To

The victims of the September 11 attack,
in whose memory I write this book;

To

The dead and disabled American soldiers of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars,

who made the ultimate sacrifice in defense of freedom;

To

Mr. Naraian Kataria,

(a Hindu activist in New York who has been fighting Islamic fundamentalism, on his own, for nearly half a century),

Mr. Ali Sina,

(a Native of Iran, ex-Muslim, the founder of www.faithfreedom.org), and

Dr. Bill Warner,

(Director, Center for the Study of Political Islam, www.politicalislam.com):

These three individuals are great examples of totally selfless service to humanity. They have dedicated their lives to fighting Islamic imperialism, heart and soul.

Acknowledgements

This work would not have been possible without continuous and sustained help from many people. However, because of the nature of the work, most of the many who helped prefer to remain anonymous.

A few have agreed to be identified only by their last names. They are: D. Reynolds, L. Sambodhi, H. Garg, and finally, my Editor, Mr. Wells. Without the assistance and guidance of Mr. Wells, this work would never have been complete.

Three individuals stand out among those who have helped, and who do not mind having their names published. They are: Dr. Bill Warner of the Center for Political Islam (www.politicalislam.com); Mr. Narian Kataria, an Indian political activist from New York City; and Mr. Ali Sina, the Founder and Editor of the very popular web site, www.faithfreedom.org. These three are truly great gentlemen. Although I have never met Mr. Ali Sina, he was supremely gracious in his correspondence, encouragement, and agreement to write a preface to this book. Similarly, Dr. Warner and Mr. Kataria have been a source of strong encouragement through the years of the writing of this book.

Year after year, courageously and selflessly, Messrs. Kataria, Ali Sina, and Warner defend Western Civilization and our freedoms against the hegemony of Islamic imperialism. If the politicians in Washington had followed the wise counsel of these three great men, and many other courageous activists like them, the United States would have saved many lives and hundreds of billions of dollars fighting terrorism without any beneficial results. Washington may have the power and money; but, simply put, it lacks common sense in addressing the greatest threat that confronts the United States and Western Civilization.

This book is dedicated to these three great men as a token of respect and admiration. Emulate them, and we will win the war against Islamic fanaticism.

Finally, I am grateful to my family for their loving support during the five years that I have been working on this book.

Panini,

August 2015

A Note on Appendices

At first glance, the four appendices in this book might seem to be unrelated to its main thesis—empirical analysis of Islam as a religion and a political supremacist movement. The following brief summaries of the content of the appendices will make these connections clear.

Appendix 1: Buddhist Jesus

Islam regards Jesus as a Muslim and a Prophet of God, but not as a savior, the Son of God, or divine. This is in keeping with Islam’s approach to Christianity as a whole, which is to regard it as a subset or variation of Islam rather than as a legitimately independent religion. This high-handed approach is taken without empirical evidence and with total disregard to the facts of history, most notably the historical precedence of Christian thought and practice. Compared to the theological appropriation of Jesus by Islam, Buddhist influence on Christianity is historically demonstrable.

In the light of the distinction between measurable Buddhist influence and historically and empirically unfounded Islamic claims that Jesus is merely a prophet preceding Muhammad (the final prophet), one might question the motives for the latter. Islamic claims seem to be an attempt to legitimize their doctrine by claiming without authority a connection with an earlier doctrine. Then in turn the earlier doctrine is dismissed as inaccurate or incomplete—in need of the later doctrine for its alleged correction and perfection. The Islamic motive here seems quite self-serving and even parasitic in nature.

Islamic apologists like to claim (when it is convenient for them to do so) that Islam and Christianity are related religions. What they do not add is that the relation, from Islam’s perspective, is entirely to Islam’s advantage. Islam denies the divinity of Christ and sets itself in direct opposition to the fundamentals of Christian belief. Where the Buddhist influence on Christianity, as this appendix argues, gives a non-Semitic and universalist ethos to that religion, Islam retains the dualist outlook which is characteristic of the Semitic mind. This appendix demonstrates just how divorced Islam truly is from Christian thought.

Appendix 2: The Classical Roots of Western Civilization

Since World War II, it has been fashionable in many circles to describe Western civilization as “Judeo-Christian.” This description is only partially true, and in its partiality it ignores aspects of the Western mindset. By emphasizing Jewish and Christian roots, the contributions of Hellenic, Roman, Teutonic, Celtic, Slavic, and other native European peoples are ignored or diminished. Furthermore, the enormous contributions of Classical Greece and Rome to Western science and secularism are completely left out by this phrase, Judeo-Christian. The words and phrases, the science and architecture, the poetry and history—all this is part of the greatness of the West’s cultural heritage. This must be reclaimed, not left to become mere footnotes to Judeo-Christianity or Abrahamic monotheism.

Appendix 3: The Case for Universal Secular Ethics

This writer believes that the alternative to Islam is not a competing religion but a secular and universal ideology. The world needs science and Secular Humanism, not the ancient theology of Muhammad. Universal secular ethics is an attempt to replace the metaphysically-based ethics of religions with an ethical system which is empirical, verifiable, and in keeping with the changing conditions and needs of humanity. One of Islam’s defining features is its inability to change. Alteration of its doctrines is seen by Islam as an admission of falsehood. This renders Islam incapable of critical examination and without its own means of escape from theological debates and seventh century solutions. Such debates and solutions have been applies for 1,400 years without resolution or positive results. Must they continue until the whole world falls into the same useless circular reasoning?

Appendix 4: Hilary Clinton’s Diplomacy of Delusions, A Critical Review of Hard Choices.

As a leading candidate for the Presidency of the United States in 2016, Hillary Clinton’s views on world affairs deserve critical examination. Hard Choices is the most recent and comprehensive statement of these views, and in this appendix it is held up to close scrutiny. As I see it, Clinton’s views on foreign policy in general and the Islamic World and Middle East conflict in particular are naïve and superficial. She shows all the signs of the usual errors and misjudgments which characterize elite Western opinion about Islam. If she continues to hold such views and takes them with her to the presidency it will be yet another disaster for the United States.

Table of Contents

Foreword

Preface

Introduction

Part One

1. Is Islam a religion?

2. 9/11—A Nation Transformed

3. Osama bin laden

4. Afghanistan—Before 9/11

5. Afghanistan after 9/11

6. Iraq

Part Two

7. Saudi Arabia: De Facto Superpower

8. Pakistan: False Foundations

9. Pakistan: War and Ideology

10. Pakistan: Post-9/11 Double Game

11. Iran After the Islamic Revolution (1979)

12. Gulf Cooperation Council

Part Three

13. Muhammad

14. The Qur’an, Sharia Law, and The Mosque

15. The Ummah

16. Sufism

17. Universal Jihad

Part Four

18. What Islamic Civilization?

19. Suicide Bombers

20. Women’s Rights in Islam

21. Islam is Arab Imperialism

22. Islam in the 21st Century

Part Five

23. India Before Islam

24. Jihad in India

25. The Partition of India

26. India: Islam, Independence, and the Misguided Mahatma

Part Six

27. America: The Civilizational Jihad

28. The U.S. and the Ungrateful Arab

29. How the West Backs Islamic Fundamentalism

Part Seven

30. Europe: The Demographic Conquest

31. A Warning to Europe

32. Israel and Palestine: Cousins in Continuous Conflict

33. Israel and Palestine: Semites and anti-Semitism

Part Eight

34. What is Religion?

35. Monotheism and its Discontents

36. The Elimination of Metaphysics

Part Nine

37. The Axis of Jihad

38. The Faces of Jihad

39. Islam and the Clash of Civilizations

40. Postscript

41. Postscript Two

Appendices

1. Buddhist Jesus

2. The Classical Roots of Western Civilization

3. The Case for Universal Secular Ethics

4. Hillary Clinton and Diplomacy of Delusions

Bibliography

Notes

Foreword

The attack on the World Trade Towers on September 11, 2001 is long past, but our understanding of what caused the attacks that day is vague in many people’s mind. People say that 9/11 was a terrorist act, but that conventional knowledge is wrong. Jihad is not performed by terrorists, but by Islamic jihadists. Unfortunately, those who are uninformed include politicians, clergy, media, and educators, among others.

A determined scholar can learn about the true nature of Islam, but history shows us that few are willing to do the work required to get the entire picture. The key idea is “the entire picture.” The first mental hurdle to clear is that Islam is only a religion. If Islam were only a religion, it would be of limited interest. As Panini shows us, Islam is a complete idea of civilization, not just a religion.

The idea of Islamic civilization means that we must study many aspects of civilization. The ongoing tragedy of most investigations of Islam is to confuse knowledge about one aspect of Islam with complete knowledge of Islam. We must know the whole truth, not just a half-truth of one area. An example of failure of partial knowledge is that for 1,400 years non-Muslims have attempted to resist Islam by the same tactics—such as compromise—again and again. But these historic failures are never examined for why they failed.

The greatest non-Muslim failure is the assumption that Islam is similar to non-Muslim civilizations. As Panini shows, Islam is sui generis, a thing without parallel or analogy. An example of a failure to see that Islam has no similarity to Western civilization is the ongoing attempt to use dialogue, not debate. Dialogue always works from the assumption that a compromise can be found. Once you understand Islamic doctrine, “compromise” can be seen as merely a half step towards annihilation.

Even those who know the history of the destruction of Christianity in the Middle East, North Africa, Turkey, and Egypt do not understand the annihilation of Hindu and Buddhist civilizations. Islam and the Clash of Civilizations lays out a summary of the historic global jihad. It deserves a place on your bookshelf for this feature alone.

Then there is the matter of religion and philosophy. The biggest failure of non-Muslims is to think that Islam is like Christianity and Judaism. But, as Panini shows us, this is not true. It could be said that there are only two religions: Islam and all the rest. All similarities turn out to be an illusion. There is only one goal of Islamic philosophy: support and implementation of Islamic supremacy.

Panini also includes sidebar issues, such as Sufism, that help to fill out the complete picture on the subject of Islam. These side issues are important, since some of them are thought of as nooks and crannies that hold some goodness about Islam. But in the end, all of those glimmers of hope are shown to be devoid of success.

The chapters on current-day political dealings with Islam show us that non-Muslims do not have a clue about Islam. Only a systematic professional ignorance can produce such repeated failures and ongoing disasters. The Bushes, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton demonstrate that both Democrats and Republicans are blind, ignorant, and determined to use the powers of the state to crush any attempt to make decisions based on facts of doctrine or history. In light of the history shown, we see that the greatest failure of modern non-Muslim states is the refusal to teach the history of annihilation by Islam. Today’s politicians are blind, because their cultures have made them blind.

It is a straightforward but difficult intellectual task to write a book containing history, philosophy, current events, and Islamic doctrine. It is even more difficult to integrate all of the material into one book. But it is a task of the highest order to offer a solution to the problem. Islam and the Clash of Civilizations gives an answer to the question of what to do that is based on the idea of civilizational war and national politics. In short, a civilizational enemy requires a civilizational strategy.

Readers will find Islam and the Clash of Civilizations to be a holistic study of Islam that is well written and useful for novice and scholar alike.

Bill Warner

Director

Center for the Study of Political Islam

Nashville, Tennessee

Preface

On September 11, 2001, nineteen Muslims hijacked four American passenger jets, used them as weapons of mass destruction, killed thousands of people, and ushered the world into a new war. Over two million lives and trillions of dollars have been lost since, and it is just the beginning.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich warned that the United States is losing the war with radical Islamists. “The U.S. today is losing the war with radical Islamists,” he said. “We have to have the courage to confront just how badly we are doing in this war.” The 2012 Republican candidate for the presidency said you cannot win this war if you don’t admit that it’s a war. “I look around the planet at suicide bombings, I look at beheadings, there is one common pattern occurring everywhere across the planet—that is radical Islamists who hate our civilization, are prepared to cut off our head, are determined to impose their religion by force.”

We are losing this war because we don’t know the enemy. Gingrich said, “This is a campaign that should be fought with the largest possible number of allies, a campaign that should be fought wherever possible by surgically and methodically hunting down these [terrorists].”

And there lies the problem. We are not at war with terrorists or with radical Islamists. There is no such thing as radical Islam. There is only one Islam, which is at war with us. “The problem,” as Panini says, “is Muhammad, the Qur’an and sharia, period.” Fighting radical Islam is shadow boxing. You kill hundreds of terrorists, and thousands crawl out from beneath the rocks. They are now recruiting our children to kill us and we are helping them to do so. It took just $500,000 for Bin Laden to kill 3000 Americans. The financial damage to the country exceeded $3.3 trillion. It cost nothing for the Chechen Tsarnaev brothers to kill 3 people and injure/maim an estimated 264 others. With Iran and consequently Saudi Arabia becoming nuclear powers, this war will take a new dimension. What we saw so far is child’s play in comparison to what is to come. This is not a war that you can win through military superiority.

The fact that politicians think the problem of Islamic terrorism can be solved through military force shows how little they understand it. No remedy can be prescribed without proper diagnosis. No war can be won without properly understanding it. Who is attacking us and who are we fighting against? How can we know the enemy if we are afraid of even naming him?

Unlike the politicians and the media, Panini is not handicapped by political correctness. He shows how Islam destroyed mighty civilizations and how great cultures were reduced into barbarity when they succumbed to Islam. He explains the problems affecting the Muslim world, country after country, leaving no room for doubt that Islam is the problem. There is not a single bright spot in this creed. The so-called Golden Age of Islam is a myth. It never existed, and what existed had nothing to do with Islam. Islam killed scientific inquiry, suppressed rational thought, and delayed the advent of Enlightenment for 700 years. He also shows why Islam is incompatible with the U.S. Constitution and as such has no place in America.

We are at war without knowing whom we are fighting against. Can one win a war fighting it blindfolded? How are we supposed to defeat terrorism when we don’t understand what causes it? How can we be victorious while abetting the enemy?

In the 2015 UK elections, Ed Miliband, the leader of the Labour Party, vowed to his Muslim audience that if elected he would “outlaw the scourge of Islamophobia.”

“We are going to make it an aggravated crime,” he said. “We are going to make sure it is marked on people’s records with the police to make sure they root out Islamophobia as a hate crime. We are going to change the law on this so we make our abhorrence of hate crime and Islamophobia absolutely clear. It will be the first time that the police will record Islamophobic attacks right across the country.”

Miliband offered that he would impose the Islamic blasphemy law in the UK, and criminalize and prosecute the British citizens for expressing their fear of Islam, if Muslims voted for him. This is treason. There is no other word for it. Who is more despicable? A man who offers his wife to sleep with his boss to get promoted or a politician who offers to sacrifice the freedom of an entire nation just to be elected?

Phobia is an irrational fear. Muhammad wanted people to fear him. He said, “I will instill terror into the hearts of the unbelievers: smite ye above their necks and smite all their finger-tips off them” (8:12). How then can we say the fear of Islam is irrational? Islamophobia, as someone pointed out, is a word invented by fascists and used by cowards to manipulate morons.

Miliband is not an exception. There is no dearth of corrupt and amoral politicians. In 2013, the Conservative government of the UK banned the prominent bloggers and freedom activists Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer from entering the country, citing security concerns. What security threats did they pose to the UK? The intent was to appease Muslims who interpreted it as “we fear you.” Four years earlier, the Labour Party banned the Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders. Meanwhile, true hate preachers like Zakir Naik, the man who backed Bin Laden and said “every Muslim must be a terrorist” was given free entry to the country.

The situation in America is not any better. Nidal Malik Hasan, the Palestinian-American convicted of fatally shooting 13 people and injuring over 30 others in the Fort Hood mass shooting in 2009, shouted Allahu Akbar while carrying out his terrorist act and maintained that his motives were religious. Yet, the Department of Defense, supported by law enforcement, politicians, and journalists refused to make any connection between Islam and Hasan’s action.

Daniel Pipes points out, “Were the subject not morbid, one could be amused by the disagreement over what exactly caused the major to erupt. Speculations included “racism” against him, “harassment he had received as a Muslim,” his “sense of not belonging,” “mental problems,” “emotional problems,” “an inordinate amount of stress,” the “worst nightmare” of his being deployed to Afghanistan, or something fancifully called “pre-traumatic stress disorder.” One newspaper headline, “Mindset of Rogue Major a Mystery,” sums up this bogus state of confusion.

There is no confusion. This is part of the plan to surrender the country to the enemy. Take for example the indoctrination of schoolchildren.

A student of Farmville Central High School in North Carolina was surprised to find out that her textbook actually promoted Islam. The Vocabulary Workshop Fourth Course by Holt Rinehart & Winston, taught to high school kids all over America teaches students how to use words in a sentence. The following are a few examples.

Aptitude: Although Muhammad did not have a formal education, he had a good aptitude for business because he learned the merchant trade.

Astute: It is entirely possible that Muhammad was an astute or shrewd merchant, but about the age of 40 he gave up his career as a merchant and became a religious hermit.

Conducive: Muhammad, who was familiar with the teachings of Judaism and Christianity, found solitude to be conducive to understanding to proper faith. He also found meditation to be helpful.

Erratic: The response to Muhammad’s teachings were at first erratic. Some people responded favorably, while others resisted his claim that “there is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his Prophet.”

Quantitative: His success could be measured not only in quantitative ways – the number of followers of Islam – but also in a qualitative way: the improvement in people’s lives.

Requisite: Following the “Five Pillars of Faith” is a requisite part of Muslim religious duties. The required duties include giving to the poor.

This is allegedly a lesson in the proper use of vocabulary. This is the kind of indoctrination students receive in Iran, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia—and now also in America. The textbooks make no mention of Christianity and Judaism upon which western civilization was built.

Another textbook called History Alive: The Medieval World and Beyond dedicates three pages to Christianity (most of which paints it in a bad light and presents the Crusades as an act of Christian aggression) and barely any mention of Judaism, while simultaneously painting Islam as the defender against the aggression of the Crusaders. The “unit” dedicates seven chapters to Islam. Muhammad is presented as a holy man, someone who stood for the weak and the needy, who was opposed to his people because they were a greedy folk. They chased him out of his home because they feared he would destroy their income. The book claims all of Muhammad’s wars were in self-defense, and says Islam spread thanks to Arab traders. According to this book, as Muslims went to other countries for trade, they taught their religion along the way; and people flocked to Islam, embracing it eagerly. There is no mention of raids, massacres, genocides, plunders, rapes, slavery, and the terror that actually characterized Islamic expansion. Jihad is mentioned as struggle for self-improvement, which is a blatant lie. These are taught in publically funded schools with your tax money.

Western civilization is under attack—and the politicians, the media, and the educational institutions are all compromised. Those who are elected to protect us are selling out our freedom and the freedom of our children to fill their pockets for a few years of worldly power.

Politicians all over the world try to outdo each other to appease Muslims and vie for their vote. They are helping the enemy, while wasting your money and the lives of your sons and daughters fighting a phantom. That is why we are losing this war. This war cannot be won by surgically and methodically hunting down the terrorists, as Newt Gingrich suggests. And we don’t need to be constantly reminded that there is something wrong with Islam or that it needs reformation. Islam does not allow reform. It is a fossilized creed. It allows no change. How can we find a solution when we refuse to see the problem? Panini does not spell out the solution. The solution becomes self-evident once the problem is properly diagnosed. And that he does superbly.

With the exception of a few decades in the 20th century, when the Islamic caliphate was overthrown and Muslims were weakened, Islam has always been at war with the world. Some civilizations were conquered through terror and others were deceived. “This pattern of conquest by force and fraud,” Panini points out, “was established by Islam’s founder, Muhammad, and is even today the classic style of Islamic jihad.”

Terror (ro’b) and deception (taqiyah) are the twin wings of jihad. Like the proverbial good cop/bad cop, some Muslims specialize in one and some in the other. Although they may disagree in strategy, all Muslims have the same goal: to make Islam dominant, to subdue other cultures and religions, and to establish sharia law all over the world. This does not mean that they will force their religion on you. You will be free not to become a Muslim as long as you pay jizyah to them with willing submission while feeling humiliated.

Muslims don’t see themselves as citizens of any non-Muslim country and their allegiance is not and cannot be to a country where they are not the rulers. If they tell you otherwise they would be going against the Qur’an (9:23), which states that Muslims should not accept the guardianship, i.e. the rule, of the unbelievers. They believe the Qur’an is the word of God and the Qur’an says, “We made you an exalted nation, that you may be guardians over the people.” (2:143) The only status that is acceptable to Muslims is that they should rule over others while others are reduced to dhimmis, second-class citizens who would labor and support their Muslim masters. There is no compulsion in religion as long as you accept Islamic supremacy.

Panini shatters the myth of moderate Islam and any hope of peaceful coexistence with Muslims. Such hope is not supported by 1400 years of Islamic history or by its scriptures. While people of other faiths have, at times, clashed with each other, they did so despite their religions. They fought over territory or disputes that had nothing to do with religion. No religion incites fighting. Some like Jainism, Buddhism, Christianity, and the Baha’i Faith are actually pacifist. Islam is the only religion that prescribes fighting. “Fighting is made mandatory for you, but you dislike it. You may not like something which is good for you and like something that is bad for you. Allah knows better” (2:216). Muhammad not only encouraged violence, he bragged that he owed his success to terror. “I have been made victorious with terror,” he boasted.

So what percentage of Muslims is radicalized? In May 2015, Al Jazeera conducted an online poll in Arabic with the question, “Do you support ISIS?” More than 58,000 responded. Over 81% said yes, while less than 19% said no. Can anyone still say the terrorists are a tiny minority and that the majority of Muslims are peaceful? The Qur’an prescribes violence. “Those who believe fight in the cause of Allah.” (4:76).

The Qur’an contains over 100 verses that call Muslims to fight the unbelievers. There is no such thing as jihad for self-improvement. There is only one jihad and that is through fighting. If we recognize the Qur’an as a holy book we must not complain if Muslims kill us. That is what it requires from them.

Muhammad ranked jihad among the “dearest actions in the sight of God.” He said, “setting out to fight in Allah’s way is better than the world and what it contains.” When a man asked him “who is the best among men,” he replied, “A believer who fights in the way of Allah with his wealth and life.”

The fact that not all Muslims are terrorists is no consolation. Once the wind blows in the right direction, the so-called peaceful Muslims suddenly turn into extremists overnight. I saw this happening in Iran in 1979.

In the neighboring country of Iraq, Christians and Yezidis lived as minorities among Muslims for centuries. They were not equal, but as long as they did not proselytize and did not make a public display of their faith they were left alone. The little freedom that they enjoyed had nothing to do with Islam. It was because the rulers were often secular. Even the caliphs were more concerned about expanding their domains and holding to power than enforcing Islam. They used Islam as a pretext. They provided some degree of protection for the minorities. When ISIS came to power and sharia became the law, the peaceful Muslims began beheading their Christian and Yezidi neighbors and raping their women.

Although not all Muslims are terrorists, a good percentage of them are, and four out of five of them condone terrorism. Does it matter who is and who is not? If I give you 1,000 cups of good wine and tell you one of them contains cyanide, will you drink any of them? Moderate Islam is the breeding ground for terrorist Islam. Without the demographic, moral, and financial support of the moderates, there can be no extremists. It is delusional to think that moderate Muslims have nothing to do with terrorism. Where do the terrorists come from if not from the so-called moderates?

Ali Sina
Author of “Understanding Muhammad”,
and the Founder of www.faithfreedom.org

Introduction

Great civilizations are not murdered. They commit suicide.

—Historian Arnold Toynbee

This is a book on Islam, the second-largest religion in the world with 1.6 billion adherents. More precisely, it is a polemic against Islam.

I want to make clear at the outset that I am not a Muslim or an Arab. I do not speak Arabic, and I have no formal academic training in religious studies in general or Islam in particular.

I was born into a middle class Hindu family in Hyderabad, India, nearly 60 years ago. My father was a secular Hindu and my elder brother a Marxist. The culture I grew up in was essentially liberal to the core. For the last 50 years or so of my life I have scarcely ever visited a Hindu temple unless to attend a wedding or to meet a business client (i.e., “Let’s meet at the temple on Sunday, it’s more convenient”). I have never been on a Hindu pilgrimage or participated in Hindu rituals. Religious Hinduism is no part of my life and in no way informs this polemic.

I am a secular humanist. I believe in “free minds and free markets” rather than supernatural beings and religious rituals. In American terms I am what one might call a secular conservative. I believe that reason, not mysticism, is what frees the human spirit. In this, my opinions are not far different from those of America’s Founding Fathers, for whom I have great respect.

My encounter with Islam was purely accidental. In 1976, I was 22 years old, poor, and unemployed with no meaningful prospects in Hyderabad. I heard there were good jobs in Iran, which at that time was still governed by the Shah. Through the help of a fellow Indian, a Hindu who was living in Iran, I got a job in Bandar Abbas with an Italian company which was constructing a seaport (the largest in Iran at that time). The job was good; the Iranians were good; life was good. I was earning around $300 USD a month with no expenses to speak of. I lived in a desert trailer park owned by the company which was more or less a work camp. Many businesses in the Middle East provide similar accommodations.

I was happy with my work. Bandar Abbas was not far from my home, about 1,600 miles away. My daily routine brought me from camp to work and back to camp again six days a week with Fridays off, so I had little interaction with Iranian society. Employees at the company were divided into Iranians, Europeans, and Asians. The last group numbered several hundred mostly Pakistanis, Filipinos, Indians, and Bangladeshis. My job was to maintain the timesheets for the Asian immigrant employees.

While working for this company, I became aware of strange behavior directed at me. A group of Pakistani and Indian workers there, including about 10 or 12 from my own home town, treated me as a personal enemy. I was subjected to insults, humiliation, intimidation, and threats. There were constant interferences with my work. For a while I thought there was something wrong with my behavior, because why else would I be receiving this treatment? Then I realized this group of people all had one thing in common: they were Muslims.

I was not the only victim. Other Indians were subjected to the same treatment. In every case they were Hindus or Sikhs. I began to realize that this was religious bullying. This came as a complete shock to me because I had never considered myself religious or Hindu. There were no Hindu temples in Bandar Abbas, and I had no interest in practicing the religion even if there had been. But the Indian and Pakistani Muslims in Bandar Abbas branded me as a Hindu whether I wanted the label or not.

This abuse went on for nearly two years. At no time were local Iranians or Italians from the company involved—it was always Indian and Pakistani Muslim immigrants, particularly the Indian Muslims from Hyderabad. It took me nearly a year to understand the theological dynamic of their vendetta. They hated me and the other Hindu immigrants simply because we were Hindus (whether we practiced or not did not matter). I slowly came to identify myself as a Hindu. Even though I rejected the metaphysics and theology of Hinduism, I was by race, by heritage, by culture, by language, and by nationality a Hindu in the eyes of the Muslims. I had no way to escape their branding.

I worked in Bandar Abbas for nearly two years until January, 1979, when the secular monarchy of the Shah was overthrown. Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Iran from exile in February, and with his arrival the new Islamic government of Iran cancelled all contracts with foreign companies and revoked the work and residence permits of most of the foreigners living in Iran. I went to Italy in the hope of getting another job with the same company, but while I waited to see if they had a job for me I got my visa for the United States.

I came to New York City in November, 1979. For a young man who grew up in a small village near Hyderabad, this was an incredible experience. The energy, the freedom, and the opportunity to assimilate into society were all remarkable. I found surprisingly many New Yorkers who were more accessible and friendly—and also less class-conscious—than the people of India or Iran. The Iran Hostage Crisis was at this time in full swing, following the capture of the embassy on November 4th. Jimmy Carter had just lost the presidential election, and Ronald Reagan was poised to succeed him.

When I first arrived in the United States, I found I had no need to fear the Islamic intimidation I had experienced in Iran. The Muslims from Pakistan and India living in New York at that time were neither aggressive nor intimidating; they were just another immigrant group. At the same time, I noticed there was a pronounced cultural divide between Indian Hindus and Indian Muslims. Even in New York, the Indian Muslims were closer culturally and intellectually to Pakistani Muslims than they were to other Indians. This prompted a number of questions about Islam, Muslims, and India. At that time, I had no answers to these questions.

I lived in New York until 1986, which was a remarkable time to be in that city. I worked entry level jobs in restaurants, in the garment industry, and at a prestigious law firm. These jobs offered me enormous opportunities to meet people from all walks of life and from all over the world.

During my years in New York City I had three remarkable opportunities to meet with leading Indian politicians. Such meetings would have been almost impossible in India, where all three were enormously important men with no time for people such as me. But in New York, they were nothing more than three more visiting third-world politicians. Few took them seriously. Therefore, it was much easier for me to meet them and question them at a close and personal level. In India, such men are never questioned—one simply listens to their wisdom. In New York, I dared to raise the controversial issue of Islam.

The first meeting came in early 1980. I went to attend a lecture at the Indian Consulate in Manhattan. P.V. Narsimha Rao was visiting. He would later become the tenth Prime Minister of India (1991 to 1996), but at that time he was India’s Foreign Minister, having been awarded the position for his loyalty to then-Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and his well-respected scholarship. Meeting with Rao was a big deal for me. He was a native of my hometown; he was also well known to me as a scholar, poet, and freedom-fighter who had opposed the tyrannical Nizam of Hyderabad.

There were nearly 200 people at this meeting, which lasted over an hour. Afterwards, I introduced myself to Rao as a fellow native of Hyderabad who had recently moved to the United States. He was very gracious to me and asked about my well-being. After a few minutes of conversation I told him that Iranians and Muslim immigrants did not like me because I was a Hindu and that I had noticed a great deal of anti-Hindu sentiment in Islamic nations. I asked him, as Foreign Minister of India, what was he going to do about the anti-Hindu and anti-Indian apartheid taking place in the Middle East? That question made him visibly angry and he began to speak with me in our native tongue, Telugu (so that few others would understand the rudeness of his words). “You can’t do anything,” he said, “I can’t do anything. Just get a job, support your parents, and now you leave this place.” Then he walked away.

In 1984 I had another encounter, this time at a friend’s house on Staten Island. The man was the great Morarji Desai, the fifth Prime Minister of India, a Gandhian and a Stoic. He had come to the United States at the advanced age of 88 to take part in a lawsuit against veteran journalist Seymour Hersh over Hersh’s accusations that Desai had been a paid CIA agent. Desai would later lose his case, but at the time of my meeting he was supremely gracious and kind to both me and my wife. Our meeting was intimate, with only about 20 people (including our hosts) at the mansion. I asked Desai a simple question: How can Hindus and Muslims live together in India peacefully? His response was pure Gandhian. He told me to turn the other cheek, follow dharma, don’t be angry, and everything would be all right.

The third encounter came later in 1984 or 1985. Jyothi Basu, the Chief Minister of the State of West Bengal was in New York looking for investment capital. Basu was a leader of the Communist Party of India and a leading Marxist intellectual. When I was growing up in India, I had been sympathetic to Marxist egalitarianism in my late teens and early twenties. Living in the deeply unequal caste system of India and facing the violent class conflicts of Indian society, I had regarded the Marxist vision of a classless society as more humane. I came to a dinner hosted at a motel in Queens for him. There were about 50 people at this meeting. I introduced myself to him and gave him a book on Islam written by a Bengali friend of mine. Then I asked him why his party supported Muslims in India given that Marxist philosophy was diametrically opposed to Islam (and vice versa).

Basu became visibly angry. He told me he knew everything that I was saying about Islam and Hindu-Muslim conflicts and that he had come to raise money for industry not to discuss theology or philosophy. If I wanted to discuss those topics, he said, I should write a letter to him and he would answer my questions. I wrote a letter asking him the same questions and sent it to his Calcutta address. He never bothered to reply. Had I asked him such a question in India, it is entirely possible that I would have been jailed on trumped-up charges; Indian politicians do not like to be challenged.

None of these men, all of whom were powerful and influential politicians, had a complete understanding of Islam’s imperialist ambitions. They knew only a part. Rao had fought the Muslim tyrant of Hyderabad. Basu was chief minister of West Bengal, a Hindu-dominated area next to the Muslim-dominated East Bengal (which had just become the Republic of Bangladesh in 1971). Desai had been a freedom fighter and close associate of Mahatma Gandhi, during which time he witnessed the partition of India into the modern states of India and Pakistan. From the depth of their experience with Islam these men should have known better how to answer my questions. Most likely they thought they were being wise and diplomatic in offering such responses to me; instead, they were showing their apathy, their fear, and their cowardice.

It was not my meetings with these men, however, which drove me to write this book. Instead, it was the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 and the subsequent western response, which instilled in me a determination to tell the truth about Islamic imperialism. I saw the U.S. making the same mistakes the Indians had made with Islam. I saw Western countries exposing themselves to the same demographic conquest that has been so fateful to India’s history.

For the last 40 years the West has had no better answer to Islamic imperialism than those three Indian politicians. The same apathy, fear, and cowardice is called “political correctness.” From Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama, America’s presidents have without exception been apologists for Islamic imperialism. Many Western politicians take Desai’s approach, thinking that appeasement and good thoughts will provide a solution. They do not realize the history of Islam shows that such an approach ends in destruction for the appeaser. Others, most notably politicians and academics on the Left, take Basu’s approach and completely ignore the contradictions between their own beliefs and those of Islam. They ally with what they think is a disadvantaged minority group to further their own political goals. Leftists did the same in Iran in 1979, and the Islamic Revolution destroyed them once it attained power. Sadly, too many who see the threat Islam poses take Rao’s approach and worry that nothing can be done to stop it.

Since 9/11 the U.S. government has tried to steer a contradictory course in the Islamic world. On one hand, it offers appeasing words to Islam, calling it one of the great religions and assuring everyone that jihad does not mean what it clearly does mean—to kill others on behalf of the Islamic religion. On the other, it wants to fight some of the more radical jihadists, calling them political extremists and ignoring the Quranic roots of everything they say and do. Ultimately, the U.S. approach to the war against Islamic imperialism amounts to putting a Band-Aid on leprosy. The problem is not “radical extremists” or “fundamentalists” like Bin Laden; the problem is Muhammad, the Qur’an, and sharia law.

The consequences of this failed approach are all around us. The financial burden of our disastrous adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan exerts a drag on our economy. Families mourn the loss of soldiers, workers, and diplomats lost in the struggle. In the vacuum of power created by the removal of Saddam Hussein in Iraq and the Taliban in Afghanistan an even greater threat has arisen in the form of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. We have seen an alleged pro-democracy movement called the Arab Spring give way to a Sunni Winter. The Muslim world is in the midst of a global Sunni fundamentalist revolution, and few in the media, the academy or the political establishment are willing or able to call it what it is.

Those who try to warn the world about Islam are immediately attacked by Muslims and their supporters. This can take many forms, from petty criticism and accusations of racism to death threats and actual murder. Hinduism, Christianity, Buddhism or Atheism may be openly criticized in Western media, but not Islam. Those who dare to challenge the so-called religion of peace are often likely to find their lives and property in danger. At the very least, their integrity will be called into question and their arguments dismissed as “Islamophobic.”

Given such a situation I feel compelled to make a preemptive defense against the attacks critics will use against me to distract attention from the threat of Islam. The first line of attack is usually to dismiss any critic who is non-Muslim or who does not know Arabic. This approach is absurd on its face, given that the majority of the world’s Muslims themselves have little understanding of Arabic.¹ Non-Arab Muslims who do learn Arabic writing often learn only enough to recite from the Qur’an—often without knowing what it is they are saying. Despite this, Muslims do not argue that such people do not understand Islam. As Ali Nawaz Memon has observed, “mosques are often full of worshippers who do not understand what has been said in the [Arabic] prayer.”² If it is not necessary to understand Arabic in order to be a Muslim; therefore, it is not necessary to understand Arabic in order to criticize Muslims.

There is plenty of information about Islam available to English speakers—more than enough to come to an informed judgment. Whole shelves of library space can be found in a typical university library full of publications on and about Islam. The curious English speaker can learn more about Islam than many Arab-speaking Muslims ever bother to learn in their lifetimes.³ Anyone who wishes to accuse me of ignorance on the subject of Islam should consider his or her own situation first. All too often those who accuse others of ignorance are themselves completely ignorant of the history and practices of their own faith.

Furthermore, a great deal about Islam can be learned by simple observation of how it operates in the world. As the Biblical saying goes, “By your fruits you shall know them.” I was born in Hyderabad, India, a city with a sizable Muslim population, and I lived and worked for several years in Iran. During my life I have had ample opportunity to see the fruits of Islam all around me. In 2014, I was not at all surprised by the Rotherham sex scandal that broke in Yorkshire in the United Kingdom. An investigation determined that over a period of nearly 20 years more than 1,400 children were sexually exploited by men of “Asian” heritage (in context, this means primarily Pakistani Muslims). Local police and the town council did nothing, and may have even conspired to cover up the scandal out of fear of the accusation of racism.⁴ Over that same 20 year period the UK has been introduced to the phenomenon of honor killings, beheadings in broad daylight, and mass murder plots for the greater glory of Islam. From my own experience, I can say that what is happening in the UK is not unique.

A second line of attack often taken against those who criticize Islam is to argue that academics are the only non-Muslims who are qualified to make such a critique. I refuse to accept such a dismissal. The standard by which my work should be judged is truth and accuracy, not academic qualifications. Let my arguments and my claims be judged on their own merit. If they are true and accurate, why should it matter whether or not I hold a degree in Islam or religious studies? The Qur’an is a logically inconsistent work; do I need a degree to notice that? Islamic doctrines are demonstrably inconsistent with American and Western principles; are only scholars permitted to point out these inconsistencies? Let my arguments be considered and weighed carefully on their own merits.

With Islam, academic qualifications are no guarantee of quality of argument. Big financial donations from countries like Saudi Arabia have turned many Islamic Studies departments from areas of objective inquiry to little better than Islamic propaganda centers. Across America, many so-called experts on Islam and the Middle East are full-time apologists for Islam who offer a deceptively whitewashed picture of Islamic history and culture. In today’s climate, the scholar who takes rabidly anti-American and pro-Islamic positions can find a secure path to tenure. As a result, intelligent outside observers can often be surer guides to Islam than scholars who hold distinguished Saudi-funded chairs of Islamic Studies.

A third line of attack often taken against criticism of Islam is to play the racism card. This approach is absurd on its face because Islam is not a race. To criticize Islam is to reject a doctrine of Arab supremacy. It means, really, to oppose Arab racism—the worst form of racism there is. Opposing Arab racism is the very opposite of being a racist.

Many Muslims make the charge of racism for completely cynical reasons. They know that Westerners fear being labeled racist more than almost anything else. As soon as someone is charged with being a racist he must go on the defensive. Muslims therefore level this accusation in order to draw attention away from any criticisms they cannot answer. This is ironic given that Islam itself is one of the most powerful imperialist movements, as well as the most successful racist movement in human history.

