em>Sharia Versus Freedom: The Legacy of Islamic Totalitarianism</em>, has turned to the totalitarian foundations of Islam codified in shari’a law, the totalizing system that controls every dimension of human life––political, economic, civic, familial, and personal.</p>
<p>The great virtue of Dr. Bostom’s work is the collection of primary documents and secondary commentary that taken together provide a more accurate picture of Islam than the fantasies concocted from ignorance or political expediency, or the postmodern propaganda manufactured by Edward Said and his followers. The notion of jihad, for example, has been distorted by apologists like Georgetown professor John Esposito, who wrote in the <em>Washington Post</em> that in the Koran jihad “means ‘to strive or struggle’ to realize God’s will, to lead a virtuous life, to create a just society and to defend Islam and the Muslim community.” Under the Bush administration, the National Counterterrorism Center similarly advised its employees never to use the term “jihadist,” since “jihad means ‘striving in the path of God’ and is used in many contexts beyond warfare.” But these assertions cannot stand next to the abundant evidence Bostom collects, such as Al-Tabari’s 10<sup>th</sup> century “Book of Jihad,” which shows that for 14 centuries jihad refers to war waged against the unbelievers, the “harbis” (denizens of Dar al Harb, the “House of War”) whom it is legal to kill, enslave, and plunder.</p>
<p>Even those, like the influential scholar Bernard Lewis, who accept the martial meaning of jihad sometimes assert that such wars are conducted under limitations similar to the Western laws of war, limitations so-called Islamist extremists ignore. Yet Islamic jurists such as the 8<sup>th</sup> century founder of the Hanifi school of Islamic jurisprudence, Abu Hanifa, Bostom writes, affirm “the impunity with which non-combatant ‘harbis’––women, children, the elderly, the mentally and physically disabled––may be killed.” According to Hanifa, there is nothing wrong with using catapults against “the polytheists’ fortresses . . . even if there are among them a woman, child, elder, idiot” or anyone suffering from a physical disability.</p>
<p>Illustrating the continuity of modern Islamist ideology with traditional Islamic theology and jurisprudence, Bostom quotes Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, the “spiritual” leader of the Muslim Brotherhood and Al-Jazeera television star whose program reaches 60 million people: “It has been determined by Islamic law that the blood and property of people of Dar Al-Harb . . . is not protected . . . in modern war, all of society, with all its classes and ethnic groups, is mobilized to participate in war.” Hence even those not actually fighting are fair game, an argument similar to the one bin Laden made after 9/11 when he justified attacking civilians. These traditions give the lie to the “religion of peace” claim made by apologists, and also explain why, as Bostom quotes Samuel Huntington, “Wherever one looks along the perimeter of Islam, Muslims have problems living peaceably with their neighbors.” Moreover, jihadist raids and attacks across those borders were, Bostom writes, “designed to sow terror” in order to make future conquests easier by breaking the spirit of the enemy, as recorded by the 17<sup>th</sup> century historian al-Maqqari when discussing such attacks: “Allah thus instilled such fear among the infidels that they did not dare to go and fight the conquerors; they only approached them as suppliants, to beg for peace.” Such passages suggest how the Islamists interpreted Obama’s 2009 groveling Cairo speech: as the supplications of the infidel begging for peace.</p>
<p>Bostom provides a similar correction to the oft-repeated claims that anti-Semitism is not inherent in Islam. On the contrary, Bostom writes, “There is voluminous evidence from Islam’s foundational texts of theological Jew hatred: virulently Antisemitic Koranic verses whose virulence is only amplified by the greatest classical and Muslim Koranic commentaries . . . the six canonical hadiths collections, and the most respected sira,” biographies of Muhammad. In this tradition Jews are minions of Satan, cursed because they resisted Islam, killed prophets, and transgressed the will of Allah. They are destined to be transformed into apes and swine, and to be humiliated, abased, and eternally damned for their deceit and treachery.</p>
<p>Again demonstrating the continuity of this 14-century-long tradition with the anti-Semitic calumny of modern Islamists, Bostom quotes from a sermon given by an Egyptian-government appointed cleric delivered at a mosque at Al Azhar, the most prestigious and venerable institution of Sunni learning: “Muslim brothers, God has inflicted the Muslim nation with a people whom God has become angry at [Koran 1:7] and whom he cursed [Koran 5:78] so he made monkeys and pigs [Koran 5:60] out of them. They killed prophets and messengers [Koran 2:61/3:112] and sowed corruption on Earth [Koran 5:33/5:64]. They are the most evil on Earth [5:62/63].” And Bostom reminds us that Muhammad’s jihadist career began with the conquest and massacres inflicted on the Banu Qurayza, Banu Khaybar, and Banu Nadir Jews. As Bostom summarizes, “Muhammad’s brutal conquest and subjugation of the Medinan and Khaybar Jews and their subsequent expulsion” by the “Rightly Guided” Caliph Umar “epitomize permanent, archetypal behavior patterns Islamic Law deemed appropriate to Muslim interactions with Jews.”</p>
