It's Not Easy Being Muslim

By Alan Caruba

As this is written, we’re just over a week or so away from Palm Sunday, Passover, and Easter in April. I am no expert, but I have found nothing in either the Jewish or Christian Testaments that require Christians or Jews to make war on other religions to convert them. Proselytizing is encouraged, but not with a threat of death.

Islam is not a religion of peace. It never was.

Despite being pre-dated centuries by both Judaism and Christianity (as well as Buddhism and Hindu), from its beginning in the seventh century C.E., Islam made it very clear that it intended to be the only game in town. In predominantly Muslim nations today, practicing any other faith can often get you killed. The decision to leave Islam can also get you killed.

While Islam has had brief periods of tolerance, in the past when Muslims showed up people soon learned that could either convert or be subjected to a very unpleasant social status (Dhimmi) and taxed for their failure to embrace Islam. Wherever Muslims gain in population, they always act to demand that elements of Sharia law be obeyed by non-Muslims. There is no separation of church and state in Islam.

They are easily offended. It can get you killed.

Islam translates as “submission” and even a cursory reading of the Koran reveals a very harsh view of what is moral and what is not. Multiple wives are moral. Concubines are moral. Slavery is moral. Honor killings are moral. It’s a long, unpleasant list.

Converts from Islam continually say they feel like that they have been freed from an insane asylum. You would, too, if you were constantly harangued in the mosque to wage war against everyone who is not a Muslim.

There are more than a billion Muslims in the world, but we tend to think only of Arabs when we think of Islam. It is widespread in Africa and has resulted in rioting and death in many African nations. In the Philippines, the killing of Christians is widespread.

It’s a cliché that not all Muslims are terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims. Not quite true, but close enough these days. An American convert to Islam calling herself Jihad Jane pled innocent this week to charges of planning to kill a Swedish cartoonist.

I got to thinking about this on news that an American-born Muslim cleric, Anwar al-Awlaki, currently residing in Sana’a Yemen is in the news calling for a jihad against the United States.

“With the American invasion of Iraq and continued U.S. aggression against Muslims,” said al-Awlaki, “I could not reconcile between living in the U.S. and being a Muslim, and I eventually came to the conclusion that jihad against America is binding on myself just as it is binding on every other Muslim.”

Al-Awlaki is afflicted with a very selective memory as is frequently the case with his version of being a good Muslim. He seems to have forgotten all the bombings, kidnappings, and killings of Americans from around the 1980s onwards until, of course, 9/11 in which a group of Muslims killed nearly 3,000 Americans in attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a flight that was diverted from a target in the nation’s capital.

He seems to not recall that Iraq’s dictator for thirty years, Saddam Hussein, waged war against the very Muslim nation of Iran for eight years to a stalemate and then invaded Kuwait, he gassed Kurds to death in his own nation. You could find yourself fed live into a wood chopper in his glory days. If ever a dictator needed removal, Saddam was the poster boy.

In more recent days, Awlaki had been in communication with U.S. Army Major Nidal Hasan who thought it was a really good idea to yell “Allah akbar” while murdering thirteen unarmed soldiers at Fort Hood.

To Muslims in America, al-Awlaki said, “How can your conscience allow you to live in peaceful coexistence with a nation that is responsible for the tyranny and crimes committed against your own brothers and sisters?” In short, he is saying that an American Muslim’s first and only allegiance is to Islam, not the United States.

He’s wrong. Muslims have lived and thrived and served America with honor. Their problem, however, is a religion that directly threatens America and all other non-Muslim nations; a religion lacking tolerance, lacking mercy, and lacking the very conscience that permits al-Awlaki to urge treason.

It’s not going to be easy to be a Muslim in America for a very long time to come. Loyal Muslim Americans have an obligation to identify those who are not.

© Alan Caruba, 2010