In the Islamic world, non-Arab Muslims from South Asia, East Asia, and Africa are required to despise, reject, and subordinate their culture, their language, and their own nationality to the Arabs. Wherever Islam has become dominant this pattern can be seen. Although Muslims pay lip service to the idea of an Islamic ummah, or community of believers, in reality non-Arabs are second-class persons in Islam. All Muslims must listen to, read, and recite Arabic words they do not understand and genuflect toward Arabia as part of the practice of their faith. They are taught to regard their pre-Islamic cultural heritage as a period of ignorance and evil. Let those who doubt this situation ask one of the millions of non-Arab Muslims who has had the misfortune of working in an Arab country. Across the Arabian Gulf, non-Arab Muslim workers are commonly treated with contempt as modern-day slaves fit only to serve the needs of their Arab masters. For example, those who claim to be descendants of Prophet Muhammad are called Sayyids, and they are considered almost a “master race” within the worldwide Islamic community. On the Indian subcontinent it means someone who is not a Hindu convert or a native but someone who is a natural master, superior to the native converts to Islam (i.e., former Hindus). In South Asia, these Sayyids number in the hundreds of thousands.

Another possible line of attack which may be taken against me is to depict me as a Hindu fanatic or as a right-wing Hindu nationalist. Let me say this unequivocally: I have never been a Hindu nationalist. In fact, when I was growing up my sympathies were with Marxism and the political Left. I appreciated the egalitarian utopia Marxism advocated, where race and ethnicity, class and religion were transcended. Even today, I still share its materialist interpretation of history.

Now, however, I believe Marx went wrong in his theory of class struggle. His doctrine of a “Dictatorship of the Proletariat” has proven to be a disaster in practice. One of the most fundamental and axiomatic elements of Marxist theory is the contradiction between capitalist and proletariat, yet this is a serious error. The conflict between “haves” and “have-nots” is not immutable. We see in life that there are capitalists who lose their wealth and become members of the working class and there are workers who become capitalists through business acumen and determination. Not all capitalists are blood-sucking leeches, nor are all workers angels on the earth. Marx’s dichotomy between capitalists and the working class has its roots in rabbinical thinking. It is similar to the sort of split made by the Semitic religions, i.e., Jew and Gentile, believer and heathen, Muslim and kafir. By prohibiting the free and independent thought of the individual, Marxism becomes reinforced dogmatism: static, sterile, and frozen in time. Bertrand Russell explains this phenomenon further when he says:

The whole of his [Marx’s] theory of economic development may perfectly well be true if his metaphysics is false and false if his metaphysics is true; and, but for the influence of Hegel, it would never have occurred to him that a matter so purely empirical could depend upon abstract metaphysics.⁵

The Marxist idea of class struggle is unworkable. That is one of the foremost reasons for the collapse of the former Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc. It’s also the reason why both China and Vietnam have abandoned Communist orthodoxy and embraced free-market reforms.

I believe capitalism and democracy provide a viable path to the same egalitarian outcomes Marxism claims to establish. The methodologies are different, with Marxism seeking to impose a classless society through struggle and proletarian dictatorship, while a secular conservative looks for one to develop out of the exercise of free minds and free markets. I consider myself such a secular conservative. I believe in class harmony, or rather in the abolition of social class through free minds and free markets.

Far from being a Hindu nationalist or religious fundamentalist of any kind, I identify as a secular humanist. My philosophy and epistemology is logical empiricism. My heroes are Bertrand Russell, Rudolf Carnap, Alfred Ayer, and physicist Stephen Hawking. I am no religious partisan—I regard metaphysics and theology as absurd.

Most importantly, I am an American citizen who has lived in the United States for the past 35 years. I renounced my Indian citizenship long ago; I have no property in that country, and both of my parents have passed away. My ties are to America. My wife is an American (her family has lived in this country since the time of the Jamestown colony), and our children are Americans. I have no divided loyalties.

One of the most fundamental rights we have as Americans is the right to self-preservation. My respect for the rights of others does not extend to allowing others to call for or seek my death. This is one of the main reasons behind my leaving Hinduism—Hindu leaders and Hindu society have forgotten how to address the problem of evil. They do not face it, but rather sidestep it through apathy and silence. They call this nonviolence, tolerance, and open-mindedness. (Apathy, thy name is ahimsa [nonviolence]!) They have no sense of self-preservation.

As a former Hindu and a secular humanist I am twice condemned to death by Islam—an unbeliever both by birth and by choice. I have only to look at how ISIS treated the Yazidi refugees it captured on Mount Sinjar in August 2014 to learn how Islam deals with such people. United Nations observers confirmed that Yazidi refugees were “lined up, shot dead, then bulldozed into mass graves.” In all, about 5,000 men were executed and 7,000 women seized as concubines for ISIS fighters.⁶ As this book will show, the behavior of ISIS is no anomaly; it is an imitation of actions taken by none other than Muhammad himself. It is not only ISIS which treats non-Muslims this way. Saudi Arabia has gone so far as to declare atheists to be terrorists who can be treated accordingly.⁷ No less an authority than the Qur’an encourages Muslims to act aggressively in this way when they have the advantage: “So be not weak and ask not for peace (from the enemies of Islam), while you are having the upper hand.”⁸ Before Islam gains the upper hand in America, therefore, I will speak out against it.

I wrote this book for a simple reason: I do not want America or Western civilization to make the same mistake about Islam that India has made. India and Hindu civilization were conquered by Islam over a very long period of about 1,350 years. Before this happened, the countries we now call Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan were all part of India. When Islam arrived in the 7th century, Hindus thought they were confronting a rival religion or metaphysical system. They were wrong, and they have paid an enormous price for their error. Today, there is still an unresolved conflict between Hindus and Islam. It is entirely possible that there could be a nuclear war between India and Pakistan in the near future. The very possibility of such a disaster is rooted in Muhammad Bin Qasim’s invasion of Sindh in 711 AD. The conflict between Hindus and Muslims on the Indian subcontinent has never been theological—it has been a civilizational conflict, pitting Arab imperialism against Hindu civilization.

After the 9/11 attacks, I noticed that Americans were asking the same questions I had asked of those three Indian politicians in the 1980s. Above all, they wanted to know why we had been attacked by Islam. In this book, I hope to keep Americans from falling into the trap of thinking that their fight is against a particular individual like Osama bin Laden or any one group of jihadists like ISIS. The enemy is Islamic imperialism, an Arab supremacist ideology. If Islamic imperialism is not defeated, India’s past will become America’s future. The non-Muslim world needs a lasting, permanent, and comprehensive solution to the Islamic Question once and for all.

Muslim apologists say that there are nearly 1.6 billion Muslims in the world. I say that of this number 1.5 billion are only the first victims of Arab imperialism. No more than 50 million or so of the Muslim elite benefit directly from the doctrine and religion of Islam. These are some of the most unjust and undemocratic human beings you could ever come across.

The greatest flaw in Islam is not terrorism or even hatred for non-Muslims. Rather, it is the inability of Muslims to engage in self-criticism or introspection. Muslims are very able when it comes to criticizing unbelievers, but they choose not to look in the mirror. If they could only examine their religion and their societies closely, it would go a long way toward reducing Islam’s role in global conflict. Show me someone who believes in the Qur’an literally and I will show you one of the most illiberal and intolerant persons in the world.

The Qur’an is not only a religious treatise; it is also a political document that defines the relationship between Muslims and the non-Muslim world. As such, the contradiction between the Qur’an and the U.S. Constitution is absolute and eternal. The two cannot peacefully coexist. This is a fact Americans have no choice but to confront.

In this book I will present part of the overwhelming evidence that Islam is not a religion, but an ideology of death and destruction. To call it a religion of peace is to pacify people with a pleasing lie. The country of my birth can bear witness to this. Over centuries the ancient and peaceful civilization of India was slowly worn away by constant massacres, looting, slavery, and tyranny. The most lasting destruction of all, one that I see in its nascent form in Europe and America today, was demographic conquest. Today, what was once India has been shattered and parts of it are now called Pakistan and Bangladesh—exclusively Muslim lands. The eternal jihad against India is still ongoing, 1,300 years later.

I have witnessed firsthand what Islam has done to India. I have spent a long time studying what Islam has done everywhere that it has spread. I do not want the past of my civilization to become the future of yours. That is why I have written this book. I want America and the West to fully wake up to and confront the clear and present danger Islam poses to your families, your nations, and your civilization. You must do so, or join the long list of civilizations destroyed by Islam.

For the West to experience such a thing would be no murder, but a suicide. We have all the facts needed to perceive the threat. We have all the resources and the skills we need to defend America and the West. There are no more than 50 million or so people who directly and materially benefit from Islam, and these are some of the most oppressive persons you could ever hope to meet. Nevertheless, this is a winnable war, and there is reason to hope for success. Let it not be said that America and the West saw the danger and failed to act.

I want to be perfectly clear about my intentions. We need a global revolution to defeat Islamic imperialism worldwide. It must be defeated absolutely, globally, and forever. In this book, I will make the case that Islamic imperialism is infinitely more dangerous than Nazism and Communism combined. Unlike the Nazis or the Communists, Islam operates by demographic conquest—the most permanent form of conquest that exists. In the following pages I will show you the necessity for war against Islamic totalitarianism and how that war can be won.

Panini

August 2015

PART ONE

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

Is Islam a religion?

The [Muslim Brotherhood] must understand that their work in America is a kind of Grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within, and “sabotaging” its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers.

—Muslim Brotherhood¹

Islam wishes to destroy all States and Governments anywhere on the face of the earth which are opposed to the ideology and program of Islam regardless of the country or the Nation which rules it. The purpose of Islam is to set up a State on the basis of its own ideology and program … Islam requires the earth—not just a portion, but the whole planet.

—Abul A’la Maududi²

Non-believers or atheists in Muslim countries do not have “the right to life”; all the major law schools, whether Sunni or Shia, agree that they are to be killed … Slavery is recognized as legitimate in the Koran. Muslim men are allowed to cohabit with any of their female slaves, and they are allowed to take possession even of married female slaves.

—Ibn Warraq³

Ever since the religion of Mahomet [Islam] appeared in the world, the espousers of it … have been as wolves and tigers to all other nations, rending and tearing all that fell into their merciless paws, and grinding them with their iron teeth … that many countries, which were once as the garden of God, are now a desolate wilderness; and that so many once numerous and powerful nations are vanished from the earth! Such was, and is at this day, the rage, the fury, the revenge, of these destroyers of human-kind.

—John Wesley⁴

Muslims are the first victims of Islam. Many times I have observed in my travels in the Orient that fanaticism comes from a small number of dangerous men who maintain the others in the practice of religion by terror. To liberate the Muslim from his religion is the best service one can render him.

—Ernest Renan⁵

And whoever seeks a religion other than Islam [submission to Allah], it will never be accepted of him.

—Qur’an 3:85

Islam is a doctrine of death, inasmuch as the spiritual not being separated from the temporal, and every manifestation of activity being subjected to dogmatic law, formally forbids any change, any evolution, any progress. It condemns all believers to live, to think, and to act as lived, thought and acted the Muslims of the second century of the Hegira, when the law of Islam and its interpretation were definitely fixed.

—Andre Servier⁶

INTRODUCTION

Can any system of faith be rightly called a religion when it is clearly intent on the conversion, enslavement, or murder of everyone who holds different beliefs? All other globally recognized religions today accept, in practice at least, the right of all faiths to coexist peacefully with others. As any glance at the news will reveal, Islam alone does not recognize that right.

Islam does not qualify as a philosophy, either. Philosophy means the love of wisdom, as gained through free and rational inquiry into the nature of things. Islam, as even its followers readily insist, means submission to the will of Allah—and in particular to that will as it was revealed to and interpreted by the Prophet Muhammad. Rational inquiry doesn’t enter into it.

If Islam is neither a religion nor a philosophy, what is it? The answer provided by this book is that Islam is above all a militant, imperialist ideology of Arab supremacy. Its agenda is world conquest. For 1,400 years its goal has been the same: the establishment of a global caliphate and the conversion, enslavement, and humbling of the people of the world.

In its relentless pursuit of this goal, Islam has caused death and suffering on a massive scale. One conservative estimate of the non-Muslims killed in the cause of Islamic jihad puts the number at 270 million—a number that the Nazis and Communists combined did not reach.⁷ Approximately 23 percent of the global population today is subjugated to Islamic rule. Under Sharia law, the threat of death hangs over anyone who dares to question or leave Islam. A recent clerical ruling in Saudi Arabia reaffirmed this subjugation, and extended it further to include any who dares to call him or herself an atheist.⁸ Vast numbers of people in Islamic countries are impoverished and uneducated; according to the New York Times, nearly 60 percent cannot read and write.⁹

In its 1,400-year campaign for world domination, Islam has invaded and laid waste to proud and thriving civilizations. The Islamic Republic of Iran was once the great nation of Persia, renowned throughout the East for the beauty and attainments of its culture. The Persian city of Ctesiphon was at one time the largest city in the world and the home of a vast library of priceless manuscripts. In 637, Ctesiphon was overrun by Islamic hordes which destroyed the manuscripts and depopulated the city. Today, its former glories are all but forgotten.¹⁰

Grand and romantic Egypt was ruled by pharaohs for over 3,000 years and served as the breadbasket of the Roman Empire for centuries. Mark the Evangelist established the Christian Patriarchate of Alexandria as early as AD 42. Under the Byzantine Empire, Egypt was still primarily Coptic Christian until Muslims invaded and ransacked the country, beginning in 639. Inhabitants were subjected to the discriminatory Islamic tax (jizya) on unbelievers to enforce obedience and conversion.¹¹ Today, Egypt is over 90 percent Muslim and wracked by revolutions and sectarian violence.

The Islamic state of Pakistan was once Hindu land, home to the Indus Valley civilization. Its inhabitants formerly prized wisdom and practiced the arts of nonviolence. Today, Pakistan is a fragmented nation, a training ground and hideout for Islamic terrorists, and one of the primary centers for the teaching and export of Sharia law.

Afghanistan was once Hindu and Buddhist, with a history stretching back as far as 3,000 years before Christ. It was the home of the legendary scholar Panini, who has been called the father of linguistics. The Islamic hordes turned toward Afghanistan after their conquest of Persia, and by 870 they had decimated and subjected the Hindus and Buddhists, destroying their temples or converting them into squalid command posts. Forced to convert to Islam or die, the population gave in. Today, Afghanistan’s chief exports are heroin and terrorism.¹²

Turkey was formerly a Christian and Hellenic nation. Northern Africa was once part of a bustling and bright Mediterranean civilization. Like the others, these nations too collapsed in the face of Islamic encroachment. Some civilizations were conquered by military force; others were deceived by fraudulent religious claims and welcomed the invaders only to discover the bitter truth too late. This pattern of conquest by force and fraud was established by Islam’s founder, Muhammad, and is even today the classic style of Islamic jihad.

MUHAMMAD—ISLAM’S WARLORD FOUNDER

Islam was founded by a seventh century Arabian general named Abū al-Qāsim Muhammad ibn Abd Allāh ibn Abd al-Muttalib ibn Hāshim. Today, we know him simply as “Muhammad.” He got his start as a caravan trader before experiencing visions at the age of 40 which induced him to become a prophet. His first years as a prophet were not particularly successful, providing him only with one or two hundred followers, mostly from the dregs of Meccan society.¹³ Muhammad achieved far greater success not as a street preacher but as a military commander.

Through caravan raids and kidnappings, Muhammad and his followers acquired wealth and influence. These achievements, together with his personal charisma, soon made him a power broker in central Arabia. Success followed success, as there were far more converts to be found for a war leader than for a mere prophet. Less than ten years after he first picked up the sword, Muhammad’s forces had conquered the Arabian Peninsula. The tribes of Arabia—formerly a mix of polytheistic Arabs, Christians, and Jews—had either submitted to the new Islamic hegemony, or been subjected to exile, slavery, or death.

When Muhammad’s actions are compared with those of the other great religious leaders, there are noticeable differences. Jesus did not lead raids against Roman trade caravans, nor did he condemn anyone to torture and death. Instead, his followers believe he endured these things himself for the sake of human salvation. Likewise, there is no record of the Buddha, or Confucius, or Lao Tzu, or Socrates robbing and killing merchants or burning crops. None of them ordered whole tribes to be beheaded or enslaved. Yet Muhammad did all these things and more.

Through metaphysics—the part of Islam that does resemble other religions—Muhammad accomplished what other mere military commanders could not. He found a way for his empire to persist after his death. But the notable thing about Islam’s metaphysics was that in itself it was hardly new. Much of it was actually taken from existing religious and cultural traditions. Allah was the name of a pagan god who had a well-established cult of worshippers long before Muhammad’s time. Muhammad’s own grandfather provided water for the pilgrims who came to visit Allah’s shrine, known as the Kaaba, in Mecca. Stories told by the various Jewish and Christian tribes living in Arabia in Muhammad’s time can also be found woven into the Qur’an. Muhammad would then claim that Allah was actually Yahweh (or vice versa), and that this was the god who had begun talking to him—not directly, of course, but through another supernatural creature borrowed from Judeo-Christian tradition, the archangel Gabriel.

Even many of the rituals and rites of Islam are borrowed from pagans, Christians, and Jews. One of the Pillars of Islam, the five most basic requirements of all Muslims, is the Hajj (pilgrimage to Mecca). In one of the hadith, the stories of Muhammad’s life, which are accepted as true and religiously binding, an early Muslim follower complains to Muhammad about the pagan origins of the Hajj. After this complaint was lodged, the story goes, a new verse of the Qur’an was revealed to Muhammad, assuring Muslims that the pagan practices of the Hajj were completely acceptable.¹⁴ In another hadith, Muhammad’s wife Aisha explains how fasting on the day of Ashura was a pagan ritual that Muhammad kept, but made voluntary.¹⁵

Most Western scholars agree that Muhammad borrowed words and phrases from other traditions for the Qur’an. Words such as injil (derived from gospel), taurat (Torah), and Iblis (Devil) appear in the Qur’an though they are not of Arabic origin. Scholars also agree that there are numerous stories and teachings borrowed from the many religious traditions existing in Arabia in Muhammad’s time. Most of the borrowings, however, are likely to have come from oral traditions—stories told by merchants around the oasis before Muhammad and his men came for them. Muhammad most likely did not read the Old Testament to learn about the story of Noah (called “Nuh” in the Qur’an), but instead heard stories about him which he weaved into Qur’anic verses.¹⁶

Religions have borrowed from one another before, but with Muhammad the borrowing reaches a new level. It was even noticed by Muhammad’s contemporaries and included in the Qur’an itself: “And they say: “Tales of the ancients, which he [Muhammad] has caused to be written: and they are dictated before him morning and evening.”¹⁷ Muhammad denies the claim that he is merely copying “tales of the ancients,” but most scholars are not convinced. His “borrowing” is even more troubling given that he used his claims to divine agency as justification to kill or enslave pagans, Jews, and Christians alike.

ISLAMIC CLAIMS TO TRUTH AND COMPETITION WITH SECULARISM

Despite overwhelming evidence of extensive Quranic borrowing from Jewish and Christian religious texts and traditions, Muslims from Muhammad on down have long maintained that the Qur’an was divinely revealed to Muhammad alone. Furthermore, they claim that the revelation to Muhammad is the final revelation of God to man, and is thus the last word on all issues. Because the revelation comes from God, it is infallible and immutable.

Dr. Shabbir Akhtar, a Muslim and philosopher at the University of Oxford, in his 2008 book The Qur’an and the Secular Mind expresses what can be called the orthodox traditionalist Muslim opinion on this topic:

Normative Islam’s self-estimate as climactic and ultimate (Q:45:6), a meta-religion revealed to correct and perfect all religious as such, dictates its attitudes towards change and towards rival faiths. The scripture is self-described as the final revelation (Q:7:185), a protector-guarantor (al-muhaymin) of all revelation (Q:5:48), and a confirmation of previous revelations (Q:3:3), a finality that corresponds to Muhammad’s status as the seal of all prophecy (Q:333:40) … By implication, the Quran authorizes Muslims to view Islam, once it has appeared on the historical plane, as complete, as the culmination of religion. No crucial new development is hidden in the womb of Islam’s future.¹⁸

Furthermore, Islam is not only the final revelation; it is the one true religion, as Akhtar explains:

The Quran conceives of Islam not merely as another religion among religions but rather as the decisive religion, a meta-religion (al-din), a self-image that was bound to encourage universal expansion. The word al-din occurs only in the singular and with the definite article in the Quran since there is only one true religion (the plural adyan) never occurs).¹⁹

The implications of Akhtar’s statements here are profound and revealing. Not only does Islam understand itself as the final word, the only true word when it comes to religion, this understanding is at the heart of its drive to dominate and destroy all other religions. Although Islam may acknowledge some partial and imperfect truth in Judaism and Christianity, the scriptures of which Islam has certainly borrowed from, only the Qur’an and Islam are completely true. In addition, this attitude makes Islam incredibly hostile and resistant to any attempts at change or accommodation of other viewpoints. There are no “new developments” to look for, as Dr. Akhtar says:

Islam’s self-image as meta-religion explains the Muslim decision to confront rather than accommodate secularism. [Both] Islam and secularism compete to be considered the culmination of history … the last rung on the historical ladder.²⁰

Islam’s response to the changes and challenges of modernity, in other words, is to demand a return to 7th century Arabia. This view is not merely Dr. Akhtar’s, but has been the orthodox Muslim approach since Muhammad’s time. Again, Dr. Akhtar provides insight into the struggle this approach creates in the minds of thoughtful people:

Reflective modern believers cannot ignore the tension between the accumulated weight of tradition and the immediacy of the present moment. Many Muslims want to achieve co-existence with the secular world but they refuse to disown problematic parts of the Quran. Why do they hesitate to make this sacrifice at the altar of secularism when other religious believers, with equally proud inflexible attitudes sustained by huge deposits of traditional faith, have gradually genuflected to the infant god of secularism? The main reason is that Muslims see themselves, from the earliest times, as alone in carrying the torch of pristine monotheism … The second reason is rooted in the traditional tendency to condemn all religious innovation (bid’ah) as heretical. The Quran interdicts hypothetical speculation and speculative curiosity in religious doctrine and practical religious conduct (Q:17:36; 49:12).²¹

In other words, the traditional attitude of Islam is to believe that Islam alone is the truth and resist all efforts to alter or change that truth in any way.

However sympathetic one may be to the traditionalist point of view, we must ask whether the attitude Dr. Akhtar describes is justified, rational, and supportable in the modern world. Dr. Akhtar himself admits that “no religious tradition can avoid ossification or death if it’s frozen or arrested in time.”²² He recommends a vision of Islam which is open to modernity and confronts secularism without taking refuge in dogmatic traditionalism. At the same time, he admits that Islam tends to become frozen in time, unable to respond to the needs of a changing world. This has been a recurrent problem with Islamic thought, one which has been noted by its critics from the beginning. In his 1904 book Religion, its Origin and Forms, John Arnott MacCulloch observes:

More than any other religion Islam has shown itself unable to develop from within and to adapt itself to the varying needs of successive ages. The absolute authority of the Quran is the cause why, as [William Gifford] Palgrave says, “Islam is lifeless, and, because lifeless, cannot grow, cannot advance, cannot change, and was never intended to do so.”²³

DEMOGRAPHIC CONQUEST—ESTABLISHING A STATE WITHIN A STATE

Unable to coexist with other religions, Islam’s approach has always been to conquer them. Where it cannot conquer all at once, it seeks instead to establish a token presence—a toehold or foothold from which a different approach can be taken. The favored strategy here is called demographic conquest, the time tested and approved approach when direct military attack is infeasible.

Demographic conquest begins with the establishment of a de facto state within a state. It is a small enclave of Muslims run according to Islamic law within which the number of Muslims is increased by steady breeding rather than by conversion or slaughter. Over time, the number of Muslims comes to overtake the original host citizenry. This is how Kashmir, and many other Indian regions, were turned from Hinduism to Islam. And it is how the Muslim Brotherhood hopes to establish an Islamic state in the United States, as their own documents describe:

Establishment [means]: That Islam turns into firmly-rooted organizations on whose bases civilization, structure and testimony are built … Rooting [means]: That Islam is resident and not a passing thing, or rooted ‘entrenched’ in the soil of the spot where it moves not, a strange plant to it.²⁴

The Islamic “plant” described here sounds like the parasitic Strangler Fig. The Strangler likewise attaches itself to a host tree, then grows along with it until finally the Strangler chokes all the life out of the host plant. The host dies and falls away, leaving only the Strangler standing in the rough shape of its original host.

This strategy originated with Muhammad himself. During Islam’s earliest years in Mecca, he was a minor annoyance—going to the temple to rave like a lunatic, insult the pagan gods, ridicule the locals’ religious beliefs, and engage in arguments. His behavior was so bizarre the Meccans largely dismissed him as a madman, at one point asking the city elders to find help for this man whom they regarded as possessed with a foul spirit. Afraid that the Meccans might seek to kill him, Muhammad fled and hid in the nearby hills for three days. He then decamped for Medina with about 70 followers. In Medina, Muhammad took root like a Strangler Fig, making himself useful and even necessary as a power broker among the different factions in the city. Over time he built up wealth and power through this activity (and caravan raids), eventually turning his small band of followers into a potent military and political force. That done, he one by one destroyed or exiled the previously existing powers of Medina and took sole control of the city.

DO ALL MUSLIMS BELONG TO A SINGLE NATION?

The Muslim world is loosely held together through the concept of the ummah, an Arabic word which means ‘nation’. The idea is that all Muslims are truly members of this nation and no other. The Islamic Constitution of Iran contains an explicit statement of this basic idea, declaring that “all Muslims form a single nation.”²⁵ This notion discourages Muslims from assimilating into other nations, encouraging them instead to see themselves as a people apart.

The creation of the ummah dates back to December 11, 629 AD. On that day, Muhammad and an army of 10,000 men stormed the gates of Mecca, overthrew the government, and occupied the city. Dressed in his military garb, Muhammad walked to the Kaaba and delivered a famous speech to both the vanquishers and the vanquished:

Every claim of privilege, whether that of blood or property, is abolished … I reject all claims relating to life and property and all imaginary honors of the past, and declare them to be baseless … A Muslim is the brother of another Muslim and all the Muslims are brothers or one another and constitute one hand as against the non-Muslims. The blood of every one of them is equal to that of others and even the smallest among them can make a promise on behalf of others.²⁶

These words inaugurated a new social and political system based on submission to the revealed will of Allah. They bound all of Muhammad’s new subjects into a single nation united against all those who had not yet submitted to Allah. Muhammad concluded his speech by destroying the idols and religious art that had previously existed around the Kaaba.

The supremacist nation Muhammad established that day, based in stolen superstition and ancient mysticism, still exists. It still seeks to invade the cities of the world, pronounce its new brotherhood, and destroy the existing social and political orders. Like its founder, this nation has nothing but contempt for man’s law or geopolitical boundaries. It does not measure its territory using maps. Instead, it exists as a transnational body of more than one and a half billion people, many of them impoverished and illiterate. Each member of this ummah has sworn slavish devotion to the nation and its leaders. Many will follow its orders without question, including orders to kill unbelievers or to die on behalf of Islam.

THE QUR’AN AS POLITICAL MANIFESTO

The Qur’an is a political document. Whatever claims the text might make about itself, the way it actually functions in the lives of its followers is the decisive point. That function is supremely political. Islam holds up the Qur’an as the source and final authority on all law, all politics, all human interaction, and all acceptable behavior. Not only that, but Islam insists that the Qur’an is the supreme authority not only for Muslims but for every human being on earth. Any other political document must be subjugated to the Qur’an. The United States Constitution claims its authority derives from “we the people.” Islam cannot accept this. The authority of the people is nothing compared to the ultimate authority of Allah.

The Qur’an and the sayings and practices of Muhammad (collected in the Hadith) form the basis of many Islamic governments, such as those of Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and both Iraq and Afghanistan (following the U.S. occupation). All these countries establish Islam as the state religion, and most of them recognize Sharia as their supreme law.

Some Muslim countries are nominally democratic, but the conception of democracy in Islam is radically different from western notions. Secularism, which is viewed as an integral part of most western democracies, is viewed with suspicion and hostility by Islamic cultures. Any democratic or secular idea must be subordinated to Islamic dogma. Popular will is placed under the correction and guidance of Islamic clerics, who ensure that that will remains in conformity with Islamic orthodoxy. Democracy as it is commonly understood requires freedom of thought and freedom of speech—both of which are anathema to the Qur’an. It is not democratic will but the will of Allah which governs in Islamic countries. Properly speaking, it is the 7th century dictates of Muhammad, the founder of Islam, which govern Islam.

THE MEDIEVAL CODE OF SHARIA

Wherever the Qur’an becomes the basis of government, laws are enforced and administered according to the medieval code of justice known as Sharia. There is no completely written canon of Sharia law, no one text which comprises the sum total of what Muslims mean by the word. Instead, it is more of a patchwork of ad hoc laws, collected over centuries, and interpreted according to the whims of Islamic officials and clerics. Essentially, it is whatever Islamic judges, jurists, scholars, dictators, monarchs, ayatollahs, secret police, and terrorists decide that it is in each individual case. There is no consensus among either Muslims or non-Muslims as to what Sharia is in terms of where it begins, where it ends, where or when it should be applied, where or when it cannot be applied or on how to apply it. In other words, it seems like a rather vague term.

Because of this vagueness, Muslims will often deny that they are actively seeking to implement Sharia law in any particular country or jurisdiction. Instead, they resort to the subterfuge that they seek only “free exercise of religion.” They will persist in these claims right up to the point where Sharia is being enforced in secular courts, as has already happened in England.²⁷ Once this door is opened, it is only a matter of time until Sharia in its totality is recognized and written into the constitution. Once this happens, Sharia can be used to justify anything from laws that sentence homosexuals to hang or to requiring Islamic prayers.

The truth, however, is that Sharia is not completely vague and arbitrary. There is broad agreement among Muslims concerning many of the core principles of Sharia, and these principles are universally accepted and practiced by Muslims. Confusingly, these principles are not always explicitly called or recognized as Sharia. But they do exist. For example, mandating that the government may not make a law contrary to the established provisions of Islam is a principle of Sharia. This principle is even enshrined in the current constitutions of both Iraq and Afghanistan.

Many of Sharia’s principles are directly contrary to the fundamental premises of the U.S. Constitution and its Bill of Rights. In practice, Sharia recognizes Islam as the one true religion, and even in those Islamic countries where other religions are allowed to be practiced, Islam remains under special protection due to this status. Therefore, First Amendment protections of freedom of religion are simply impossible in Sharia. Sharia contradicts Eight Amendment protections against cruel and unusual punishments by permitting 7th century stoning and torture. Even the fundamental Constitutional assumption that “we the people” have come together to form a more perfect union is contradicted in Sharia, which gives the people no authority to go against the will of Allah.

A MODERATE ISLAM?

Many westerners stubbornly cling to the idea that Islam only needs to be guided by “moderate” voices in its communities. Their reasoning presupposes that Islam is a peaceful religion which has only been hijacked by a vocal and militant minority of extremists. While such notions may be comforting and politically expedient to pronounce, they are based on a complete misunderstanding of the nature of Islam. There is only one Islam, not a moderate and a radical one.

The truth about Islam must be found in its three authoritative scriptural sources. These are the Qur’an, the Hadith, and the Sira (which are authorized biographies of Muhammad’s life). The first of these is the most fundamental and well-known in the West. The Hadith and Sira are massive collections of biographies, stories, and sayings, which were derived from oral traditions. They contain vast stores of information about what Muhammad said and did in various situations. They are also considered religiously valid, though they include everything from how to wage war to Muhammad’s prescription for an upset stomach.

There are many disagreements among Muslims concerning these three sources. Some hadiths are considered more authoritative than others. Some biographies are more authentic than others. Some Islamic scholars do not distinguish between hadith and sira and refer to the entire collection as the Sunna. Some consider the Sunna to refer only to the biographies. Some say the Sunna is only the sayings and stories. These varying opinions are significant because the Qur’an is only one source of authoritative information about Islam—and not even the largest source.

As the Center for Political Islam points out:

You probably think that the Quran is the bible of Islam. Not true. The bible of Islam is the Quran, the Sira and the Hadith; these three texts can be called the Trilogy … The Quran is a small part, only 14% of the total words, of the doctrine that is Islam. The text devoted to the Sunna (Sira and Hadith) is 86% of the total textual doctrine of Islam. Islam is 14% Allah and 86% Mohammed.²⁸

Within Islam, a Muslim is one who follows or attempts to follow the rules and way of life laid out in the Trilogy. For guidance as to how to act and what to believe, Muhammad is considered the supreme teacher and exemplar. While there are dilettante Muslims who pass themselves off as moderates because they perform the basic rituals (sometimes known as the Five Pillars), these are not what people in the Islamic world understand as Muslims. Real Muslims are those who understand Islam and practice it in the way it was practiced by Muhammad. Real Muslims are always accorded greater religious authority among the common people than moderate dilettantes. It is the real Muslims who fill the news daily with stories of violence, threats, riots, and all the rest. What moderate Muslims practice is not authoritative because it goes against what is prescribed by the three authoritative texts that define Islam. In sum, there is only one Islam, not an Islam with moderate and radical varieties.

TWO RADICALLY DIFFERENT PATHS

Today, a large part of the world follows the path of freedom and individual rights. People are free to follow and practice their religion, but there is a separation between church and state which is accepted on both sides. People are allowed full scope to express and create beauty through art, literature, and music. Ideas are debated, even fiercely contested, but for the most part no one is killed or sentenced to die for a belief.

Since Islam’s inception, its goals have been markedly different. The individual is expected to submit to the state. The express goal of the Islamic religion is the subjection of every man, woman, and child on earth to the way of life proscribed by its founder in the 7th century. Under Islam, no one is free to create. Certain forms of expression, such as personal depictions of Muhammad, are forbidden; others, such as music and dancing, are severely restricted. Some ideas may be debated, but Islam and its founder are not up for debate—in many places, trying to question either can get you killed.

Clearly, the goals of Islam are radically opposed and contradictory to the goals of humanity. This is why Muslims believe themselves to be engaged in a life-or-death struggle with an implacable enemy. Since co-existence is not their aim, if they continue not to accept the notion of reform the rest of the world must join to stop their advance before, one by one, they consume us all.

PART ONE

CHAPTER TWO

9/11—A Nation Transformed

And when We decide to destroy a town (population), We (first) send a definite order (to obey Allah and be righteous) to those among them … Then, they transgress therein, and thus the word (of torment) is justified against it (them). Then We destroy it with complete destruction.

—Qur’an 17:16

The pieces of the bodies of infidels were flying like dust particles. If you would have seen it with your own eyes, you would have been very pleased, and your heart would have been filled with joy.

—Osama bin Laden¹

Time is passing. Yet, for the United States of America, there will be no forgetting September the 11th. We will remember every rescuer who died in honor. We will remember every family that lives in grief. We will remember the fire and ash, the last phone calls, the funerals of the children.

—President George W. Bush²

Seen from 230 miles above, the event on Earth was not dramatic—just a plume of smoke where none was expected. The International Space Station glided through its orbit silent and majestic against the vastness of space on the morning of September 11, 2001. From its perspective, the planet below was placidly turning as it had been since long before the appearance of man. The landmasses below showed no sign of ideological or political boundaries, no artificial lines or colors to mark either the borders of thoughts or the borders of governments. All Captain Frank L. Culbertson, commander of the NASA Expedition-3 mission aboard the ISS at the time, knew from the map on his computer was that he was passing southeast from Canada into New England when reports reached orbit about what had happened in New York and Washington, D.C.

Two planes had slammed into the World Trade Center towers in New York City. A third had struck the Pentagon. Commander Culbertson quickly got hold of a video camera and found a window with a good view of New York. He recorded the odd plume of smoke rising up from far below, streaming toward the south from Manhattan. Culbertson knew, despite the hundreds of miles between himself and the scene of destruction, that something profoundly disturbing had happened. Nevertheless, in his NASA radio address that day he tried to be reassuring:

I just wanted the folks to know that their city still looks very beautiful from out in space. I know it’s very difficult for everybody in America right now. The country still looks good, and for New Yorkers, your city still looks great from up here.³

Down there, it was chaos. The magnitude of the sudden, senseless violence and carnage was more than any rational mind could grasp. Even seasoned news reporters struggled to find words. Jaded comedians and pundits could only look on in horror. All struggled to find the right words, and no words adequate to the situation came.

The most stupefying fact at the core of it all was that the cruelty of the massacre, the indiscriminate viciousness of the wanton destruction, was the culmination and legacy of Islam. At the dawn of the 21st century there were still people in the world who believed, as an unquestioned article of faith, that inflicting such chaos and suffering on others was a holy act and a ticket to a mystical paradise.

THE 9/11 ATTACK PLAN AND EXECUTION

The events of 9/11 were not random. There was an overseer, an inspirational figure regarded by other Muslims who knew him as devout, a man who dedicated his life to living as well as he could in the way established by Muhammad. That man was already known to the United States; his name was Osama bin Laden.

But for all the importance attached to bin Laden, he was not the architect of the destruction. That dubious honor belongs to another man, also a devout Muslim, known as Khalid Sheikh Muhammad (KSM). It was KSM who hatched the plan to hijack commercial airliners and crash them into buildings to produce the wholesale slaughter of civilians. Bin Laden merely provided the money and the organizational power to make this plan a reality.

Yet for all bin Laden’s money and KSM’s clever scheming, the plot would have come to nothing without workmen to carry it out. Bin Laden and KSM had 19 such men, all devoted as they were to being model Muslims in the mold of Muhammad. Like bin Laden, these men spent their lives obeying the Qur’anic decree to follow the “good example” of conduct established by Islam’s founder.⁴ In other words, all 19 hijackers were devoted emissaries of Islam.

Osama bin Laden had no compunctions about sending 19 young men to kill themselves along with 2,977 victims. Muhammad had already told them all, “Whoever amongst us is killed as a martyr shall go to Paradise to lead such a luxurious life as he has never seen.”⁵ And he had also told them, “Whoever produces a proof that he has killed an infidel, will have the spoils of the killed man.”⁶ Muhammad said so, and Muhammad was the ideal model of human conduct.

When the mission clock started on September 11, 2001, the trained hijacking crews were deployed to strategically chosen locations, where they joined commercial flights as ordinary passengers. Once the planes were airborne, the hijackers took control of the aircraft and turned the vehicles into weapons of mass destruction. The intended result was misery for the enemy, martyrs for Islam. The exact identities of the victims didn’t matter—the goal was mayhem, terror, and murder on the broadest possible scale for the greater glory of Islam.

When the dust cleared, there were nearly three thousand dead, untold billions of dollars in damage done, and a nation scarred. Islamic imperialism had arrived in America.

THE DICHOTOMY

When the International Space Station passed over the United States after the events of 9/11, the nation may have looked the same as before, but it was a very different place. Commander Culbertson knew it. On the day after the destruction, he wrote:

It’s difficult to describe how it feels to be the only American completely off the planet at a time such as this. The feeling that I should be there with all of you, dealing with this, helping in some way, is overwhelming. I know that we are on the threshold (or beyond) of a terrible shift in the history of the world. Many things will never be the same again after September 11, 2001. Not just for the thousands of thousands of people directly affected by these horrendous acts of terrorism, but probably for all of us. We will find ourselves feeling differently about dozens of things, including probably space exploration, unfortunately.