<p>Given this theological sanction, we should not be surprised to find the grimly consistent record of Muslim pogroms and massacres of Jews that Bostom documents from the Middle Ages to the 20<sup>th</sup> century. Nor should we be surprised that Jew-hatred continues to dominate the modern Middle East, and is foundational to the Arab hatred of Israel. Hence the quotation of the apes and swine Koranic verse in the charter of the terrorist Hamas organization, or the quotation of Koran 5:64, which calls Jews the sowers of corruption, by “moderate” Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in 2007 during a speech urging Muslims to “aim their rifles at Israel.”</p>
<p>The exposure of these “Islamophilic” distortions of Islam provides the necessary backdrop for the discussions of Islamic shari’a law that follows. Our misunderstanding and downplaying of the threat to liberal democracy represented by a legal code that subjects every facet of human life to its strictures have been facilitated by the same political and ideological prejudices. Meanwhile, the imposition of shari’a is the highest goal of the various Islamist organizations, whether actively violent or not, roiling the Middle East and North Africa today. Bostom’s essays remind us what history also teaches: that totalitarian threats to our freedom and way of life will not be neutralized by the refusal to see clearly the illiberal ideology driving the Islamist agenda.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Benghazi and the Oslo Syndrome</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/richard-l-cravatts/benghazi-and-the-oslo-syndrome/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=benghazi-and-the-oslo-syndrome</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/richard-l-cravatts/benghazi-and-the-oslo-syndrome/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 02 Nov 2012 04:42:52 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Richard L. Cravatts]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Benghazi]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hillary Clinton]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jihad]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[mitt romney]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Muhammad]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Oslo]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Terrorism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Video]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=163481</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Unmasking the psychology of blaming America for the terrorism perpetrated against it. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/richard-l-cravatts/benghazi-and-the-oslo-syndrome/benghazi-attack-consulate-550x344/" rel="attachment wp-att-163521"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-163521" title="Benghazi-Attack-consulate-550x344" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Benghazi-Attack-consulate-550x344-450x281.jpg" alt="" width="315" height="197" /></a>In their third and final presidential debate in Boca Raton on October 22<sup>nd</sup>, this one focused on foreign affairs, neither President Obama nor Governor Romney, somewhat inexplicably, addressed a still nagging question on the minds of many, both Republican and Democrat: namely, why, for some two weeks after the lethal attack on the Libyan embassy, did the State Department and Obama administration continue to explain the attacks as a random madness of Muslim protestors incited by an innocuous video clip on You Tube rather than a pre-planned, determined attack by well-armed terrorists commemorating 9/11 again by spilling American blood?</p>
<p>Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was quick to point out that the anti-Islam video, “Innocence of Muslims,” was “inflammatory, despicable material posted on the Internet” and “an awful Internet video that we had nothing to do with,” trying to distance both the administration and the U.S. government as a whole from the film.</p>
<p>White House Press Secretary Jay Carney similarly insisted that the protests and deadly attacks in Benghazi were not “directed at the United States,” but could be traced directly to the video. “This is a fairly volatile situation, and it is in response not to United States policy, obviously not to the administration, not to the American people,” he told the press, “but it is in response to video that is offensive to Muslims.” Appearing on no less than five Sunday news programs on September 16<sup>th</sup>, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice repeated the by-then widely promoted theory that “the best information and the best assessment we have today is that in fact this was not a preplanned, premeditated attack  . . . that it was a spontaneous reaction to what had just transpired in Cairo as a consequence of the video.” And a story released just last week reveals that a flurry of emails, sent nearly in real time as the embassy attacks were underway, contained information that Ansar al Sharia, a group identified by the State Department as being an Al Qaeda-affiliated group, initially claimed responsibly for the attack that was clearly an act of terrorism and not, as the Obama administration continued to contend and position the event, a random reaction to perceived insults of Islam.</p>
