"Destroy all the Churches"

By Alan Caruba

News Report, March 19, 2012: “Four people, including three children, have been killed after a man opened fire outside a Jewish school in the French city of Toulouse Monday. Police say the bullets came from the same gun that was used last week in the murder of three soldiers.”

Recently, according to several Arabic news sources, Sheikh Abdul Aziz bin Abdullah, the Grand Mufi of Saudi Arabia, declared that is “necessary to destroy all the churches of the region.” By “region” one assumes he was referring to the Middle East, but he might as well have been referring to the entire world.

There are no churches in Saudi Arabia and no bibles either. No evidence of or access to any other religion is permitted and one has to pause to ask whether Islam is a “religion” in any other than its outward appearance. It has mosques for “religious” worship. It has clerics in the form of imams and ayatollahs. It has a holy book, the Quran. And it has more than a billion people who identify themselves as Muslims.

As Raymond Ibrahim noted in a recent article, “Likewise, consider the significance of the Grant Mufti’s rationale for destroying churches; it is simply based on a Hadith. But when non-Muslims evoke hadiths—this one or the countless others that incite violence and intolerance against the ‘infidel’—they are accused of being ‘Islamophobes’, of intentionally slandering and misrepresenting Islam, of being obstacles on the road to ‘dialogue’, and so forth.”

Islam translates as “submission” and it is a common human trait to let someone or some institution do all one’s thinking as opposed to personally having to grapple with ethical, social, moral, and academic issues. Authoritarian regimes exist to stamp out all independent thought or action.

Reviewing a book by Robert R. Reilly, “The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern islamist Crisis”, Imbrahim, a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowtiz Freedom Center and an Associate Fellow at the Middle East Forum, notes that, in Islam, “Reilly chronicles how the giants of Muslim philosophy, such as Ghazali and Ashari, concluded that knowledge was unknowable, that moral truths can only be ascertained through revelation. Accordingly, all knowledge—the very bounds of reality—came to be limited to the words of the Quran and its pronouncer, Islam's prophet Muhammad.”

This explains why the burning of some Qurans in Afghanistan brought scores of Afghanis into the streets in protest and resulted in the killing of American soldiers, but the massacre of Afghanis by an American soldier has not produced the same response. They are regarded merely as “martyrs.” Indeed, what the West has witnessed countless times, the killing of infidels does not result in any calls for an end to the murders.

Mosques are hotbeds of violence planned and perpetrated against “infidels”, unbelievers.

There is, from a Western, Judeo-Christian point of view a total incomprehension of Islam’s utter contempt for any other system of faith or governance.

This is why Christians and those of other faiths are fleeing the whole of the Middle East if they can because they have no protection from either Islam or from their respective governments against the violence that has been preached and practiced against them since the rise of Islam. Christianity literally has no future in the Middle East and anywhere else where Islam is the dominant force.

This is why, if Iran acquires the ability to manufacture nuclear weapons, it will use them against Israel first, America second, and the rest of the West unless it is stopped.

In Dr. Peter Hammond's book: “Slavery, Terrorism and Islam: The Historical Roots and Contemporary Threat”, he describes Islam, saying that it “is not a religion, nor is it a cult. In its fullest form, it is a complete, total, 100% system of life. Islam has religious, legal, political, economic, social, and military components. The religious component is a ‘beard’ for all of the other components.”

“Islamization begins when there are sufficient Muslims in a country to agitate for their religious privileges. When politically correct, tolerant, and culturally diverse societies agree to Muslim demands for their religious privileges, some of the other components tend to creep in as well.”

What current generations in the West and around the non-Islamic world are witnessing is the absolute evil that lies at the heart of Islam, repeated on a daily basis. It is most evident in the Middle East from where the threat emanates, but it is a part of the daily life of Europe where an increasing Muslim population will reverse many of the advances of civilization and democracy the West takes for granted.

This accounts for Islam’s intense hatred of Judaism for its ethical philosophy, its spirit of intellectual inquiry and the way this was eventually adopted with the rise of Christianity in the West after it was largely driven from its Middle Eastern origins.

It is the greatest folly to dismiss a call to “destroy all the churches” as just the uttering of some Muslim madman. The call lies at the very heart of Islam’s total contempt for any other faith—Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, Bahai—and its determination to rule the whole of the world’s population through terror and intimidation.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Islam's Legacy is Constant War

By Alan Caruba

The failed Christmas bomber attack was yet another wake-up call for Americans who have slipped into a self-induced coma regarding Islam’s constant threat to the nation and the West.