It’s horrible to see smoke pouring from wounds in your own country from such a fantastic vantage point. The dichotomy of being on a spacecraft dedicated to improving life on the earth and watching life being destroyed by such willful, terrible acts is jolting to the psyche, no matter who you are. And the knowledge that everything will be different than when we launched by the time we land is a little disconcerting.⁷

That very dichotomy between the orderly accomplishments of science and the chaotic impulses of mysticism has lurked beneath all of mankind’s attempts at progress and civilization. But rarely has it stood in such stark contrast as it did on the brutality of that day in 2001. For the short term, at least, the forces of chaos had the upper hand.

IMMEDIATE AND LASTING EFFECTS OF THE 9/11 ATTACKS

The American psyche changed on 9/11. In the months and years since the attacks, awareness of global Islamic terrorism has become part of our daily consciousness. The use of peaceful passenger aircraft as weapons against defenseless civilian populations is doubtless a major reason for this. Such a barbaric act, with no hint of human decency, struck many at the time—and now—with the feeling that some primordial beast had gone on a rampage.

The American government didn’t understand it and had no answer to it. It still doesn’t.

1. Government Intrusion

A crucial change to America after 9/11 was the passage of the USA PATRIOT Act. Ostensibly designed to protect Americans from future terror attacks, this act allows the government to invade the personal lives of its citizens like never before.

This legislation provided the government with unprecedented power to search the personal information and communications of its citizens. Not only phone calls but e-mails and financial records were open to government access, even if the citizens involved were not suspected of involvement in criminal activity. Government agencies became capable of warrantless monitoring of civilians on a scale previously unknown in American history. Furthermore, because of the mandate of secrecy, people may not even know they’ve been spied upon.

The Information Awareness Office is an example of the increased power of the government to spy on its citizens. Created in 2002 to collect large amounts of electronic data in hopes of preventing future terror attacks, the IAO was the brainchild of John Poindexter, who gained his reputation as a national security advisor under the Reagan administration. The purpose of the IAO system is to recognize patterns of behavior and map out possible terrorist attacks in time to prevent them from happening. To that end, IAO collects electronic information about any seemingly normal private activity (such as car rentals, website use, and financial transactions). The work of IAO soon became polarized, however, as some Americans began to suspect IAO was encroaching too much on the privacy of citizens while apologists (including President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama) argued that strict surveillance was necessary for safety.

In the sage words of Benjamin Franklin, “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”⁸

2. Effects on Travel

One of the most noticeable effects of 9/11 on Americans is the proliferation of airport security. The Aviation and Transportation Security Act sailed through congress in November 2001, while the attacks were still fresh in the minds—and fears—of most Americans. This act made the American government, rather than individual airports, responsible for airport security. A federal security force, the Transportation Safety Administration, was created to scrutinize passengers and flight crew—and a lingering sore spot for American travelers ever since.

Among the many embarrassing outrages the TSA has been connected with was the insistence by agents at a Florida airport that a 95-year-old female cancer patient remove her wet adult diaper because it was interfering with their pat-down procedure. When the woman’s daughter started to cry over the indignity, she earned a pat-down of her own. The government’s response? Fully justified. There’s nothing to see here, so just move along.⁹

In another incident, TSA agents (again in Florida) acted quickly to save passengers from a potential terrorist threat by a passenger named “Riyanna” from a JetBlue plane about to take off from Fort Lauderdale. The infamous Riyanna was on the much-discussed “no fly” list. The fact that the actual Riyanna was an 18-month-old infant drinking from a bottle in her mother’s arms didn’t stop the TSA from pulling her and her parents off the plane and holding up departure for half an hour. By the time the absurd situation was resolved, the family was too embarrassed to get back on the plane. When questioned about the incident, TSA blamed the airline, which pointed the finger right back at TSA.¹⁰

There was still more uproar when TSA introduced full-body scans. In 2010, Oceanside, California resident John Tyner refused to submit to TSA’s full-body scan for health and privacy reasons. At first, he agreed to the pat-down which TSA requires for those who reject the scan. Then at the last minute Tyner backed out of the intimate search and received a refund for his plane ticket. When a TSA official decided to perform the search anyway, Tyner refused. The TSA fined him $10,000 and threatened him with prosecution. Tyner complained to a reporter that he didn’t fit the profile of a terrorist because he was “white, short brown hair, 6-foot-1.” With that statement, Tyner proved himself more rational than anyone in Congress since the first plane hit the North Tower. Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer discussed the abuses of uniformed government gropers in more measured language:

Everyone knows that the entire apparatus of the security line is a national homage to political correctness. Nowhere do more people meekly acquiesce to more useless inconvenience and needless indignity for less purpose. Wizened seniors strain to untie their shoes; beltless salesmen struggle comically to hold up their pants; 3-year-olds scream while being searched insanely for explosives—when everyone, everyone, knows that none of these people is a threat to anyone.¹¹

3. Cost to American Society

The New York Times has estimated the total cost to the United States of the 9/11 attacks, including the ensuing wars, at $3.3 trillion.¹² Most estimates of the cost to put Osama bin Laden’s plan into action peg it at around $500,000. Mathematically speaking, the incident has cost the United States over six million times as much as it has cost Muslims.

This doesn’t even take into account ongoing spending arising from the attacks. Federal spending on homeland security increased from $16 billion to $72 billion between 2001 and 2014.¹³ State, local, and private sector expenditures for security have necessarily increased due to the terrorist threat.

4. Commercial Financial Losses

Almost as soon as the first plane struck the North Tower, global stock markets began to plummet in response to the 9/11 attacks. In America, the markets were closed for four days—the longest such closure since 1933, when President Franklin Roosevelt closed them for two days to prevent a bank run. The effects of the attacks on the stock market were long-lasting and kept stock prices depressed for several years.¹⁴

Some of the biggest financial losses arose from insurance claims. The RAND Corporation did a study of these costs:

The RAND study found that the majority of the $38.1 billion in total payouts to individuals and businesses that could be quantified came from insurers ($19.6 billion). Another substantial piece ($15.8 billion) came from government programs. The remaining amount ($2.7 billion) came from charitable organizations.¹⁵

Property insurance claims for the World Trade Center buildings were settled at around $5 billion.

The 9/11 attacks also deeply aggravated pre-existing financial problems in the airline industry. Between 2001 and 2011, the number of workers employed by the airlines fell 26 percent. U.S. airline revenues fell by nearly the same rate, and carriers reported operating losses of close to $20 billion in the wake of the tragedy.¹⁶ Travelers and airlines alike must contend with higher operating costs and increased travel delays due to new security procedures.

5. Effect on New York City

Already suffering a slowdown due to the dot-com bust, the economy of New York City was hit dramatically by 9/11. The third quarter of 2001 saw the city’s economy contract by around 15 percent. Jobs in finance, insurance, and real estate—mainstays for city revenue and employment—were lost by the thousands. More than 13 million square feet of office space was destroyed and another 21 million square feet damaged.¹⁷ In all, nearly 18,000 businesses were “dislocated, disrupted or destroyed” by the attacks.¹⁸ The federal government stepped in with more than $20 billion in direct assistance to assist with economic development and repairs.

Both the public and private sectors in New York were drastically affected by the attacks and their aftermath. In addition to the money and effort needed for cleanup, Manhattan lost approximately 30 percent of its office space. Scores of business disappeared from the area never to return. Thousands of small businesses, lacking the resources or the savings of large corporations, were destroyed or displaced.

THE MEANING OF 9/11

Such a major event with such deep, far-reaching costs has had no shortage of explanations and analysis. It is sometimes suggested that poverty, lack of aid, or support for Israel are relevant factors. They are not.

Prior to World War II, the Arab nations were extremely poor. In the years since, thanks to Western aid and trade (and enormous oil reserves), many of these nations are among the most prosperous in the world. The West has sent trillions of dollars to Muslim nations since World War II to build their infrastructure and purchase their oil. Since the 1950s, the West has directed billions of dollars in direct aid to Palestinians, Pakistanis, and Egyptians. Financially speaking, the West has supported Muslims much more than it has supported Israel.

Alternative explanations fail to account for a simple fact: the 9/11 attacks were planned and executed by Muslims. The Muslims involved, from Osama bin Laden to the hijackers, understood their actions as the continuation of the Universal Jihad against infidels that has been going on since the birth of Islam. Islam does not believe in peace with infidels—making peace means you have no more cause for enmity. Rather, Islam believes in making truce with infidels. Truce is temporary. Truce is a tactic to be resorted to when Islam is in a weak position. Islam describes the state of the world this way: the Muslim nations are Dar al-Islam, the house of Islam; everywhere else is Dar al-Harb, the house of war.¹⁹ It is therefore improper to say that American support for Israel provokes Muslim anger: Muslims have been angry for 1,400 years. They want the whole world.

Speaking frankly, even if the whole world became Muslim there would be no peace. As the bloody conflicts between Sunni and Shia indicate, Muslims would still be killing one another. If two men are left on the planet, and both are Muslims, you can bet they would probably object to each other’s interpretation of religious law.

CHAOS AND CULTURE

Within weeks of each other in 2001, two major initiatives were set in motion. Each involved millions of dollars and the coordinated efforts of large groups of people. One initiative was the legacy of thousands of years of scientific and cultural progress, the fruit of centuries of advancement in the arts and sciences. It was a mission to the International Space Station consisting of an American and two Russians—former global enemies—with the benign purpose of increasing our knowledge and understanding of the universe.

The other initiative was the legacy of one man, Muhammad, who told his followers that the “one and only god” spoke to him in private, telling only him what was right and wrong. That initiative produced a secret plot by Osama bin Laden and Khalid Sheikh Muhammad to rain death and suffering upon an unsuspecting and innocent people, without regard for justice or human decency. It seems symbolically fitting that those engaged in the first initiative, motivated by rational thought, looked down from on high at the horror created by those engaged in the second, who were motivated by mysticism and dogma.

September 11, 2001 saw a pivotal moment in the clash between two civilizations. One is Western civilization, developed over centuries from Hellenic thought through periods of painful trial and error and historical evolution. The other is Islamic civilization, rooted in metaphysics and mysticism, dogma and blind faith. The former seeks to repair the errors of the past by securing the rights and freedoms of all individuals for the future. The latter seeks a return to the past, to 7th century Arabia, and to impose its will upon all mankind.

These two civilizations are mutually exclusive. There can be no peace or coexistence between them; Islam will not allow it. If America is to recover its greatness and its hope, every American must decide which of the two civilizations he or she will support.

PART ONE

CHAPTER THREE

Osama bin laden

Osama was just like many of us who became part of the [Muslim] Brotherhood movement in Saudi Arabia. The only difference which set him apart from me and others, he was more religious, more literal, more fundamentalist. For example, he would not listen to music. He would not shake hands with a woman. He would not smoke. He would not watch television, unless it is news.

—Jamal Khashoggi¹

A good Muslim! 100 percent, you know?

—Sheikh Abdul Ghafar²

I was ordered to fight all men until they say “there is no god but Allah.”

—Muhammad³

I was ordered to fight the people until they say there is no god but Allah, and Muhammad his prophet.

—Osama bin Laden⁴

Elif Yavuz was eight-and-a-half months pregnant and living and working in Nairobi, Kenya. She was already well known in humanitarian circles for her energy and dedication to improving the lives of others. The Clinton Foundation, which had recently hired Yavuz to help with its programs in Africa, was very excited about this young Harvard graduate. With her due date just two short weeks away, she and boyfriend Ross Langdon went shopping at Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi on September 21, 2013. Yavuz and Langdon did not leave the shopping mall alive. They were among the first victims of a three-day attack by Islamist group Al-Shabaab that left 72 people dead and hundreds injured.

All Saints’ Church was built in 1883 in Peshawar, Pakistan as a place of worship for members of that country’s Christian minority. The interior walls are covered in biblical quotations elegantly painted in English, Hebrew, and Persian. A large congregation was filing out after Sunday services in All Saints on September 22, 2013 when two suicide bombers sent by the Taliban detonated explosive vests, one just outside and one inside the church. At least 80 were killed and over a hundred others injured. The Taliban group responsible for the attack has already said they will continue to target non-Muslims because they are enemies of Islam.

On April 15, 2013, a large crowd was gathered in Boston to watch the annual running of the Boston Marathon. It was about 2:50 in the afternoon, and families, friends, and well-wishers were cheering at the finish line as runners from the middle of the pack finished the grueling race. In a flash, the peaceful scene dissolved into smoke and confusion as two homemade pressure-cooker explosives went off, killing three and injuring more than two hundred others as bodies and limbs were sent flying. In the ensuing manhunt for what turned out to be two “self-radicalized” Muslim brothers, a fourth victim was killed and another seriously injured. The city of Boston was essentially shut down for a day while police struggled to locate one of the two men responsible for the chaos—a young college student whose family emigrated from Chechnya over a decade ago.

It is important to recognize the genetic similarity shared by these stories. In each story, a peaceful community comes under assault by barbarians who do not care whether they live or die. In each story, innocents are targeted without regard for human decency. In each story, life is disrupted and suffering inflicted in the name of Islam. Regardless of the country in which such acts take place, the story plays out the same. This should come as no surprise—the acts were all carried out by the same family. The shopping mall victims in Nairobi, the Pakistani Christians in Peshawar, and the people of Boston were all visited by the disciples of Osama bin Laden.

A MODEL MUSLIM

Osama bin Laden was born in 1957, the 17th of more than four dozen children (the exact number is hard to determine) of an illiterate Yemeni billionaire named Mohammad bin Awad bin Laden. Awad did not start out as a billionaire; instead, he immigrated to Saudi Arabia from his native Yemen and cultivated connections with the Saudi royal family.⁵ Through these connections, the one-time bricklayer became a construction company magnate with a family fortune estimated at $5 billion in 2001.⁶ Osama inherited a considerable chunk of that fortune when Awad was killed in a plane crash in 1967. Estimates of the exact amount of his fortune vary widely, but Osama was certainly a comfortable multi-millionaire.

For his early schooling, Osama bin Laden was educated in Jeddah. From a very early age he had shown an unusual degree of religious conviction, and this continued at Jeddah, where he joined an extracurricular group devoted to memorizing the oral tradition stories of Muhammad found in the Hadith. Some investigators believe bin Laden may have served a “sort of apprenticeship” with the Muslim Brotherhood around this time as well.⁷ The motto of the Brotherhood is: “Allah is our objective; the Qur’an is our law, the Prophet [Muhammad] is our leader; Jihad is our way; and death for the sake of Allah is the highest of our aspirations.”

Around the time Osama finished the equivalent of high school he married his 14-year-old first cousin, the first of what would become five wives over the course of his life. Cousin marriage is encouraged in Islam because Muhammad married his own cousin and declared it to be lawful for his followers to do so.⁸ Osama also showed himself to be “drawn to teachings that a righteous Muslim should imitate the dress and customs that prevailed” in the 7th century era of Muhammad.⁹ According to Osama’s own account, his early dedication to following the example of Muhammad extended to certain feelings of hatred toward Americans:

Every Muslim, from the moment they realize the distinction in their hearts, hates Americans, hates Jews, and hates Christians. This is a part of our belief and our religion. For as long as I can remember, I have felt tormented and at war, and have felt hatred and animosity for Americans.¹⁰

Prior to entering college, Osama read two works by the influential Islamic author Sayyid Qutb: In the Shade of the Quran and Milestones. Qutb wrote these works while in prison for plotting to overthrow the government of Abdel Nassar in Egypt (he was eventually hanged in 1966 for his role in arranging Nassar’s assassination). Both works are invectives against secularism and glorify the path of Islam as the only acceptable way of life not only for individuals but for all the governments of the world. Qutb gained considerable posthumous celebrity as an Islamic icon and martyr. After Osama enrolled at King Abdulaziz University in 1976, he attended religious lectures by a visiting professor named Mohammad Qutb—the younger brother of that same Sayyid Qutb.

A lecturer at the university during this time was one Abdullah Yusef Azzam, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and fervent disciple of Sayyid Qutb. Although the two may not have met while at the same university together, Azzam would later become an important contact for Osama when he was directing aid to Afghani Muslims during their struggle with the Soviet Union. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 24, 1979 would lead to an important turning point in young Osama bin Laden’s life. He would soon turn his back on his family and fortune to live out the dream of Muslims who wish to follow the way of Muhammad—hunting and killing “infidels.” Although Soviets would be his first targets, they would not be his last.

OSAMA’S FIRST TRIP TO PAKISTAN/AFGHANISTAN

There is still disagreement about exactly when or where Osama went when he got involved in the Soviet-Afghanistan conflict. Forbes reports that he first went to Peshawar, Pakistan (near the Afghanistan border) in January, 1980, just weeks after the initial Soviet invasion.¹¹ One of Osama’s Muslim Brotherhood cohorts, Jamal Koshoggi, says Osama went to Lahore, Pakistan in November, 1980 to connect with the Pakistani branch of the Brotherhood.¹² Whatever the truth may be, Osama himself says it was the Saudi royal family who first sent him to the region:

To counter these atheist Russians, the Saudis chose me as their representative in Afghanistan … I set up my first camp where these volunteers were trained by Pakistani and American officers. The weapons were supplied by the Americans, the money by the Saudis.¹³

During the early years of the war, Osama traveled back and forth between Saudi Arabia and Peshawar. He would later claim that the Saudis ordered him to stay out of Afghanistan and operate from Pakistan—a practice still in use among Afghani Islamist guerillas today. According to Small Wars Journal:

The United States and Saudi Arabia, amongst others, had given around ten billion dollars of subsidies to the mujahideen [local Muslim fighters] in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation. These funds were distributed with the help of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). The ISI preferred the Pashtun tribes around Peshawar. They were therefore systematically given preferential treatment in the distribution of weapons and money by the Americans.¹⁴

The ISI, as we shall see later in this book, remain an important force in Pakistan today.

A key associate of bin Laden’s at this time was a former teacher from his school days in Jeddah, Saeed Badeeb. Badeeb was by this time working for the Saudi royal family under their chief of foreign intelligence. His role was to purchase weapons for the Afghani freedom fighters and ship them through Pakistan via the ISI. Bin Laden was both a source and a middleman for this trade in money and weapons.¹⁵ Although some news outlets have reported that bin Laden helped train Afghan freedom fighters at this time, his actual role was that of a recruiter, supplier, and financier—he had no military training.

For several years, bin Laden was a go-between for the Saudis and the mujahideen, developing contacts with the various networks involved in the Soviet-Afghanistan conflict. By January, 1984 he was living in Jeddah but making regular runs to Peshawar.¹⁶ During these years he was not active in actual combat, but made regular pilgrimages to mosques in Arab countries encouraging Muslims to go fight the atheist Soviets in Afghanistan.

THE MUJAHIDEEN AND THE “AFGHAN ARABS”

Mujahideen refers broadly to any Muslim engaged in jihad (holy war). In recent years, the word has come to refer more specifically to Muslims using terror and guerilla tactics to revive a 7th century Islamic theocracy, particularly in Afghanistan and Iraq. In 1980s Afghanistan, the mujahideen were local boys—a rag-tag militia consisting primarily of impoverished, illiterate Afghani Muslims. Osama bin Laden was a rich kid from opulent Saudi Arabia, an “Afghan Arab” import supporting war against the Soviet infidel. Arab imports like bin Laden enjoyed a sort of celebrity status among Afghanis at the time, as one later recalled:

[When the villagers] hear that among the caravan there was an Arab, all the village’s people come out of their home to see this Arab, because they remember that the Arabs speak the language of [Muhammad]; they come from the land of Mecca and Medina.¹⁷

Bin Laden was like a rock star to the beleaguered people of Afghanistan. Many of the mujahideen regarded him with awe as a model Muslim.

But bin Laden and the other Afghan Arabs weren’t there for praise from simple mountain folk: they were there for the sake of the Ummah, the international Islamic nation. Saudi Arabia wasn’t interested in gaining land; they were protecting their imperial interests against an invading army of communist atheists. The Afghan Arabs, the ISI agents from Pakistan, and the Saudi money were all there for the sake of the Islamic nation.

By his own account, Osama used his family business and personal fortune to send heavy construction equipment into Afghanistan to build roads, tunnels, and storage facilities for the mujahideen. He wasn’t doing this for an Afghani nation; he did it for Islam. Bin Laden didn’t even set foot in Afghanistan himself until 1984. In 1986 he left Saudi Arabia behind and moved his family to Peshawar.

STUNG

Some pundits still deny it—and it took the Soviet Union a while to come to terms with it—but the Soviets lost their war in Afghanistan on September 25, 1986. On that day, the first U.S. Stinger missile was fired in Afghanistan. The missile took out a Russian Mil Mi-24 gunship, the workhorse of the fleet of super choppers that had helped the Soviets hold military supremacy over the vast mountainous regions where tanks could not go.

Before that date, U.S. involvement in the conflict was mostly covert. No American-made armaments were directly supplied to Afghan rebels. As later chronicled in the Hollywood movie Charlie Wilson’s War, Congressman Charlie Wilson was instrumental in getting the CIA to supply the mujahideen with Stingers. After September 25 (as Wilson would later crow), the mujahideen did not lose a pitched battle with Soviet forces.¹⁸

The first wave of the Soviet withdrawal began on May 15, 1988. Three months later, Osama bin Laden held a three-day meeting in Pakistan to discuss the formation of a new organization called al-Qaeda.

BIN LADEN’S HIJRA

Bin Laden used the connections he formed during the Afghanistan conflict to continue his fight on behalf of the Islamic Ummah. Being well aware of the role the deadly accurate Stinger missiles played in defeating the Soviets, he attempted to smuggle Stingers from Peshawar to a new base he had built in the Sudan. He also attempted (in November 1989) to buy a no-confidence vote in the Pakistan National Assembly against Benazir Bhutto, the country’s first female prime minister. Bhutto survived the vote, and when she discovered bin Laden’s role in financing it, she told the Saudis to get him out of her country or she would have him arrested. Bin Laden was soon on a plane back to Saudi Arabia. When he returned, he was relieved of his passport.

The Arabic word hijra refers to Muhammad’s “migration” from Mecca to Medina. Following the episode with Bhutto, Osama bin Laden went on a migration of his own. In 1990, while bin Laden was stuck in Saudi Arabia, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. Hussein, a secularist, was nowhere near being a model Muslim in bin Laden’s eyes. Alarmed that Hussein might turn to Saudi Arabia next, he rushed to propose to the Saudi government that he, bin Laden, should leverage his Afghanistan celebrity to raise a jihad against Hussein. He claimed he could raise an army of 100,000 or more fighters if the royal family would let him off his chain. The Saudis said no.

Instead, the Saudi royal family backed an American invasion, and even allowed the Americans to establish bases in Saudi Arabia for easier access to the battle zone. Osama, who despised the Americans, was livid. Not long after being refused, he left Saudi Arabia for Pakistan. He never returned.

In Pakistan, bin Laden ramped up his efforts to create al-Qaeda. He tightened connections with an Egyptian group, called Egyptian Islamic Jihad, led by Ayman al-Zawahiri. He sent some of his new al-Qaeda “brothers in Islam” to Sudan to buy up land for use as a base. Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri then met up in Sudan to launch a campaign of terror.

One of their earliest victims was a 15-year-old boy who had been persuaded by the Egyptian government to help them keep tabs on al-Zawahiri’s group of Egyptian jihadists. The boy wore a wire in the presence of al-Zawahiri and other members of his group. The ruse was discovered, and Zawahiri quickly assembled an ad hoc sharia court. The boy was found guilty of treason, and according to Islamic law he was summarily executed in front of his own father.

In 1996, bin Laden returned to Afghanistan in his own imitation of Muhammad’s journey from Mecca to Medina. He and a group of like-minded Muslims formed the World Islamic Front with an aggressive declaration against all non-Muslim enemies and against all Muslims who accommodated those enemies. All of this was in keeping with Muhammad’s teaching that Muslims were “the best of peoples” and non-Muslims “the worst of creatures.”¹⁹ Bin Laden publicly excoriated the king of Saudi Arabia for what he called “atrocities,” and openly declared war on “the Crusaders” (a Muslim code word for Christians) and the Jews. Acting as a spokesman for the “one and only god” Osama declared war on the United States in the following terms [emphasis added]:

The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies—civilians and military—is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it … We—with Allah’s help—call on every Muslim who believes in Allah and wishes to be rewarded to comply with Allah’s order to kill the Americans and plunder their money wherever and whenever they find it.²⁰

The statement in which bin Laden makes this declaration identifies itself as a fatwa—that is, a religious edict binding on all Muslims. Bin Laden even identifies himself therein as a sheikh or religious leader.

Not long after issuing this order, bin Laden and the other good Muslims of al-Qaeda arranged for trucks full of explosives to be driven into the American embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The blast in Nairobi was devastating. Over 200 were killed and more than 4,000 injured. In comparison, the inhabitants of Dar es Salaam were lucky, with only 11 people killed and 85 others injured. Three years later, 19 more good Muslims flew commercial airliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, killing nearly 3,000 people.

BIN LADEN’S FINAL HOME

Contrary to popular belief, Osama bin Laden did not spend the last years of his life after the 9/11 attacks on the run. He spent several of those years in relative comfort and safety in Pakistan. A key American “ally” in the so-called War on Terror either directly or indirectly provided a guarded compound complete with servants to a mastermind of one of the greatest attacks ever perpetrated on American soil.

Bin Laden did not spend his last years in obscurity, either. Since his days with the mujahideen, he was looked up to by millions of Muslims around the world. They admired him; they cheered him; they adored him. He was given romantic nicknames over the course of his life: “the Prince,” “the Sheikh,” “the jihadist Sheikh,” “the Lion Sheikh.” Millions felt—and doubtless still feel—that he represented true Islam, the best-of-the-best. He was a tall, commanding symbol of uncompromising obedience to the literal teaching of Islam and Muhammad. Alleged Islamic moderates can call him many things, but they cannot call him a “bad Muslim.” In 2013, Islamists in Pakistan held a rally to mark the second anniversary of bin Laden’s death. “We are observing [the] death anniversary of an Islamic hero,” one attendee said.²¹

Other Muslims may disagree with his tactics, but they find it hard to repudiate what he believed. When the American SEAL team brought treatment stimulants for erectile dysfunction in his medicine cabinet, they brought down an Islamic legend.²²

It remains to be seen whether bin Laden’s own children (there are between 20 and 26 of them, but it is hard to be certain) will follow in their father’s footsteps. Perhaps tellingly, bin Laden himself expressly wrote in his will that they should not do so.²³ This doesn’t mean that bin Laden had ceased to believe in jihad, however; it means he wanted his own children to survive and let his spiritual children do the killing and dying instead. As an attendee at a rally in Pakistan in 2013 put it, “Bin Laden’s martyrdom gave a new impetus to jihad against forces inimical to Islam.”²⁴

THE CHILDREN OF BIN LADEN

Since September 11, 2001, there have been tens of thousands of terror attacks and attempted attacks worldwide. As the events in Nairobi, Peshawar, and Boston indicate, even after the death of bin Laden there are still Islamists across the globe willing to commit horrifying acts. Bin Laden the man is dead; bin Laden the idea is alive and well.

With all such attacks, it must be kept in mind that the strategy is not simply to kill or injure—or even just to “spread terror.” There is an economic component as well, which has been called a “war of a thousand cuts.” In a post-9/11 interview with Al Jazeera, bin Laden remarked at length on the financial impact of the attacks. He concluded that the total cost to America was “no less than $1 trillion,” in comparison with the approximately $500,000 al-Qaeda spent to make it happen.²⁵ Even failed attempts such as the infamous “underwear bomber” Umar Abdulmutallab count as partial successes in this war, because there will always be money spent in responding to the attempt and in implementing new safety rules and regulations. This is even without factoring in the psychological toll.

According to the bin Laden “war of a thousand cuts” strategy, the Boston Marathon Bombing was an enormous success. At a cost of nearly nothing, two men inflicted what could end up being over $350 million dollars’ worth of damage in lost wages, sales, infrastructure damage, and medical costs.²⁶ The costs facing Nairobi and Peshawar after the September 2013 terror attacks there could easily reach the tens of millions (for countries which lack the enormous resources of the United States). So long as there remain children of bin Laden willing to carry out such attacks, the world will continue to face such costs—even if we should be so lucky as to foil every plot before it claims a life.

PART ONE

CHAPTER FOUR

Afghanistan—Before 9/11

To watch the courageous Afghan freedom fighters battle modern arsenals with hand-held weapons is an inspiration to those who love freedom.

—President Ronald Reagan¹

What is most important for world history? The Taliban or the fall of the Soviet Empire? Some Islamic hotheads or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?

—Zbigniew Brzezinski²

Every religion, including Islam, has its crazed fanatics. Few in numbers and small in strength, they can properly be assigned to the “loony” section. This was true for Islam as well until 1979, the year of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Indeed, there may well have been no 9/11 but for this game-changer.

—Perez Hoodbhoy³

Charlie did it.

—Pakistani President Zia ul-Haq⁴

In 1979, U.S. Representative Charlie Wilson was a big-talking, big-drinking Texan whose primary accomplishment after four terms in Congress was getting himself reelected three times. Within a year he was a key player in Operation Cyclone, a CIA operation aimed at arming and financing Afghan mujahideen fighters in their guerilla fight against the Soviet Union. For a decade, operatives were able to provide financial—and later military—assistance to militant Islamic groups of tribal Afghans. Wilson was instrumental in securing appropriations for the operation, which wasn’t quite officially legal, at least at first. The story of how a larger-than-life character like Wilson, who probably couldn’t even find Afghanistan on a map in 1979, could become so important is told in the 2003 book Charlie Wilson’s War, later made into a Hollywood movie in 2007.

In the movie, the whole episode is presented primarily as a comedy. No one expects a good-natured blowhard like Wilson to become an important mover of world events. He is an underdog, much like the mujahideen he helped to funnel several billion dollars to. But at the end of the movie, things suddenly become serious. The CIA operative Wilson has been teaming up with comes to tell him things aren’t going swimmingly in Afghanistan now that the Soviets are gone. There are religious hotheads and crazies pouring in to the country. The former holy warriors are now turning on each other in civil war—and they’re still well armed with American weapons. We hear the sound of jet airliners approaching from the distance as Wilson shrugs off the warning. America has moved on even if the mujahideen have not.

The real Charlie Wilson was not nearly so blasé about his former allies. In a 2009 interview with a Texas newspaper, Wilson was highly skeptical about Afghanistan and the permanent removal of the “awful” Taliban:

Generally, I’m a pretty optimistic person, and I’m not very optimistic about this … I feel like I would not be surprised if in two years we’ve taken a lot of casualties and spent a lot of money and don’t have much to show for it.⁵

As for those years in the early 90s, when Afghanistan was falling into the hands of the Taliban, Wilson admitted, “I feel guilty about it.”⁶ Just a few months after the interview, Charlie Wilson died. The Afghanistan quagmire continues.

Now more than six years since Wilson’s prediction, the story in Afghanistan is much the same. It’s worth asking what this retired politician could see in 2009 that America’s foreign policy experts and advisors did not. It’s worth asking what America is still doing in Afghanistan in the first place.

THE HUNT FOR BIN LADEN

Shortly after 9/11 American intelligence identified al-Qaeda and its leader Osama bin Laden as the prime movers behind the attack. President Bush issued a demand to the Taliban, then the ostensible (if mostly unrecognized) government of Afghanistan, to deliver up al-Qaeda’s leaders or face the consequences.

Ironically, these demands were made to—and about—former allies. Bin Laden and the men who would later become the Taliban had worked for a long time with American and Pakistani intelligence agencies (the CIA and ISI, respectively) as part of a proxy war of attrition against the Soviet Union. The CIA was well aware of the radically religious character of the proto-Taliban fighters, but still preferred them to Afghan nationals because they believed their motivations easier to read. For the sake of defeating the USSR, the CIA regarded bin Laden and the Islamic militants who had flocked to Afghanistan in the wake of the Soviet invasion as reliable partners.⁷

When the U.S. came to the Taliban with its demand for bin Laden in 2001, they were speaking to religious zealots nourished for more than a decade by Saudi money, Pakistani training, and American military hardware. As far as the Americans were concerned, these zealots had helped us topple the “evil empire” more than a decade before. But in the eyes of the zealots, America was just another evil empire, to be used and deceived—as Muhammad taught his followers to do with unbelievers—then turned on and destroyed at the first opportunity. As for bin Laden, the zealots saw him as a hero of the Soviet war engaged in righteous jihad with the foolish Americans who had once indirectly supported him. They rejected U.S. demands. When the Americans subsequently invaded Afghanistan the official reason was simple: to destroy al-Qaeda and bring Osama bin Laden to justice.

After ten years, and thousands of American soldiers killed and injured, with more than two trillion dollars spent, bin Laden was finally found and killed—but not in Afghanistan. Instead, this skinny, middle-aged man taking drugs for erectile dysfunction was resting comfortably in Pakistan. The “most wanted man in the world” had his own compound, complete with servants, near the Abbottabad military base—essentially the West Point of Pakistan—near the capital of a country we consider a key ally in the so-called War on Terror.

With the elimination of bin Laden we are left with questions that still lack good answers. If bin Laden was hiding out in Pakistan, why are we in Afghanistan? As part of the initial invasion, American forces overthrew the Taliban because of their role in harboring bin Laden and his al-Qaeda organization. Who is the Taliban? Where did they come from? What is their connection to al-Qaeda?

The sad fact of the Afghanistan invasion and all the death and suffering and waste that has resulted from it is that the Taliban is, in part, our responsibility—along with two supposed allies, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. The Afghan people had nothing to do with 9/11, but they have suffered greatly for it. The biggest losers in our war there have been the main participants: the United States and the Afghans themselves. For over a decade we have been both bombing and trying to rebuild a country that was destroyed not by bombs but by Islam.

THE ISLAM BOMB

Before there was Muhammad or Islam, the region which now includes Afghanistan and Pakistan was occupied by what we now refer to as Gandhara civilization. In one popular modern misconception, Afghanistan is thought of as a country that never left the Stone Age. In fact, the Gandhara civilization enjoyed a thriving culture before Homer composed his Iliad in Greece.

When Alexander and his Greek phalanxes marched through Persia toward India in 326 BC, it was the Gandhara civilization that they passed through. His historians described the capital, Taxila, as “wealthy, prosperous, and well-governed.”⁸ The region was known as a spiritual center, the birthplace of the Zoroastrian religion. When Buddhist influence later came to Afghanistan, it produced an incredible array of religious art and architecture, with hundreds of monasteries and stupas (Buddhist temples) dotting the landscape. Even today, prominent museums around the world have displays of unique sculptures known as “Gandhara Art” which were produced by members of this civilization.

One of the most remarkable figures in Gandhara civilization was a scholar named Panini. Born in the 4th century BC in a region which now lies on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, Panini was an incredibly advanced Sanskrit scholar who produced a stunningly precise work of linguistic analysis which introduced ideas still in use by linguists today. Ferdinand de Saussure, widely considered the father of modern linguistics, himself cited Panini as one of the major influences on his linguistic theories.⁹ The ancient scholar’s pioneering work has even been incorporated into computer science as an element in the design of programming languages.¹⁰

When Arab Muslims first appeared in the region in the 7th century AD, Afghanistan and the surrounding areas were part of an ancient, multi-religious civilization. Buddhist art and architecture was everywhere. The mountains and fields were full of Buddhists, Zoroastrians, Hindus, Christians, Jews, and pagans of various sorts. Afghanistan was a land of saints and scholars. The religious leaders in the Gandhara civilization practiced such things as celibacy, compassion, and service to humanity. Compare that with their modern Taliban counterparts and their particular brand of religious zealotry.

In the 11th century, the area now known as Afghanistan was completely Islamized. The various competing religions were stamped out. Since that time, the country’s fortunes have been largely tied to the fortunes of global Islam. When the medieval Caliphate was in its ascendency, Afghanistan remained a cultural center; when that declined, so did the country. In some ways, it has never fully recovered.

THE BEGINNINGS OF MODERN AFGHANISTAN

The roots of modern Afghanistan begin with the British removal from the region and the long reign of King Mohammed Zadir Shah. King Zahir Shah ruled from 1933 to 1973, a period still remembered affectionately by many elderly Afghans today. During his reign, the country was essentially managed as a collection of semi-harmonious fiefdoms. The king pursued a policy of gradual modernization, turning away from literal, tribal Islamism to instead join the 20th century. For example, the constitution established in 1964 gave women the right to vote.

But Afghanistan’s geography meant its destiny would be otherwise. Placed at a nexus point between what was (in the 1950s) the southern USSR, the rich oil fields of Iran, China, and Pakistan, Afghanistan naturally attracted the interest of the major powers during the cold war. In 1953, Vice President Richard Nixon made a visit to Afghanistan, followed later by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1959. President Kennedy hosted King Zahir Shah in Washington, D.C. in 1963, further strengthening America’s relationship with Afghanistan.¹¹

Although he met with American leaders, King Zahir Shah had already made an arms agreement with the Soviet Union. This agreement did not meet the approval of some of the king’s people, however. Conservative Muslims in particular were openly hostile toward the Soviet atheists and regarded Soviet-Marxist influence in Kabul as disgraceful. For a time, the king was able to use the competing interests of the cold war powers to his advantage. Both the US and the USSR tried to curry favor with him by funding elaborate infrastructure projects in Afghanistan.

Communist influence in Afghanistan needs to be understood in a South Asian, rather than an American, context. In Afghanistan, the communists were not so interested in secret police and central economic planning. Instead, their primary interest was in modernizing the country, which in many places remained tribal, feudal, and Islamic. De facto slavery was still practiced in some regions. To be a communist in 1960s Afghanistan meant that you opposed backward, uneducated religious extremists who still engaged in honor killings, ritual oppression of women and slaves, and all manner of murder, theft, and rape. Those who supported increasing the level of civilization in the country were often communists or other Leftists, while those who opposed this tended to be conservative Islamists. This pattern also existed across the Middle East at the time (and is why many of these countries remain monarchical).

In keeping with its foreign policy throughout the cold war, the United States viewed communist influence in Afghanistan with concern. Oil-rich Iran was right next door. When King Zahir Shah finally threw in with the communists, both the Americans and the Afghan Islamists reacted with hostility. In 1973, the king’s cousin and brother-in-law, Prime Minister Mohammad Daoud Khan, overthrew him in a bloodless coup. Khan pressed hard against the communist-aligned political party, deposing its leader in 1978. The communists responded by assassinating Daoud Khan (and most of his family) and seizing control of the country. The Saur Revolution was on.

