A Commentary by the Editor-in-Chief
This statement may shock some of you and offend others, but here goes:
It almost makes no difference whether 9/11 was genuinely carried out by Saudi-connected Al-Qaeda operatives or not. The goal of Islam is to conquer the world–period.
For the past two years, this writer has written repeatedly about Islam, its goals and its objectives. In some of the articles, I’ve quoted directly from the Qur’an.
In our naivete, we Americans want to believe that the racial, ethnic and religious problems in the Middle East are all one big misunderstanding. We reason: If the parties would sit down at the conference table and talk to one another, all of the contentiousness would disappear.
The major flaw with this naive hope is that it isn’t based on history or reality.
Muslims have been making war on the west for centuries. Muslim conquests took Turkish Muslims to the gates of the city of Vienna, Austria. Furthermore, since the founding of the American Republic, Muslims have been a thorn in the side of almost every American president.
In 1803, President Thomas Jefferson had to dispatch a naval task force to Libya to rescue American sailors held on board the Philadelphia. The rescue made Navy Lieutenant Stephen Decatur a national hero.
About one hundred years later, President Theodore Roosevelt dealt with the capture of Greek-American businessman Ion Perdicaris. This time the incident was in Morocco, but the surrounding issue was a tribal dispute among the various Muslim leaders.
Seventy-six years later, President Carter had to contend with Iranian Shia Muslim radicals after revolutionary zealots supporting the Ayatollah Khomeini took Americans hostage in the American embassy in Teheran. His successor Ronald Reagan was in office during a string of terrorist incidents.
Twenty-two years after the Iranian hostage debacle, Al-Qaeda operatives flew three American jetliners into the sides of some of our most prominent buildings and eighteen months later, President George W. Bush gambled the future of his presidency and the future of American Middle Eastern policy on the removal of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. The publicly announced reason was to battle a terrorist supporting Middle Eastern state.
What have we learned from all of this? The honest answer is that we haven’t learned very much at all. That will continue to be the case until Americans comes to terms with the realities of Islam. The Islamic world has a very distinct world view, and one that is poles apart from the Western world.
This world view is completely rooted in the texts of the Muslim holy book, the Qur’an, and Hadiths, statements that expound on the Qur’an. The Qur’an and related Hadiths speak to every aspect of their lives, and the combined writings form a distinctly Muslim view of the world, from relationships with foreign countries, relationships with non Muslims and even women’s rights. Those writings even propose how Muslims will relate to an ever-changing world.
The world of the Muslim is divided into two distinct parts: The Dar al-Islam and the Dar al-Harg. These are the spheres of Islam and everything else. Thus, Islamic foreign policy is driven by an overarching belief that the world is in two parts, the sphere of Islam and the sphere of war. If a county is not in the Islamic world, it’s in the sphere of war. In one sense, this makes Muslim foreign policy very simple. They believe they’re right and everyone else is an infidel.
In Sura 2.216 we see the Qur’an’s prescribed method of dealing with the outside world:
“Fighting is enjoined on you, though it is disliked by you; and it may be that you dislike a thing while it is good for you, and it may be that you love a thing while it is evil for you; and Allah knows while you know not.”
The passage clearly tells us that war is enjoined on a Muslim. In English, the word carries the same meaning as an injunction, a court order that has the authority of law. In other words, the Qur’an tells us that Allah has ordered that war is good for his followers.
This dovetails nicely with a verse from Sura 9.5:
“So when the sacred months have passed, slay the idolaters, wherever you find them, and take them captive and besiege them and lie in wait for them in every ambush.”
Qur’an scholar Maulana Muhammad Ali says in footnote 1033, page 385 of his Qur’an translation that this verse is directed at those idolaters who attended a Muslim pilgrimage and violated an agreement made with Muslims. While the verses immediately preceding verse five discuss idolaters who make treaties with Arabs, this verse breaks the literary context.
Mr. Ali’s interpretation is slightly off the mark because he omits any discussion on the phrase, “wherever you find them…” The verse further encourages Muslims to “lie in wait for them in every ambush.” It seems that the passage doesn’t expressly limit the carnage to idolaters who break treaties.
In his book, The Crisis of Islam, Bernard Lewis writes on the issue of Muslim foreign policy by quoting an early Hadith thought to have been issued by Muhammad himself:
“Jihad is your duty under any ruler, be he godly or wicked. A day and night of fighting on the frontier is better than a month of fasting and prayer.”
And later in the same Hadith:
“He who dies without having taken part in a campaign dies in a kind of unbelief. Learn to shoot, for the space between the mark and the archer is one of the gardens of Paradise. Paradise is in the shadow of swords.”
Passages such as these open help illuminate the Islamic concept of Imperialism.
Lewis continues by saying that Muslims traditionally believe that the expansion of Islam through military conquest is not only justified, it’s encouraged. However, Western nations that defend their interests or expand their territories by military means are imperialist aggressors and should be resisted at all costs.
The Qur’an delves into how Muslims should treat Christians, Jews and everyone else. Clearly, relationships with non-Muslims are forbidden by the Qur’an. In Sura 5, verse 51, the Qur’an says:
“O you who believe, take not the Jews and Christians for friends…”
Six verses later, verse 57 says:
“O you who believe (Muslims), take not for friends those who take your religion as a mockery and a sport, from among those who were given the Book before you.”
The key words in the passage are, “who were given the Book before you.”
Who are those, “who were given the Book before you”? The text is clearly speaking about Jews and Christians, for in Sura 5 prior to verses 51 and 57 the Qur’an says that Moses and Jesus were prophets.
In reality, the Qur’an teaches us that a special level of punishment awaits Jews and Christians. Sura 4.160 tells us:
“So for the iniquity of the Jews, We forbade them the good things which had been made lawful for them, and for their hindering many (people) from Allah’s way.”
In Sura 62.5, Jews further incur the wrath of Allah’s followers by this verse:
“Say: O you who are Jews, if you think that you are the favourites of Allah to the exclusion of other people, then invoke death, if you are truthful.”
In his commentary on this verse, Qur’an expositor Maulana Muhammad Ali says that Sura 2.94, which reads, “Say: If the abode of the Hereafter with Allah is specially for you to the exclusion of the people, then invoke death if you are truthful.”
Ali says that Jews and Christians who have not been true to Allah should pray that they die. The only problem with this comment is that in these verses, the invocation of death is directed exclusively at Jews and Christians. Simply put, if a Jew or a Christian is true to his or her faith, they cannot be faithful to Allah. Thus, they should ask Allah for death.
These passages tell us that there is almost no common ground for Muslims and the rest of the world. Furthermore, if a Muslim takes his holy book seriously, they know that they’re told that they cannot be friends with Jews and Christians. This philosophical point of view not only makes personal relationships difficult, it trickles upward to almost completely prevent Islamic nations from having relations with the West.
Ask Dutch film maker Geert Wilders how tolerant the Muslims are. His film on the Qur’an Fitna has earned him a Fatwa. The film will shock you, but it is a brutally honest assessment of the nature of radical, Qur’an believing Islam.
Here is the link to the film:
Watch it before CAIR gets it pulled from the internet.
It’s reality.
Posted under Uncategorized
This post was written by mcarl on September 4, 2008
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Rome (AsiaNews) – The treatment of Christians is a stain on India’s reputation. That is the opinion voiced by Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. 