<p>The problem with all of the explanations emanating from the Obama White House was, of course, that they were intentionally misleading or certainly misguided, a situation that was immediately apparent to many observers outside of the White House’s inner circle who saw the attack on the Libyan embassy exactly for what it was: a carefully executed terrorist attack on a day with specific symbolic import, and not a spontaneous burst of anger from indignant and aggrieved Muslim mobs.</p>
<p>The question is, why did the Obama administration reflexively, and obsessively, cling to the view that an obnoxious video inflamed Muslim passions, not a long-apparent ideology of jihad against the West in general and America specifically? Why were the President’s spokespeople so adamant in deflecting the obvious explanation that the Libyan events were very clearly acts of terrorism, and that they signaled quite obviously, on the anniversary of 9/11, that the lethal reach of radical Islam had not been contained with the killing of Bin-Laden?</p>
<p>The answer to those questions may not come from strategists in the State Department, or even from the White House spin doctors, but may have an explanation from psychotherapy, and particularly in a theory developed by Dr. Kenneth Levin when, in his book <em>The Oslo Syndrome: Delusions of a People Under Siege</em>, he examined Israel’s responses to terror as it tried to hammer out peace with its Palestinian foes. Levin, an historian and psychiatrist, postulated that Israelis, faced with persistent hostility and existential attack from an implacable foe with whom they were forced to negotiate for peace, had the characteristics “of at least some members of besieged or abused groups to embrace the indictments and calumnies of their abusers . . , the psychoanalytic concept of ‘identification with the aggressor.’” In the case of Israel, Levin saw the repetitive inclination on many Israelis on the Left, in the peace movement, and others to negotiate for peaceful coexistence with the Palestinian leadership—and to make continued one-sided concessions and accommodations in that effort—at the same time Yasser Arafat was conspicuously derailing authentic peace negotiations and actually continuing his efforts to extirpate the Jewish state through terror, incitement, and ideological attack.</p>
<p>But all the while, the failure to achieve peace after the Oslo Agreements was assigned to Israel, not to its abusive and disingenuous “peace” partner, a classic symptom of the Oslo Syndrome, which Dr. Levin describes as “a defense mechanism in which the individual blunts the pain of negative interactions with others, such as criticism or rejection, by embracing the indictment, making it one’s own criticism.” Embracing the indictment and making it one’s own criticism, of course, has been a salient and oft-noted characteristic of this administration, starting with what Governor Romney referred to as the President’s “apology tour” and his 2009 Cairo speech where Obama contended that the “great tension between the United States and Muslims around the world” was the result, not of an expanding Islamism and impulses of jihad, but “tension [that] has been fed by colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims.” So, in Obama’s view, it was the behavior and actions of the U.S. and the West that had inspired jihad, and our own progress and freedoms were at fault, that “the sweeping change brought by modernity and globalization led many Muslims to view the West as hostile to the traditions of Islam.” Similarly, in an <em>al Arabiya</em> interview in which he announced his intention to reset the diplomatic vagaries introduced by George Bush, the President suggested that the U.S. must “start by listening, because all too often the United States starts by dictating—in the past on some of these issues—and we don&#8217;t always know all the factors that are involved.” There is also the prevalent strain in the multiculturalist, victimology, group identity ideology of the Left on campuses and in the current administration who have been willingly blind to the realities of terrorism, and have either obscured its existence when it was seemingly self-evident (as in the Ft. Hood mass murder by Maj. Nidal Hasan, defined by the administration as an incidence of “workplace violence”), or in the Libyan embassy incident when the U.S. embassy in Cairo, during the height of the attacks, quickly issued a statement condemning, not the slaughter of Americans by jihadist madmen, but “the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims—as we condemn efforts to offend believers of all religions.”</p>
<p>The reality is that members of this administration, because of their delusions about their own healing abilities and their misinterpretation of and apologetics for the lethal nature of radical Islam, have continually sidestepped the issue of terrorism, falling for the psychological trap, as Levin describes at it, of thinking they can remain in control by ignoring manifestations of radical Islam over which they actually have <em>no</em> control, and instead blaming terroristic events on causes over which they presumably can exercise control, such as workplace conditions, aggressive U.S. foreign policy, and You Tube videos. In this psychological juggling, Levin observed, “the individual [or nation, a collective individual] at least attains a sense of being in control of the indictment rather than simply feeling the passive victim of assault by others, and he or she attains also a sense of shared comprehension and rapport with the attacking other rather than feeling simply the targeted outsider.”</p>