A communist junta called the PDPA took power with an eye toward modernizing the country. Through edicts they redistributed land, absolved feudal and tribal customs, established equality between men and women, and abolished slavery. Many changes imposed by the PDPA were symbolic, such as shifting the national flag from traditional Islamic green to Soviet red. Some were cruel, such as imprisoning or murdering religious leaders and members of the traditional Afghan elite. Others were well intentioned, such as a prohibition on usury, which eventually provoked an agricultural crisis.

The sudden changes to Afghan society provoked anger and rebellion. But the forces which arose in opposition to the Saur Revolution were not democratic or capitalist—they were Islamic. Insurrection against the PDPA was primarily the work of Afghan tribes with a deep attachment to what most Americans would likely regard as brutal, outdated religious customs.

The Soviet Union took a strong interest in the survival of the Afghan junta. For one thing, they were fellow communists. For another, the Soviet states on the border of Afghanistan were also full of religious Muslims. With the USSR already suffering from a crumbling infrastructure, the last thing they needed was riled-up religious resistance on its borders and potentially sympathetic rebels within its borders. At the end of 1979 they sent the first of many troops (estimates suggest around 120,000 at the peak) to Afghanistan to quell the anti-communist rebellion. Despite the large number of men and materiel, however, the Soviets soon found themselves in a quagmire.

THE BRZEZINSKI DOCTRINE

In the late 70s, one of the most influential foreign policy minds in the Carter White House belonged to Zbigniew Brzezinski. Originally from Poland, Brzezinski had a deep-seated antagonism toward the Soviet empire which in turn informed what became known as “The Carter Doctrine.” Soviet influence in Afghanistan posed a threat to the free movement of Middle East oil and therefore, according to the Carter Doctrine, was a threat to vital American interests.¹² The method Brzezinski (and others) took to deal with this threat continues to bear bitter fruit for the United States today.

As Brzezinski acknowledged in a later interview, prior to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Americans were secretly enticing them to go:

On 3 July 1979 … Carter signed the first directive for the secret support of the opposition against the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And on the same day I wrote a note, in which I explained to the president that this support would in my opinion lead to a military intervention by the Soviets … We didn’t push the Russians to intervene but we knowingly increased the probability that they would do it … This secret operation was an excellent idea. It lured the Russians into the Afghan trap … I wrote president Carter, in essence: “We now have the opportunity to provide the USSR with their Viet Nam war.”¹³

In response to the Soviets, the United States embarked on a campaign that encouraged religious radicalization across the region. The Soviet states along Afghanistan’s northern border (Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan) were majority Muslim; The US sent them Qur’ans.¹⁴ The Afghan opponents of the Soviets were Muslims; the US and its allies Saudi Arabia and Pakistan sent them money and weapons. The so-called mujahideen, the “holy warriors” of Afghanistan, were a policy weapon used by America against its global competitor, the Soviet Union. This is what the Carter Doctrine and Brzezinski’s advice meant in practice.

Once the Soviets took the bait and crossed the border, support for the mujahideen intensified. In addition to money, Arab revolutionaries flocked to Afghanistan to aid the rebels in what was billed as a romantic jihad against atheist invaders. To the native Afghans, these revolutionaries were heroic figures—they came from wealthy countries like Saudi Arabia and spoke the language of Islam and the Prophet (Afghans are mostly Pashtun and Asiatic peoples who do not speak Arabic). These “Afghan Arabs” enjoyed enormous status in the country. As we saw in the previous chapter, Osama bin Laden was one of the most famous of these, and he didn’t even have to fire a shot. The ranks of the mujahideen were also filled via the efforts of Pakistan’s largest clandestine organization, the Inter-Services Intelligence Agency (ISI). The ISI was supported in its efforts to train and supply rebel soldiers by the CIA and members of the U.S. Congress.¹⁵

Under President Ronald Reagan, support for the mujahideen began to include an impressive arsenal of weaponry, including highly accurate Stinger missiles. With this kind of firepower at their disposal, the mujahideen began to carry out major offenses against the hated Soviets. By 1988 the Soviets had had enough and agreed to a UN-sponsored peace deal. That year, having lost about 15,000 men and squandering billions of rubles, Soviet troops began to withdraw.

Americans lost interest in Afghanistan, but the mujahideen did not. In the aftermath of the Soviet withdrawal, various factions arose among the victorious “holy warriors” competing for control of a nation now devastated by nearly a decade of war. One thing was already clear, however: whoever ended up controlling the country would not be any kind of secularist. The only organized forces left in the country were the ones Americans, Saudis, and Pakistanis had built up, and they were all deeply conservative Muslims.

THE RISE OF THE TALIBAN AND AL-QAEDA

Although the Taliban and al-Qaeda are not interchangeable, there is considerable overlap between the two groups. Both groups coalesced in the years after Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in direct response to the power vacuum created. Both groups arose from the mujahideen forces that battled the Soviets. The difference is that the Taliban is a radical political party that seeks to (and for a few years did) control Afghanistan, while al-Qaeda is an international Islamic organization formed by Osama bin Laden. The sphere of influence of the Taliban includes Afghanistan and regions of Pakistan along the border. Al-Qaeda’s influence is global, with acolytes recruited from Muslim communities across the world. Bin Laden’s first recruits, of course, were former Afghan Arab revolutionaries. Once the Soviets were gone, he gave them a new cause. America’s former allies would soon reveal themselves to be our worst enemies.

Since Saudi Arabia financed so much of the mujahideen fighting, it should come as no surprise that many Afghan clerics, mullahs, and ex-fighters became interested in a form of Islam similar to Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabism.¹⁶ Briefly put, Wahhabism is an Islamic sect which believes that only the Salafis, the chosen Muslims, are destined for heaven. The approach to Islamic theology and practice is very literal, with a strong emphasis on living and acting as Muhammad did in the 7th century. With an entire country ravaged by war, there was no shortage of young men willing to listen to religious promises of future glory.

A former mujahideen fighter named Mullah Omar became the Taliban’s leader. Omar quickly saw that the puppet government established in Kabul in the early 90s was weak.¹⁷ He waged an inflammatory propaganda campaign against them, convincing the country only the strong arm of the Taliban was capable of ruling. In 1994, the Taliban took control of Kandahar in the south and made it their stronghold. Since this region is the most fertile for growing opium poppies, the Taliban quickly engaged in the drug trade to raise money.¹⁸ Like a gangster organization, these “religious” leaders leveraged opium and heroin profits into political and military control. By 1996, they had become the governing body of Afghanistan.¹⁹ The former home of peaceful scholars like Panini was now under the control of drug-dealing rapist thugs who styled themselves as holy warriors.

The Taliban’s hold on power remained unrecognized by the world community. In the five years between their assumption of power and the September 11 attacks, only three countries recognized the Taliban: Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and the United Arab Emirates.²⁰

Whatever the world community thought, the Taliban were masters inside the borders of Afghanistan. Adhering to a literal approach to Islam, they established a “Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and the Suppression of Vice” which carried out public executions, stonings, and blanket bans on television, music, and dancing.²¹ Women were banned from attending school or taking jobs outside the home—a reversal of the efforts King Zahri Shah had tried to put in place during his reign. Non-Islamic elements of Afghan history and culture were violently purged, with the most notable example being the explosive demolition of two large, 1,700-year-old Buddha statues carved into the cliff walls of Bamiyan City.²² Honor killings, beheadings, and vicious beatings of women simply for wearing the wrong kind of clothing became standard practice.

THE ROLE OF PAKISTAN

U.S. funding is far from the sole or even primary reason for the Taliban’s rise to power. Of crucial importance is the role of Pakistan and its ISI agency in the development of what became the Taliban. Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden were both trained by the ISI for the fight against the Soviets. Omar was plucked, along with thousands of other Afghans, from the enormous Afghan refugee camps that sprung up in northern Pakistan after the Soviet invasion.

Pakistani support of the Taliban continued even after the group proved itself hostile to American interests. Throughout the 1990s, Pakistani military officials provided covert advice to the Taliban in their fight against the Northern Alliance (the only real ally the West had in Afghanistan). Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, who overthrew the country’s previous government in a 1999 coup, swore his government ceased all support to the Taliban after 9/11, but that secret support continued. In 2011, bin Laden was found within Pakistan’s borders.

AL-QAEDA, AFGHANISTAN, AND THE FIRST IRAQ WAR

Osama bin Laden spent much of the 90s recruiting soldiers for al-Qaeda, using Afghanistan as a gathering-spot even as the Taliban steadily gained control over the countryside. American interest at this time was on the oil-rich nations to the west. A long, bloody war between Iran and Iraq claimed at least half a million lives. Although officially a stalemate, Iran was seen as victorious because its economy remained intact, whereas Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was essentially broken.²³ When the Sunni Muslim states who financed Saddam’s war against Shiite Iran called in their war loans, Saddam did what any despot with no money and a large military would do—he attacked one of his neighboring creditors.

Iraqi forces quickly took control of tiny, oil-rich Kuwait and its ports in the Persian Gulf. Given the large amount of oil that travels through the Gulf, America took an immediate military interest. Saudi Arabia allowed the American military and its allies to use its country as a staging ground for over half a million troops. The superior firepower and discipline of the allied forces soon crushed Saddam’s invasion force, sending his army back to Iraq crippled and embarrassed.

In Afghanistan, the pan-Arab revolutionaries watched these events unfold with mounting anger. Saddam was loathed as a secular despot, but allowing the holy land of Saudi Arabia to be used by infidel soldiers—by “crusaders”—was too much. Bin Laden found many eager recruits among Islamic fundamentalists across the world after this. While America patted itself on the back for liberating Kuwait, al-Qaeda quietly grew in size and power.

Throughout the 90s al-Qaeda developed a reputation across the globe for its role in planning and executing terror attacks. In 1998, as discussed in the previous chapter, it bombed U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The Clinton administration responded by bombing a handful of al-Qaeda targets in Afghanistan and Sudan. The Sudanese bombing backfired when the target was later determined to be a civilian factory.

On September 9, 2001, al-Qaeda conducted an audacious attack on its long-time Afghan nemesis the Northern Alliance, killing its charismatic leader under cover of a television interview. Two days afterwards, 19 operatives carried out the most infamous and devastating attack in al-Qaeda’s history. The majority of the operatives were not Afghanis or Iraqis—they were Saudi Arabian nationals. When America invaded Afghanistan a month later, we were fighting our former allies.

How is that working out for us?

PART ONE

CHAPTER FIVE

Afghanistan after 9/11

She really thought there was a lot to be done [in Afghanistan], and she could be a part of it … As parents you always want to make sure no harm comes to your children, but I knew that she wanted to embrace this opportunity.

—Mary Beth Smedinghoff¹

Some of the [Afghan Local Police] are just Taliban, who have been recruited to the government side, and if they don’t get paid, they can easily go back to the Taliban overnight.

—Graeme Smith²

On the security front the entire NATO exercise was one that caused Afghanistan a lot of suffering, a lot of loss of life, and no gains because the country is not secure.

—President Hamid Karzai³

Diplomat Anne Smedinghoff was in Afghanistan to make a difference. The 25-year-old from Chicago volunteered for the dangerous position knowing it would offer plenty of opportunities. In her time there she worked with the public, helping Afghani women and schoolchildren. She spent much of her time there in a heavily fortified compound, relatively safe from the violence plaguing the countryside. But, as friends and colleagues recall, she was eager to get outside to help the people more directly.

In April 2013, she got an opportunity. She joined a convoy from Kabul carrying a supply of science and math textbooks to southern Afghanistan. The U.S. Provincial Reconstruction Team was engaged in efforts to improve the education of young Afghans in Zabul province—an area where the uneducated often find themselves involved in the dangerous but lucrative drug trade. Smedinghoff was coordinating with Afghan journalists to cover an event at a local school with an eye toward making more Afghans aware of the educational opportunities arising in their country.

Smedinghoff and four other Americans were walking through a town in Zabul when a suicide bomber drove up in a vehicle loaded with explosives and detonated. Reportedly, a device set up on the roadside also went off. The young diplomat was killed, together with three soldiers, a civilian contractor, and an Afghan doctor. The Taliban later claimed responsibility for the attack.⁴

The fate of American intervention in Afghanistan has been similar to the fate of idealistic young diplomat Anne Smedinghoff. Even the best intentions in that country are prey to the hostility of Islamic radicals. So long as such radicals are around, no amount of diplomats or textbooks will be able to transform the country from its current state.

The case of Corporal Pat Tillman illustrates a related problem. Tillman was also an admirable figure, turning down a $3.6 million NFL contract to serve his country as an Army Ranger. Motivated by patriotism in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, Tillman also wanted to make a difference. He was on his second tour in Afghanistan in 2004 when his group was mistaken for enemy combatants and killed by friendly fire. Compounding the tragedy, the military initially covered up the true cause of death—a fact many believe arose from their desire to use him as a recruiting tool.⁵ Tillman’s death also serves as a tragic metaphor for what has plagued American policy in Afghanistan for years: the inability to properly define and deal with the enemy.

REMOVING THE TALIBAN

In response to the September 11 attacks, Americans and allied forces invaded Afghanistan in October, 2001. Their aim was to destroy terrorist training camps and capture senior al-Qaeda leadership. To accomplish these goals, the coalition relied primarily on Special Forces units and aerial bombardments, with some ground support from insurgent groups hostile to the Taliban (most prominently the Northern Alliance). This approach proved successful in accomplishing some of the goals. Terrorist training camps were destroyed and the Taliban was driven from power—at least officially. But Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda leaders disappeared.

Although the Taliban was unrecognized by the majority of the world community (Pakistan and Saudi Arabia being notable exceptions), by 2001 they had been the closest thing to a government within Afghanistan’s borders for half a decade. Special Forces and the Northern Alliance could displace them, but they could not control the country. Many problems confronting the U.S. in Afghanistan stem from this basic issue. If violent fundamentalists will not govern in Afghanistan, who can?

Since 2002, the answer has been the government of Hamid Karzai. Karzai’s background in many ways mirrors that of our deadliest enemies in Afghanistan. He first made a name for himself in the 80s working as a fundraiser for the mujahideen in their struggle against the Soviet Union. He subsequently spent time in Pakistan, coordinating with the ISI and the CIA—much as Osama bin Laden had done. But Karzai was a native Afghan, and his patrician background made him more of a royalist than an Islamist. When the Taliban began to emerge in the 90s, he supported them at first as a viable Pashtun alternative to the current rulers who had arrested and beaten him. He later backed away when the destructiveness of their policies and their foreign influences were revealed. Then he became an anti-Taliban leader across the border in Quetta, Pakistan, where the Taliban assassinated his father in 1999. Karzai cultivated connections in the West, which culminated in his appointment to lead the transitional government in 2002.⁶

The U.S. and the West have supported Karzai and his Afghan government with money, diplomacy, and military might. In many ways, this government has been a significant improvement over the Taliban. But significant problems remain unsolved—problems which threaten to undo everything the U.S. has attempted since first engaging the Taliban in 2001.

CORRUPTION AND WASTE

In 2012, Karzai described the corruption in his governmentas a level “not ever before seen in Afghanistan,” even during Soviet occupation. Although Karzai blamed the United States, most outside observers agree that Karzai bears responsibility as well—appointing family members and fellow tribal members to key government positions.⁷ Still, Karzai had a point. At least one security expert has admitted, “The fact is that we are at least as much to blame for what has happened as the Afghans, and we have been grindingly slow to either admit our efforts or correct them.”⁸

The example of purchasing fuel will illustrate the nature of the corruption. In 2014 the U.S. military handed over to the Afghan National Army (ANA) the responsibility for purchasing all the oil and lubricants it needs. The annual bill will be paid by the U.S. government ($343 million) and international donors ($123 million). The funding will be based on estimates by the ANA, but the U.S. has no method for checking on the validity of these estimates. Without such checks, it is easy for unscrupulous members of the supply chain to overestimate their needs, invoice for the overestimate, and pocket the difference. A number of American servicemen have already been caught in similar plots.⁹

Are Afghans more likely to be circumspect with American money? In 2013, unidentified Afghans stole about $50 million worth of U.S. government funds and placed it all in an Afghan bank account. When American investigators found out about the theft, they froze the account and tried to trace the money. Within days a “powerful bureaucrat in Kabul” unfroze the account and the money disappeared.¹⁰

An investigation by the U.S. House of Representatives in 2010 placed partial responsibility for a corrupt system on the Department of Defense. The study noted that the DoD’s reliance on largely unaccountable contractors and security providers “has fueled a vast protection racket run by a shadowy network of warlords, strongmen, commanders, corrupt Afghan officials, and perhaps others.”¹¹ Government reliance on wartime contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan has been cited as a prime cause for about $60 billion worth of waste and fraud.¹²

The Afghan government hasn’t impressed outside observers, either. In 2012, Transparency International ranked Afghanistan’s public sector last in the world in a three-way alongside Somalia and North Korea.¹³ One of the largest examples of Afghan corruption is the Kabul Bank Scandal revealed in 2010. The bank was involved in a massive fraud that channeled close to $900 million worth of funds to well-connected members of the country’s political elite. The money was directed in the form of loans made to individuals and fake companies. Mahmoud Karzai, one of President Hamid Karzai’s elder brothers, was alleged to have benefited from the scam. When word of the scam got out, Afghans made a run on the bank, forcing foreign donors to bail it out to avoid a complete collapse of the country’s economy.¹⁴

As the House study concluded, corruption in Afghanistan “appears to risk undermining the U.S. strategy for achieving its goals in Afghanistan.”¹⁵

SECURITY AND ECONOMY

The Afghanistan government has long had problems maintaining peace and social order. A detailed January 2014 assessment commissioned by the U.S. Congress concluded:

The security environment in Afghanistan will become more challenging after the drawdown of most international forces in 2014, and … the Taliban insurgency will become a greater threat to Afghanistan’s stability in the 2015—2018 timeframe than it is now.¹⁶

This is a stark assessment for a country which still has a high number of civilian deaths due to the Taliban’s insurgency. Although the experts who produced this report did not give up hope for success, they nevertheless concluded that Afghan security forces would still have “significant gaps in capability” at the time of the drawdown in 2014.¹⁷

A key problem in providing security involves the infiltration of security forces by former Taliban members. Reporter and analyst Graeme Smith notes that some members of Afghanistan’s police force “are just Taliban, who have been recruited to the government side.” If the money runs out, Smith says, “they can easily go back to the Taliban overnight.”¹⁸

Human Rights Watch has reported that Afghan police forces have had to be completely re-vetted due to numerous abuses. They have also proven unable to prevent Taliban assaults against the civilian population, contributing to widespread perception that they are incapable of providing necessary protections. The Afghan government itself has a low reputation with the people owing to its habit of allowing well-connected politicians, warlords, and businessmen to operate with impunity.¹⁹

Problems with security and public order make many Afghans nervous about the pending U.S. troop withdrawal in 2014. One survey found that a third of Afghans would leave their country if they could—with many fearful that the Taliban will simply return to power once coalition forces are gone.²⁰ Afghans aren’t the only ones who feel that way. According to an Australian expert:

There is almost universal consensus among the analysts, humanitarians, and policy-makers with whom I’ve spoken in recent weeks that security in Afghanistan is likely to deteriorate over the next two years, that there will be significant population displacement as a result.²¹

Security problems are also bound up with looming economic issues in Afghanistan. The Afghan government raises around $2 billion in annual revenues, but it is expected that adequate, sustainable security for the country will require more than $7 billion annually.²²As a whole, Afghanistan boasts a GDP of about $20 billion, and has seen economic growth in recent years as it rebuilds infrastructure. But the extent to which that growth depends on foreign aid is hard to determine, and as aid tapers off in the coming years there will inevitably be a slowdown. The World Bank estimates that 36 percent of Afghans live in poverty.²³ With numbers like this it is not hard to see why security issues and fears of the Taliban are so common.

AFGHANISTAN AND ISLAMIC FUNDAMENTALISM

Coalition forces tossed out the fundamentalist Taliban, but after 12 years of American presence in the country Afghanistan is, if anything, even more religiously conservative than it was before. A Pew poll of Muslim countries found the populations of Afghanistan and Iraq to be among the least liberalized in the world. In Afghanistan, 99 percent of the population supported the imposition of Sharia law, as compared with more secular countries like Turkey and Azerbaijan, where only 12 percent and 8 percent supported Sharia. More than 60 percent of Afghan Muslims felt Sharia should be applied even to non-Muslim members of the population. The vast majority of Afghan men reported that women should be forced to wear a veil.²⁴

Numbers like these suggest that even if the Taliban doesn’t return, whatever government the Afghans do settle on is likely to be backward and Islamist. Nevertheless, the Taliban still leads a powerful insurgency in Afghanistan. There is a real danger that after 13 years, and a heavy price in money and human life, the Taliban might pick up where they left off. How have they managed this?

THE TALIBAN: DRUGS, ABUSE, AND POWER

From captured Taliban fighters, we have learned that the primary source of funding for the organization is the drug trade. The allegedly religious group, despite a declaration from its own leader that opium was haram (religiously unclean), still enacts an Islamic tax (ushr) of 10 percent on opium farmers. Today, the Taliban earns over $200 million a year from the drug trade.²⁵

A detailed study of the Taliban’s connections with the drug trade has found that the organization has emerged as a full-fledged drug cartel in its own right. In addition to collecting their tax, the Taliban also provides seed funds to opium farmers, charges protection money, runs heroin refineries, and engages in kidnapping and smuggling schemes. Through its engagement in drug trafficking, the Taliban is no longer based solely on religious ideology—it is also increasingly driven by the desire for profit.²⁶

The one-time “holy warriors” of Afghanistan have proven themselves to be thugs no better than a South American cartel smuggling cocaine. Thanks to the profits involved, criminal activity with a superficial religious face is now pervasive in Afghanistan, and poses a serious threat both to coalition forces and to the Afghan government.²⁷ One insurgent commander characterized the whole organization in terms of its connection to the drug business, noting that the Taliban had taken over a business formerly run by a variety of independent operators and was now “running the business from top to bottom.”²⁸

The Taliban’s interests do not stop at drugs and religion; there is also a well-documented history with the sexual abuse of young boys. This practice actually predates the Taliban, but it has become significant enough among members that leadership had to address it in a set of rules issued to Taliban fighters in 2006. Along with emphasizing the need to kill teachers and destroy anything set up by foreign aid organizations, this list of rules included a command that fighters not take boys without facial hair into their private quarters. This abuse of young boys is not often heard about in Western news outlets. Although it is well known that many Arab/Muslim societies take a dim view of homosexuality—acts of sodomy can earn the death penalty in several Muslim countries—in fact homosexual practices are common, particularly in Afghanistan where sex between men and women is strictly prohibited and controlled. The abuse of boys occurs because they are not recognized as “men” yet. Amnesty International has found such abuse to be almost routine among some Afghan warlords, who film their exploits.²⁹

One particularly elaborate pattern of pedophilic abuse is so common it even has a name: bacha bazi. A journalist offers the following description:

The adolescent boys who are groomed for sexual relationships with older men are bought—or, in some instances, kidnapped—from their families and thrust into a world which strips them of their masculine identity. These boys are often made to dress as females, wear makeup, and dance for parties of men. They are expected to engage in sexual acts with much older suitors, often remaining a man’s or group’s sexual underling for a protracted period.³⁰

The practice was particularly common among the mujahideen warlords who were supported by America during the 1980s struggle with the Soviet Union. Keeping “chai boys” as servants and sexual objects was considered a symbol of power and social status. In one of many bitter ironies of Afghanistan, bacha bazi was outlawed under the Taliban only to return stronger than ever in the lawlessness after the American invasion in 2001. The practice is even deemed permissible under Islam—much more acceptable, in fact, than similar behavior would be if the victims were young women!

The Taliban reserved much of its religious fervor for the abuse and oppression of women.

Public beatings of women, even to the point of death, for such “disciplinary” reasons as wearing clothing that was too bright or laughing too loudly in the vicinity of a member of the Taliban can be daily occurrences in parts of the country under their control.³¹ The abuse of women was cited as a reason for the overthrow of the Taliban regime, and it was widely believed that such abuse stopped when they were removed from power. As reports from inside the country show, however, the fact is, “the religious fundamentalism which is the main cause of all [their] miseries” still remains.³²

One region reported a 25 percent increase in incidents of violence against women in 2013 from the previous year.³³ A high profile instance involved a girl named Halima who was shot to death in public by her own father over allegations of a sexual affair. Local Islamic religious leaders had encouraged the killing.³⁴ A key imam named Abdul Ghafoor was later arrested for his inappropriate fatwa against Halima. Other religious leaders objected that there had not been enough evidence to convict the girl, and that she had not received a proper Sharia court trial.³⁵

Another example involves a ten-year-old girl sold by her father to be the bride of a wealthy man with another wife and six children already. The girl wanted desperately to stay with her family, and even her mother and brothers pleaded with the father to let her stay. Poverty, however, forced the father’s hand, and he had the religious blessing of Islam, which permits girls even as young as ten to be given (or sold) in marriage. Only when her story was picked up by international media and assistance provided to the family was the marriage called off. In the majority of such cases, the wedding would have gone as planned.³⁶ In 2011, Human Rights Watch reported on the case of Sahar Gul, a girl who was sold into marriage when she was only 13, then locked in a basement and tortured by her in-laws after resisting their attempts to turn her into a prostitute.³⁷

Despite their connection to criminal behavior and unconscionable abuse, the Taliban remains a power to be reckoned with. Taliban insurgents in 2013 have made efforts to regain lost territory, particularly in the south (where the majority of opium growing takes place).³⁸ A number of observers have expressed deep concern. Notably, last year the outgoing French ambassador to Kabul Bernard Bajolet reported that he regarded the whole Afghan project as vulnerable. Although the West had done a good job of fighting terrorism, he observed that much of that fighting was actually being conducted in Pakistan.³⁹

The porous border with Pakistan is a notorious problem in getting the upper hand on the Taliban. Insurgent soldiers routinely strike, then disappear over the border, where they easily find support and shelter. While the Pakistani government routinely receives large checks from the U.S. government to help fight terrorism, they remain unable—or unwilling—to reduce assistance to terrorists within their own borders. As was noted in the previous chapter, Pakistan’s relationship with the Taliban goes back even before they were called the Taliban. As a creature of Pakistan’s own ISI and a former proxy for Pakistani interests, the Taliban seems to enjoy some measure of protection within Pakistan’s borders. It is worth noting again that Osama bin Laden himself found shelter there when things got too hot for him in Afghanistan.

Major General Lee Miller, the commander of NATO-led forces in Afghanistan’s southwest region, has expressed serious doubt that the U.S. will be able to drive the Taliban out and keep them out. “If we think the Taliban will be completely destroyed,” he told reporters, “that’s not feasible. They’ll continue to show up.”⁴⁰ President Hamid Karzai agrees. In fact, his government has tried to bring the Taliban into the government:

They are Afghans. Where the Afghan president, the Afghan government can appoint the Taliban to a government job they are welcome … The return of the Taliban will not undermine progress. This country needs to have peace.⁴¹

If even top military and political leaders are saying it, the possibility feared by many looks to be increasingly plausible: when coalition forces withdraw in 2016 the Taliban will simply return. The situation will be very little different from where it was in the beginning.

THE COSTS OF AFGHANISTAN

In 2013, Afghanistan became the longest conflict in American history. As of June 10, 2014, the U.S. military alone has registered at least 2,187 deaths as a direct result of the conflict in Afghanistan. This number includes those killed in combat as well as deaths resulting from improvised explosive devices (IEDs), suicide bombings, and accidents. If the number of injured is included, total casualties for Afghanistan alone are in the tens of thousands.

Numbers only tell part of the story, however. Each death and each injury represents a whole extended network of people whose lives have been changed, disrupted, or shattered by conflict. The families of Anne Smedinghoff and Pat Tillman are just two of the thousands directly impacted by Afghanistan. The full extent of the damage wrought by the conflict may not be known for years to come.

Among Afghans, the price has been even steeper. According to the government of Afghanistan, as of March 2014, 13,729 Afghan soldiers and police officers have been killed over the last thirteen years. Meanwhile, 12,336 civilians have also lost their lives in the long war.⁴² Civilian deaths have come from direct combat as well as from IEDs, assassinations, bombings, friendly fire, and encounters with unexploded ordnance. The number of wounded is difficult to assess due to incomplete records, but are likely to be well in excess of the total number killed. Further, with drone strikes and combat with insurgents often crossing borders, the number of civilians killed in Pakistan can also be attributed to the Afghanistan conflict.

Casualties are only part of the picture. Although experts disagree on precise figures, the financial cost of the war is certainly astronomical—and rising. According to one study group, the U.S. has spent as much as $100 billion per year on a country whose total GDP is only a fraction of that:

The U.S. military budget has grown from $370 billion in 2000 to $707 billion in 2011, and the current Middle East war is now the second most expensive in U.S. history, behind World War II. The [current] war is more expensive than the Vietnam and Korean wars combined. It is now the longest in U.S. history.⁴³

Another expert from Harvard paints an even grimmer picture:

The Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, taken together, will be the most expensive wars in U.S. history—totaling somewhere between $4 trillion and $6 trillion … The largest portion of that bill is yet to be paid … The legacy of decisions taken during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars will dominate future federal budgets for decades to come.⁴⁴

Given these costs, it seems we must ask ourselves what we have accomplished for the price we have paid. We drove out the Taliban, but they are still supported by our alleged ally in the “War on Terror,” Pakistan. Thanks to this support, as well as enormous benefits from the drug trade, the Taliban remain strong and are poised to make a play to control the country when we withdraw. We finally killed Osama bin Laden, but he wasn’t even in Afghanistan. Instead, he too was across the border enjoying fine Pakistani hospitality. We brought democracy to Afghanistan, but what kind of democracy is it? The citizenry is even more fundamentalist than before, measurably less liberal and free even as compared to other Islamic states in the world.

After more than 12 years in Afghanistan America needs to look at what has been accomplished there. We went in to remove the Taliban and to find Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden turned out to be in Pakistan, and the removal of the Taliban may end up being temporary. The Afghan people, who had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks, have suffered greatly. America itself has spent over three-quarters of a trillion dollars and lost more than 2,100 killed and 19,000 injured in Afghanistan alone.

Despite these heavy costs, the Afghan economy remains completely reliant on foreign aid, which made up more than 90 percent of its GDP in 2011 and 2012.⁴⁵ The illicit opium trade has made a massive comeback, setting a new record for cultivation in 2013 with more than 200,000 hectares devoted to growing opium poppy.⁴⁶ To top it off, President Karzai, the man Americans essentially helped put in power in Afghanistan, is now unwilling to sign a defense pact with America.⁴⁷

To spend so much blood and treasure in Afghanistan with so little to show for it begs the question: Did we properly identify the enemy? Do we know who or what we’re fighting against? Are we fighting a war on “terrorism,” or is it something bigger—something which has no respect for national boundaries and secular governments?

PART ONE

CHAPTER SIX

Iraq

I do not believe and have never seen any evidence to confirm that [Saddam Hussein] was involved in 9/11. We had that reporting for a while, [but] eventually it turned out not to be true.

—Vice President Dick Cheney¹

What can they discover, when we have nothing?

—Saddam Hussein²

Saddam viewed [terrorist] groups through the eyes of a pan-Arab revolutionary, while the leaders of the growing Islamist movements viewed them as potential affiliates for their Jihad. In other words, two movements, one pan-Arab the other pan-Islamic, were seeking and developing supporters from the same demographic pool.

—Kevin Woods, Saddam and Terrorism³

Al-Qaeda’s transnational suicide terrorists have come overwhelmingly from America’s closest allies in the Muslim world and not at all from the Muslim regimes that the U.S. State Department considers “state sponsors of terrorism.”

—Robert Pape⁴

A white Kia sedan slowly approached busy Nisour Square in downtown Baghdad. Mohassin Ahmed, a physician, was in the car; with her was her adult son. The Ahmeds were running an errand for the family. As they approached the square, a policeman blew his whistle to stop traffic for a convoy of Blackwater security guards who were securing the square for approaching U.S. State Department vehicles.

The Blackwater guards were nervous. Earlier the same day an explosion had gone off near a construction site not far from Nisour Square. Although some of the guards later claimed otherwise, the evidence suggests that when they saw the Ahmeds’ sedan approaching, they were the first to open fire, killing first the young driver and then his mother as she cradled her dead son. When the people in the square began to panic, the guards tossed smoke bombs to maintain crowd control. A confusing, eight-minute firefight took place, the exact details of which have still not been pinned down. In the course of the fight, however, some members of the Blackwater team continued to fire at civilians fleeing the scene—contributing to the high casualty count.⁵

When the firing stopped, 17 civilians were dead, including the Ahmeds, whose vehicle was reduced to a charred, shredded lump. At least 20 others were injured. Although Blackwater claimed self-defense, neither the Iraqis nor U.S. investigators agreed. The F.B.I. suggested three of the killings may have had plausible justification, but 14 were unwarranted. A military review of the incident called the F.B.I. assessment “generous,” finding none of the killings to be justified.⁶ Three Blackwater guards later testified that their fellow mercenaries opened fire on civilians who posed “no threat” to them.⁷

Fallout from the incident continues to this day. Blackwater is no longer welcome in Iraq. The State Department has canceled its contract with the company for its services in the country. Relations between the United States and the country we supposedly liberated and the people we set free have been strained. For some Iraqis, the incident was the culmination of experiences that have been mounting for years. As one put it:

We see the security firms … doing whatever they want in the streets. They beat citizens and scorn them … If such a thing happened in America or Britain, would the American president or the American citizens accept it?⁸

Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki demanded compensation for the victims. Legal action is still pending against a handful of guards for their role in the incident. And all this is to say nothing of the victims themselves or their families.

Whether you believe the guards acted reasonably to protect themselves or you believe they acted with reckless disregard for human life, there is no disputing that the incident is a tragic mess. In this one ten minute sequence of confusion, violence, and death you can see the fundamental problems with what we have done in Iraq. These things have come to pass because in 2003 the United States decided we had to get rid of Saddam Hussein. The Nisour Square incident—and countless others that have taken place since the Iraq war was launched—begs us to ask the question: Was getting rid of this one man worth it?

When the invasion of Iraq was launched under the name “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” then-President George W. Bush cited three goals for the mission: “to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, to end Saddam Hussein’s support for terrorism, and to free the Iraqi people.”⁹ Each of these goals, as we shall see, was based on a mistake.

SADDAM’S WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION

Leading up to the Iraq invasion, American officials often repeated the claim that Saddam Hussein had used weapons of mass destruction before, including against his own people. What was rarely mentioned at the time was that we had helped him restock his chemical weapons arsenal during the Iran-Iraq War. A 1983 visit to Saddam by then-pharmaceutical executive Donald Rumsfeld resulted in biological agents being shipped to Iraq with the blessing of the U.S. government.¹⁰ We even provided Saddam with battlefield intelligence to assist in his use of weapons of mass destruction. But it appeared to be justified at the time, because he was using them against Iran.¹¹ And when Saddam unleashed poison gas on Iraqi Kurds in 1988, while the U.S. Senate unanimously passed a bill that would have imposed sanctions, the bill was not supported by either President Reagan or the House. Iraq was a useful ally.¹²

Iraq remained a useful ally until the first Gulf War in 1990 – 1991. Saddam Hussein’s regime at this time was deeply in debt to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, who had both loaned him money to fight his war against Iran. Given that Hussein’s war on Iran had partially benefitted Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, who were keen to control or destroy the Shiite regime in control of that country, he asked them to forgive his war debts. Both refused. Evidence of Kuwait using slant drilling techniques to siphon oil from Iraq provided further motivation. Hussein also invoked the history of the Ottoman Empire, when both Kuwait and Iraq were part of that same nation. In short, Hussein had ample motivation for his attack.

Thanks in part to falsified stories of Iraqi atrocities, Kuwait persuaded the United States to intervene on its behalf.¹³ The first Gulf War resulted in defeat and containment for Hussein’s regime. UN sanctions damaged Iraq’s economy and its ability to fund WMD. American air power prevented Iraq’s military from mounting any further credible threats in the region.

By the time of the 2003 Iraq invasion, Saddam Hussein’s regime had been laboring under UN sanctions for well over a decade. Although Hussein tried to maintain the illusion that he still retained chemical and biological weapons, some estimates prior to the invasion suggested as much as 90-95 percent of his capability had been destroyed.¹⁴ After the invasion, the Iraq Survey Group found no evidence of WMD stocks in the country.¹⁵ Whatever Saddam may have intended to do once UN sanctions were lifted, when the United States invaded in 2003 there simply were no WMD in the country to be found.¹⁶

Even if Iraq had WMD, there is no evidence that this would have posed a threat to the United States. Most evaluations of his regime have found that they viewed Iran as their most significant enemy. The most frequent target of Iraq’s known chemical weapons attacks had been the Iranians, and Saddam Hussein is known to have considered WMD a crucial component in Iraq’s ability to defend against encroachment from Iran—or aggression from the United States.¹⁷

One of the key goals behind the U.S. invasion turned out to be a wild goose chase. There were no WMD. There were not likely to be WMD in Iraq anytime soon. And even then the most likely target of any WMD (assuming they would be used offensively) was not going to be the United States.

SADDAM AND ISLAMIC TERRORISM

The second goal of Operation Iraqi Freedom was to end Saddam Hussein’s support for terrorism. This goal represents a mistake on two fronts. First, the Iraqi dictator was not connected with the 9/11 attacks or al-Qaeda. Second, his regime’s connections to terrorism were aimed at promoting Iraqi and Arab nationalist interests—not the interests of Osama bin Laden or literal Islam.

No connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda or the 9/11 attacks was ever proven. As former CIA Director George Tenet admitted, “We could never verify that there was any Iraqi authority, direction and control, complicity with al-Qaeda for 9/11 or any operational act against America.”¹⁸ Far from supporting Hussein or his regime, bin Laden sponsored anti-Saddam Islamists in Iraq. When he turned around in the late 1990s and made tentative inquiries about possibly setting up shop there, the Iraqis offered no known response.¹⁹ A Pentagon study compared Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and bin Laden’s al-Qaeda to competing drug cartels. While mutual interests may have led them to cooperate indirectly from time to time, in the end each group was both aligned with and threatened by the other. Hussein wanted to rule the Arab world; al-Qaeda viewed him as a typical apostate—a barrier to the reestablishment of a unified Islamic caliphate.²⁰

On the other hand, Saddam Hussein certainly had many connections with various terrorist organizations, including fundamentalist Islamic groups of various stripes. But what investigators found about these connections was that Hussein’s interest was solely in using them for the greater glory of himself rather than Islam.²¹ Iraqi cooperation with terrorist groups was typically cautious and directed toward the secular interests of Saddam’s regime. Thus, if the situation called for it they would actively develop relationships with Islamists they liked in one place while arresting or wiping out similar groups whom they saw as threatening in another.

Saddam Hussein used terrorist groups as a political weapon. Did he intend to use those groups against the United States? A careful study of the most top secret documents in his government archives could not answer this question conclusively. At most, we can say he was ready to use them defensively—as he showed in a 1990 statement to his lieutenants: “If America interferes, we will strike.”²² The connections Hussein had with terrorist organizations were opportunistic. Unlike bin Laden’s, these connections had nothing to do with the interests of political or literal Islam.

