Because They Hate: A Survivor of Islamic Terror Warns America (27 page)

"Moderate” Muslims, and apologists and propagandists for Islam, will attempt to deny or obscure the real meaning, nature, and intent of jihad. Some will say that jihad means only a Muslim’s “inner struggle” to be a better person, and that jihad has no military meaning whatever. Others will acknowledge that Muslims have a religious duty to spread Islam throughout the world, but insist that it is to be spread only peacefully, through
dawah
—literally “the call"— meaning persuasion and reasoning. Finally, some will go so far as to admit that it can also mean warfare, but insist that in Islam, warfare is allowed only in self-defense or against oppression. However, all of these assertions are examples of a tactic that Islam encourages in waging jihad:
taqiyya
or
Kithman
—"lying,” “deception,” “deceit.” Muslims are encouraged to lie if, in the opinion of the liar, telling the lie will be “good” for Islam. This is a documented fact according to both ancient and modern scholars of Islam.
¹⁸
The renowned classical Islamic scholar and theologian Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali (1058-1111) instructs that “[s]peaking is a means to achieve objectives” and that “it is permissible to lie if attaining the goal is permissible."
¹⁹
More recently, Amir Taheri, author of numerous books on Islam and the Middle East, states that according to Islam, “Muslims have every right to lie and to deceive their adversaries, and a promise made to a non-Muslim can be broken whenever necessary."
²⁰
According to Abdullah al-Araby,

within Islam there are certain provisions under which lying is not simply tolerated, hut actually encouraged. The hook
The Spirit of Islam,
by the Muslim scholar Afif A. Tabbarah, was written to promote Islam. On page 247, Tahharah stated: “Lying is not always had, to he sure; there are times when telling a lie is more profitable and better for the general welfare, and for the settlement of conciliation among people, than telling the truth. To this effect, the Prophet says: 'He is not a false person who
[through lies]
settles conciliation among people, supports good or says what is good.' “
²¹

Since the sacred goal of jihad is to make Islam “supreme in this world,” every lie told to achieve that goal is not only permitted, but sanctified. Obviously it is “good” for Islam that the infidel should be kept ignorant of the true meaning of jihad. The Islamists' strategy is working perfectly on the gullible, good-hearted, fair-minded, make-love-not-war crowd, raised in the comfort of the West.

Taqiyya/Kithman
can take different forms. One form is blatant lying, asserting as fact something that is not true, such as claiming that jihad means only a Muslim’s “inner struggle” to be a better person, and that jihad has no military meaning whatever. A more insidious form of
taqiyya/kithman
is dissembling, telling part of the truth, but intentionally concealing a more important truth in order to create a false impression. An example is acknowledging the Muslims' religious duty to spread Islam throughout the world, but insisting that it is to be spread peacefully, through
dawah,
persuasion and reasoning. This assertion is very reasonable and appealing to the Western mind. However, it is intended to deceive. While it is true that Muslims must
initially
use
dawah
to spread Islam, this
taqiyya
intentionally conceals the fact, based on numerous passages of the Koran and Islamic tradition, that when
dawah
fails, Muslims must
impose
Islam on the infidel through
harb
and
qital
—war, killing, slaughter.

A related example of
taqiyya
is acknowledging that Islam permits war, but asserting that it is permitted only for defensive purposes. This could be referred to as double
taqiyya.
First, according to the Koran and the Hadith, aggressive warfare for the purpose of imposing Islam on the world is the ultimate religious obligation of jihad.
²²
Second, the history of the expansion of Islam clearly reveals its aggressive, offensive nature. In the seventh century, Islam did not emerge peacefully from the Arabian Peninsula floating harmlessly on the breeze. Islam was spread across the Middle East and North Africa at the edge of the sword. The only choice offered by the Muslim conquerors was conversion or submission to Islam, or death. The same choice was offered when Muslims subjugated Spain and Portugal in 711, and occupied all or part of the Iberian Peninsula until 1492, an occupation of almost eight centuries. Shortly after conquering Spain and Portugal, the Muslims invaded France, but they were repulsed in 732. Muslims also invaded, conquered, and occupied Sicily and large parts of Italy. In addition to invading Spain, France, Sicily, and Italy from North Africa, Muslim armies repeatedly invaded Europe from the east, until they were finally driven out for the last time in 1683. Islam was not waging “defensive” war when it conquered and occupied Spain, Sicily, and Italy or when it besieged Vienna three times.