<p>This explains why many on the Left, including those in academia, have regularly glossed over terroristic behavior on the part of Islamists—Hamas, Hezbollah, Fatah, the Al Aqsa Brigades, or others—and not only refused to call this terrorism, but have romanticized this violence as justifiable “resistance.”  But in Obama’s idealized, post-colonial, multicultural world of progressive thought the assumption is that political actors behave in rational ways, something that is clearly absent in conflicts in which theology, apocalyptic views of the world, a longing for martyrdom, contempt for the infidel, or genocidal ethnic hatred underlie geopolitical struggles. The administration’s professed belief that through sheer good will and mutual understanding the forces of radical Islam could be moderated has shown itself to be delusional, which Levin pointed to as what Israel attempted to achieve by making itself, on its own, responsible for achieving peace even when confronted with an implacable, even hostile, opponent.</p>
<p>This “pain of abuse and the fantasies of relief,” Levin said, “however divorced from realistic expectations those fantasies may be,” result in two behaviors: one is “self-denigration,” as Obama has expressed in Cairo and elsewhere and was certainly underlying the sentiment of the diplomatically-worded communiqué that announced that “the Embassy of the United States in Cairo condemns the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims.” The second behavior, Levin noted, is “grandiosity, the inclination to believe that they have the power by their own actions, by their self-reform, to alter the behavior of their abusers.”</p>
<p>That grandiosity was on display in Cairo in 2009, where Obama, announcing himself as the new, multicultural, compassionate face of American diplomacy, deluded himself into thinking that making apologies for America’s perceived diplomatic excesses under Bush, excusing its failure to appreciate the subtleties of Islam and to accommodate its beliefs, and ending the U.S.’s own feeling of exceptionalism in dealing with the world would, as measures of self-reform, work to moderate radicalism and suppress terrorism. The problem with that thinking, of course, just as it was a lethal problem for Israel, is that jihadist foes see those reforms, not as acts of kindness and understanding, but as weakness. The Islamists who murdered Ambassador Stevens and three other Americans may have actually been insulted by the silly You Tube video, just as many Muslims were outraged by the Danish cartoons of Mohammed, but these offenses were simply pretexts for the ensuing violence, not its root cause.</p>
<p>Radical Islam is at war with the U.S. and the West, and with Israel, because our way of life, rights of expressions, standards of law, and civil and human rights conflict with the rigidity of Islam and its inability, in its fundamental form and practice, to coexist. That reality contradicts the administration’s apparent belief that Islamic truculence and aggression are merely understandable and natural responses to the vagaries of American policy and culture, and that if we simply behave appropriately, terrorism will disappear. That is why, too, this administration is so wary of even using the word terrorism, or identifying terroristic acts as being just that when they do occur.</p>
<p>It may give psychological comfort to the Obama administration to think they have the power and ability to moderate the behavior of jihadist foes by reforming U.S. behavior, but in spending two weeks arguing about the merits of an offensive film, tracking down its producer, and blaming the victims of terror instead of the perpetrators, the Obama administration simply demonstrated to our lethal foes what James Burnham described in <em>The Suicide of the West</em> when he spoke of those who threaten themselves from within because they “hate their own civilization, readily excuse or even praise blows struck against it, and themselves lend a willing hand, frequently enough to pull it down.”</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>Muhammad, the Sexual Superman</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/raymond-ibrahim/muhammad-the-sexual-superman/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=muhammad-the-sexual-superman</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/raymond-ibrahim/muhammad-the-sexual-superman/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 26 Oct 2012 04:10:30 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Raymond Ibrahim]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Aisha]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Muhammad]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[pedophilia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[prophet]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[sex]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Wives]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=162792</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[What the prophet’s insatiable libido says about Islam.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/raymond-ibrahim/muhammad-the-sexual-superman/islam3-2/" rel="attachment wp-att-162817"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-162817" title="islam3" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/islam3.gif" alt="" width="315" height="243" /></a>Apparently the prophet of Islam, Muhammad, was something of a sexual superman—indeed, possessing the sexual appetite and potency of 4,000 mortal men.</p>