SADDAM’S SECULAR RULE

The only goal left to consider is the freedom of the Iraqi people. This issue is much more complicated and requires consideration of several issues, beginning with what sort of government the Iraqis had before Operation Iraqi Freedom. Many Americans were surprised to find that not all Iraqis were equally keen on the removal of Saddam Hussein. But their response is understandable if you look closely at the context of Iraq.

During his reign, Saddam Hussein pursued a secular political agenda in Iraq. The Ba’ath party he represented, which was the only game in town while he was in power, is a secular Arabic-socialist group, founded on ideas developed by a Christian Arab named Michel Aflaq.²³ Saddam Hussein abolished Sharia courts and responded to Islamist movements as a personal threat, having the leaders of such movements tortured or executed. The religious division in Iraq, which is majority Shi’ite, meant a Sunni like Saddam Hussein would never be accepted as a religious leader.

America’s invasion of Iraq destroyed secularism in the country and opened the door to religious fundamentalists such as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Today, the former secular socialists of the Ba’ath party have joined ISIS. Other secular Sunnis have done likewise or else fled the country. Sexual slavery and Sharia Law are now the order of the day across a broad range of Iraq’s territory. Reporter Mark Thompson is one of a number of people who blame the US “decision to disband the Iraqi army shortly after the 2003 invasion” for the military success of ISIS, saying that the disbanding eventually provided the group with some of its “best commanders and fighters.”²⁴

In fact, ISIS territory now embraces not only a large part of Iraq but as much as half of Syria. Across the border in Syria, American support for forces opposed to Bashar Assad has likewise opened the door to Sunni fundamentalists. After ISIS seized the historic city of Palmyra in May 2015 it is believed to be in control of about half the country.²⁵ That city’s ancient Roman ruins will likely be destroyed, and Assad’s regime is in jeopardy. If he falls too, secularism in Syria will die just as it did in Iraq.

Saddam was a ruthless dictator to his own people, but he kept the country relatively stable despite its deep religious divisions. When the Islamic Revolution seized power in Iran, the balance of power in the region was toppled along with the Shah. Saddam was fearful that the spread of Islamic ideas would incite the Shi’ite majority of his country against him. In fact, Ayatollah Khomeini (the leader of Iran’s Islamic Revolution) had tried to do exactly that when he was living in exile in Iraq.²⁶ It wasn’t long after Khomeini rose to power before Iran and Iraq were skirmishing along their border—skirmishes which soon blossomed into outright war.

With the Shah gone, America turned to Saddam as a bolster to its interests in the region.²⁷ He was even more autocratic and harsh than the Shah, but he also had control of one of the largest oil reserves on earth outside of Saudi Arabia. And he was not at all interested in an Islamist revolution. By being the lesser of two evils as compared with Iran, Saddam earned himself over a decade of American support. The reasons for attacking him and then removing him from power were trumped up—more importantly, his removal has paved the way for the rise to power of Sunni fundamentalism in Iraq and the surrounding area. This rise represents a far greater threat to America’s interests than Saddam Hussein ever dreamed of.

In a sense, the United States helped to create the suffering of the Iraqis which the second Gulf War was meant to liberate them from. The UN-imposed sanctions and US military flybys put in place after the first Gulf War were successful. Iraq’s economy was devastated, and Hussein was forced into ever-more despotic acts to maintain his hold on power. Some members of the second Bush administration believed Iraqis would greet American troops as liberators; they didn’t realize that some Iraqis blamed America for their suffering in the first place!

SELLING GULF WAR TWO AND OPERATION IRAQI FREEDOM

If the stated goals of the Operation Iraqi Freedom were based on mistakes, where did those mistakes come from? A quick look at how the war was sold both to the American people and to reluctant members of the U.S. government will illustrate the problems. One element was a struggle within the Federal government over both intelligence and the conclusions drawn from it. Typically, such information is analyzed and placed in context by experienced members of the intelligence community, mainly the CIA. But thanks to the efforts of the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans, members of the Bush administration were presented with intelligence and analysis that sometimes ran counter to that of the CIA (or which were overturned by data found in investigations later).²⁸

Government advisors and the media alike were also taken in by data gathered from unreliable sources. Perhaps the most famous example of this was journalist Judith Miller at the New York Times, who relied on reports from Ahmed Chalabi for detailed coverage of Iraq’s alleged WMD program. Journalist James Moore later found a CIA analyst who described the circular manner in which Miller was manipulated:

The White House had a perfect deal with Miller … Chalabi is providing the Bush people with the information they need to support their political objectives, and he is supplying the same material to Judy Miller. Chalabi tips her on something and then she goes to the White House, which has already heard the same thing from Chalabi, and she gets it corroborated.²⁹

Miller thought she was getting two sources for her tips, when she was really only getting the same information repeated. As Moore points out, since the information from Chalabi was bunk, both Miller and the White House were deceived.³⁰

Perhaps the most significant source of error, however, came from government officials seeking to justify what they had already decided. As the old saying goes, no man is more thoroughly deceived than one who deceives himself. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, officials such as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his Deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, seized readily on the idea of expanding the target beyond our immediate attackers. “Why shouldn’t we go against Iraq, not just al-Qaeda?” Rumsfeld reportedly asked. Soon, he and Wolfowitz did much more than just ask.³¹ For some, Wolfowitz in particular became the poster boy for the desire to root out regimes hostile to America, regardless of whether they posed a credible threat to us or not.³²

Consideration of Iraq’s threat to Israel also played a role in selling the war within the government and to the public at large. Saddam’s rhetoric against Israel is sometimes brought to bear here, but using this as evidence of a credible threat is somewhat absurd. All Arab leaders engage regularly in anti-Israel rhetoric—almost as commonly as American politicians say “God bless America.” They do it cynically because it is a point on which they can assume broad agreement among the people without any particular actions being taken. He posed little military threat: during the first Persian Gulf War, his forces had lobbed SCUD missiles at Israel to little effect, and in the years since their capabilities had not increased.

THE FAILURE OF U.S. FOREIGN POLICY IN GULF WAR TWO

This war is best understood as an armed conflict with two phases. The first phase was the invasion of Ba’athist Iraq under Saddam Hussein and the removal of the existing government. This phase occurred relatively quickly, with the regime collapsing inside of two months. The second phase was a long period of fighting between the U.S. and its allies on one side and an insurgency within the Iraqi population (but soon including elements from outside the country) on the other. Although the second phase officially ended with the withdrawal of American military personnel in December 2011, the insurgency continues to this day.³³

The Iraqi insurgency is one of the most immediate and devastating consequences of the invasion. It began as native forces loyal to Saddam and the Ba’ath party sought to make things difficult for the American military. In less than a year, the native insurgents were already giving way to foreign fighters—many of them affiliated with al-Qaeda. They were also joined by sectarian uprisings, such as the Mahdi Army, among Iraq’s Shi’ite majority. In the years since American forces left in 2011 sectarian violence has continued, with many thousands dead. A high-profile jailbreak in July 2013 saw 500 prisoners—including some seasoned al-Qaeda operatives—sprung loose by a suicide bombing.³⁴ More recently, the emergence of the terrorist state known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria has posed an even bigger threat to the Iraqi government.

Col. Ted Spain, who commanded the Army’s 18th Military Police Brigade during the ground war and the first year of occupation, blames the success of the insurgency in part on planning mistakes. Spain identifies a woeful lack of attention to law and order issues—including adequate numbers of military police, a coherent policing system, a process for collecting information and intelligence, and poor leadership—as critical mistakes in the handling of post-war Iraq. He also indicates a problem, which remains endemic to American foreign policy, with clear definitions: “The categories of the thousands of detainees were never clear, causing confusion as to their proper legal treatment. Were they enemy, terrorist, or criminal? What’s the difference?”³⁵ As we have seen before, and will see again in this book, proper definitions of such terms are absolutely critical.

Another painful legacy of the invasion is corruption and waste. The U.S. spent $60 billion solely on rebuilding Iraqi infrastructure—much of it flown in on cargo planes in piles of 50s like Columbian drug money. That money, together with $146 billion in Iraqi currency, was spent with comparatively little to show for it. Money mismanagement in Iraq produced what one U.S. official has called “the largest theft of funds in national history.”³⁶ An internal audit in 2012 found that at least $6 to $8 billion of the U.S. funds spent were lost to fraud and waste.³⁷ With such large amounts of money floating around, it should come as no surprise that the flood of cash encouraged widespread political corruption. An Iraqi bank auditor called the situation a “triangle of political patronage” involving sectarian groups, government officials, and political parties all aimed at siphoning money for their own personal gain.³⁸ About 25 percent of Iraq’s population of 31 million is living in poverty—much more than under Saddam Hussein.³⁹

Even well-intentioned projects have resulted in considerable waste. Take a 2004 prison construction project in Diyala province for example. U.S. contractors were forced to abandon the building site when violent sectarian clashes made further construction dangerous. Nine years later, the half-completed structure sits amid a pile of rubble. Iraqi officials say they have no plans to complete the facility or put it to use. Cost to the American taxpayer? $40 million.⁴⁰

Some of the consequences of Operation Iraqi Freedom are still being assessed. Most observers agree the balance of powers in the region has been overturned by the invasion and its aftermath. Within Iraq, ethnic minorities like the Kurds and religious minorities such as Sunni Muslims and Arab Christians are experiencing pressures not fully felt for centuries. Under the control of the Ottoman Empire and later the British, Iraqi society for the most part lived in harmony. Tensions were not erased under Saddam, who reacted brutally to a Kurdish independence movement. But in the wake of the invasion, sectarian clashes have reached deadly levels hardly seen since before the days of Ottoman rule. Iraqi Christians in particular have suffered, with more than half of an estimated population of 1.4 million fleeing the country.⁴¹ A community in place since the first century AD is being forced to leave!

As the Singapore statesman Lee Kuan Yew has observed, regime change in Iraq means the Shi’ites have come to power. This is to the advantage of the fundamentalist religious regime in Iran, which professes the same sect. Without the secular Saddam on their doorstep, the Iranians have been bolder in extending their influence westward. It remains to be seen how the “150 million or so Shiites living in Sunni countries elsewhere in the region” will react.⁴² At the very least, a former secular check on Iran has been removed. Iran regularly sends militia fighters through the Iraqi countryside into Syria and Lebanon. As another observer put it, “we spent a trillion dollars and countless American lives to give Iran strategic advantage in the region.”⁴³

One of the express aims of the invasion was to establish democracy in Iraq. On paper, they have one. The Democracy Index, an evaluation of governments across the globe, classifies Iraq’s government (in 2012) as somewhere between a “flawed democracy” and an authoritarian regime and ranks it 119th out of 165 countries.⁴⁴ Most outside observers regard the ongoing sectarian violence in the country as a significant barrier to democratic progress. Transparency International takes a dim look at the corruption of the current Iraqi regime, scoring it at 16 on a scale of 0 to 100, ranking it as one of the ten most corrupt nations or territories in the world.⁴⁵ Finally, a quick look at the new Iraqi constitution confirms that the first thing we seem to have established in the country is Islam: “Islam is the official religion of the State and it is a fundamental source of legislation: No law that contradicts the established provisions of Islam may be established.”⁴⁶ As the former prime minister of the regional government in Kurdistan admitted in 2013, “We hoped for an inclusive democracy that is at peace with itself and at peace with its neighbors. To be blunt, we are far from that.”⁴⁷

Despite the preceding, it would be ridiculously one-sided to assert that Operation Iraqi Freedom accomplished nothing. Saddam Hussein was removed from power and later executed. He was a brutal dictator who willingly used terrorism and WMD to further his state interests. With regard to the Kurds, his approach was genocidal, with tens of thousands or more killed. The majority of Iraqis seem to believe they’re better off without Saddam, and most likely their judgment is correct. But for Americans, the question we must ask ourselves is whether it was worth it for us. Was the removal of Saddam worth the price we paid in blood and treasure?

THE COSTS

The “Costs of War” project at Brown University represents what could be the most detailed, comprehensive effort to assess the costs of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in terms of money and human life. As of May 2015, the project estimates that price at over 350,000 killed by violence and $4.4 trillion dollars spent or obligated to be spent.⁴⁸ American casualties at this time included over 6,800 U.S. service members killed as well as just over 6,700 civilian contractors. The number of American troops wounded in action comes to more than 32,000. According to the Costs of War project, “the US VA system alone has already approved 675,000 disability claims from veterans of the two wars.”⁴⁹ Among the Iraqis, there have been “more than 133,000 individually recorded civilian deaths since the 2003 invasion of Iraq due to direct war related violence.”⁵⁰

Financial costs are more difficult to tally. In addition to direct expenses for fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, battling insurgencies, and maintaining a troop presence for over a decade, there are long-term expenses such as interest payments on loans, increased spending by Homeland Security, and Veteran’s care and disability costs. The total amount (as of fiscal year 2014) estimated by Costs of War is likely to increase beyond $4.4 trillion because later obligations may increase as interest rates go up and military veterans age.⁵¹ Furthermore, the Costs of War estimate includes only federal spending—state and local expenses for veteran care could push the total over five trillion. There is also an opportunity cost, as each dollar spent on the war must be paid back later with interest from tax revenues; in other words, each dollar spent is more than a dollar removed later from the productive economy.

It is much more difficult to determine costs such as America’s loss of political capital abroad. But as the negative response to possible military strikes in Syria in 2013 showed, the world is no longer willing to take our word for it when we talk about the use of WMD. Before the Iraq invasion, Saddam may have posed a threat, but the Iraqi people were largely indifferent toward America. Now, even many who may be grateful to us for the removal of Saddam are at best ambivalent because of the long legacy of suffering and violence that came in the wake of Saddam’s removal.

Saddam Hussein was undoubtedly a tyrant, but he was a secular tyrant. His atrocities against the Kurdish people were the acts of an authoritarian nationalist against Kurdish political separatism. Under Hussein, large populations of Christians, Sunnis, and Shias lived together in relative peace. Al-Qaeda had no real home in Iraq, because they regarded Hussein as a pan-Arab secularist with no interest in global Islamic revolution. Iraq and its people were not involved in 9/11.

Removing Saddam Hussein has been a disaster. Among veterans, only 44 percent now say it was worth it.⁵² More than 6,800 soldiers killed, over 52,000 wounded in action, and $4.4 trillion spent—and what have we accomplished? The matter has become so clear cut that leading candidates for the presidency in 2016 have come out publicly to denounce the Iraq invasion. Hillary Clinton now says “I’ve made it very clear that I made a mistake, plain and simple,” when as a U.S. Senator she voted to authorize the Iraq invasion in 2002.⁵³ Jeb Bush has publicly admitted, “Knowing what we know now, I would not have engaged” in Iraq—a direct repudiation of his brother’s policy (former President George W. Bush has said he has no regrets about invading Iraq).⁵⁴ The most telling repudiation, however, comes from Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, who describes the problem quite wisely and succinctly: “It was a mistake to topple Hussein … Each time we topple a secular dictator, I think we wind up with chaos and radical Islam seems to rise.”⁵⁵

PART TWO

PART TWO

CHAPTER SEVEN

Saudi Arabia:
De Facto Superpower

If the Saudis’ efforts had been limited to pushing fundamentalism abroad their work would have been cause for controversy. But some Saudi charities played a far more troubling role. U.S. officials now say that key charities became the pipelines of cash that helped transform ragtag bands of insurgents and jihadists into a sophisticated, interlocking movement with global ambitions.

—David Kaplan, U.S. News and World Report¹

Italian wiretaps monitoring members of a European al-Qaeda cell overheard a senior operative reassuring his subordinate about funding: “Don’t ever worry about money, because Saudi Arabia’s money is your money.”

—Matthew Levitt, The Washington Institute²

American efforts to combat this [al-Qaeda] contagion are hamstrung by the fact that its ideological and financial epicenter is Saudi Arabia, where an ostensibly pro-Western royal family governs through a centuries-old alliance with the fanatical Wahhabi Islamic sect.

—Ambassador Curtin Winsor³

In 1999, Saudi Prince Nayef al-Shaalan used his diplomatic immunity as cover to smuggle two tons of Columbian cocaine into France. Prince Nayef used a family jet to transport the drug, then transferred it into ambassadorial vehicles to bypass customs agents. But a U.S. DEA tip led to the French police raiding the safe house where the Saudis had stored the illegal shipment, and Miami police indicted the prince.

As soon as the Saudis found out about the incident, “They threatened to pull the plug on a contract … worth a colossal 7 billion euros that had been under negotiation between the Saudis and France for a decade.”⁴ The French investigation began to drag, leaving Prince Nayef free to operate. When the prince was finally convicted and sentenced to ten years in prison in 2007, he was safe and secure in Saudi Arabia. Since Saudi Arabia has no extradition treaty with France, it’s unlikely he will ever see the inside of a cell.

In 2005, an Indonesian woman appeared at a hospital in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia in critical condition. The woman, who had been working as a maid, was bleeding from one eye and had deep marks on her ankles and wrists as well as several broken teeth. As she was being taken to surgery, doctors found evidence of gangrene in her extremities and were forced to amputate fingers on both hands and parts of both feet to save her life.

An investigation revealed that her Saudi employer had been keeping her tied up in a bathroom for a month as punishment for failing to clean his house completely. There was physical evidence that the employer beat her regularly as well. The woman claimed she was forbidden to speak to police or embassy officials on pain of further abuse. According to the Indonesian Embassy, her case is not unique. Among the more than 2,000 housemaids who had already been repatriated to Indonesia that year, many claimed maltreatment, nonpayment of wages, and physical abuse from their Saudi employers.⁵ Mistreatment of foreign workers, even from other Muslim countries, is so common that Human Rights Watch and other observers have lobbied the Saudi government to do something to strengthen legal protections for its large population of foreign workers.

In 2004, a series of sites for foreign workers in Khobar, Saudi Arabia were attacked by terrorists. At the Al-Khobar Petroleum Center, another oil-industry office complex, and the Oasis Resort, the terrorists went on a rampage, asking foreign workers if they were Muslims, Christians, or Jews—then killing non-Muslims. A British oil executive killed by the jihadists was tied to the back of a vehicle and dragged through the street.

The assault lasted 25 hours. When it was over, 22 people had been killed and 25 others injured. But the Saudi Special Forces who brought the assault to an end somehow managed to let three of the murderers escape, baffling many observers. The dead included an American, a Swede, an Italian, Filipinos, Indians, and—despite the jihadists’ relish at slaughtering non-Muslims—four Muslims as well.⁶

Prince Saud bin Abdulaziz Bin Nasir of Saudi Arabia was convicted in 2010 for killing his Sudanese manservant during an alcohol-fueled Valentine’s Day attack in a London hotel. Marks on the victim showed he had been bitten, beaten, and strangled. At trial, Prince Saud was accused of subjecting the victim to violence and sexual abuse for a period long before the day of the murder. He was also found guilty of trying to cover up his actions, not realizing his attack had been caught on one of the hotel’s security cameras. Although Prince Saud denied he was homosexual—a crime which carries the death penalty in his native Saudi Arabia—prosecutors presented evidence that he had employed gay escorts in London and had made frequent web searches for gay massage parlors and escort agencies.⁷

In 2013, Prince Saud was transferred back home. Despite receiving a life sentence for his vicious crime, British authorities confirmed his transfer to a prison in Saudi Arabia after only three years in accordance with a Saudi-British agreement that facilitates such prisoner repatriations. It remains to be seen whether Saudi Arabian authorities will respect the sentence or look the other way for a member of the royal family. There is certainly no reason the prince could not end up free to find another foreign sex slave to abuse as much as he pleases.

Perhaps the best representative of the ups and downs of the Saudi-U.S. relationship is the man who was the Saudi ambassador for Washington for over 20 years, Prince Bandar bin Sultan. There is no ambassador, certainly no Arab ambassador, who has had comparable influence in our capital. Bandar was popular for his personal energy and Western tastes—including a love of tailored suits, big cigars, and the Dallas Cowboys. At the same time, it was treacherous to rely on him, since no one could ever be sure whose interests he had in mind: the Saudis’, the Americans’, or his own.⁸

Bandar’s relationship with Washington, like the Saudi-U.S. relationship, was at its peak during the Reagan years, when the Americans and Saudis worked together to support the Afghan mujahideen against the Soviets. This lasted through the early 90s, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and put the Saudis in mortal fear that they could be next. The relationship soured during the Clinton years when the Americans showed little interest in the Palestinians during the second intifada. Then, in 2001, everything changed:

The prince watched the World Trade Centre being attacked. Much of his life’s work (and Saudi-American relations) went up in smoke when it emerged that most of the terrorists who struck the Twin Towers came from Saudi Arabia.⁹

Unable to defend the kingdom from its detractors, Bandar lost his taste for diplomacy and eventually left to become Saudi Arabia’s new national security advisor in 2005. The old fun-loving, Western-style, larger-than-life Bandar was gone.

The 9/11 attacks have compelled a reevaluation of the Saudi-U.S. relationship. A proper assessment of that relationship must take into account several things which are still misunderstood or realized by only a few. First, Saudi Arabia is a superpower, with money, power, and political influence that only superpowers command. Second, it abuses its position for its own advantage and treats the other peoples of the world—including other Muslim nations—with hatred or disdain. Third, it is an Islamist superpower, the world center of an Islamic supremacist ideology that seeks to destroy America and the West. And fourth, it knowingly exports this ideology, and all the terror and death that come with it, with hardly a peep of protest from the world community. Far from being a key American ally in the War on Terror, Saudi Arabia is in fact America’s most dangerous and deadly enemy—more deadly than Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union ever were.

SAUDI ARABIA AS SUPERPOWER

Saudi Arabia’s rise to prominence as a superpower began in 1932, when King Abdulaziz (also known as Ibn Saud), combined the Kingdom of Nejd and the Sultanate of Hejaz into the modern Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, ruled by himself.¹⁰ The country itself was worth very little at the time, consisting primarily of arid desert and rocky terrain unsuitable for cultivation. For most of its history, Saudi Arabia was the home of tribal nomadic communities who made their living by trading or robbing trade caravans. So, when King Abdulaziz took charge, the country had very little in terms of capital or economic infrastructure. He did what any good Arab leader would do in a weak position: he asked the British and Americans for help.¹¹

A year later, an American company set off down a path that would eventually enrich Saudi Arabia in a way it had never seen. In 1933, King Abdulaziz granted Standard Oil of California exploration rights in his country. Lacking the means or the technology to probe for oil themselves, the Saudis let the Americans do the dirty work. Standard Oil hit paydirt, but before the infrastructure was in place to access the oil, World War II had broken out.

The Americans knew Saudi Arabian oil would be critical for the future. President Roosevelt in 1943 called the defense of Saudi Arabia crucial for America’s defense. That same year, he tried to nationalize Standard Oil’s Saudi Arabian subsidiary by purchasing a controlling interest through a government-owned corporation.¹² When this unprecedented effort failed, the administration turned to diplomacy. President Roosevelt’s first stop after discussing the future of Europe at the Yalta Conference was a meeting with King Abdulaziz aboard the U.S.S. Quincy.

The diplomatic approach begun by Roosevelt was followed in turn by every U.S. president from Truman to Ford. The Saudis were viewed as a frontline ally against the spread of communism during the Cold War. Accordingly, the U.S. signed a mutual-defense agreement with the kingdom in 1951 and encouraged American companies to develop the infrastructure and technology that would allow the Saudis to access their enormous oil reserves. The Saudis gradually took control of the successor to the Standard Oil subsidiary, culminating in the establishment of the state-owned Saudi Arabian Oil company by royal decree in 1988.¹³

In the 1970s, domestic oil production in America passed its peak and Saudi Arabia emerged as the largest producer of oil in the world. Billions of petrodollars flowed into the country’s coffers from the oil-hungry Western nations. Since the oil industry is owned by the Saudi Arabian government and its royal family, this has made members of the house of Saud very wealthy. With a population of just over 20 million citizens, there is more than enough money for many to avoid doing an honest day’s work. Instead, Saudi Arabia imports somewhere between 5.5 and 8.8 million expatriates to clean its homes, cook its food, and run its oil industry. Foreign workers—mostly from developing nations like India, Pakistan, and the Philippines—make up a significant portion of the Saudi workforce.¹⁴

As of 2012, Saudi Arabia enjoyed a respectable GDP of $740.5 billion. The majority of that value comes from oil and gas related industries.¹⁵ The West needs oil to fuel the modern world, so vast amounts of western money go right into Saudi Arabia’s coffers—thereby fueling one of the most backwards and anti-modern regimes on earth. Oil wealth is the cornerstone of Saudi Arabia’s power, and one of the keys to its status as a de facto superpower.

The other key lies in its religious prominence. As the birthplace of the prophet Muhammad, Saudi Arabia enjoys significant prominence among Muslims. On top of that, it also controls access to two of the most important cities in Islam: Mecca and Medina. Medina is the original stronghold of Islam, Muhammad’s power base in the early years. It also contains his burial site. Mecca is the site of the famous hajj (or pilgrimage all Muslims are required to take) and receives millions of visitors each year. The Saudi government even decides which Islamic groups are legitimately Muslim enough to be permitted entry.

Because of its religious prominence, Saudi Arabia has 1.5 billion Muslims willing to die in its defense. Any number of them would sacrifice their money, their families, and their own lives simply for religious belief. Saudi Arabia does nothing itself to earn this devotion. Nevertheless, it has armies at its disposal with more men than the Soviet Empire ever had. This unprecedented religious prominence makes Saudi Arabia a superpower to be feared.

HUMAN RIGHTS ABUSES IN THE KINGDOM

Kuwaiti officials came to Saudi Arabia in early 2013 to discuss affairs with the top Islamic authority in the country. The officials wanted to question the Saudi Grand Mufti about the small, mostly informal Christian churches which they permitted in their country for foreign workers who wished to worship in private. Like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait requires all of its citizens to adhere to Islam. But Kuwait also hosts a large number of foreign workers, for whom it makes small, grudging accommodations. The Saudi Grand Mufti was blunt: “There should be no Christian churches on the Arabian Peninsula.” He later went even further, declaring that it was “necessary to destroy all the churches of the region.”¹⁶

It isn’t enough for Saudis to prevent their enormous foreign worker population from building churches or engaging in any form of public worship of their own religion. They also want to export this radical intolerance throughout the region. There are Christian churches throughout the Arabian Peninsula today—in Kuwait, Oman, Yemen, Bahrain, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. If the Grand Mufti’s authority were to be accepted, they would all be torn down.

This is what Saudi Arabia does with its money and prominence. The country is run by a theocratic monarchy with unmatched hostility and intolerance toward all other religions. All citizens are required to be Muslims and are routinely policed for their adherence to Islamic custom as determined by the ruling religious elite. A Muslim who dares to convert to another religion faces the death penalty. Non-Muslims are forbidden to build churches or similar buildings for worship, and any public displays connected to another faith (simply wearing a cross, for example) are illegal. They are also forbidden to proselytize, and could face expulsion, imprisonment, or even death for attempting to do so. Officials regularly confiscate and burn the holy books of other religions—a bald hypocrisy given the loud complaints raised by Muslims over alleged Qur’an burnings in the West. As one observer at the Saudi Institute wrote:

My Christian and other non-Muslim brothers and sisters in Saudi Arabia—where I come from—are not even allowed to own a copy of their holy books. Indeed, the Saudi government desecrates and burns Bibles that its security forces confiscate at immigration points into the kingdom or during raids on Christian expatriates worshipping privately.¹⁷

Even owning a copy of the Bible in Saudi Arabia can lead to arrest, deportation, or even the death penalty for citizens.¹⁸

The annual global report on human rights published by the U.S. State Department details the detention and deportation of Christian worshippers every year in Saudi Arabia. Thousands of Christians living and working in the kingdom do not dare to celebrate Easter, Christmas, or even Thanksgiving. This abuse extends even outside Saudi Arabia’s borders, as Saudi embassies have been known to distribute Muslim books labeling Jews, Christians, and members of other religions as monkeys and pigs.¹⁹ So while Muslims are permitted free practice of their religion in the West—even to the point of being allowed to pronounce hateful doctrines against members of other faiths—the very opposite treatment is afforded to non-Muslims in Muslim countries. And Muslims have the audacity to claim victimhood.

Saudi Arabia also uses its money to engage in labor practices that could be characterized as modern slavery. Slavery was legal in the country until the early 1960s, when it was abolished by royal decree under pressure from President Kennedy.²⁰ Nevertheless, Saudi Arabia is still a “destination country for men and women trafficked for the purposes of involuntary servitude.”²¹ Millions of laborers from countries such as India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, the Philippines, Indonesia, and the Sudan come to work in Saudi Arabia as servants or low-skilled laborers. Legal protections for these workers are scant. Many face harsh working conditions, severe restrictions on movement (including being confined to one building for their entire stay), physical abuse, and withheld wages. In 2011, one Saudi company was found to be six months delinquent in paying salaries to its foreign employees.²² Complaints from foreign workers became so common that year, that Kenya, Nepal, and the Philippines began to restrict their citizens from traveling to the kingdom for work. The Philippines only eased restrictions after the Saudis finally agreed to a minimum wage of $400 a month (remember, this is a country with a GNP of hundreds of billions of dollars).²³

Foreign laborers are typically treated by Saudis as inferiors. Migrant workers from Asian and African countries in particular have complained to Human Rights Watch that racial discrimination is rampant in the kingdom, and that the legacy of slavery “continues to influence the perception and treatment of migrant workers.”²⁴ Some of this discrimination is codified in law, which forbids Saudi women to marry non-Muslims, although Saudi men can marry whomever they like.

Attitudes toward slavery and foreigners are strongly influenced by Saudi Arabia’s religious elite. According to Sheikh Saleh Al-Fazwan, a leading cleric in the Saudi government, “Slavery is part of Islam.” Al-Fazwan is a man of wide-ranging influence: he is the author of Saudi Arabia’s religious textbooks, used to teach five million Saudi students at home and around the world. He is also a member of the Senior Council of Clerics, the highest religious body in Saudi Arabia. In Al-Fazwan’s best known textbook (a Wahhabi work on monotheism), he claims most so-called Muslims are actually polytheists and therefore their blood and money are “free for the taking by ‘true Muslims.’”²⁵ It should be no surprise, then, that some Saudi Arabians would feel free to exploit even “fellow Muslims” from Pakistan, Indonesia, and Bangladesh.

Commercial sexual exploitation in Saudi Arabia is also a significant problem. There are reports of women trafficked into Saudi Arabia for use as prostitutes or kidnapped from legitimate jobs in the country and forced into prostitution.²⁶ Saudi men will also use a legal contract known as a “temporary marriage” to sexually exploit migrant workers:

Females as young as seven years old are led to believe they are being wed in earnest, but upon arrival in Saudi Arabia subsequently become their husbands’ sexual slaves, and are forced into domestic labor and, in some cases, prostitution.²⁷

Saudis do not always fare much better at the hands of their own countrymen. Despite being required to wear full-body clothing and being forbidden to mingle with men they aren’t related to, Saudi women still suffer a relatively high level of gender-based violence (including rape and domestic abuse).²⁸ Only in 2013 did the Saudi government finally get around to banning domestic violence (behavior which was formerly treated as a private affair). A 2008 study of Saudi university students found that as many as 23 percent were raped as children, and 62 percent of the cases went unreported (often because a relative of the victim was responsible).²⁹

WAHHABISM AND SAUDI ARABIA

During the conflict in Bosnia in the early 1990s, American churches and synagogues came together to raise funds for food and humanitarian aid to Bosnian Muslims. With an eye toward further pooling their efforts, these groups also approached American mosques to suggest cooperating for the benefit of their religious brothers overseas. On a number of occasions, these approaches were rejected. What could make a Muslim group refuse to join in on a project to help fellow Muslims?

The answer, according to R. James Woolsey at Freedom House, is the influence of Wahhabi imams who now lead many American mosques. It is impermissible for Wahhabi Muslims to work with infidels, even if the goal is helping Muslims. There is an absolute distinction between the Wahhabi and every other human being on earth, which all ordinary human feelings—cooperation, friendship, and common politeness—are not allowed to bridge. In the words of one observer, Wahhabism and Islamist extremism “is the soil in which al Qaeda and its sister terrorist organizations are growing.”³⁰

Wahhabism is inseparable from Saudi Arabia—the land of its birth and the source of its support and power. It began as an 18th century “back to basics” Islamic reform movement. Its founder, Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab, believed that Islam had lost touch with its 7th century values. Basing his teachings on a literal reading of the Qur’an and the Sunna, Wahhab advocated a strict division of the world into Dar al-Islam (the house of Islam) and Dar al-Harb (the house of war). These two worlds could never be reconciled. Instead, the aim of human life was constant jihad waged so that the former could utterly conquer and destroy the latter. Many in the West refer to Wahhabism as “conservative,” “strict,” or “puritanical.” These terms are inadequate. Wahhabism is a religious and political ideology that calls for Islam—particularly its own brand of literal Islam—to take over the world.³¹

Wahhabism might have remained a fringe Islamic sect, if not for a timely connection to the Saud family. The Sauds were seeking to unite the Arabian Peninsula under their authority at the same time that Wahhab was trying to revive universal jihad. The Saud family made a deal with Wahhab to adopt and promote his brand of Islam in exchange for recognition as the political and religious leaders of his movement. Even today, this deal lies at the heart of Saudi Arabian culture, as the Saud family is both the royal family and the source of supreme religious authority for the country.³²

Since 1979, however, this relationship has taken an even more radical turn. In that year, two events occurred which shook the Saudi royal family to its core. One was the revolution in Iran, which swept Khomeini to power on the promise of Islamic revolutionary reform. The Iranians were Shiites and therefore religious rivals. Since the Saudis believe themselves to be the preeminent religious authority for all Muslims, the Iranian revolution presented a threat to their authority.³³ The other event was the seizure of the great mosque in Mecca, the holiest of Islamic shrines, by religious extremists. Although the Saudis soon regained control of the mosque, the incident was an enormous and costly embarrassment. Fearful of losing control of the country, the royal family effectively turned the education of its citizens over to the control of the Wahhabis. In exchange, the clerics agreed to concentrate their religious hatred on targets outside the country—specifically on the U.S. and Israel.³⁴ By giving up the soul of its people to religious extremists, the Saudi elite gained a free pass to be as degenerate and corrupt as they wanted to be.

As a result of these events, Saudi Arabia has become a fountainhead of religious hatred. Using their enormous oil wealth, the Saudis have provided funding for mosques, Islamic centers and schools, publications, and missionaries to spread their virulent ideology. The core of their campaign to spread Wahhabism lies in the use of Islamic charities. Billions of dollars have been poured into them from both the Saudi government and private individuals with the publicly stated goal of promoting correct beliefs in the hearts of Muslims. In practice, this means promoting Wahhabi beliefs.

The Wahhabi ideology exported by Saudi Arabia rejects religious coexistence or tolerance of any kind. Rather, it calls it a religious obligation for Muslims to hate Christians and Jews (as well as all other non-Muslims and even non-Wahhabi Muslims). Such hatred supposedly demonstrates that the Muslim is truly a believer because he has completely separated from the world of non-believers and has no attachments to them.³⁵ Saudi publications instruct Muslims not to hire non-Muslim workers, but if they do they are told they must hate them “for Allah’s sake.”³⁶ Even wishing a Christian “Happy Holiday” on Christmas is called “more loathsome to God … than imbibing liquor, or murder, or fornication.”³⁷

Saudi-financed publications and imams teach that Muslims who do not follow Wahhabi sexual mores or Wahhabi codes of behavior or who do not govern their countries according to Wahhabi-style sharia law are to be condemned. Any problems or poor conditions in Muslim countries are attributed to governments ruling contrary to the guidance of Islam according to secular rather than religious laws. Democracy is portrayed as a cultural invasion from the West, pushing “deadly” principles such as separation of religion and politics or the equality of men and women.³⁸

Even freedom and human rights are considered un-Islamic, according to Saudi Wahhabism. One tract declares:

Freedom of thinking, requires permitting the denial of faith, and attacking what is sacred, glorifying falsehood and defending the heretics, finding fault in religion and letting loose the ideas and pens to write of disbelief as one likes, and to put ornaments on sin as one likes.³⁹

Such things are unacceptable. Since Wahhabism is the truth, anything we might think of as “freedom of thought” is just a freedom to lie, as far as they are concerned. Human rights are dismissed as a weapon of the infidel used to undermine Islam. What we call the “conscience of the world” they dismiss as “the conscience of Christians, Jews, and communists.”⁴⁰

Through Saudi sponsorship, according to one estimate, Wahhabist Islam has radicalized more than 80 percent of the mosques in the United States.⁴¹ In Wahhabi-influenced mosques, Wahhabis maintain absolute control of the buildings, the religious training, the appointment of imams, the content of their teaching, the literature made available, and any charitable solicitation. This is particularly troubling given that literature distributed by the Saudis, even in American schools and mosques, has proven to be anti-American, anti-Semitic, and pro-jihad.⁴²

For the past quarter century, thanks to Saudi money and influence, this virulent brand of Islam has become widespread in the world—even in the United States—as the Saudis have strived to compete with Iran in spreading their literal version of the Islamic faith. In spreading Wahhabism, the Saudis are spreading a radically intolerant, hateful ideology completely at odds with the values of the United States. But the Saudis do more than support the ideas that fuel terror: they support terror directly.

SAUDI ARABIA AND GLOBAL TERRORISM

Saudi Arabia’s connection to global terrorism begins with petrodollars. That money doesn’t sit idle. The Saudis invest part of their surplus overseas, and through those investments alone they gain economic and political influence. The amounts are staggering: Saudi private sector investment in the U.S. alone was an estimated $400 million in 2009.⁴³

The Motiva oil refinery in Port Arthur, Texas is a perfect example of Saudi investment in America. A $10 billion expansion of the refinery, which is jointly owned by Saudi Amoco and Royal Dutch Shell, was just completed in 2013. The refinery is the largest petroleum processor in the United States, and the expansion will move Saudi Amoco, already the largest oil company in the world, closer to becoming the largest petroleum refiner as well. Despite politicians’ claims of decreasing American dependency on imported oil, this expansion shows the Saudis are still eager to do business in America. With a bilateral trade deficit favoring them at a 3-to-1 ratio, why wouldn’t they be? Saudi Amoco has also been increasing its economic reach, reaching deals in China, South Korea, India, and the Netherlands. This translates into increased financial and political clout.⁴⁴

Next, consider how terrorist organizations receive and transfer funds. One routine form of illicit money movement uses an Islamic system known as hawala. Because this informal money transfer system involves brokers disbursing funds based on a promise to be paid back, it operates more or less outside normal political and economic channels and is very difficult to track or shut down.⁴⁵ Another money transfer scheme is based on the Islamic zakat tithe. One of the Pillars of Islam, zakat requires Muslims to donate two and a half percent of their wealth to charity—hence the proliferation of Islamic charity groups around the world. Since most zakat donations are anonymous and made in cash, it can be very difficult to track them. Many zakat charities are perfectly legitimate, but some are used to provide a cloak of legitimacy to the transfer of funds for use in terror attacks.