We are seeing today an escalation of Islamic influence throughout the world as radical Muslims use their resources to finance terrorism and bring nation after nation to its knees. They are not robed Arabs waving swords and riding horses, charging at our borders. They are using their wealth, which the West has created for them with oil, to purchase Western corporations, establish schools, and buy and control media conglomerates to spread their radical message throughout the Arab and the Western worlds. They are buying plane tickets, arriving in our cities first-class, delivering their babies in our hospitals, and acquiring our citizenship legally and illegally using whatever resources they have to obtain it. They are coming in throngs and settling
in
our lands. They are outreproducing us almost seven to one.
²³
Their invasion and declaration of war may be disguised under our Western lifestyle, but nevertheless it is an invasion. You just have to open your eyes and connect the dots to see the picture unfolding right before your eyes. They are so confident that they declare their message and intent from mosques, state it on television, and spin out suicide bombers throughout the globe. All we have to do is watch and listen. Just look at Europe (France, Denmark, Britain) and what is happening over there. The U.S. is not there yet, but we are not far behind before Islamic riots start breaking out on American streets.

Muslims deny that jihad has any military meaning, and assert that Islam permits only defensive warfare; Muslim apologists, propagandists, and so-called moderates will quote sura (chapter) and verse from the Koran to “prove” that Islam is a tolerant and peaceful religion. There are, indeed, verses in the Koran which call for patience and tolerance. This is the partial truth that is used to create a lie.

Taqiyya
is created by concealing the fact that the Koran also contains verses, written
later
in Muhammad’s preaching ministry, which call for unremitting war and violence against infidels until they submit to Islam. They conceal the fact that, under the Islamic doctrine of
naksh,
or “abrogation,” when there is a contradiction between verses in the Koran, the later verse supersedes the earlier verse.
²⁴
According to sura 2:106, a later verse “substitutes something better” in place of an earlier verse; according to sura 16:101, the later verse will “substitute one revelation for another.” Chronologically, sura 9 was the second-to-last chapter written by Muhammad. Sura 9:5 commands Muslims to “fight the Pagans wherever ye find them, and seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem (of war).” Sura 5 was the very last chapter written by Muhammad. Sura 5:33 states that “[f]or those who do not submit to Allah their punishment is . . . execution or crucifixion, or the cutting off of hands and feet, from the opposite sides, or exile from the land.” According to some scholars of Islam, verses 9:5 and 5:33, all by themselves, supersede and cancel at least 124 earlier verses in which Muhammad preached patience and tolerance.
²⁵
For Muhammad and Islam, the revelations of violent jihad replaced the revelations of peace.

The hatred, treachery, and violence of the Koran and the Hadith are reflected in the relationships between the rival power centers of the Islamist movement. The religion of Islam has two main branches, the Sunni and the Shia, along with a number of smaller sects and denominations (e.g., the Alawis, the Ismailis, the Druze). A substantial majority of the Arab world is Sunni, but there are significant Shia minority populations in many Arab countries, and the Shia constitute a majority in Iraq and in non-Arab Iran.

The Wahhabi or Salafi school of Sunni Islam is practiced and propagated by “moderate” Saudi Arabia as well as by the Taliban and the al Qaeda terrorist network. All over the world, from Pakistan and Indonesia to the USA, this is the version of Islam that is preached at every institution built or supported by Saudi oil money.
²⁶
According to Wahhabi Sunni religious doctrine, Shia Muslims are apostates from Islam, and therefore deserve death even more than Jews, Christians, and pagans.
²⁷
The late Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, declared by Osama bin Laden to be the “emir of al Qaeda in Iraq,"
²⁸
relied on this religious doctrine in declaring jihad in 2005 on Iraqi Shia Muslims.
²⁹

The Shia extremists, led by Iranian disciples of the Ayatollah Khomeini and exemplified by the terrorist organization Hezbollah, have demonstrated themselves to be just as hateful and just as murderous as the Wahhabi Sunnis. We must remember that it was the Shia of Hezbollah who pioneered the tactic of suicide bombing.