<p>According to Islam’s most trusted and traditional sources, the story is as follows: Muhammad used to visit and have sex with his nine wives in a single hour (other accounts indicate 11 wives in a single hour).  This averages to about six minutes per wife (not counting traveling time from tent to tent).  When one of Muhammad’s companions wondered at the prophet’s superhuman feats of libido and speed, another companion, the famous Anas, responded that the prophet had the potency of 40 men.</p>
<p>This account was deemed authentic enough to include in <em>Sahih Bukhari</em>—the most canonical hadith collection, second in authority only to the Quran itself—meaning that mainstream Islam accepts it as fact.</p>
<p>But alas, the matter doesn’t just end there.</p>
<p>Another, more fabulous, account says that Muhammad had the strength of 400 “heavenly men”—each of whom are said to have the strength of 100 mortal men.  Strength for what, you ask?  In the <a href="http://islamqa.info/en/ref/10053">words of Islam’s prophet</a>, “a [heavenly] man will be given the strength of a hundred men to eat, drink, feel desire [i.e., libido], and have sexual intercourse.”</p>
<p>Thus, according to Islam, when he was alive on earth, Muhammad had the sexual lust and potency of 400 “heavenly men,” which is equivalent to 4,000 mortal men.</p>
<p>Lest the reader think all this a joke (or a “<a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/islam/islams-insanities-all-just-a-hoax/">hoax</a>”), here is <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vgir-rMRY2g">a video</a> of popular Muslim preacher Sheikh Mahmoud al-Misri confirming all the above. After declaring that Muhammad had the sexual strength of 4,000 men, he assured his audience that this is not just some rumor, but was “verified through scientific research.” He then recounted the above narrative—that Muhammad used to copulate with his nine wives in one hour and that he had the strength of 400 heavenly men.</p>
<p>He even quoted from yet another authoritative Islamic text—telling his audience to “commit this reference to memory, so you can recall it when people ask for proof.”  According to the authoritative <em>Fath al-Bari</em>, compiled by the esteemed Muslim scholar Ibn Hajar, “based on these calculations [400 heavenly men x 100 mortal men], our prophet Muhammad—prayers and blessings upon him—had the strength of 4,000 men.”</p>
<p>Accordingly, Sheikh Mahmoud marveled at the fact that, despite Muhammad’s sexual superpowers—“which required 4,000 mortal wives”—he was married to only one woman for 15 years, Khadija, his elderly wife and patroness.</p>
<p>This approach—boasting about the prophet’s lasciviousness, only to try to rationalize it into some magnanimous point—is common among Islam’s clerics.  For example, discussing <a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/from-the-arab-world/rationalizing-pedophilia-in-islam/">pedophilia in Islam</a>, another TV cleric spoke in awe concerning Muhammad’s “patience” with his 9-year-old child bride Aisha:</p>
<blockquote><p>We know that Asia’s mother went to take her down from the swing that she was playing on to fix her hair and prepare her for the prophet so he could enter her [have sex with her]—and she did that all on the same day. So you see, she was playing with her fellow playmates even though her day of consummation was that very same day—and all that they did was to fix her up for the prophet so he could have sex with her. Now what do we see when the prophet married Aisha? Did he go to her and say “Okay that’s it, you’re married, you’re now a grown up, you’re supposed to be mature, you need to do this and that; you need to forget about your toys and your little friends; you are now a wife of a man, you have to see to my needs” and that’s it? No. The prophet allowed her to continue playing with her toy dolls—indeed, the prophet even sometimes gave her such things to play with.</p></blockquote>
<p>Three observations:</p>
<ul>
<li>What other religion portrays its head figure and prophet in such a manner?  What do these accounts of Muhammad—having sex with several women in a single hour, having sex with a 9-year-old—say about the founder and role model of Islam?  What does a sexual paradise—where men will be granted 400 times the power and pleasure for life’s most carnal pursuits, food, drink, and sex, indicate?  Understanding this great divide between Islam and other religions is key to understanding why Islam is at conflict with the rest of the world (hint: it’s not because of land, politics, or grievances).</li>
<li>With such obsessions and priorities, is it any wonder that countless stories concerning sex-slavery, female abduction, and rape—<a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/raymond-ibrahim/the-rape-and-murder-of-pakistans-christian-children/">especially for infidel non-Muslims</a>—flood the (non-mainstream) media?</li>