Numerous Saudi charity organizations and their offshoots have been directly linked to terrorist activities. The most notorious involves an affiliate of the Muslim World League (a large charity organization sponsored by the Saudi royal family) called the International Islamic Relief Organization (IIRO). A branch of the IIRO in the Philippines which had been controlled by Osama bin Laden’s brother-in-law was placed on a watch list by the United Nations for funneling money to the Abu Sayyaf terrorist group.⁴⁶ Another branch in Bangladesh was raided and broken up by Indian authorities when they discovered its connection with plans to bomb U.S. consulates in Calcutta and Madras.⁴⁷

Other Saudi charities connected to terrorism include the Mercy International Relief Organization, which was proven to be connected to the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Africa. Documents at the trial of the four men convicted of involvement in those attacks showed that Mercy smuggled weapons from Somalia to Kenya, and unmasked the charity, according to a former al-Qaeda agent, as a front for al-Qaeda. In 2001, NATO forces raided the Saudi High Commission for Aid to Bosnia, a charity group founded by a member of the Saudi royal family and supported directly by King Fahd. The raid uncovered some disturbing terror links, including:

Before-and-after photographs of the World Trade Center, U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and the USS Cole; maps of government buildings in Washington; materials for forging U.S. State Department badges; files on the use of crop duster aircraft; and anti-Semitic and anti-American material geared toward children.⁴⁸

The Saudi-based al-Wafa Humanitarian organization has been described as a key al-Qaeda group which “do[es] a small amount of legitimate humanitarian work and raise[s] a lot of money for equipment and weapons.”⁴⁹

The Saudi Arabian government has denied providing any funding for terrorism or having any direct links with terrorism. Nevertheless, Saudi officials “have at minimum a clear pattern of looking the other way when funds are known to support extremist purposes.”⁵⁰ This is not new behavior for Saudi Arabia—it dates back to at least the 1980s, if not before. Former CIA agent Robert Baer describes Saudi Arabia’s use of IIRO to fund Afghan rebels in the 80s, saying the charity organization “proved a perfect fit, a money conduit and plausible denial rolled into one.”⁵¹

Although publicly the United States treats Saudi Arabia as an ally in the War on Terror, behind the scenes things are not quite so simple. A leaked diplomatic cable revealed in 2010 showed that U.S. officials still regard the Saudis with some distrust when it comes to terror financing. Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton observed:

It has been an ongoing challenge to persuade Saudi officials to treat terrorist financing emanating from Saudi Arabia as a strategic priority … donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide.⁵²

Under Secretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Stuart Levey was equally blunt in his assessment. Testifying before the Senate Finance Committee, Levey said:

If I could somehow snap my fingers and cut off the funding [for terrorism] from one country, it would be Saudi Arabia … Saudi Arabia today remains the location from which more money is going to … Sunni terror groups and the Taliban … than from any other place in the world.⁵³

According to Levey, the Saudi government has yet to prosecute even one individual identified by the United Nations or the United States as a terrorist financier.⁵⁴ The Saudis say “trust us, we’ll take care of these financiers,” and then do nothing.

American efforts to cut off funding to Islamic militants have faced serious pushback and accusations of heavy-handedness and lack of evidence from foreign leaders.⁵⁵ Nevertheless, as the cable above illustrates, there is reason to believe that terrorist violence is significantly bankrolled by affluent conservative donors in the Persian Gulf—and that the governments of those countries do little or nothing to prevent it. In Saudi Arabia, the government will apprehend individuals suspected of terrorist financing only to drop all legal charges when the individuals claim they are nothing more than “political dissidents.”⁵⁶ There is every reason to believe that some individuals get a pass solely because of favorable political connections with the royal family or powerful Islamic clerics.

Another way terrorists gain funding in Saudi Arabia involves the use of the Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca as a cover. Terrorists slip into the country under the guise of being holy pilgrims, then establish companies to act as fronts for government-sanctioned charities. Another leaked cable described the problem:

The Hajj is still a major security loophole for the Saudis, since pilgrims often travel with large amounts of cash and the Saudis cannot refuse them entry into Saudi Arabia … The Saudi government recently passed a law requiring arriving travelers to declare cash above a certain amount, but Hajj was “still a vacuum in our security” [Senior Advisor Major General Dr. Sa’ad al-Jabri] said.⁵⁷

Funding is essential to Islamic terrorist activities. When Ramzi Yousef, the lead conspirator of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, was captured in 1995, he confessed that it was financial troubles which prevented his operatives from building the larger bomb he had originally intended. The 9/11 attacks allegedly cost somewhere between $400,000 and $500,000; not an inconsiderable sum.⁵⁸

Saudi Arabia also does a great deal to supply fighters to the cause of global jihad. As is already well known, Osama bin Laden and 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers were Saudi nationals. But they are only the tip of a very large iceberg. According to former diplomat Curtin Winsor, audio tapes recorded in a Saudi mosque in 2004 reveal the then Chief Justice of Saudi Arabia—a man charged with managing trials of terrorists in his country—urging Saudi youth to fight against Americans as well as Iraqi forces inside Iraq.⁵⁹ Reports during the Iraq war revealed that foreign fighters in Iraq were often Saudis.⁶⁰ One such report observes:

The intensive involvement of Saudi volunteers for Jihad in Iraq is also the result of the Saudi government’s doublespeak, whereby it is willing to fight terrorism, but only if directly affected by it on its own soil.⁶¹

The same report by terrorism expert Reuven Paz found that out of 154 Arab deaths attributed to jihad during a six-month period in Iraq, 61 percent were Saudis.⁶² This means one of our “allies” in the War on Terror could have been supplying the majority of our most deadly opponents in Iraq.

THE 9/11 ATTACKS AND U.S.-SAUDI RELATIONS SINCE 9/11

The 9/11 attacks have presented the gravest challenge to Saudi-U.S. relations since the oil embargo from 1973-4. There is no disguising the fact that Osama bin Laden and 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi nationals. Two of the hijackers are believed to have been radicalized at the King Fahd mosque in Los Angeles thanks in part to the efforts of Imam Fahad al Thumairy. Fahad was a diplomat with the Saudi Arabian consulate from 1996 – 2003 (when he was barred from reentering the U.S. due to terrorist connections).⁶³ There is also no disguising how much funding for al-Qaeda and its sister organizations has come directly or indirectly from Saudi Arabian sources.

Due to such links, America’s diplomatic relationship with Saudi Arabia has become strained. For the past decades, the typical American approach to the Saudis has been to avoid any direct confrontations in favor of gentle manipulations. Some government officials cautioned that excessive pressure on the Saudis could destabilize the power structure, resulting in the replacement of the royal family with even more dangerous extremists.⁶⁴ This approach is harder to sustain in the face of the facts about Saudi Arabia and Wahhabism.

For its survival, the Saudi monarchy depends on the support of extremist Wahhabi clerics. In turn, those clerics support global terror in the ways shown above. Even if the ruling government wanted to shut down all support for terrorism, their ability to force the Wahhabi clerics is limited. Instead there is a vicious loop which ends in Saudi inaction—and the deaths of American men and women around the world.⁶⁵ In turn, the oil lobby has exerted powerful influence over American institutions. The scholar Mitchell Bard has found evidence of oil money buying control of ideas in American colleges and universities, in the media, and in Presidential administrations and in Congress.⁶⁶ This enormous financial leverage further induces the United States to look the other way when evidence of Saudi malfeasance comes to light.

The consequences of the current U.S. approach to Saudi Arabia could be disastrous. Matthew Levitt, a senior fellow at The Washington Institute, warns that “foreign funding of subversive domestic organizations linked to designated terrorist groups poses immediate dangers to US national security.”⁶⁷ With Saudi Arabia standing as one of the richest and most ideologically virulent sources of such foreign funding, America’s refusal to take a stand against it could be deadly.

These issues have become more pressing after the November 24, 2013 deal with Iran in Geneva and the “historic understanding” the U.S. government reached with Iran on April 3, 2015. As America and other key powers signed off with Iran, the Saudis were signaling their intentions to acquire nuclear weapons. Before the ink was dry on the deal, the Saudi ambassador to the U.K. was already proclaiming to the media, “We are not going to sit idly by and receive a threat there [Iran] and not think seriously how we can best defend our country and our region.”⁶⁸ According to a former Obama advisor and weapons expert, a deal with Pakistan could make the ambassador’s threat a reality:

Pakistan isn’t just going to hand over nuclear weapons; it’s more likely that Pakistan would station forces in Saudi Arabia, and those forces will have the ability to deploy nuclear weapons from Saudi soil.⁶⁹

Such an act would be the most provocative since the 1973 oil embargo. After Geneva, it has become a possibility.

One of the surest signs of a nation’s power is how readily it flaunts the rules others must abide by. Saudi Arabia’s late-2013 program of “Saudization” of the labor force is a clear illustration of this principle in action. Starting in late November, the kingdom began the forcible removal of a large portion of its foreign labor force. About “one million Bangladeshis, Indians, Filipinos, Nepalis, Pakistanis and Yemenis” were deported, with the aim of removing two million by the end of 2014.⁷⁰ What would the outcry around the world be if America, Britain, or France suddenly deported 1-2 million foreign workers? How many human rights organizations would protest such treatment? Yet the Saudis suffer nothing worse than a few disapproving media articles. Keep in mind also that many of these foreign workers are fellow Muslims. Muslims often speak of their whole religious community being one ummah, one nation of fellow-believers. If that’s true, how can the Saudis treat their own “nationals” like dogs?

PART TWO

CHAPTER EIGHT

Pakistan: False Foundations

There is only one way out. Muslims should strengthen Jinnah’s hands. They should join the Muslim League. Indian question, as is now being solved, can be countered by our united front against both the Hindus and the English. Without it our demands are not going to be accepted. People say our demands smack of communalism. This is sheer propaganda. These demands relate to the defense of our national existence. The united front can be formed under the leadership of the Muslim League. And the Muslim League can succeed only on account of Jinnah. Now none but Jinnah is capable of leading the Muslims.

—Sir Muhammad Iqbal (1938)¹

We maintain and hold that Muslims and Hindus are two major nations by any definition or test of a nation. We are a nation of hundred million and what is more, we are a nation with our own distinctive culture and civilization, language and literature, art and architecture, names and nomenclature, sense of values and proportions, legal laws and moral codes, customs and calendar, history and tradition, and aptitude and ambitions. In short, we have our own outlook on life and of life.

—Muhammad Ali Jinnah (1944)²

Islam is not only a religious doctrine but also a realistic code of conduct in terms of every day and everything important in life: our history, our laws and our jurisprudence. In all these things, our outlook is not only fundamentally different but also opposed to Hindus. There is nothing in life that links us together. Our names, clothes, food, festivals, and rituals, all are different. Our economic life, our educational ideas, treatment of women, attitude towards animals, and humanitarian considerations, all are very different.

—Muhammad Ali Jinnah³

Pakistan is teetering on the brink of becoming a failed state. As the Taliban continues to use the territory of our supposed ally as a sanctuary, a Pakistani version of the group has sprung up to wreak vengeance within Pakistan itself. Horrifying massacres and suicide bombings which would have been unthinkable a decade ago have become commonplace. The political system blunders through scandals, corruption, and popular illegitimacy. Foreign policy has become a duplicitous and confusing riddle with the government promising one thing while non-state actors agitate for another—above all, for yet another war with India. What’s worse, this unstable country is not only a breeding ground for jihadist terrorism, it is armed with nuclear weapons. In short, Pakistan is more of a clear and present danger to the United States and the world than Iraq and Afghanistan ever were.

Adding to the confusion and misunderstanding surrounding Pakistan, its government continues to hold to an absurd public narrative of being a victimized and abandoned hero. Typical of this narrative is a 2008 speech by then-Pakistani President Zardari in which he traced modern terrorism to the Afghan-Soviet war, declaring, “We are not the cause of the problem of terrorist, we are its victims. We are an aggrieved nation, not one that has caused grief. We have fought this battle largely alone.”⁴ What Zardari’s speech neglected to mention was the central role Pakistan has played in training, funding, directing, and supporting jihadists before, during, and after that war. Current Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has continued to stick to the narrative, deceitfully claiming in Washington, D.C. that “Pakistan is neither the source nor the epicenter of terrorism as is sometimes alleged.”⁵

While most Western analysts would readily point out the convenient gaps and easy hypocrisy in Pakistan’s official narrative, many would agree with Zardari in tracing the Afghan-Soviet war as the root of Pakistan’s looming failure. As we shall see in this chapter, however, the roots lie much deeper—in fact, they lie in the very foundations of Pakistan. The Islamic Republic of Pakistan is and has always been bound up in its very essence and identity with the cause of jihad.

Western observers unfamiliar with Pakistan’s origins and history are often led to believe that virulent Islamic ideology is an artificial import. Operating within Western assumptions, they fall into a binary logic where Islamic militancy is associated with military usurpation while hopes for reform are connected to the rule of law and democratically-elected governments. As the history of Pakistan demonstrates, though, democratic politics there have always been mired in arbitrary decision-making and Faustian bargains with Islamic radicalism. Civilian leaders have been just as responsible as their military counterparts for the institutionalization of jihad. To gain a proper understanding of Pakistan’s predicament, as well as the threat it poses to the international community, we must go back to its foundations.

TWO-NATION THEORY AND THE PARTITION OF INDIA

At the start of the 20th century, there was no Pakistan. The Indian subcontinent was under the political administration of the British Raj. The majority of the population was Hindu, with a sizable Muslim minority. Toward the end of the 19th century there was a growing call among the Indian people for greater say in their own affairs. In 1885 the Indian National Congress (INC) was formed with the objective of getting more educated Indians involved in the government. Over time, this objective developed into a call for independence from the United Kingdom.

As interest in independence grew in the Raj, an ideology began to take hold among well-educated Indian Muslims called the two-nation theory. This theory held that the people of the Indian subcontinent were defined primarily by their religion, not by language or ethnicity. Muslims in the Raj, according to this theory, shared more in common with Muslims of the Arabian Peninsula than they shared with the Hindus whom they lived among. Therefore, proponents argued, it wasn’t enough for India to become independent. It would also have to be split apart, with one nation for the Muslims and another for the Hindus. The two-nation theory had two significant and influential champions, men who would later come to be regarded as founding fathers of Pakistan: Muhammad Iqbal and Muhammad Ali Jinnah.

The primary political vehicle for the two-nation theory was the All-India Muslim League. Founded in 1906 by urban Muslim elites keen on defending their interests, the League would become vital in the real-world application of the two-nation theory.⁶ Iqbal was the first President of the League, and also the first to fully articulate the two-nation theory during an address to the League in 1930:

I would like to see the Punjab, the North-West Frontier Province, Sindh and Baluchistan amalgamated into a single state … the formation of a consolidated North-Western Indian Muslim State appears to me the final destiny of the Muslims, at least of North-West India.⁷

Jinnah, who joined the league in 1913, would turn Iqbal’s tentative hope into a robust political platform—even going so far as to claim that “religion alone is a cohesive force for the idea of nationality.”⁸

Jinnah’s conception of national identity is open to several serious objections. While religion is certainly a crucial element of national identity, in no other modern nation on earth is it the sole element.⁹ Furthermore, his division of India into Muslim and Hindu populations completely ignored Christian and Sikh minorities. If it was impossible, as he argued, for Hindus and Muslims to share a national identity, why should Sikhs and Christians be consigned to places within Muslim or Hindu nation-states? If Muslims and Hindus could not possibly reconcile, how could Muslims in geographically distinct areas form a coherent whole? As later events showed, the practical realities behind Jinnah’s assumptions about nationality were ticking time bombs.

Jinnah and the two-nation theory might have come to nothing were it not for World War II. By 1940, the Muslim League was adept at playing both sides—siding with the Indian National Congress when it came to extracting concessions of autonomy from the British, then currying favor with the British to support their interest in a sectarian partition of India.¹⁰ During the war, the Muslim-majority Bengal was a gateway to be defended to keep the Japanese out of India. Jinnah and the Muslim League cooperated willingly with the British while the Indian National Congress (INC) launched a tone-deaf and fruitless “Quit India” campaign.

As a result, the INC’s leaders spent much of the war years in jail, during which time the Muslim League filled the positions of responsibility they vacated. By war’s end, the League had increased its political power as well as its prestige and credibility with the British. Although the Muslims of India were not particularly supportive of the League (1937 election results showed Muslims voting along lines of ethnic and political interests rather than on the basis of religion),¹¹ the British had grown receptive to the League’s position regarding a partition.

After the War, Jinnah and the League were in a strong position to advance their interest in partition. Learning its lesson from 1937, the League focused its 1945-6 election campaign almost entirely on Islamist rhetoric.¹² The approach successfully generated religious fervor among the people, winning 75 percent of the Muslim vote (about 15 percent of the total population was eligible to vote). This confirmed the League as the unequivocal representative of Indian Muslims and persuaded the British to grant their central demand for a separate nation-state.¹³ The Socialist government which came into power in post-war Britain was particularly eager to expedite the withdrawal from India. In 1947, the Raj was ended and the nation of Pakistan was born.

Jinnah’s role in the creation of Pakistan was absolutely essential. After the 1945-6 election, he was seen as the foremost champion of the Muslim population. Since 1940 he had been adamant and inflexible in his insistence on a separate country for Muslims as the two-nation theory demanded. But at the creation of Pakistan in 1947 Jinnah was already gravely ill with tuberculosis. He would be dead just over a year later. Lord Mountbatten, the last British Viceroy in India, later confessed that if he had known about Jinnah’s illness he would have delayed the partition of British India.

The political success of Jinnah and the League masked a complex reality. The leaders of the Islamic separatist movement, Jinnah included, were primarily secularists who had gained power among the masses with the cry of “Islam in danger.”¹⁴ As the movement for partition gained momentum and practical success, it was forced to become theoretically as well as actively and rhetorically Islamic.¹⁵ Then, as the abstract demands of the two-nation theory became a territorial and political reality, religious fervor devolved into violence and chaos.

Since the two-nation theory placed religion above all else in the formation of the state, British authorities were left with little more than census data when it came to the practical partition of the Raj. New national frontiers were drawn up according to relative percentages of Hindu and Muslim populations. Accordingly, the ancient provinces of Bengal and the Punjab found themselves joined together in a new Pakistani nation. Separated by 800 miles of Indian soil, with only the bare name of “Muslim” connecting them, these two distinct territories were expected to coalesce as a single nation.

Upon creation of Pakistan, Jinnah gave voice to his curious vision of a liberal, secular state that was nevertheless founded upon religion. He declared to his new people:

You are free. You are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other place of worship in this place of Pakistan, you may belong to any religion or caste or creed—that has nothing to do with the business of the state.¹⁶

By contrast, Muhammad Iqbal realized from the very beginning that Pakistan’s foundation in religion meant that religion would be essential to its very survival and identity:

Your solidarity rests on the strength of your religion. When faith slips away, where is the solidarity of your community? And when the community is no more, neither is the nation.¹⁷

Of the two founders, Iqbal was the more perceptive and prophetic—but without Jinnah there would never even have been a Pakistan.

However, the record shows quite clearly that Jinnah was a hypocrite. The “Great Leader” of Indian Muslims was not even a practicing Muslim himself. He did not attend mosque regularly, and was not even familiar with the basic rituals for prayer. He did not keep a fast during the month of Ramadan, and, despite being extremely wealthy, he did not perform the hajj (the pilgrimage to Mecca required at least once of practicing Muslims). Jinnah kept up a smoking habit of about 50 cigarettes a day, drank alcohol, and ate pork. To make matters worse, at least from the perspective of Sunni Pakistan, his family was Ismaili Shia.¹⁸

When he was 42, Jinnah fell in love with the 16-year-old daughter of a Parsee friend of his in Mumbai, Rattanbai “Ruttie” Petit. Over the objections of her family, they married when Ruttie turned 18. Although she converted to Islam in order to marry Jinnah, Ruttie continued to dress western-style in public. Jinnah was mocked by orthodox Muslims at the time, who said he had abandoned Islam for the sake of an infidel woman.

Jinnah’s family also reveals his very tenuous connection to Islam. His grandfather was a Hindu convert. His only child, daughter Dina Jinnah, grew up to marry a Parsee Christian who later returned to Zoroastrianism. Their son, Nusli Wadia, is a businessman in India. He has two children who are Zoroastrian Indians. The family of the father of the Islamic nation-state seems to have no remaining connection to Islam. Dina herself remained in India after the partition and later moved to New York City, where she has lived for many years. In 2008, she sued for the right to inherit Jinnah’s expansive home in Mumbai. Amazingly, in Dina’s lawsuit she even claimed that Islamic law did not apply to her father’s estate:

According to Dina, her father was a Khoja Muslim and this sect followed the Hindu law and not the sharia. Hence, the Hindu Succession law that leaves property to his daughter would be applicable and not the Islamic law where the deceased’s sibling also have a right over the property.¹⁹

From his life, it is clear that Jinnah’s use of the two-nation theory was opportunistic. He had no difficulty participating in “infidel” British culture in order to obtain a law degree, with which he became very wealthy. He certainly fought to retain his connections to Indian society, such as Jinnah House in Mumbai, when it suited him to do so: he wrote a letter to Jawaharlal Nehru begging him to preserve the house. Not a practicing Muslim himself, Jinnah used Islam and the two-nation theory to gain political power and make a name for himself as the founder of Pakistan. But while Pakistan’s founder may have been a secular man, its future lay in the embrace of Islam at its most radical.

PART TWO

CHAPTER NINE

Pakistan: War and Ideology

If India builds the [atomic] bomb, we [Pakistan] will eat grass or leaves, even go hungry, but we will get one of our own. We have no other choice.

—Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, Prime Minister of Pakistan¹

What is a Constitution? It is a booklet with twelve or ten pages. I can tear them away and say that tomorrow we shall live under a different system. Today, the people will followwherever I lead. All the politicians, including the once mighty Mr. Bhutto will follow me with tails wagging.

—Mohammad Zia ul-Haq, President of Pakistan²

The Pakistan Army’s biggest folly has been that under Zia (ul-Haq), it started outsourcing its basic job—soldiering—to these freelance militants. By blurring the line between a professional soldier—who, at least in theory, is always required to obey his officer, who in turn is governed by a set of laws—and a mujahid, who can pick and choose his cause and his commander depending on his mood, the Pakistan Army has caused immense confusion it its own ranks.

—Mohammad Hanif, Pakistani journalist³

Terror struck into the hearts of the enemies is not only a means, it is the end in itself. Once a condition of terror into the opponent’s heart is obtained, hardly anything is left to be achieved. It is the point where the means and the end meet and merge. Terror is not a means of imposing decision upon the enemy; it is the decision we wish to impose upon him.

—Brig. S. K. Malik, The Quranic Concept of War⁴

In the years between its creation and the 9/11 attacks on the United States, Pakistan followed through on the logic of Iqbal, Jinnah, and the two-nation theory. The world has seen the result—a violent, schizophrenic nation at war with its neighbors and with itself. Above all, a nation which has followed its religion into one disaster after another, while remaining unable to step back or examine itself critically to realize what is happening.

Flaws in the two-nation theory were apparent from the very beginning. After the partition of India, fully a third of the Raj’s Muslim population remained in the territory that had been set aside for Hindus rather than move to the new Muslim nation of Pakistan.⁵ In East Pakistan (later to become the nation of Bangladesh), a large Hindu population remained behind. These facts ran counter to the two-nation theory, which claimed that Muslims and Hindus were incapable of forming a single nation together. At the very moment of Pakistan’s creation, the theory behind its existence was challenged by reality.

The theory was promoted by Jinnah as a way for India to ensure peace. Far from doing so, the partition which created Pakistan led almost immediately to warfare. The first flash point for conflict was the Princely State of Jammu and Kashmir.

PAKISTAN AND KASHMIR—THE FIRST CONFLICT

A major complicating factor behind the partition of India was that a large part of the subcontinent had never been ruled directly from Britain. There were over 500 princely states (as they were called) which were governed directly by a local ruler in the name of the British crown. The various rulers of these states were given the option of aligning with India or Pakistan

Jammu and Kashmir was a princely state with a majority Muslim population and sizable numbers of Hindus and Sikhs. But it was governed by a Hindu maharajah who alone had the choice of which country to align with. Both India and Pakistan were interested in the territory. Since India does not accept the two-nation theory, it encourages Hindu and Muslim populations to live together peacefully within its border. But Pakistan insists that any region with a majority of Muslims must belong to them.

In October of 1947, Pakistan crossed over from politics to warfare:

[Elements of the Pakistani Army] invoked jihad to mobilize tribesmen from the [North-West] frontier and send them to raid and seize Kashmir; the government in turn called on religious scholars to issue supportive fatwas or religious decrees.⁶

Facing an invasion from Pakistan by guerilla fighters, Maharaja Hari Singh of Jammu and Kashmir turned to the Indian Army for help. On October 26, he signed an Instrument of Accession granting sovereignty of his state to India.⁷

During the conflict over Kashmir, Pakistan established what would become a foreign policy pattern: using non-state actors as proxies to stir up trouble. The Times of London reported in 1948:

That Pakistan is unofficially involved in aiding the [Kashmiri] raiders is certain. Your correspondent has first hand evidence that arms, ammunition and supplies are being made available to the Azad Kashmiri forces. A few Pakistani officers are also helping to direct the operations.⁸

The irregular warfare characteristic of this first Kashmir conflict was not successful in giving Pakistan control of the territory, but it did keep India from asserting its authority. The ceasefire line of 1948 (later to become the Line of Control) divided the princely state into Pakistani and Indian sectors. The war also signaled Pakistan’s willingness to go to war over Muslim-majority territories—a defining quality of its foreign policy ever since.

A MILITARY FOUNDATION

A quick glance at the history of Pakistan will show a cycle of military coups and dictatorships followed by periods of civilian governance. This cycle goes back to the foundations of the country. In the early years, the Pakistani Army was still very British in its ethos and training. It was the only truly national institution with any prestige or credibility. Consequently, the Army quickly established itself as the guardian of the nation. Since then they have often stepped in when civilian leadership appeared to flag and destabilize the country.

The only unifying ideology behind Pakistan, however, was the Islamic religion. Thus, the Army has always been involved in the promotion of Islam within the country and in the struggle against any forces which were perceived as undermining Islam. In the earliest years, Pakistan consisted of a disparate mishmash of tribes and ethnicities, languages and customs. But any demands made on behalf of ethnic groups were treated as threats to national stability.⁹

Initially, some in the Army tried to limit the influence of Islam, but there was a limit to what even military commanders could accomplish. In 1958, the Army’s commander-in-chief Ayub Khan seized control of the government. Khan was interested in pursuing moderate and relatively secular political policies. Accordingly, he tried to ban Jamaar-i-Islami (the nation’s militant Islamic party) and even removed the word “Islamic” from Pakistan’s official title. But popular and institutional momentum ran against such changes. Khan was soon forced to reverse course.¹⁰

THE IMPORTANCE OF VIOLENCE

A conceptual barrier prevents most western observers from getting a handle on Pakistan. Imagine a modern Western politician expressing support for the idea that Protestants should kill Catholics or encouraging a jihad on behalf of the Pope. Such a person would be on the lunatic fringe—or thrown in jail. In Pakistan, it is politically correct to decry the infidel or praise the way of jihad. Any public figure who wants to be taken seriously must say such things, and to some extent believe them.

This is why, when Ayub Khan started planning a new war with India over Kashmir, he knew such an act would meet with tremendous popular approval. Khan’s foreign minister, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, blustered publicly that Pakistan would embark on a “thousand year war” with India, if necessary.¹¹ Such war-mongering would get a politician fired in the West; in Pakistan, it is the political equivalent of shaking hands and kissing babies.

The two-nation theory dictates that Kashmir must be part of Pakistan because its population is majority Muslim. Bhutto showed how well he had absorbed that logic in his insistence that “Kashmir must be liberated if Pakistan is to have its full meaning.”¹² In 1965, Khan and Bhutto brought their plan to fruition and engaged in the old trick of sending in armed guerillas to stir up trouble in Kashmir.¹³

But the two-nation theory again produced faulty thinking. Khan believed that “Hindu resolve” would soon crack after a few hard blows.¹⁴ He and Bhutto both believed the Kashmiris would welcome the chance to embark on an armed uprising to “liberate” themselves from the Hindus. Instead, Pakistani guerillas found that the Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs of Kashmir had achieved a fair degree of peaceful coexistence. They weren’t interested in an uprising. The subsequent invasion of Kashmir by Pakistani regular forces had very little success. Instead of cracking under hard blows, the Indian Army launched a successful counterattack deep into Pakistan’s southern heartland, effectively ending the conflict.¹⁵

Tellingly, this spectacular failure did not produce self-reflection in the Pakistani government. Bhutto doubled down on his strategy, saying Pakistan should have continued the war and criticizing Ayub Khan for signing the Tashkent treaty which ended hostilities.¹⁶ Since the Pakistani people had been force-fed propaganda detailing the “great success” of the war, they were shocked and outraged when Khan ended the war without success.¹⁷

In 1969, a discredited Ayub Khan handed power over to the Army’s commander-in-chief, Yahya Khan. During Yahya’s brief tenure, he reaffirmed Pakistan’s commitment to militant Islamic ideology.¹⁸ The same ideology which had foundered on the rocks of Kashmir simply brought forward a new champion.

THE BANGLADESHI GENOCIDE

The Muslim Bengalis of East Pakistan were at the forefront of the problems facing Yahya Khan’s new regime. The Muslim Punjabis of West Pakistan looked down upon them with undisguised racism and contempt. They wanted to forge a homogenous Islamic nation, and the Islamic practices of the East Bengalis—as well as their friendly relations with Hindu Bengalis—were highly suspect. For their part, Bengali Muslims had little intention of conforming to Muslim Punjabi preferences.¹⁹

Here again the two-nation theory was pointing Pakistan toward disaster. According to the theory, Bengali Muslims should have more in common with Muslim Punjabis living over a thousand miles away than with the Bengali Hindus who had been their neighbors for centuries. Since Bengali Muslims didn’t see things that way, they were un-Islamic to the elites of West Pakistan. Therefore, they had to be purified.

As some Muslim leaders in West Pakistan developed these arguments, the Bengali Muslims of East Pakistan understandably viewed them as a threat. In addition to having a lot more Hindus living among them after the partition, East Bengali Muslim politicians inclined toward pragmatism and secularism, preferring to emphasize the ties that bound them to their Hindu cousins (culture and language) rather than their religious differences.²⁰ This was anathema to West Pakistanis, and within a few years of Yahya Khan assuming power he and the other self-appointed guardians of Pakistan and its Islamic ideology moved against it.

The flash point came in long-promised elections held in December of 1970. Taking a page from Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s playbook, the Awami League in East Pakistan managed to unify the Bengali Muslim electorate behind a platform for increased East Pakistan autonomy. Their electoral success was so sweeping that they gained a majority in Pakistan’s national legislature. Yahya Khan and Zulfiqar Bhutto (whose own Pakistani People’s Party—the PPP—had come in second) immediately saw this as political disaster. Khan was determined that the elected legislature would never meet. After breaking off talks with East Pakistani representatives, he sent the Pakistani Army on a stunning campaign of violence and murder among the civilian population of East Pakistan in 1971.

What followed was genocide. The West Pakistani military, in concert with irregular militias composed of militant jihadists, embarked on a campaign of systematic murder and rape designed to crush Bangladeshi calls for self-determination and eradicate the Bengali Hindu population. As many as three million people were killed. Somewhere between 200,000 and 400,000 Bengali Hindu and Muslim women were raped by the West Pakistanis.²¹

The campaign stretched over nine months, but within days those close to the events could see that a Bangladeshi genocide was taking place:

There is no reason now to refrain from declaring, on evidence which is brave and strong, that the Government and the Army of Pakistan, which is to say the establishment of West Pakistan, is and has been for some weeks engaged upon the most extensive and barbarous exercise of genocide that the world has known about since the end of the second world war.²²

A U.S. consul in East Pakistan wrote back to the State Department, describing the killing that was taking place. Since the U.S. supplied Pakistan with much of its weaponry and ammunition, Washington had some pull with Yahya Khan and his government. But the Nixon administration was using Khan “as a secret communications channel to Mao Zedong’s China” and wanted nothing to interfere with their broader Cold War interests.²³

President Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger were actually annoyed at diplomatic efforts to inform them about the genocide. When U.S. Ambassador to India Kenneth Keating publicly decried the genocide and excoriated the U.S. policy of ignoring it he was isolated and even scorned privately as a traitor. The U.S. consul in Dhaka who had informed Washington of the cruelty Pakistan was inflicting on the Bengalis, Archer Blood, was removed from his post. Kissinger went so far as to “sneer at people who ‘bleed’ for ‘the dying Bengalis’.”²⁴ It was a true low point in American foreign policy.

Between eight and ten million East Bengalis became refugees as they fled from the violence to India, most of them Hindus. Within East Pakistan, about 30 million were internally displaced. Shocked by Pakistan’s reckless mass murder and pressured by an infuriated country, Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi organized a military intervention. Once the Indian Army was involved, after a patient build-up, Pakistani forces were overwhelmed and soon surrendered in December, 1971. In the aftermath East Pakistan split off completely, forming the new nation of Bangladesh. Bangladesh later conferred its highest state honor on Indira Gandhi for her critical role in its attainment of independence.

ZULFIQAR ALI BHUTTO’S ISLAMIC SOCIALISM

After a second humiliating defeat in under a decade, the military government of Pakistan finally yielded to a civilian government. As the leader of the largest remaining political party (the PPP) in the wake of East Pakistan’s bloody departure, Zulfiqar Bhutto found his road to the presidency clear. One might think that, as an avowed socialist, Bhutto’s time in government would be marked by shaking off Pakistan’s dangerous commitment to violent Islamist ideology. It was not so.

Despite Bhutto’s fashionable socialism, common among leaders of the Islamic world in the 1970s, his authority came from his membership in the landowning class. As John Schmidt explains, “The mainstream political parties in Pakistan can best be viewed as patronage networks.”²⁵ Bhutto is best thought of as a kind of feudal leader, sitting at the top of a large network of reciprocal expectations and obligations. He was also steeped in the idea that Islamic ideology was essential to the unity and the survival of Pakistan.

Bhutto’s main political strategy, as historian Zahid Hussain argues, was to unite Pakistan under the banner of Islamic nationalism. He seems to have used religion to provide the cohesion and stability needed to enact the socialist economic reforms he championed. Under Bhutto, the government increased Islamic teaching in schools and even went so far as to declare the Ahmadi Islamic sect officially non-Muslim by constitutional amendment.²⁶ This was devastating for the millions of Ahmadis, who had developed their brand of Islam in the Pakistani heartland of the Punjab; by amendment, they were made infidels in their own land. Bhutto was desperate to appeal to religious purists throughout his time as Prime Minister. In his last days in power he banned alcohol sales and gambling and closed down nightclubs in an attempt to win more popular support.²⁷

Two of Bhutto’s contributions as Prime Minister would come to have global impact. The first of these was his empowerment of Pakistan’s intelligence services. It was under Bhutto that the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) first rose to national prominence. Under his successor, ISI would become one of the premiere trainers of jihadists in the world—a position it has never truly relinquished.²⁸

Bhutto’s second contribution was Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program. Within weeks of attaining power, Bhutto held a clandestine meeting with 70 scientists in which he asked them to develop nuclear weapons. As Bhutto crudely put it after a nuclear bomb test by India in 1974, “there’s a Hindu bomb, a Jewish bomb, and a Christian bomb; there must be an Islamic bomb.”²⁹ In this statement we see again the Pakistani mode of assessing world affairs through a narrow sectarian paradigm. Fortunately for Bhutto, a Pakistani named Abdul Kadeer Khan was working in the Netherlands as a scientist. He stole critical information on a uranium enrichment process developed by his employer and brought it back to Pakistan.³⁰

To the end, Bhutto’s hand was often forced by concerns about Pakistan’s religious authorities. When he appointed General Zia ul-Haq (his eventual successor) as Army Chief-of-Staff, a crucial element in the decision was the general’s reputation for Islamic piety.³¹ But Bhutto was ultimately unable to govern the Islamic forces he hoped to co-opt. In 1977, General Zia replaced him in a coup engineered by Pakistani Islamists.³² Two years later, Bhutto was hanged for allegedly conspiring to murder a rival politician.

GENERAL ZIA’S AGGRESSIVE ISLAMIZATION

General Zia’s authority rested upon his military competence and his unquestioned commitment to Islam. Almost immediately after the coup which brought him to power he asserted, “Pakistan, which was created in the name of Islam, will continue to survive only if it sticks to Islam.”³³ His policies showed this commitment lay deeper than mere words.

Under the general, Pakistan became even more aggressively Islamized than before. He cut back on public education spending and instead encouraged Islamic groups to establish madrasas for the education of the young. By the end of his rule in 1988, the number of madrasas in Pakistan had grown from a mere 900 to over 8,000 (with another 25,000 unofficial Islamic schools).³⁴ Madrasas, as we will see later, would prove essential in educating a whole generation of young men into the world of jihad.

Zia also recreated the Pakistani Army as an institution for disseminating Islamic ideology. Religious commitment became essential for promotion through the ranks. All officers were required to read The Quranic Concept of War, a book which came with a foreword and personal endorsement from Zia himself. This book is a tour de force of jihadist sentiment. In the words of its author:

Death in this world is inevitable; life in the Hereafter is certain; and the reward of those who fight for the cause of Allah is safe, splendid and sure … Those who die fighting for the cause of Allah never actually die.³⁵

The key to victory, the book argues, is terror: “Terror struck into the hearts of the enemies is not only a means, it is the end itself.”³⁶ These sentiments are familiar to anyone in the West who has been exposed to the realities of Islamic terrorism.