Furthermore, both the Sunni and Shia Islamists consider the nominally secular pan-Arab nationalist governments (such as Assad’s Syria, Mubarak’s Egypt, and the Iraq of Saddam Hussein) to be apostates deserving of death. On the occasions when Islamists have challenged the authority of these Arab nationalist dictatorships, the Islamists have been slaughtered, sometimes by the tens of thousands. In 1982, the Muslim Brotherhood, a Wahhabi paramilitary organization, sought to bring down the Syrian Baathist dictatorship of Hafez al-Assad. In response, Assad attacked and destroyed the city of Hama, which had been a stronghold of the Brotherhood. According to Amnesty International, between ten thousand and twenty-five thousand inhabitants of Hama were killed, most of them civilians.
³⁰
More recently, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt was brutally suppressed after launching a terror campaign to destabilize the Mubarak government.

However, despite all of this intense mutual hatred and wholesale slaughter, Sunni and Shia Islamist terrorists will join forces with each other, and with secular Arab terrorist states, despite assumptions to the contrary by some “experts.” They will do so whenever they believe it will serve their own tactical or strategic interests. For instance, secular Syria and Shia Iran have been close allies for over twenty years, since shortly after Saddam Hussein invaded Iran in 1981. The fundamentalist Shia Iranians had no theological problems in forming an alliance with Syria’s Assad, a rigidly secular pan-Arab apostate who had killed thousands of Muslim fundamentalists. The terrorist alliance between Iran and Syria still exists today, even though the cast of characters has changed. In a truly remarkable display of Sunni-Shia-secular terrorist cooperation, Sunni terrorists from all over the Arab world are trained in Lebanon by Shia Hezbollah, under the protection of secular Arab nationalist Syria, paid for by Shia Iran. After their training is completed, these Sunni terrorists are transported through Syria and smuggled into Iraq, where they will commit terrorist atrocities, mostly against Shia Iraqis. There are numerous other examples of cooperation between some combination of Sunni, Shia, and secular Arab terrorists.
³¹

If you want to understand the nature of the enemy we face, visualize a tapestry of snakes. They slither and they hiss, and they could eat each other alive, but they will unite in a hideous mass to achieve their common goal of imposing Islam on the world. This is the enemy we are fighting.

It is certain that there are genuinely moderate Muslims, perhaps a substantial number, who do not seek to impose Islam on this country and the world through violent jihad. However, they are conspicuous by their silence regarding the more problematic doctrines of Islam. To the extent that Muslim “leaders” and lobbying organizations in the United States even address the issue, they offer nothing more than vague, tepid condemnations of terrorist violence and heated denials that the behavior of Islamic terrorists has any connection with Islam.

Where is the Muslim outrage in this country over the supposed few who hijacked their religion? Where is the Million Muslim March on the Mall in Washington, D.C., sending a message to all Muslims in the Arabic world condemning the killing of human beings in the name of Allah? Where is the cry to raise the consciousness of the rest of the Muslim world about their hijacked religion? If something of yours had been stolen, wouldn’t you scream to the world that someone had hijacked it?

Where are the voices of Western Muslims, particularly the American Muslim community, sending a clear message to the Arabic world that we are Americans, and when you attack one of us you attack all of us? We condemn and consider the enemy Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, al Gamaat al Islamiya, and the rest of the collection of barbaric Islamic thugs and murderers who have neither conscience nor humanity. Where is the outrage of the Muslim community? Why aren’t the imams of every mosque holding press conferences, and inviting the media to tell the American public, “We are Americans first. Any enemy of America is our enemy. We will work to find, stop, arrest, turn in, and condemn anyone in our community who aspires to radicalize our religion and harm our country"?

You hear moderates giving excuses for the Muslims in America by saying that maybe they are afraid to speak because of retaliation. What a bogus excuse. What retaliation? This is America. If American Muslims feel free to burn an American flag on any street corner in the USA, they can voice their opinion freely and openly condemning our enemy, America’s enemy. They live here in America, not in Iran or Saudi Arabia. I can understand why supposedly moderate Muslims in the Middle East are afraid to speak. They’d be lynched and have their bodies hung on electricity poles, as they do in the Palestinian territories, Iran, Iraq, and other Islamic countries, to send a message to silence other critics. They’d be hung in the public square for everyone to learn a lesson about speaking about their dictators. But Muslims living in America afraid to speak? Give me a break.