<li>Muslims are obligated to accept such accounts about their prophet.  These stories concerning Muhammad’s superhuman sexuality are contained in <em>Sahih Bukhari</em>, <em>Sunan al-Tirmidhi</em>, and <em>Fath al-Bari</em>—all mainstays of Islamic teachings.  To cast doubt on one of the accounts contained in them is to cast doubt on the entire collections—and hence, to cast doubt on Islam.  This is why the guardians of Allah’s religion insist all these accounts be accepted without question, and why Muslims are compelled to uphold their prophet’s teachings, from “<a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/raymond-ibrahim/islamic-%E2%80%98adult-breastfeeding%E2%80%99-fatwas-return/">adult breastfeeding</a>” to <a href="http://www.raymondibrahim.com/from-the-arab-world/shocking-video-muslim-women-drinking-camel-urine-for-good-health/">drinking camel urine</a>.</li>
</ul>
<p>Incidentally, any Muslim offended by all this should consider: Who is truly responsible for defaming the prophet of Islam—people like me, for translating and sharing the texts of Islam and the teachings of its clerics, or the texts and clerics of Islam themselves?</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Are Radical Imams Going to Redefine Freedom of Speech?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/alan-m-dershowitz/are-radical-imams-going-to-redefine-freedom-of-speech/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=are-radical-imams-going-to-redefine-freedom-of-speech</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 20 Sep 2012 04:36:34 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Alan M. Dershowitz]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Censorship]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Film]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Muhammad]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[violence]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=144868</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why we cannot allow those who employ violence to initiate a debate about the limits of free speech.  ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/imams.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-144873" title="imams" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/imams.jpg" alt="" width="280" height="187" /></a>Now there are threats of violence directed against France for the publication of a cartoon depicting the prophet Mohammad in violation of Islamic law.  This is simply the most recent manifestation of a worldwide effort to censor freedom of expression and make it conform to the most radical interpretation of Islamic tradition.  The bounty on the head of Salman Rushdie was recently increased and this distinguished author remains in peril.  Theo Van Gogh was murdered for violating Islamic Law.  And numerous people have been killed as the result of cartoons being published in Denmark and a video shown on YouTube.</p>
<p>I have seen several minutes of the stupid little film that has, arguably, incited so much violence and the deaths of four distinguished public servants, including a United States Ambassador who was uniquely sympathetic to Islam and Arab interests.</p>
<p>There is nothing good that can be said about the low budget film.  It has little redeeming social value and the world would be a better place if it had never been made or shown.  Nevertheless, it would be wrong, and under American law unconstitutional, to censor or punish such despicable expression.  Freedom of speech means freedom for those who you despise, and freedom to express the most despicable views.  It also means that the government cannot pick and choose which expressions to authorize and which to prevent.</p>
<p>There are several exceptions recognized under American law to untrammeled freedom of expression.  These include falsely shouting fire in a crowded theater, fighting words and speech that present a clear and present danger of inciting violence.  Even if these exceptions were applied to anti-Islamic expressions that would not solve the problem.  It is easy to argue that a video such as the one on YouTube could be banned without doing much damage to freedom of expression, but that would only be the tip of the iceberg.  The radical Imams who incite the violence would not be satisfied until they could decide what could be seen and heard. They want to become the ultimate judges, juries and executioners when it comes to anything that relates to Islam or its prophet.  But religious fanatics who are easily offended by those outside of their religion who violate the rules of their religion cannot serve as censors in democratic societies.  The threat or fear of violence should not become an excuse or justification for restricting freedom of speech.</p>
<p>Those who blame America for allowing what some Muslims regard as blasphemous speech must come to understand that by not censoring such speech, the government does not place its imprimatur upon it.  That may be difficult to understand for people who have come of age in repressive regimes which do not permit any expressions disfavored by the government.  In such regimes, the publication of bigoted materials can be taken as representing the views of the government.  For example, when Iranians newspapers publish anti-Semitic diatribes, the views expressed in those diatribes are the views of the government.  Not so with democratic states.  Indeed it is probably true that more anti-Semitic material is published in the United States than in Iran, simply because so much is published here and almost none of it is subject to any kind of restriction or censorship.  That does not make the United States an anti-Semitic country, but rather a country in which there is freedom to express anti-Semitic views.  It does make Iran an anti-Semitic country, because all views that appear in the media must be approved by the government.</p>