The critical moment for Zia’s regime came in 1979, when Soviet tanks rumbled into Afghanistan, its western neighbor. Pakistan’s response was lying ready-made in the ideology and experience it had built up over the years. Here was Zia’s very own jihad. When the United States determined upon a course of financial (and later military) support for Afghanistan’s resistance to Soviet occupation, it was Pakistan that directed the funds, the fighters, and the weapons. Zia ensured that American money would serve his and Pakistan’s political and strategic interests.³⁷

The Soviet invasion was both a threat and an opportunity, as far as Pakistan was concerned. On the one hand, since atheistic communism was the enemy, it was clear that religious fervor should be the true source of successful resistance to that enemy. On the other, it would be to Pakistan’s benefit if the communist threat could be replaced by a regime with strategic and ideological goals identical to Pakistan’s. There were also ethnic motivations, as Pashtuns straddled the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. All these factors ensured, as Steve Coll reports, “that ISI’s Muslim Brotherhood-inspired clients … won the greatest share of support.”³⁸

As we now know quite well, the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan involved much more than just funding and providing support for native Afghan fighters. A large part of the effort managed and directed by Pakistan was involved in enticing and training new recruits for the struggle. The madrasas Zia’s regime was already promoting proved critical in this. They began to proliferate in the areas near the porous border between the two countries. Students from Karachi would later be the first to establish a jihadist organization in Pakistan committed to fighting the jihad in Afghanistan.³⁹ The whole Afghanistan-Pakistan border region became a province of interlocking networks made up of ISI officers, Arab volunteers, and radical Islamist madrasas.⁴⁰

Using American and Saudi money, the ISI trained guerillas soldiers for the fight in Afghanistan. Radical Islamic ideology was an indispensable element of this training. Previously tranquil and remote areas beyond the reach of the Pakistani government became awash in militant religious ideas and high-powered weaponry. As the American military would later discover, this situation would prove disastrous.⁴¹

The Americans were thinking only of defeating the Soviets, but the Pakistanis were already planning for what happened after the Soviets left. When the Soviets began their withdrawal in 1988, Pakistan lost little time in diverting its well-prepared jihadists for another insurgency in Kashmir.⁴² This effort was no more successful than the previous ones, but it was also no less bloody and devastating. The same year, General Zia’s tenure came to an end with his mysterious death in a plane crash (in which Arnold Raphel, the American ambassador to Pakistan, was also killed). He left behind a country primed for jihad, radically Islamized, and awash in cheap weaponry.

AFTER THE SOVIET INVASION—THE RISE OF THE TALIBAN

Although the Pakistani government returned to civilian control after General Zia’s death, its policies remained largely the same. Whether the Prime Minister was Benazir Bhutto (daughter of Zulfiqar) or Nawaz Sharif, Pakistan continued its effort to gain control in Afghanistan. The chief agents for this takeover were eventually the Pashtun students trained at Pakistan’s jihadist madrasas along the Afghan border.

However, when the Soviets withdrew in 1989, the main opponents to the left-wing government in Afghanistan was the Tajik war hero Ahmed Shah Massoud and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Hekmatyar had been ISIS’s chief Pashtun mujahideen proxy, and Pakistan saw Massoud’s growing authority as a threat to their own influence. The Pakistanis hated Massoud, whom they saw as a secular-minded Tajik who would not be under their thumb. When Massoud finally removed the left-wing government from power in 1992 and Hekmatyar’s power began to fade, Pakistan turned to a different group of Pashtun fanatics to carry on the jihad. These emerging young jihadists, who had taken to calling themselves Taliban (the Pashtun word for “students”) because of their origins in the Pakistan-sponsored madrasas on the border, began seizing territory in the south. Infused with puritanical Islamic militancy and feelings of ethnic superiority, the Taliban was eager to take on Massoud’s Tajiks. With full support from Pakistan’s ISI they engaged in a low-level civil war, culminating in the Taliban’s 1996 capture of Kabul.⁴³ Two days before the 9/11 attacks Massoud was assassinated, at the behest of Osama bin Laden, by Tunisians posing as a news crew.

With ISI in “command and control of military operations,” the Taliban slowly took control of Afghanistan in the mid-90s.⁴⁴ They had a steady supply of new fighters coming from ISI-controlled madrasas, making their war machine almost unstoppable. At this time, Benazir Bhutto and her administration publicly denied any connection with their Taliban protégés.⁴⁵

After the Taliban captured Kabul and de facto governance of Afghanistan, Pakistan was one of only three nations (Saudi Arabia and the UAE being the other two) to recognize them as the legitimate government. Having finally put its proxies in charge of the country, Pakistan sought to protect the new regime:

Pakistani ISI officers were stationed in every [Afghan] ministry in the provinces, the ISI established about eight bases manned by active duty and retired ISI colonels and brigadiers.⁴⁶

One of Pakistan’s bases for training jihadists was a large facility in Khost, Afghanistan, close to the Pakistan border. In 1997, an old Arab mujahideen financier came looking for a training camp to use for his own jihadist organization. The organization, of course, was al-Qaeda, and the man was Osama bin Laden. It was this camp that America struck with cruise missiles in 1998 after al-Qaeda’s African embassy bombings. Unfortunately, by that time bin Laden and his acolytes had already departed.

THE KARGIL WAR—NUCLEAR BRINKSMANSHIP

In 1999, Pakistan brought the Indian subcontinent to the brink of nuclear war over Kashmir. After successfully testing six nuclear weapons in 1998, it sent the Pakistani Army over the Line of Control into the Kargil district of Kashmir. Again there was public deception, as Pakistan argued that it was independent Kashmiri insurgents who started the conflict, while documents later revealed that Pakistani irregular forces were definitely involved.

Army Chief-of-Staff Pervez Musharraf calculated that nuclear weapons gave his country room to seize the initiative. The thinking was that India would be cautious in its response for fear of a nuclear exchange. Pakistani officials deliberately cultivated an air of unpredictability over how and when it would use its new nuclear arsenal. An indirect threat was conveyed to India that Pakistan was willing to use tactical nuclear weapons against Indian forces inside Pakistan if they happened to invade.⁴⁷

General Musharraf launched the Kargil attack on his own initiative, without the knowledge of Prime Minister Sharif. The general seems to have believed that once Pakistan had acquired territory in Kashmir, international moderation would focus on avoiding nuclear conflict. This would work to Pakistan’s favor, allowing them to hold onto any territory gained.⁴⁸ Instead, there was only two months of fighting that left 527 Indians and as many as 4,000 Pakistanis dead. The incident might have broken out into nuclear war, but Bill Clinton intervened with Sharif and insisted that he withdraw Pakistani troops from Kargil. Eventually, Sharif and Clinton released a joint statement agreeing to respect the Line of Control and pick up bilateral talks. Pakistan ended up with no new territory.

The Kargil War demonstrates how much Pakistan’s strategic thinking is shaped by its experience with proxy wars and terror-inducing jihadist aggression. General Musharraf’s assumptions were not only incorrect, they were incredibly dangerous, with implications far beyond Kashmir or even just Pakistan and India if a nuclear exchange had occurred. Over 3,000 people were killed or injured over a fruitless military adventure. In a final irony, when Prime Minister Sharif attempted to fire Musharraf after the Kargil failure he was deposed and eventually replaced by General Musharraf himself.

THE PATH TO 9/11

After deadly bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa in 1988 and a bold attack on the USS Cole in 2000, the United States began to step up its efforts to get hold of Osama bin Laden. The Americans used UN sanctions and political pressure in an attempt to get the Taliban to hand him over. Yet even as Pakistan pretended to help out, behind the scenes they had no intention of abandoning their Taliban allies. As Musharraf’s principal staff officer made clear at the time:

We are trying to stop the U.S. from undermining the Taliban regime. They cannot do it without Pakistan’s help, because they have no assets there, but we will not allow it to happen.⁴⁹

In the months before the 9/11 attacks, the Russians and French were sharing intelligence with the UN that showed about 30 ISI trucks a day moving into Afghanistan to supply the Taliban in direct contravention of UN sanctions.

When the 9/11 attacks took place, the leader of al-Qaeda was being sheltered by a regime created and nurtured by Pakistan. Despite intense international pressure on the Taliban to give up bin Laden, it could depend on Pakistan’s sponsorship and support. Even after 9/11, as the next chapter will show, very little really changed in this relationship.

PART TWO

CHAPTER TEN

Pakistan:
Post-9/11 Double Game

Pakistan is 173 million people, 100 nuclear weapons, an army bigger than the U.S. Army, and al-Qaeda headquarters sitting right there in the two-thirds of the country that the government doesn’t control. The Pakistani military and police and intelligence service don’t follow the civilian government; they are essentially a rogue state within a state. We’re now reaching the point where within one to six months we could see the collapse of the Pakistani state … The collapse of Pakistan, al-Qaeda acquiring nuclear weapons, an extremist takeover — that would dwarf everything we’ve seen in the war on terror today.

—David Kilcullen, counterinsurgency expert¹

Obviously, bin Laden did have a support system (in Pakistan). The issue was that support system within the government and the state of Pakistan or within the society of Pakistan … We all know that there are people in Pakistan who share the same belief system as bin Laden and other extremists … So that is a fact, that there are people who probably protected him.

—Husain Haqqani, former Pakistan ambassador²

Obviously the concern has always been how could a compound like this, how could bin Laden be in an area where there were [Pakistani] military establishments, where we could see the military operating and not have them know.

—U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta³

I think it’s inconceivable that bin Laden did not have a support system in the country that allowed him to remain there for an extended period of time.

—Tom Brennan, White House counterterrorism advisor⁴

Bin Laden was the ‘Golden Goose’ that the [Pakistani] army had kept under its watch but which, to its chagrin, has now been stolen from under its nose. Until then, the thinking had been to trade in the Goose at the right time for the right price, either in the form of dollars or political concessions.

—Pervez Hoodbhoy, Pakistani scientist and analyst⁵

In the weeks between September 11, 2001 and the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan, the head of the ISI, Mahmood Ahmed, made a personal visit to the Taliban’s ambassador in Islamabad. “We want to assure you,” he told the ambassador, “that you will not be alone in this jihad against America. We will be with you.”⁶ And they were. What is amazing about Pakistan’s behavior after 9/11 is not how much it changed, but how much never changed.

PAKISTAN’S 9/11 AND AL QAEDA CONNECTIONS

It is now commonly known that many of the movements and the key individuals that spread terrorism around the world today got their start during the Afghan jihad. But not many realize how many of them were trained, funded, and supplied for that jihad by Pakistan. Even less appreciated are the direct links between Pakistan and the 9/11 plot. Foremost among these links is Khalid Sheikh Mohammad (now commonly referred to simply as “KSM”).

KSM and his family were Pakistanis, although KSM himself was born and raised in Kuwait, where his father was working as an imam. Early on he became enamored by the virulent teachings of the Muslim Brotherhood, which emphasized complete rejection of western influences and the embrace of violent Islamic supremacy. KSM bounced around as a young man, eventually obtaining an engineering degree from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University. But it was during a stay in Peshawar in the 1980s where he truly found his calling as a major player in the terror business.

Peshawar was effectively the Pakistani headquarters of the Afghan jihad. Many of the jihadists who came from around the world looking to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan passed through Peshawar on their way to or from the battlefields. It was the home of now-legendary figures in modern jihadist terrorism: Abdullah Azzam, bin Laden and Zawahiri.⁷ KSM moved in this milieu for several years, expanding his knowledge and skills—and more importantly, making contacts.

One of these contacts was a nephew, a man known in the West by the name Ramzi Yousef. With financial assistance from KSM, Yousef carried out the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Yousef eluded capture and reunited with his uncle at KSM’s apartment in Karachi. The pair moved together to the Philippines, thinking it would be an ideal spot to launch more terror plots. But their elaborate plan to blow up multiple airliners was scuttled by a bomb-making fire in their apartment. Yousef was arrested and taken to the United States, but KSM escaped. Back in Pakistan, he continued to mull over the idea of using airliners to cause widespread death and destruction. Soon he had a new plan—what became the 9/11 attacks—and he traveled from Karachi to bin Laden’s safe haven in Afghanistan to make a proposal.⁸

Bin Laden gave the green light and the financial backing to the plot, but the organization and oversight was KSM’s. From Pakistan, KSM recruited the hijackers, gave them their instructions, made the final choice of targets, and issued the go order. It was in Pakistan, according to journalist Zahid Hussain, that KSM was finally arrested in 2003.⁹ At the time, he was still involved in plotting future terror attacks. He also had a personal killing to his credit: the American journalist Daniel Pearl. On a videotape later captured by American intelligence, KSM brags about beheading Pearl with his own hands.¹⁰

In retrospect, it is clear that KSM’s terrorist activities were deeply embedded in his Pakistani homeland. He received “huge support from extended family members living in Balochistan and Karachi” and was sheltered by Pakistani political activists and even an Army Major.¹¹ Recall that KSM was, by this time, a senior al-Qaeda operative. Terry McDermott, a journalist who has been investigating KSM for years, concludes:

Mohammad thrived in the chaos of Pakistan, and that chaos still exists. The melding of the various jihadi groups with Al Qaeda and the Taliban has resulted in an indecipherable mess … Most of the terrorists who have attacked the West in the name of Islam … are sparks thrown off by the fires in Pakistan.¹²

Pakistani officials claim that the opposite is true. They publicize the arrest of KSM as a demonstration of their implacable opposition to terror. Certainly Pakistan arrested hundreds of al-Qaeda operatives in the first years after 9/11. But the details of these arrests often run counter to Pakistani claims about fighting terror. For example, Abu Zubaydah was another high-profile capture made by Pakistani officials in the early 2000s. Yet, as Ahmed Rashid describes, before his arrest he “lived openly in Peshawar, with the full knowledge of the ISI, running a guesthouse for al Qaeda.” Rashid points to evidence showing that prior to 9/11 Zubaydah had worked directly with the ISI in vetting potential militants for training in al-Qaeda’s camps.¹³

Frankly, arresting al-Qaeda operatives was the least Pakistan could do to placate the United States after 9/11—particularly given that they were still maintaining active and widespread support for jihadists in western Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Kashmir. Pakistan gladly accepted billions of dollars in American aid for its anti-terrorist efforts. But the Army and the ISI focused their attention mainly on al-Qaeda members in the large cities, thereby ensuring that many Taliban fighters and leaders could escape. Not only that, they protected Afghan Taliban who retreated across the border into Pakistani border towns to regroup. There, the Taliban were equipped, supplied with fresh recruits, and sent back over the border to wage war against American and coalition soldiers and the new Afghan government. In the words of John Schmidt, Pakistan was simply “playing both sides of the street, supporting the forces who were killing the soldiers they were helping to provision.”¹⁴

Former American envoy to Afghanistan Peter Tomsen was in a position to know that the U.S.-led effort in that country “could only succeed … by convincing Pakistan to dismantle the unholy alliance network and allow Afghans to find their own path to stabilizing their country.”¹⁵ But no one in a position of authority in the Pakistani state had any intention of doing this. As they had been for decades, Pakistan was seeking “to harness radical Islamic fervor to gain strategic depth against India, liberate Kashmir, and fan the flames of religious holy war in the South Asian region and elsewhere.”¹⁶

This double game was apparent to well-informed observers in Pakistan. A year after 9/11 and General Musharraf’s promise to aid the United States in its war on terror, it was already clear to many Pakistanis that no fundamental change had taken place. Pakistani Army support for Islamic extremists had not ceased. Instead, there was only a short-term, tactical appeasement of the United States.¹⁷

The U.S. and its allies were unable or unwilling to see Pakistan’s post-9/11 alliance for what it was—a tactical maneuver. As a result, jihadists were able to use the porous Afghanistan-Pakistan border to regroup and resupply with impunity. Osama bin Laden made similar use of that border to flee the country at the end of 2001. He found a suitable base in the Federally Administered Tribal Area (FATA) of Pakistan and continued to oversee terror attacks in London, Bali, and even inside Pakistan itself. As we will see later, Pakistan would later reap the whirlwind for this. But in the early years after 9/11, Pakistan allowed part of the FATA to become a bastion of terrorist networks and jihadist fighters.¹⁸

By 2004, it was clear to Western intelligence sources that Pakistan’s ISI was reorganizing the bloody resurgence of the Afghan Taliban. It ran camps for new recruits, drove trucks full of fighters to the border, provided covering fire as they crossed, and picked them up again when they returned. Again, Rashid’s Pakistan-based journalism is revealing:

Most damning of all was the extensive monitoring of the US base at Bagram of wireless communications between Taliban commanders and Pakistani army officers on the border. The Taliban would speak to officers at border checkpoints, asking for safe passage as they came out of Afghanistan. The ISI’s activities emerged in the open when NATO troops deployed in southern Afghanistan in late 2005 were faced with a full-blown Taliban offensive being run out of Quetta [Pakistan].¹⁹

The Pakistani city of Quetta had become the Afghan Taliban’s base. Mullah Omar led a shura (council) in Quetta from which, as Rashid’s reporting describes, attacks against coalition and Afghan government forces were planned.

The situation was an amazing repeat of the original Afghan jihad in the 1980s. Once more the United States was handing billions of dollars over to Pakistan with which they funded and directed proxy fighters to kill on their own behalf. Only this time, those American dollars were ultimately being directed not against the Soviets but against Americans. Even as American intelligence became aware of the game, because America and its allies were unable to operate in Afghanistan without the supply lines they had established in Pakistan, they were unable to do much about it. The Americans were forced to tread lightly in criticizing the Pakistanis for fear of antagonizing them too much. Meanwhile, this supposed ally kept America’s enemies well supplied with weapons and recruits.

Speaking of a Pakistani double game might actually overstate their assistance to the U.S. side of that game. The Pakistanis did not just let the Afghan Taliban operate out of their territory, they actively provided direction and assistance to the Taliban. In his in-depth examination of the links between the ISI and the Taliban, Harvard’s Mark Waldman spoke to Taliban commanders who revealed that ISI officers sat in on the shura meetings in Quetta from which offensive operations were launched. After a major Taliban offensive in 2006, a joint assessment by the U.S., NATO, and the Afghan government concluded that the ISI was paying and even pressuring the Afghan Taliban to fight.²⁰

HIDING BIN LADEN

The most glaring and undeniable example of Pakistan’s double game is the case of America’s most wanted himself, Osama bin Laden. The spacious villa in Abbottabad where he was discovered and killed by American Special Forces was constructed, U.S. and European intelligence sources say, with money and assistance provided by former ISI officers. Current and former ISI officials who lived near the facility knew it for what it was when it was completed in 2005. Indeed, sources also suspect bin Laden’s entire escape from Afghanistan was orchestrated by Pakistan:

Bin Laden may have been staying as a guest in safe houses provided by several retired ISI officers, all with the full knowledge of the Pakistani government, for years prior to the villa being constructed.²¹

This should come as no surprise. For decades, Saudi intelligence and the ISI had worked together to support the Taliban and, at least indirectly, the efforts of bin Laden. It was highly unlikely that an attack on the United States would suddenly destroy allegiances and relationships built up over a lifetime—particularly when many of those on the Pakistani side were highly sympathetic to bin Laden’s cause. According to French intelligence services, the ISI would provide bin Laden shelter so long as he did not initiate terror operations inside Pakistan or encourage attacks against the Saudi royal family.²²

It was American intelligence which smoked out bin Laden even as the Pakistanis continued to stonewall and misdirect. In 2010, a phone call from a man known to be bin Laden’s courier to the outside was intercepted by American agents. A drone aircraft tailed the courier back to the Abbottabad complex. Even as SEALs trained for the raid that would eventually bag bin Laden, Pakistan continued its ruse, suggesting that the terror mastermind might be hiding somewhere in the mountains. This was typical behavior, according to one military intelligence agent, who claimed the Pakistanis “actually protected Bin Laden by sending the CIA and DIA down a series of false trails for years.”²³ Counter-terrorism Chief (and now CIA Director) John Brennan agrees, saying after the raid that it was “inconceivable that Bin Laden could have been living there without the knowledge of the government.”²⁴

BLOWBACK

The recognition of Pakistan’s role in aiding America’s enemies is somewhat complicated by the fact that General Musharraf’s regime and Pakistani civilians had also become terror targets. This gives some apparent credence to Pakistan’s oft-repeated claims that it was a victim of terrorism, not its sponsor.

This appearance is deceptive. In truth, the terrorism Pakistan currently endures is the result of its own recklessness and decades-long sponsorship of the forces of jihad. As we saw in the previous Pakistan chapters, the country has radical Islamic ideology baked into its original creation, and it has cleaved to that ideology ever since. The country has nurtured and supported the forces of jihad in any number of ways, including state funding and through a network of radical madrasas. What Pakistan started facing in the mid-2000s was blowback from the other side of its double game.

The blowback is due to a tactical distinction which the Pakistani government is willing to make for political reasons but which many militants are not. We have already seen that groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba, which were used to spread terror and mayhem in Kashmir, were legally banned in Pakistan while never being actively disrupted or disbanded by the government. But when the Pakistanis began to arrest al-Qaeda operatives to appease the United States they stirred up a hornet’s nest.

Al-Qaeda terrorists who were based or took refuge in Pakistan were deeply integrated with native Pakistani groups. So, when the government began to crack down on them, the native groups providing them shelter had to make a decision. Would they serve Islam by collaborating with the Pakistani state or with al-Qaeda fighters? For many, it wasn’t a difficult choice.

By 2003, it was clear to many observers that the areas of chief concern in Pakistan had been operating outside the control of the central government since the days of the Raj. Prior to 9/11, Pakistan (and even the United States, when it was interested in foiling the Soviet Union in Afghanistan) was happy to weaponize and radicalize these areas. When the Pakistani Army attempted to intervene in these regions—places like South Waziristan and the Swat Valley—they discovered a Pakistani variant of the Taliban had emerged there. In many cases these militants were working with al-Qaeda. Local tribal leaders had been usurped and replaced; their jihadist replacements were hostile and resistant Army incursions into “their” territory. John Schmidt describes the situation:

Tribal area madrasa students, who a few years earlier would have headed to Afghanistan to join the Taliban flocked to their banner. So too did disaffected members of Punjab-based groups such as the Jaish-e-Mohammad … They would side with Al Qaeda and make war against the state.²⁵

The turning point came with two serious assassination attempts against General Musharraf in December, 2003. Both occurred in Rawalpindi, where Musharraf was based at the Army’s headquarters. The first attempt destroyed a bridge moments after Musharraf’s vehicle had crossed it. An FBI device in his car saved him by jamming the detonation signal. The second attempt was a double suicide bombing on Christmas Day that killed 15 people, but just missed Musharraf.

The background of the suicide bombers was sobering. Both men had fought with the Taliban in Afghanistan, and one was even a member of Pakistan’s own Jaish-e-Mohammed (JM). Both attacks were planned by JM leader and veteran jihadist Amjad Hussain Farooqi. Al Qaeda operatives planted the explosives.²⁶ In other words, the two men had both served Pakistan’s interests for years; now they were attacking Pakistan’s leader inside Pakistan.

Another ominous development came in 2007 when 13 Pakistani jihadist groups joined together to form an umbrella group called Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). It is this group which people currently refer to as the “Pakistani Taliban.”²⁷ The TTP has brought home the suicide bombers Pakistan once sent into Kashmir and Afghanistan to carry on a ghastly campaign of mass murder inside Pakistan. In 2009 alone there were 87 suicide attacks in the country, most of them targeting civilians, with a death toll over 1,300.²⁸ Between January 2009 and September 2012, 8,953 civilian deaths in Pakistan were caused by terror attacks.²⁹

This escalation of violence has certainly encouraged the Pakistani government to engage in a serious fight against the Taliban within their borders. Yet their efforts have been full of false starts and dangerous compromises. Army incursions into mountainous frontier bases usually end in completely ineffective truces.³⁰ One such deal in February 2005 with a leader named Baitullah Mehsud illustrates the problem:

Baitullah Mehsud never fulfilled his end of the bargain. He saw it as a total Pakistani surrender and a sign of weakness. He used the reprieve from Pakistani attacks to terrorize local khans and maliks into granting him total power … When the Pakistani Army responded to these flagrant breaches of the treaty by launching an offensive, Baitullah Mehsud’s fighters fought the Pakistani army to a standstill. This necessitated further humiliating treaties, resulting in yet another peace deal that simply allowed Baitullah Mehsud to regroup and further expand his power.³¹

As the Pakistani government has continued to prop up (and to some extent direct) the Afghan Taliban, it has also found itself targeted as an enemy by native jihadists. Its response has been largely ineffective and counter-productive, neither dissuading terrorists from further attacks nor limiting their abilities to carry them out. While this situation lasts, Pakistan continues to serve as a home to a wide variety of jihadists. Today, Pakistan is both able and willing to use jihadists to damage other nations, and is also unable to control many of the very jihadists it has spawned.

FROM LONDON TO MUMBAI

These two dangers emanating from Pakistan are well represented by two of the worst terror attacks since 9/11: London 2005 and Mumbai 2008. Lashkar-e-Taiba is an unusual jihadist proxy in that it is one of the few that has not yet turned against its sponsor.³² Perhaps because the ISI groomed it for Kashmir, the group has retained its focus on that province and its chief adversary there, India. Pakistan banned Lashkar-e-Taiba in 2002, but this was just a token gesture with no follow-through. The group retains a massive headquarters complex near Lahore.³³ It still recruits new fighters from among Pakistan’s elite, and still receives training, funding, supplies, and directions from the ISI.³⁴

In November 2008 Lashkar-e-Taiba jihadists unleashed a three-day spectacle of mass murder across Mumbai. By the time it was over, they had killed 166 and spread terror throughout India and the civilized world. In the subsequent trials of two men involved in the plot, the full nature of ISI’s collusion emerged.

Trial testimony and the investigative work of U.S. intelligence independently showed that multiple ranking officers in the ISI helped recruit attackers, funded the attacks, and even directed them from a safe house in Pakistan. The explicit goal was “killing Americans, Jews and other Westerners as well as Indians.”³⁵ A trail of emails, videos, phone intercepts, credit card charges, and eyewitness accounts all corroborated the detailed involvement of ISI.

When Pakistanis immigrate to the West, the same commitment to Islam and jihad can be found. Nowhere is this more evident than the United Kingdom, which is home to about three million Muslims, most of them from South Asia.³⁶ Is it a coincidence that immigrant communities of Sikhs and Hindus have made peaceful homes in England, while Muslims who also hail from the Indian subcontinent have been a source of discontent, intolerance, and violence? Surveys have shown that second-generation Pakistani Muslims in Britain are more likely to hold violent, anti-British views than their parents.³⁷

In 2005, this situation became undeniable when three British-born Muslims from Pakistani families (along with a Jamaican-born convert to Islam) blew themselves up in suicide bombings in London, murdering 52 people. The year before the bombings, two of the members of the suicide group traveled to Pakistan for four months where they received explosives training at an al-Qaeda camp. In fact, their initial contact in Pakistan, Rashid Rauf, was himself a British-born Pakistani. Rauf stayed in contact with the future London bombers up until July 7, 2005 when he was arrested in Pakistan for plotting to blow up transatlantic airliners.³⁸

These British-born Pakistani jihadists were far from being aberrations. Richard Reid, the so-called shoe bomber, also received training and direction from Pakistan. American journalist Daniel Pearl was investigating connections between Reid and Pakistani jihadists when he was kidnapped and eventually murdered. One of the men involved in Pearl’s kidnapping was a British Pakistani named Ahmed Omar Saaed Sheikh. It later emerged that Ahmed Sheikh also may have spent time working for the ISI. He is currently on death row in Pakistan for his role in the Pearl murder.³⁹

The flow of British Pakistani jihadists has wide-ranging consequences. In 2003, a British Pakistani from West London, Asif Mohammed Hanif, blew himself up outside a nightclub in Tel Aviv, killing three civilians. Another British Pakistani killed Indian soldiers and Kashmiri students in a suicide attack in Srinagar.⁴⁰ And it’s not just Britain. In September, 2008, Spanish police arrested a dozen Pakistanis who had formed a terror-planning cell in Barcelona.⁴¹ Even though most Pakistani immigrants are honest and decent, it is clear that there is a disproportionate danger from their communities.

THE ONGOING THREAT FROM PAKISTAN

Pakistan remains a major threat to the world on three key points: as a producer of jihadists, as a major drug trafficker, and as a key agent in nuclear proliferation. On the first point, Mark Waldman has conducted eye-opening investigations in recent years. He found that the ISI continues to run training centers for jihadist insurgents and the madrasas which help to create them. In interviews with Taliban commanders he learned “that significant numbers of their fighters attend training camps in Pakistan that are run or backed by the ISI.”⁴²

As a drug trafficker, Pakistan is one of the primary routes through which Afghan poppy production reaches world markets. A 2010 report found that 40 percent of Afghanistan’s opiate trafficking (Afghanistan is the number one supplier of opiates worldwide) was either consumed in or trafficked through Pakistan.⁴³ Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has admitted that top military and intelligence officials, in his first term as Prime Minister, asked for a green light to use drug money “to finance proxy terrorism in the region” (all done in clandestine fashion so no one would suspect Pakistan).⁴⁴ This was simply a request for official imprimatur to what a number of government officials were already engaged in privately—for example, General Fazle Haq (a former Chief Minister and Governor) “was popularly known as General Noriega of Pakistan due to his deep rooted involvement in drug business.”⁴⁵

Perhaps even more significantly, Pakistan has used its status as a nuclear power to become a destabilizing force around the world. It has exported nuclear secrets to Libya, Iran, and North Korea. In the case of Iran, information on uranium processing critical to producing the material necessary for nuclear weapons was acquired from Pakistan. Now, the people of the Arabian Peninsula are looking to Pakistan to provide them with weaponry if Iran manages to build a nuclear arsenal. Saudi Arabia is reportedly negotiating with the Pakistanis to acquire a stockpile of their own to match Iran.⁴⁶

In the end, Pakistan today is very much a schizophrenic nation—a Hindu soul underneath an Arabic mind. Without a national identity of its own, “Pakistan defined itself by its opposition to India,” as the son of the assassinated Punjab governor Salman Taseer puts it. Guided by its two-nation theory, Pakistan turned its back on everything that it had known before—the literature, customs, rituals, and even clothing it once shared with India. “In trying to turn its back on its shared past with India,” the same observer says, “Pakistan turned its back on itself.”⁴⁷

But once cut off from its past, the Muslims of Pakistan could not simply become Arab any more than they could become Japanese. Instead of being unified by Islam, Pakistan—as we have seen in the past three chapters—was torn apart by it. It is still torn apart by Islam.

Take the case of one of Pakistan’s most ardent jihadists, Abul A’la Maududi. He founded the jihadist group Jamaat-i-Islami in 1941, and is one of the undisputed godfathers of the modern jihadist movement. He spent his life in a campaign “to institutionalize Islamic values in every part of Pakistani society.”⁴⁸ Despite his uncompromising approach to jihad, Maududi forbade his own children from getting involved in his movement or reading his books. As his son Farooq later reflected, “this is a tragedy of all our religious politics that we use [other] people’s children, but keep our own away from it as we all know about its negative impacts.”⁴⁹ When Maududi fell ill late in life, he sought treatment not from Islamic doctors but at an American hospital in Buffalo, New York where his son was a physician. Hypocrisy and hatred are never far apart in the stories of Pakistani jihadists.

PART TWO

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Iran After the Islamic Revolution
(1979)

Don’t listen to those who speak of democracy. They all are against Islam. They want to take the nation away from its mission. We will break all the poison pens of those who speak of nationalism, democracy, and such things.

—Grand Ayatollah Khomeini¹

If the people of this religion [Islam] are asked about the proof for the soundness of their religion, they flare up, get angry and spill the blood of whoever confronts them with this question. They forbid rational speculation, and strive to kill their adversaries. This is why truth became thoroughly silenced and concealed.

—Razi, 9th century Persian physician²

I am an Iranian, a descendant of Cyrus the Great. This emperor proclaimed at the pinnacle of power 2,500 years ago that he “would not reign over the people if they did not wish it.” He promised not to force any person to change his religion and faith and guaranteed freedom for all. The Charter of Cyrus the Great should be studied in the history of human rights.

—Shirin Ebadi, Nobel laureate³

Iran was indeed Islamized, but it was not Arabized. Persians remained Persians. And after an interval of silence, Iran reemerged as a separate, different and distinctive element within Islam, eventually adding a new element even to Islam itself. Culturally, politically, and most remarkable of all even religiously, the Iranian contribution to this new Islamic civilization is of immense importance.

—Bernard Lewis, historian⁴

In 1986, a woman living in rural Iran, 35-year-old mother of nine Soraya Manutchehri, was buried up to her shoulders in the earth and stoned to death. Her crime, as related by family members, was becoming “an inconvenient wife.” Soraya had been bartered away at age 13 to a petty local criminal named Ghorban-Ali. A violent man who consorted with prostitutes, Ghorban-Ali turned against the mother of his children when he found a 14-year-old girl who struck his fancy. Although polygamy was allowed, he was unable to support a second family financially and unwilling to return the dowry to his wife’s family.⁵

Ghorban-Ali had a third option, one unavailable to Iranian women: he accused his wife of adultery. Under sharia law, the burden of proof falls upon the wife in such a case to prove her innocence. Meanwhile, Ghorban-Ali found a male cousin willing to swear to the truth of the adultery charge. The testimony of two adult men was compelling proof to the sharia court. The local mullah—a man who had himself been imprisoned for child molestation under the Shah—supported the charge. Soraya was convicted, sentenced, and executed in barbaric fashion.⁶

Her story would never have seen the light, if not for the efforts of an Iranian-born journalist who came to her village not long after the execution. Freidoune Sahebjam was traveling across the country, assessing the impact of the Islamic Revolution of 1979. When Sahebjam came to Soraya’s village, he heard the tale of the innocent woman’s brutal execution. His later account of the event, published in 1994 as The Stoning of Soraya M., became an international best-seller and was made into a feature film.

More than two decades after the event, however, it is the shame of Iran that such executions still take place. The victims are overwhelmingly women. By any ordinary estimate, it is the fruit of “a system that rejects modernity, justice, equality and rationality.”⁷ That it still happens in Iran, a country which is home to an ancient and civilized culture and full of all the trappings and infrastructure of a modern state, is a testimony to the impact Freidoune Sahebjam was originally trying to assess. It is part of the enduring legacy of Iran’s Islamic Revolution.

THE ISLAMIC REVOLUTION

The political regime which governs modern Iran is only 35 years old. It came to power in a 1979 revolution that replaced the Western-backed monarch Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (the Shah) with a theocratic totalitarian state led by Shi’ite clerics. Although the events leading up to the Iranian Revolution are quite complex, a couple of factors stand out: a popular perception among Iranians that their country was being dominated by western people and ideals, and growing hostility to heavy-handed efforts by the Shah to maintain control.⁸

The guiding figure of the Revolution was Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Khomeini had the view that Muslim governments should be under the “guardianship” of religious clerics.⁹ Without such protection, Islam would deviate from traditional sharia law. Khomeini attributed a wide variety of social problems to such deviation—including poverty, injustice, and the dominance of Muslims by heretics.¹⁰ This view put Khomeini at odds with more moderate Shi’ite scholars such as Mohammad Kazem Shariatmadari, because traditionally Shia clerics have held themselves aloof from government involvement.¹¹ Out of 12 Grand Ayatollahs alive during the Revolution, only one voiced support for Khomeini’s published political doctrines—and that one later recanted.¹²

Khomeini was an expert in the time-honored Shi’ite practice of taqiyya (religious dissimulation). Taqiyya is a legal or religious justification to lie, blaspheme, or commit illegal acts in order to avoid personal danger. Although all Muslim sects recognize taqiyya as sanctioned by the Qur’an, it has been particularly useful for Shia Islam, which has traditionally been a persecuted minority sect among majority-Sunni populations. Briefly put, taqiyya provided Khomeini with a religious justification to lie about his true political motives. Even today, taqiyya deception is an intrinsic part of Iran’s political engagement with the world.

Taqiyya was essential for Khomeini because the Iranian Revolution initially involved a collection of groups—not just extremist mullahs. There were more moderate religious groups who wanted to return to the Constitution of 1906, which included greater parliamentary controls over the kingship. There were leftist groups which hoped to replace the monarchy with a socialist or communist government.¹³ Khomeini also used taqiyya to help keep the Western powers from assisting the Shah. He portrayed himself as a moderate to Western media and emphasized complaints against the Shah, which were echoed by secular leftist factions within Iran. It was only after the overthrow of the Shah was completed that enough people realized that Khomeini’s true aim was the establishment of Islamic fundamentalism as the supreme political force in Iran.

Once Khomeini’s forces prevailed, the ugly reality of the Revolution became clear. One of the faces of that ugly reality was Ayatollah Khalkhalli. In the words of V.S. Naipaul:

Khomeini received and preached and blessed; Khalkhalli hanged. He was Khomeini’s hanging judge. It was Khalkhalli who had conducted many of those swift Islamic trials that had ended in executions.¹⁴

By his own estimation, Khalkhalli was personally responsible for the deaths of some 400 enemies of the Revolution in Tehran.¹⁵

Perhaps the most famous of Khalkhalli’s victims was the Shah’s long-time Prime Minister Amir Abbas Hoveyda. Hoveyda was a political pragmatist who attempted to conciliate with forces opposed to the Shah. He waged a long but unfortunately futile war against corruption in the government. After the Revolution, Khalkhalli ran a show trial in which Hoveyda was accused of a wide variety of crimes—many of which were based on nothing more than rumor and were never substantiated. Hoveyda was denied access to counsel and was not permitted even to bring testimony in his own defense. Instead of dying by firing squad as sentenced, he was shot in the neck and left lying on the floor in pain, begging his executioner to finish the job, until he was shot in the head.

The leftist and moderate groups who joined in the Revolution were purged or killed by Khomeini’s forces. Khomeini’s slogan, “Neither East, nor West—Islamic Republic,” indicates his allegiance was not to a modern political ideology, neither democracy nor communism, but to his own peculiar brand of Shia Islam.¹⁶

Khomeini seems to have seen himself as something like the Islamic version of Lenin: a revolutionary hero who would ignite a firestorm of religious revolutionary excitement that would take over the Islamic world. His main problem here was that the majority of Muslims worldwide (about 80 percent) are Sunni, while Khomeini and his regime were Shia. It was never likely that Iran would take over the leadership of the Islamic ummah (community of believers). Instead, despite internal success—including the crafting of a Constitution that enshrined Khomeini’s ideal of clerical guardianship as a fundamental political principle—Iran was not able to export its revolution. Less than two years later, it was in a prolonged, brutal war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

Today, the Shia fundamentalists whom Khomeini brought to power are still in control in Iran. But as the events surrounding the “Green Revolution” of 2009 showed, their hold over the people is far from the popular support they enjoyed in ’79. Many of the same complaints the people once directed to the Shah are now directed to the clerics who now rule the country. There is every sign that the modern regime is even more oppressive than the Shah since, in addition to security forces who abuse anyone who speaks out against the mullahs, there is widespread suppression of any cultural activity deemed “un-Islamic.” In short, there is all the oppression of the Shah with none of the freedoms he promoted.¹⁷

The regime maintains its legitimacy and its hold on power in one of the oldest ways known to politics: by stoking anger and hatred against external enemies. Khomeini’s rhetoric about “the Great Satan” (i.e. America) and “the Little Satan” (Israel) are now essentially enshrined as public policy. More significantly, the regime positions itself as a defender of Islam against the encroachments of modernity. Thus, the mullahs promote such things as sharia law, abuse of women, oppression of religious minorities, and the use of terrorism. Promoting hatred of the West and modernity is necessary—without these things, the mullahs have no purpose.