Despite the post-9/11 attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq, President Bush and now President Obama have both repeatedly asserted the absurd notion that Islam is “a religion of peace.” It is, in fact, a religion of conquest and one in which the religion and the state are one. To live in a Muslim nation is to live under Sharia law in which conversion to another religion is punished by death.

“When Asia Was the World” by Stewart Gordon is an interesting book about life in Asia during the years 500 to 1500 of the Common Era. “Buddhism and Islam arose and spread along Asia’s far-flung trade routes. So did luxury goods, such as silk, pearls, spices, medicines, glass, and simple things like rice and sugar.”

“Two centuries before Ibn Fadlan traveled (921-922 CE) through this region, the overall borders of the Muslim world had been set in one of the fastest, broadest conquests in human history.”

“Between 630 CE and 680 CE, Islamic armies swept north from Mecca across what is present-day Jordan, Palestine, and Syria and east across Iraq, then fought in Persia and attacked south into Yemen. By 720 CE, Muslim armies had successfully attacked Egypt, North Africa, and Spain and had conquered several caravan cities, Samarkand, Tashkent, Bukhara and Khwarizm. There, however, the conquest stopped.”

As the memoir of Ibn Battula (1325-1356 CE) revealed, “Every king was surrounded by rivals, factions, squabbling nobles, and a necessary but unwieldy bureaucracy. Kings particularly wanted to know about the successful strategies, symbols, and ceremonies in other courts.” In other words, the worlds of these early kings was no safer than our own today when Western leaders must maintain vast intelligence gathering agencies to know what is being plotted in the Middle East and everywhere else in the world.

It is therefore essential for America to be led by a President who understands the threat posed by Islam in general and by al Qaeda’s network in particular, but in contrast to that we have a President who intends to close the Guantanamo detention center for non-state enemy combatants, extend the protections of the U.S. Constitution to admitted terrorists given civil trials instead of military tribunals, and was slow to respond to the Fort Hood murders and the Christmas day attempted airliner bombing.

On such events and attitudes does the safety and fate of the nation hangs.

It is therefore vital that we pay attention to the voices of those who understand that history turns on winners and losers.

“The greatest advantage our opponents enjoy,” writes Ralph Peters,”is an uncompromising strength of will, their readiness to ‘pay any price and bear any burden’ to hurt and humble us. As our enemies’ view of what is permissible in war expands apocalyptically, our self-limiting definitions of allowable targets and acceptable casualties, hostile, civilian and our own, continue to narrow fatefully.”

Peters is a retired U.S. Army officer, a journalist who has reported from various war zones, is widely traveled, and an author of 24 books. He is quintessentially politically incorrect.

Among the obstacles facing the present generation of Americans, as Peters sees them, are (1) “we simply do not feel endangered”, (2) American’s “collective memory has effectively erased the European-inspired horrors of the last century”, (3) “ending the draft resulted in a superb military, but an unknowing, detached population’, (4) Americans have come to believe in a “catechism of bloodless war”, and (5) “we have become largely a white-collar, suburban society in which a child’s bloody nose is no longer a routine part of growing up, but grounds for a lawsuit.”

Americans who passed through our nation’s schools since the 1960s have been neutered because, as Peters notes, “History is no longer taught as a serious subject. As a result, politicians lack perspective; journalists lack meaningful touchstones; and the average person’s sense of warfare has been redefined by media entertainments in which misery, if introduced, is brief.”

“We have cheapened the idea of war,” says Peters, forgetting or never knowing the price paid by previous generations to defend the nation and its principles. “More Americans died in one afternoon at Cold Harbor during our Civil War than died in six years in Iraq. Three times as many American troops fell during the morning of June 6, 1944 (D-Day) as have been lost in combat in over seven years in Afghanistan.”

While President Obama cited Gandhi in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, Peters points out that “Gandhi would not have survived very long in Nazi Germany.”

The President made a case for the necessity of some wars, but returned home to spend three months making up his mind to increase our troop presence in Afghanistan and to then tell the enemy that they would be gone in eighteen months. That is astonishingly stupid and reveals the chasm that exists between Obama’s first year in office and the nearly eight years under George W. Bush in which America was spared another attack.

“The problem is religion,” says Peters. “Our Islamist enemies are inspired by it, while we are terrified even to talk about it.”

History teaches us that Islam has long since plunged those parts of the world over which it holds sway into centuries of backwardness while Europe and the New World grew in power, innovation, and dominance.

My view is that Islam is literally fighting for its life despite the more than a billion who subscribe to it. Far from its earliest years when it championed intellectual inquiry, it now holds desperately to the most primitive control over the lives of its adherents and cannot expect a Reformation such as took place in Christianity.

The wars to defeat it will take a long time, cost many lives, and be worth every dollar and every casualty.