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		<title>Drawing a &#8216;Red Line&#8217; to Protect Free Speech</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/mark-tapson/drawing-a-red-line-in-the-sand-for-free-speech/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=drawing-a-red-line-in-the-sand-for-free-speech</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 18 Sep 2012 04:50:31 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Mark Tapson]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Embassy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Free Speech]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[movie]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Muhammad]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Protest]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Riot]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=144371</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Is the First Amendment safe in the Obama era? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Protest_AP453512792815_620x350.gif"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-144376" title="Protest_AP453512792815_620x350" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Protest_AP453512792815_620x350.gif" alt="" width="375" height="247" /></a>Even as Islamic violence against American embassies swells around the world, and evidence emerges of its coordination and premeditation, our own government and media continue to insist that the source of it all is an hilariously incompetent YouTube film that offended Muslim hair-trigger sensitivities.</p>
<p>Americans abroad have been killed this last week. The black flag of jihad has been raised over our Egyptian embassy. Our Libyan ambassador was sodomized, murdered, mutilated and dragged through the streets. As with Salman Rushdie’s novel <em>The Satanic Verses</em>, the Danish cartoon riots, and Geert Wilders’ film <em>Fitna</em>, the Islamic uproar ostensibly due to the micro-budgeted <em>The Innocence of Muslims</em> has been riotous and murderous, but the blame is once again falling on the “provocateur,” not the rabid mobs looting and killing in the name of cultural sensitivity. Thanks to a president who always sides with the Islamic world over America, our kneejerk official response was to blame the seeming religious bigotry of the filmmaker.</p>
<p>Our State Department, which is in “meltdown,”  as Charles Krauthammer put it, has been scrambling to find the right wording for a response to all this, culminating in spokesman Jay Carney’s laughable pronouncement that “this is not a case of protests directed at the United States writ large or at U.S. policy; this is in response to a video that is offensive to Muslims.” So far, our official responses are all variations on the theme of “Nothing excuses this violence, <em>but</em> we also strongly condemn religious bigotry.” This neatly echoes the left’s attitude toward free speech in general these days, which is “Sure I believe in free speech, <em>but</em> hate speech must be punished.”</p>
<p>You cannot believe in free speech and then qualify it with a “but.” You either support free speech or you don’t. Honoring freedom of speech means you stand up for the right of others to say disagreeable or offensive things. If the left truly believed in free speech, the totalitarian concept of “hate speech” would not even exist. But they don’t, and so they are colluding with the OIC’s campaign to impose sharia blasphemy laws on the West.</p>
<p>The OIC, or <a href="http://discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=7453">Organization of Islamic Cooperation</a>, is the world’s largest Muslim assembly, consisting of 57 member states (you know, the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpGH02DtIws">same number of U.S. states</a> candidate Obama campaigned in). Its primary aim is “conducting a large-scale worldwide effort to confront Islamophobia” and make it an international crime. “We sent a clear message to the West regarding the red lines that should not be crossed,” the OIC leader <a href="http://www.humanevents.com/2008/06/25/george-orwell-meets-the-oic/">arrogantly declared</a> after the shrewdly orchestrated Muslim mayhem around the world protesting such infidel abominations as the Danish cartoons.</p>
<p>“Red lines” – a phrase reminiscent of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Clash-Civilizations-Remaking-World-Order/dp/0684844419/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1272000969&amp;sr=8-1">Samuel Huntington</a>’s famous observation that “Islam has bloody borders.” Except that the red lines the OIC is referring to aren’t geographical – they are the ever-tightening limits that Muslim fundamentalists are imposing to choke off our freedoms. Free speech “is not a value that the Muslims share with America as a whole,” <a href="http://revolutionmuslim.blogspot.com/">declared</a> the American group Revolution Muslim in response to an offending episode of Comedy Central’s satirical show <em>South Park</em> two years ago.</p>
<p>It’s also not valued by our administration, either. The government has <a href="http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/cotown/la-et-ct-administration-asks-youtube-to-review-innocence-of-muslims-video-20120913,0,610679.story">asked </a>YouTube to review the 14-minute <em>The Innocence of</em> <em>Muslims</em> trailer and determine whether it violates the site&#8217;s terms of service. Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, expressed his concerns over the repercussions for our soldiers abroad, who are already in grave danger from our own military leadership’s suicidal counter-insurgency idiocy. Dempsey <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/09/12/joint-chiefs-chairman-urges-pastor-to-withdraw-support-anti-islam-film/#ixzz26QKiCkfR">urged</a> controversial anti-Islam Pastor Terry Jones to consider withdrawing his support for the film – which goes to show that if all it takes is one Florida pastor’s opinion to set off the entire Muslim world’s bloodthirsty outrage against America, maybe they’re the problem and not him.</p>
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		<title>Islamic Violence Needs No Spark</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/joseph-klein/islamic-violence-needs-no-spark/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=islamic-violence-needs-no-spark</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 18 Sep 2012 04:24:51 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Joseph Klein]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ambassador]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Chris Stevens]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Christians]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Embassy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Libya]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[movie]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Muhammad]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[offensive]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Salafists]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=144496</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A look at the mindless violence in the last few months exposes the lie that a YouTube video caused embassy attacks. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/egypt-libya-embassy-attacks-morsi.gif"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-144500" title="egypt-libya-embassy-attacks-morsi" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/egypt-libya-embassy-attacks-morsi.gif" alt="" width="375" height="252" /></a>The Obama administration is willfully misleading the American people on the source of Islamic violence and throwing the First Amendment&#8217;s protections of free speech under the bus to boot.</p>
<p>In full dhimmitude mode, President Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and UN Ambassador Susan Rice have been busy blaming an obscure anti-Muslim video for the killing of our ambassador to Libya, John Christopher Stevens, and three other Americans on the eleventh anniversary of 9/11.  They refuse to place the blame where it belongs &#8211; on the Islamists themselves who do not need an excuse to incite violence against the &#8220;infidels.&#8221; Never mind that the interim president of Libya Mohamed al-Magariaf publicly took issue with the Obama administration&#8217;s apologist explanation for the killings of the Americans in his country:</p>
<blockquote><p>It&#8217;s clear from the timing, on Sept 11th, and from the detailed planning of the attacks, indicates that behind it there was experienced masterminds. It was not a spontaneous act in protest of the movie. This has been prepared for a long time, on this specific day.</p></blockquote>
<p>The video was nothing more than a convenient pretext for the latest episode of the continuing Muslim jihad against everything we stand for in the West. Consider, for example, the long list of targeted acts of terrorism on Christian civilians and church workers by devout Muslims, displayed on the website <a href="http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/Pages/ChristianAttacks.htm">ReligionofPeace.com</a>. The list goes back to 9/11/2001.  Here are a few incidents that occurred just this year alone.</p>
<p>On August 14, 2012, Salafis stormed a Christian-owned store in Asyut, Egypt and murdered the owner.  On the same day, a 14-year-old Christian girl was gang-raped and murdered by five Muslim men in Sahiwal, Pakistan.  On August 10, 2012, a Christian man was gunned down by Islamists in Jolo, Philippines on his way home from church.  Four days before that, in Okene, Nigeria, Muslims entered a church and shot members with machine-guns, slaughtering at least nineteen, including the pastor. A Christian doctor was brutally blinded by Salafist Muslims in Shubra el Khayma, Egypt on July 26, 2012.  About a month earlier, two Christians were reported murdered by Muslim Brotherhood activists in El Sharqiya, Egypt.  In Kenya, on July 1, 2012, Muslims threw grenades into two churches and then shot dead fleeing Christians including children. And in Tunisia, the birthplace of the Arab Spring, a video captured the image of an execution earlier this year in which a man&#8217;s throat was cut for embracing Christianity by Muslims who offered prayers as they sliced.</p>
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