HATRED OF THE U.S. AND ISRAEL

Almost from the beginning, the Iranian regime has used anti-American feeling to distract attention from its own problems. One of the most prominent examples of this came early in the Iranian Hostage Crisis. This event began in late 1979 when a group of Iranian students, excited by the recent Revolution, decided to take over the American embassy in Tehran. Khomeini gave the students his blessing, then tied his regime to the event to milk the students’ enthusiasm for his own prestige.¹⁸

When the hostage-taking became popular with Iranians, who still regarded the Americans as meddlers in their internal affairs, the event took on a life of its own. Originally planned to take no more than a week, the hostages remained under de facto house arrest for over a year. Throughout negotiations for the release of the hostages Khomeini followed a pattern of refusing any agreement at the last second—almost as if he didn’t want the publicity to end.¹⁹

In the meanwhile, Khomeini used the crisis to deflect criticism of his theocratic constitution. With nationalist sentiments running high, the controversial political document passed by public referendum.²⁰ His earlier promises to stay out of politics were forgotten. Once the hostages had outlived their usefulness, they were released. Ironically, none of Iran’s original demands were met: they had asked for the return of the Shah to face trial, but the Shah died in exile while the hostage crisis was at its peak. There were demands for the United States to apologize for its role in a 1953 coup that removed a popular Prime Minister and to unfreeze Iranian assets in the United States.²¹ Neither of these things happened. But the event galvanized support for the regime and enshrined anti-Americanism as a “go-to” strategy, which it has used ever since.²²

Iran’s distrust of the United States has not been entirely unfounded. The 1953 coup that was brought up during the Hostage Crisis is an embarrassing case in point. In the early 1950’s, Iranians were becoming increasingly annoyed by the profits the British Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (later British Petroleum) was reaping for their oil. In 1951, the Iranian government nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and relations between the UK and Iran rapidly deteriorated. The British appealed to the United States for help. Alarmed by the prospect that Iran could shift leftward and possibly into the orbit of the Soviet Union—even though Mosaddegh was publicly opposed to Iran’s pro-Soviet Tudeh Party²³—the CIA coordinated with British Intelligence to orchestrate a coup.²⁴ In the end, Mosaddegh was ousted as Prime Minister and spent his last years under house arrest. Mosaddegh and his nationalization policy were both popular with the Iranian people, and after the ouster their anti-British sentiments became increasingly directed toward the U.S. as well.²⁵

Iranian hostility toward Israel, on the other hand, is motivated in large part by internal concerns of the mullah’s regime. Iran does not share borders with Israel, and its population is largely Persian, not Arab, so they do not exactly have a dog in the fight between Israelis and Palestinian Arabs. Indeed, prior to 1979 Iran wasn’t particularly hostile toward Israel. Although they opposed the partition of Palestine in 1947 and voted against Israel’s admission to the U.N. in 1949, during Shah Pahlavi’s reign, relations between the two countries were cordial. It was only after the 1979 revolution that Iran became openly hostile toward Israel. Ayatollah Khomeini is the one who declared Israel “Little Satan” and an enemy of Islam.²⁶ Ironically, despite this official hostility Iran still purchased hundreds of millions of dollars worth of military arms and equipment from Israel during its war with Iraq—support which some scholars say was critical to surviving the war with its borders intact.

But despite Iranian hostility toward America and the West, these also hold an attraction for the Iranian people. Author V.S. Naipaul saw this attraction in the people even in the immediate aftermath of the Revolution:

What had attracted these Iranians to the United States and the civilization it represented? Couldn’t they say? The attraction existed; it was more than a need for education and skills. But the attraction wasn’t admitted; and in that attraction, too humiliating for an old and proud people to admit, there lay disturbance—expressed in dandyism, mimicry, boasting, and rejection.²⁷

While Khomeini was originally hailed as a liberator of Iran from the oppressions of the Shah, the Iranian people weren’t deeply religious in the sense of being regular mosque-goers or enthusiastic fasters. They didn’t expect Shia clerics to take over the economy, court system, government administration, and much of the management of day-to-day life.²⁸

A modern study of the Islamic Republic agrees with Naipaul’s early assessment, concluding that Iran’s regime hates the West, in part, because of its “seductive power as an alternative to the religious life.”²⁹ The majority of the Iranian population today was born after the revolution. They have no memory of past oppressions and plenty of experience with the oppressions of the current regime. They know that before 1979 their country had a number of civilized comforts to offer which the mullahs now declare off-limits.

OPPRESSION AND ANTI-MODERNISM

The Iranian mullahs keep themselves in business by constantly raising the cry that Islam is endangered. Naipaul observed this on his travels in post-revolutionary Iran back in 1981, reporting a Pakistani religious student at Qom telling him in hushed tones, “If there had been no revolution here, Islam would have been wiped out.”³⁰ Prior to the Revolution, efforts to modernize and westernize Iran were associated with the Shah and the Pahlavi dynasty. Under Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Iran made enormous strides in women’s rights—granting women the right to vote, the power to seek a divorce, and the possibility of winning custody of their own children. Islamic theologians who wished to become clerics had to pass examinations to demonstrate competence. Iran was a patron of the arts through such promotions as the Shiraz Art Festival.

After the Shah’s overthrow, all this was associated with unwanted “western” influences. Women’s rights became a special focus of the new Islamic Republic, but the laws which gave women equal protection now came with a caveat: “in conformity with Islamic criteria.” In practice, this has meant increased inequality and injustice. Under sharia law in Iran, the life of a woman is worth only half that of a man. This is reflected in the laws concerning “blood money” paid to the families or victims of murder and abuse: female victims and their families are compensated at half the rate for men. In court, the legal testimony of a woman is worth half that of a man—in cases of he said/she said, “he” always wins unless “she” has another woman to back her up.³¹

In some cases, the Islamic Republic simply reversed earlier movements in Iranian society. In 1936, the first Pahlavi Shah outlawed compulsory use of the hijab (proper Islamic dress for women). After 1979, despite Khomeini’s earlier promises, the hijab became compulsory for women under penalty of receiving 70 lashes. Though this harsh punishment has since been amended to “only” imprisonment and fines, women in Iran are still required to cover their bodies except for the face, hands, and feet in public.³²

In the notorious example of Nikah al-Mutah (literally, “pleasure marriage”), the Islamic Republic uses the cover of a disputed religious practice to exploit women. This “temporary marriage” involves a contract between a man (who can be married or unmarried) and an unmarried woman to marry one another for a time and price agreed on between them. The practice is obviously liable to exploitation, and is widely regarded by many Muslims and non-Muslims alike as little more than sanctioned prostitution. Mutah is forbidden under Sunni Islam, but Shi’ites allow it on the grounds that it is allegedly sanctioned by the Qur’an.³³

The Iranian regime’s attitude towards women can be seen clearly in its treatment of lawyer, activist, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shirin Ebadi. Before the Revolution, Ebadi worked to become the first female judge in Iran—a position women were barred from after Khomeini’s new constitution went into effect. Since 1979, she has been a lawyer and professor of law known for defending the rights of children and women and providing legal support to critics of the ruling mullahs. When she was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2003, government officials were critical both of the selection and Ebadi’s decision not to cover her hair during the award ceremony.³⁴ In 2008, her continued criticism of human rights violations and decision to defend the families of members of the Baha’i faith (a persecuted religious sect) provoked threats to her life and security.³⁵ In 2009, while traveling in London, Ebadi was told that her bank box had been raided and her Nobel Prize medal, along with other honors and awards stored there, had been taken by Iran’s Revolutionary Court. Although the Iranian government denies it, Ebadi has remained in exile ever since, believing that if she returns the government could imprison her as a dissident—or worse.³⁶

The leaders of the Islamic Republic have also spent the years since the Revolution purging the clerical ranks of more moderate voices. One of the earliest victims of this treatment was Grand Ayatollah Mohammad Shariatmadari, who actually saved the life of the future leader of the Revolution Ruhollah Khomeini by declaring him a Grand Ayatollah at a time when the Shah was angling to remove Khomeini as a threat. Because the Shah was unable legally to execute a member of the highest rank of the religious establishment, Khomeini was permitted to go into exile, where he remained until 1979.³⁷

Despite having saved Khomeini’s life, Shariatmadari did not exactly agree with his politics. Instead, he preferred that Iran return to its 1906 constitution, with a limited monarchy and minimal clerical influence over political decisions. He was openly critical of Khomeini’s interest in establishing a new political regime under the “guardianship” of Shi’ite scholars.³⁸ The reward for this opposition was to be placed on house arrest and to see his family members arrested and tortured. Later, he was convicted on trumped-up evidence of conspiring to overthrow the Islamic Republic and spent his few remaining years under close watch.

The Islamic Republic is even harsher in dealing with people outside the faith. Iranian-American Saeed Abedini is a prominent example. Abedini is an Iranian-born Muslim who converted to Christianity in 2000. In the early 2000’s, he was a pivotal figure in the house church movement in Iran, which was a grassroots effort to spread Christianity through the use of ordinary homes as churches where believers could come and worship together. Iranian authorities cracked down on this movement in 2005, which prompted Abedini and his family to move to the United States. Abedini was ordained as a minister in 2008 and became an American citizen in 2010. On one of his trips back to Iran in 2012, he was arrested for his previous evangelical work and sentenced to eight years in prison.³⁹

Zoroastrianism is an ancient religion native to Iran. The ruling regime actively persecutes members of this religion. Believers are typically excluded from university positions or employment. During the Iraq war, they were used for suicide missions. They are typically characterized in the media as polytheists and devil worshippers.⁴⁰

Another native Iranian religion, the Baha’i faith, is actively persecuted because its followers are viewed as apostates from Islam. Christians, Jews, and even Zoroastrians receive some manner of protection under the Islamic republic, but as Baha’is are legally regarded as “unprotected infidels” and “heretics,” they have few protections.⁴¹ The persecution of Baha’is in Iran is government policy, according to an official document produced by Iran’s Supreme Revolutionary Cultural Council. This document directs that members of the religion be expelled from universities, denied employment, and denied any “position of influence” in society. In addition, since 1979 201 members of the faith have been killed by the regime “solely on the basis of their religious belief.”⁴² Believers have also been subject to a variety of lesser abuses, including imprisonment and property theft.⁴³

THE ANOMALOUS ISLAMIC REPUBLIC

Too few appreciate just how anomalous the current ruling regime is in the history of Iran. In the words of one journalist, it is a bit of an experiment: “Can a country be run effectively by holy men imposing an extreme version of Islam on a people soaked in such a rich Persian past?”⁴⁴ In a cruel twist of historical fate, one of the great violators of human rights in the world today is the nation where concepts of freedom and human rights may well have originated. An artifact from Cyrus the Great, who first established the Persian Empire in the 6th century BC, declares the king a defender of the people’s freedom, bans slavery and oppression, and forbids taking property by force or without compensation. The same Cyrus is the king who freed the Jews from their Babylonian captivity, enabling many to return to Jerusalem and rebuild their Temple.⁴⁵

When Arab Muslims took control of the Persian Plateau in the 7th century, the people did not entirely forsake their former culture. Instead, as historian Bernard Lewis points out in the passage cited at the beginning of this chapter, Iran was Islamized without being Arabized. The Arab conquerors—more accustomed to raiding desert caravans than ruling a far-flung empire—found themselves relying on Persians for the bureaucratic maintenance of their new domains.⁴⁶ By that time, the Persian people had more than a thousand years of experience running a large-scale civilization. And they never quite gave up the pride in their past, as the great Persian poet Ferdowsi paid tribute to in his verse:

Damn this world, damn this time, damn this fate

That uncivilized Arabs have come to make me Muslim.⁴⁷

Since the founding of the Safavid Dynasty in 1501, the Shia sect of Islam has also been part of Iran’s identity. Until 1979, however, the tendency among clerics was to be removed from political affairs. This is partly religious, as Shi’ites believe that political rule of the Muslim people can only be exercised legitimately by members of the Prophet’s family—and this will not be possible until the so-called Twelfth Imam returns. But it is also partly because Shi’ites have historically been a minority party in the Muslim world and have found it to their advantage to keep silent rather than agitate the Sunni majority.⁴⁸

The ability of the Persian people themselves is perhaps best illustrated in the fate of the Parsees. The modern Parsees are the descendants of a group of Zoroastrians who emigrated from Iran to India during the Islamic conquest of the Persian Plateau. In the thousand years since that migration, they have integrated successfully into Indian society while still maintaining distinct customs and traditions. One of the most successful business ventures in India, the Tata Group, is a $100 billion dollar conglomerate founded, owned, and run by a Parsee family from Gujarat. Parsee families in general are among the wealthiest and most respected today in Indian society.⁴⁹

When the Pahlavi Dynasty came to power in 1925, they took Ataturk’s approach in Turkey as the model for modernizing and westernizing the country. The first Shah encouraged the development of modern industry, began a cross-country railway system, and set up a nationwide system for public education. Efforts by the Pahlavis also tended to shrink the influence of the clerical establishment while increasing the sphere of secular activity in Iran. A high point came with the 1963 program called the White Revolution, which reformed property laws, granted women the right to vote, and sought to end illiteracy through universal education.

The Shah was accused of trying to modernize his country too quickly and being too paranoid and heavy-handed in dealing with the people. As later events have shown, the Shah had absolutely nothing on Khomeini and the Islamic Republic of Iran.⁵⁰ Since the Islamic Republic has no claim to superior governance, their raison d’etre has become opposing the United States and Israel abroad and suppressing women and Baha’is at home. As the Green Revolution of 2009 indicated, the many Iranians who have grown up under the leadership of the mullahs are coming to suspect the Revolution only exchanged a secular despot for a worse religious one.⁵¹

Unfortunately, on November 24, 2013 the United States played right into the Iranian regime’s hands with an interim agreement in Geneva. The Islamic Republic agreed to halt certain portions of is nuclear weapons program in exchange for a significant reduction in economic sanctions (about $7 billion worth, measured in U.S. dollars). This initial deal was put into place January 20, 2014, then later extended to July 1, 2015. As of publication time, Iran is still in negotiations with the “P5+1” (the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council plus Germany) on a deal which will ramp up international inspections of the Iranian nuclear program.

The ordinary observer hears only occasional details about these ongoing negotiations, but to anyone familiar with Shia Islam the difficulties are obvious and extensive. Above all, the P5+1 are doubtless experiencing first-hand the difficulty of negotiating with people for whom deception—taqiyya—is a fundamental religious principle. The benefits to the Iranian regime of this whole affair are clear: by negotiating with the world’s major players they gain legitimacy and authority at home and also gain time for the covert pursuit of nuclear weapons. Decades of containment of the Shia regime are being cast aside out of fear of any direct confrontation, and the end result will likely be in the mullahs’ best interest—and no one else’s.

PART TWO

CHAPTER TWELVE

Gulf Cooperation Council

One of the most tragic aspects of the situation is that many migrants silently accept the exploitation and deprivation of their rights because they view themselves as powerless and without effective remedy.

—Human Rights Watch¹

When her husband walked out of the kitchen, she then beat me with the long steel rod. She even kicked me. I begged her to stop but she wouldn’t until my head was already bleeding and there was so much blood on the floor. She poured water on me and asked me to clean the floor.

—E.S., Filipino maid²

Foreign workers in Qatar are modern-day slaves to their local employers. The local Qatari owns you.

—Nasser Beydoun³

A 40-year-old Sri Lankan woman named Kusuma Nandina faced a difficult choice. There were rumors that women like her were sometimes mistreated overseas. But the lure of providing a better future for her family was strong, and she emigrated to the capital of Saudi Arabia to work as a domestic servant. She was not heard from for 17 years. Her 25-year-old daughter took the case to the Sri Lankan Foreign Ministry. Both she and the ministry were told by the homeowners who employed her mother on contract that they had no domestic workers in the house. The daughter was persistent, however, and it was eventually discovered that not only was the mother living there, she had not been paid or allowed contact with anyone, including her family, during those long 17 years. The mother was allowed to return home and awarded the equivalent of $19,000 (in US dollars) for her trouble. Instead of proposing to improve conditions, Saudi Arabian officials responded by saying they were interested in recruiting more domestic employees from Ethiopia.⁴

One of the most recognizable buildings in the world is the 160-story Burj Khalifa, standing like a giant needle over Dubai. It is a symbol of Dubai’s luxury, and includes a spectacular hotel filled with employees ready to cater to every visitor’s wishes. Less well known is the fact that this enormous edifice was raised on the backs of immigrant workers. More than 85 percent of the total workforce of the UAE (which includes Dubai) consists of foreign workers, many of them brought in to do blue-collar work like erecting the Burj Khalifa tower.⁵ On May 10, 2011 an Indian cleaner committed suicide by jumping off the 147th floor of the majestic building. Like most foreign workers in Dubai, he was there on a work permit which completely governed his life and activities. Conditions for these workers can be extreme: 12 hour workdays, six day work weeks, regular work in extremely hot conditions (over 100° F), living in crowded camps with sometimes eight or more packed into a single room.⁶ All that is known for sure is that prior to his suicide the company that employed the man denied him leave.⁷ That man wasn’t alone. The Indian consulate in Dubai estimates that at least two Indian expatriate workers commit suicide each week.⁸

In 2010, the right to host the 2022 World Cup soccer championship was given to Qatar, a small, oil-rich country in the Persian Gulf. To prepare for the games, the country has committed to build nine modern stadiums capable of keeping players and fans cool, a new airport to accommodate traffic, and billions of dollars’ worth of new roads and infrastructure. To accomplish this, Qatar will rely heavily on migrant workers, who make up 1.2 million of the country’s 1.7 million residents and 94 percent of its workforce. Qatar’s immigration Sponsorship Law puts these 1.2 million people under the almost completely unchecked control of the employers who sponsor them. With only 150 labor inspectors to monitor the conditions of 1.2 million, it is no secret that many sponsors act as if they are completely above the law.⁹ The case of Omar J., a worker from Bangladesh, shows how unscrupulous employers take advantage of the situation. Despite the dangers of his job laying cables and pipeline, Omar received no safety training:

Sometimes the job is very dangerous because we have to [go] 100 meters, 200 meters inside the pipe [we are working on]. Sometimes we can’t get oxygen. We don’t do this in front of safety inspectors, but as soon as [the inspectors] are gone, the company tells us, “go, go!¹⁰

These incidents share one thing in common: they all occurred in one of the member states of the Gulf Cooperative Council (GCC). The GCC consists of the six oil-rich Arab monarchies of the Persian Gulf region: Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. Boasting a combined GDP of well over $1 trillion, these six countries represent a sizable chunk of the world’s wealth and influence. All make extensive use of foreign workers, with native populations even being outnumbered in some of the six countries by the poor laborers brought in from the developing world to do the grunt work.

The purpose of the Gulf Cooperative Council, which formed in 1981, is to foster political and economic unity among the member states through common policies and regulations that include religion and legislation as well as more financial concerns such as trade, finance, and customs. They have developed a common market and a unified military presence called the Peninsula Shield Force. The common market allows for unrestricted interaction among economic entities, whether corporations or private citizens, while the military force is intended to defend member countries against aggression, whether the threat is external or internal (GCC forces helped control the 2011 public protests in Bahrain, for example).

The flip side of the cooperation and protection shown among the states is the complete lack of security granted by those states to their large foreign populations. The GCC member states all use a “sponsorship” system which ensures that the foreign workers in their country cannot be “immigrants” at all—they have no paths to owning business or property, no path to permanent residency. Protections for foreign workers are minimal. Exploitation and abuse is common.

Despite the obviously exploitative situation, because of their lucrative oil-based economies the GCC countries shine like a beacon of hope to blue-collar workers, particularly those in Africa and Southeast Asia. Access to wealthy western countries is difficult and often limited to highly skilled laborers. But the GCC nations have lots of money and lots of work for the uneducated millions of the developing world. At the end of the 20th century migrations from places like India and Pakistan to the GCC reached epic proportions, and the trend is still upward.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

While there have long been migrant workers in the Arabian Gulf, most of them held clerical or technical positions in relatively small numbers. The first serious increase in immigrant labor came in the 1970s in response to the rise in crude oil prices. Workers came from Arab countries like Egypt and Yemen and from Asian nations such as Indian and Pakistan. Soon, there were over two million foreign workers in the Gulf. By 1990, that number had doubled.¹¹

When the price of oil plummeted in 1985, the need for infrastructure workers also dropped. Migration from Asia tailed off by a third in the middle of the decade.¹² However, migration numbers still remained high due to growth of demand in the service sector. Accordingly, many of the migrant workers were women, especially from Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Indonesia, and the Philippines. These women tended to come alone, leaving husbands and families behind, and often became the major breadwinner for their families.¹³

The large influx of migrant workers became a cause of apprehension in the GCC. In general, about 40 percent of the total population of the GCC countries consists of foreign workers. Qatar is the most extreme example in the group, with only 225,000 actual citizens in a nation of 1.7 million people.¹⁴ Throughout the GCC, foreign workers make up approximately 60 percent of the labor force. But much of this essential labor force is imprisoned or abused, restricted from travel or even leaving the place of employment.

RACISM AND IMMIGRATION IN THE GULF COOPERATION COUNCIL

Racism is not new in the Arab world. There is an old Arabic saying, “My brother and I against my cousin; my cousin and I against the stranger.” The obvious preference is for blood ties over other connections, particularly when the chips are down. To Arabs, all non-Arabs are strangers. Accordingly, the GCC attitude toward immigrants reflects a very old belief system.

The GCC countries need a wide range of employees, from unskilled to the most highly trained professionals. Unskilled workers are both the largest in number and the most in demand because they cost employers significantly less money. Unskilled workers are also unprotected by local labor laws. As a result, unskilled immigrant workers are often contracted for jobs citizens of the GCC have no interest in performing—the dirty, dangerous, and difficult jobs. Over the years, these jobs have been most often completed by immigrant Asians and Africans, and are often associated with them. Through this kind of identification, race and racism has become part of the equation. Today in the GCC, black Muslims have borne the brunt of Islamic racism at the hands not only of Arab Muslims but also of Asian Muslims.

Interestingly enough, the GCC nations at first preferred Arab migrant workers—Egyptians, Yemenis, and Palestinians. But when these Arab workers brought with them pan-Arab socialist ideas and began to agitate against the established monarchies in the Gulf they became problematic. Arab expatriates led labor strikes that damaged the internal stability of several of the GCC nations in the 70s and 80s. Eventually, GCC governments began to prefer Asian and African migrant workers because they would be easier to control. But this meant greater friction with the local populace, with whom there were more cultural differences.¹⁵

In the Gulf, old patterns of looking down upon non-Arabs coexist with a modern attitude that money solves all problems. The words of Guardian columnist Nesrine Malik, though directed at Dubai, could easily be extended over the entire GCC: “a place where the worst of western capitalism and Gulf Arab racism meet in a horrible vortex.”¹⁶ The suicide of the Indian worker from the Burj Khalifa made no impression on the local Arabs—it was just another expatriate worker.¹⁷ Another Guardian columnist who regularly discusses the plight of Asian migrant workers described dinner with an Arab acquaintance in Abu Dhabi:

“We will never use the new metro if it’s not segregated,” he tells me, referring to the state-of-the-art underground system being built in neighboring Dubai. “We will never sit next to Indians and Pakistanis with their smell,” his wife explains … “We need slaves, my friend says. “We need slaves to build monuments. Look who built the pyramids—they were slaves.¹⁸

Almost all migrant workers have been subjected to racial intolerance. The most common practices include being excluded from potential citizenship, assigning job positions by race, and widespread contempt and abuse among the general population—and employers in particular.

WEAK LEGAL PROTECTIONS

Migrant workers in GCC states have little or no access to the local legal system. Issues such as nonpayment of wages, refused vacation time, and ignored safety standards are routinely allowed to go unpunished because the accuser is a migrant with no legal standing. The second-class status of migrants and their vulnerability to the whims of employers result in countless horror stories.

Take the case of an Indian immigrant in Bahrain as an example. The man went to Bahrain to work as a carpenter, but upon arrival his employer forced him to work as a domestic servant. In desperation, he fled deep into the desert, where he found work on a camel farm. For running away from his employer he was eventually found and jailed. But now the owner of the camel farm found use in him. The owner secured the Indian’s release, and brought him back to the camel farm to continue working. He never earned enough money to contact his family, and his employer didn’t renew his work visa. With no means or ability to leave and no legal status, the Indian became an undocumented worker, completely without legal rights. He was only permitted to leave the country when he became too old to work on the farm at age 60. To secure his return, his family had to raise more than $4000 to pay for his airfare and legal fees for being an undocumented worker. The Indian worker finally made it home after being missing for 19 years.¹⁹

Due to their precarious legal status, immigrants accused of crimes can be tried and executed without ever receiving legal representation. Take the case of a 17-year-old Sri Lankan girl named Nafeek, for example. Nafeek was anxious to save her family from desperate financial conditions, so she dropped out of high school and bribed an agent to change her birthday on her passport so she could immigrate to work as a domestic servant. Soon after arriving in Saudi Arabia, a baby girl she was feeding from a bottle choked and died. Based on a signed confession, Nafeek was sentenced to death. A human rights group hired a lawyer on her behalf to appeal the conviction. Upon appeal, her true age was discovered, as well as the fact that she had been hired as a maid and had no training or experience in child care when she was thrust into the role of nanny. Nafeek simply had no idea what to do when the baby she was feeding began to choke. The appeal also questioned the validity of the confession, which was compromised due to language barriers and only signed after physical abuse at the hands of the police. Nevertheless, the Saudi Supreme Court upheld the death sentence and Nafeek was beheaded in January 2013.²⁰

The situation is so bad that when workers attempt to stand up for their rights, they face threats and violence. This happened in the United Arab Emirates in 2014, when Bangladeshis and other immigrant workers building a new campus for New York University staged a strike protesting conditions on the construction site. Workers were living 15 to a room, had their passports confiscated, and were required to work 60+ hour work weeks with no overtime pay. UAE officials responded to the strike by beating up workers and jailing hundreds. Many key leaders were subjected to humiliating treatment, including forced “confessions.”²¹

The Gulf Cooperation Council is well aware of this situation, of course, and does whatever it can to hide it from the world. When NYU opened its new campus in the UAE in 2015, one of their professors was banned from traveling to the country. The professor, Andrew Ross, is a specialist in labor issues, and had been outspoken in his criticism of UAE exploitation of migrant workers. Although the official reason given for this travel ban was “security reasons,” Ross and others believe his criticism of the UAE was the true reason. One of the journalists who covered the Bangladeshi strike and response discussed in the previous paragraph (Sean O’Driscoll) was actually expelled from the UAE after the story was published.²²

THE CONTRACT SYSTEM AND ITS ISSUES

At the heart of the issue with immigrant workers in the GCC is the work permit or labor contract system used by the member states. This system evolved from a Bedouin tradition which granted strangers temporary refuge for as long as the stranger wished. The tradition was called kafala, and the host was known as the kafeel. Since slavery was not abolished in the GCC nations until the 1960s, the kafala system evolved and merged with traditions regarding slaves over time. Eventually, this system became the current migrant labor contract system, which retains the names kafala and kafeel, but with entirely different meanings.

Issues with the labor contract system begin with the ever-growing number of recruitment agencies who often work in tandem with employers (the kafeels). Fees that employers are supposed to pay are in fact paid by the prospective employees. Money employers are supposed to provide for airfare, visas, and visa insurance are paid by employees in cash so there is no paper trail.²³ These illegal fees are typically around two thousand dollars, an amount few immigrants desperate for work could afford. As a result, workers will mortgage their homes, sell property, borrow money from friends or, worst of all, borrow money from private institutions at excessive rates.²⁴ A typical example is an Indian man who worked for a construction and landscaping business. When interviewed by Human Rights Watch in 2012, he explained that 19 other workers with him were in exactly the same situation and couldn’t afford to go home regardless of conditions because they all had been forced to borrow money in order to pay fees to the recruiting agents.²⁵

Due to high recruiting fees, the financial pressure on foreign workers to remain, regardless of working conditions, contract deviations, or even unpaid wages, is very high. Sometimes it’s too high. Precise numbers on suicides and self-injuries among foreign workers are difficult due to sketchy record-keeping, but the phenomenon is very well known in the GCC. A typical case is that of Julfikar Korani, an Indian laborer who borrowed 90,000 Indian rupees ($2,000) for a work visa in the United Arab Emirates. Julfikar had to repay his loan at a rate of 6,300 rupees ($140) a month, which he was unable to manage on his monthly salary of $190, which had only been paid once in over six months. Falling behind badly on his payments and with no prospects of escape, Julfikar committed suicide. According to his cousin, who was living at the same workers’ compound, there was no police investigation and no questions asked.²⁶

The lives of migrant workers in the GCC are highly restricted. They are not allowed to own businesses or real estate. They are essentially told where to live. For construction workers, 10 or 12 men to a room sleeping in shifts is not uncommon. Ten Bangladeshi laborers died of smoke inhalation on Bahrain when their unregistered labor camp flat caught fire.²⁷ In Saudi Arabia, 78 Indian migrant workers were left stranded at their camp without food and water after their employer stopped paying their salaries for half a year. Having confiscated the workers’ passports on arrival and also failing to issue identity cards or medical cards, the employer ensured that they could not escape. The employer only agreed to pay partial back wages after the Indian consulate got involved. The situation with the 78 workers was not “an isolated case,” according to a consular official.²⁸ In the UAE, a group of 23 workers with a temporary workers agency were forced to live off of dates scrounged from a nearby farm after their employer withheld five months of wages. When their story came to light, it was charitable local people rather than the employers who provided them with food.²⁹

Female workers are no better off. Those working for companies supplying workers to local hospitals report living in harsh conditions. One woman described rooming with 13 others in a small space with bunk beds, one toilet, and no sink or shower.³⁰ Domestic workers also report poor working conditions. Some are made to sleep in the laundry room, on the kitchen floor, in a storage closet, or even in a bathroom.

Migrant workers are also severely restricted in their movements and ability to communicate because the kafeel, or contract-holder, routinely takes possession of their passports. Employers argue that by retaining passports they ensure workers will not steal money or secrets. What they do not say is that holding passports gives them enormous control over their employees, ensuring they will remain docile and obedient under almost any conditions. If they don’t like how they’re being treated, where can they go? Without a passport, immigrants cannot even leave the country if they wish. By controlling passports, employers therefore control migrant workers’ local and international travel.

On the issue of travel female workers are even more severely curtailed. Most domestic servants cannot even leave the premises of the house where they are employed. One Filipino Muslim woman was forced to improvise a system to purchase food. She would throw a list and money out the window to her employer’s driver, who took both to a Filipino shopkeeper who could read the note. Then the driver would come back and throw the purchases on the roof of the house where the servant could retrieve them. All this just to have enough food to eat!³¹

Employers retaining passports is of critical importance because employment is the legal requirement for being allowed in the country for all GCC member states. If workers lose their jobs, they don’t get to look for another one, they have to leave the country first. Even westerners employed as teachers or oil field workers have run into this absolute requirement. Furthermore, if workers run away or fail to renew their work permit and visas, they become illegal aliens—subject to arrest and immediate deportation.

Workers who are arrested are subjected to inhumane jail conditions prior to deportation. Three jails in Saudi Arabia provide graphic examples. One Indian worker reported being kept in a Riyadh deportation facility with up to 150 men per cell (with normal capacity being 40 to 60) and only five toilets available. A prisoner in the Jeddah deportation facility described having only one operable toilet for 400 men and no drinking water. The worst was the Dammam deportation facility, where a Filipino worker reported 1,500 prisoners waiting for deportation or court sentences stuck in a room together with two functioning toilets. Space was so limited the prisoners had to sleep sitting or standing up.³²

Another common concern illustrates the complexity of the kafala system and its ripeness for abuse. Employers will often keep employees for longer than their contract dictates without renewing the visas. This saves the employer money, but it makes the immigrant worker illegal—often without the worker himself ever being aware! Then, when the worker prepares to return home he finds himself with substantial illegal worker fines to deal with before being able to leave. Most Arab countries have some form of annual amnesty which allows workers with no valid papers to return home, so long as they pay the fines or penalties.³³ One group of ten Indian immigrants returned from UAE in February 2013 only after receiving financial help from charitable donors. Of the 1,800 workers who applied for the amnesty that month, only half could afford the fees and return flight tickets.³⁴

The contract system is also abused by employers assigning jobs to migrant workers far different than the ones they originally contracted for. In Saudi Arabia, a Filipino diesel engine mechanic arrived to discover his actual job would be driving a tractor and tending livestock at a farm owned by his employer’s brother. He had colleagues at the same farm who accepted jobs as electricians, welders, and refrigeration mechanics only to end up tending farm animals. It seems to have been a classic bait-and-switch scheme, as all of the workers involved ended up earning far less money than they were originally promised.³⁵ In another case, an Indian named Subair was given an employment visa to work as a gardener at a private home for $213 per month. When he arrived in-country, his employer forced him to work as a shepherd in an isolated location for what ended up being only $33 per month. Conditions were terrible, as Subair had no permanent lodging and had to be sent food and water every two days; for two years he was unable to bathe. Subair would later tell Human Rights Watch, “The heat was so intense that it burned the hair on my body, and in the winter it was so cold the water turned to ice.” When he tried to escape, Subair was tracked down by his employer and severely beaten.³⁶

Worker safety and health are often circumvented by the contract system. During World Cup construction, workers in Qatar told Human Rights Watch they had worked on roofs or high scaffolding without safety harnesses or precautions.³⁷ In early 2013, workers in Oman staged a rare strike to demand better safety conditions after an Indian worker was run over by a bus belonging to their contractor. Almost 10,000 workers rose up to demand improvements.³⁸

Examples concerning the lack of safety on construction sites abound, but a single day at a hospital in the UAE in 2006 makes the point. On that day two men were dumped at the hospital’s door suffering from accidents on a construction site. Neither man’s employer identified himself. One was an Indian man named Chekelli, whose employer dropped him off claiming he had fallen down a staircase. Investigation later turned up that Chekelli had been illegally employed and was injured when a cement bucket fell on his back at a construction site, pinning him to the ground. Although Chekelli was paralyzed by his injuries, he was returned home with no compensation. The other man was an Indian suffering from a severe head injury that left him confused and incoherent. The second man’s employer left no clue as to his injuries, but simply abandoned him to the hospital.³⁹

VIOLENCE AND ABUSE OF WOMEN

In all but name, immigrant workers in the GCC are slaves—and with slavery comes violence. Female workers are particularly at risk. Domestic workers are particularly at risk because they live in isolated situations and their movement is restricted. In a 2007 case, an Indonesian maid fought her Saudi employer when he tried to rape her. During the struggle she killed him with a meat cleaver. She was sentenced to death, but given the option of avoiding the sentence if she paid over $500,000 compensation to her employer’s family. The Indonesian government agreed to pay the money on her behalf.⁴⁰

A 26-year-old Muslim Filipina endured sexual advances and a beating from her male employer. One day he held a knife to her neck and threatened to kill her if she told his wife about the incidents. Not long after she managed to escape, following another sexual advance and beating from her employer, she was told that her employer was rich and that fighting him was not wise. The local police were less concerned about her assault than with sending her back to the Philippines. When she returned home, her husband provided no support and denied her any communication with their two children.⁴¹

Not all abuses of female domestic workers are sexual. In 2012, a 26-year-old woman arrived from Indonesia to start her job as a domestic worker in Saudi Arabia. Ten months later she awoke in a hospital after spending a week in a coma. She had been beaten with a belt by her employer’s wife for not mopping the floor properly and pushed out of a third floor window because she had allegedly left a bad smell in the room. The young woman was allowed to return to Indonesia but was not given any of her back pay.⁴²

In early 2013, two different maids in Kuwait went to police with tales of torture and abuse at the hands of their employers. One of the two, a Nepalese woman, accused her sponsor and his wife of beating and torturing her, and submitted a medical report confirming that she had been subjected to physical torment.⁴³ The other maid, a Filipino maid known only as E.S., had her story go viral after pictures of her bruised and battered body were posted on Facebook. E.S. recounted a stream of abuse at the hands of her lady employer, including sleep deprivation and beatings with wooden sticks and iron rods. E.S. was able to escape to the Philippine Embassy, which hired an international human rights lawyer to take up her case.⁴⁴

Even western women are vulnerable to abuse in the GCC. In a telling example from 2012, an English woman was kidnapped, gang raped, and filmed by three men in the UAE. Dazed and left alone on a mattress, she eventually escaped and reported the crime to police. Later blood tests showed no trace of alcohol in her system, and several of her personal items were recovered at the scene of the crime. Nevertheless, she was found guilty of alcohol consumption and fined.⁴⁵

Alicia Gali, an Australian manager of an exclusive resort in the UAE fared worse. She remembers going into a staff bar one evening and waking up late the next afternoon naked, bruised and aching from broken ribs. She was advised by the Australian embassy not go to the police because she would be charged with drinking alcohol—and possibly end up serving an automatic 25 year prison sentence if drugs were detected in her system (even if those drugs were administered to her without her knowledge or consent). Her employer subsequently refused to surrender her passport so she could go home for care. At last she went to a hospital where rape and abuse were confirmed. The hospital advised her to go to the police, where she was coerced into signing a confession in Arabic, which she could not read. Alicia had no idea that an accusation of rape could instead get her in trouble for “adultery” without having four adult male Muslim witnesses to back her up. She ended up serving eight months of a 12-month jail sentence for adultery.⁴⁶

A 2015 story from Gulf News illustrates the de facto slavery attitude taken by many employers in the GCC. “What to do if our maid absconds” offers advice to households in the UAE who find that their domestic workers have gone missing. The terminology used (“abscond”) and the advice given illustrates the slavery origin of the foreign worker program. Formerly, it would have been a domestic slave who “absconded” and the owner would have to report it to the authorities. The Gulf News story even advises employers that they should surrender their maid’s “original passport” to authorities when they report an absconding.⁴⁷ It is illegal for the employers to have these documents in their possession!

Some countries are beginning to address the abuse of their citizens at the hands of GCC employers. Indonesia in particular has had several public disputes with GCC member states, and has begun to prevent citizens from contracting there. However, the governments of the GCC countries have simply shifted their recruiting ground to countries such as Bangladesh, Nepal, and Ethiopia to make up the difference. It is worth noting that the United States and France, two champions of liberty, are two of the GCC’s chief supporters and clients.

CONCLUSION

The countries of the GCC are absolute monarchies with very little military power to speak of. In that respect, they cannot exist without external political support. However, the world is dependent upon their oil, which gives these countries tremendous leverage. Consequently, they are well supported by the U.S., Europe, China, Japan, and India. In fact, the United States is both the biggest supporter of the GCC military and the leading trade partner with the GCC countries. This trade value gives the United States leverage in turn on the GCC.

It is clear that the GCC makes use of an outdated system, rooted in tradition and slavery, to sidestep the ordinary international demands made on behalf of immigrants’ rights. In the GCC’s contract system, their millions of immigrant workers are only temporary residents with no consistent legal protection and no path to citizenship. Compare with the system in the United States or in Europe, where legal immigrants enjoy multiple layers of legal protection, residency status, and a path to citizenship if certain benchmarks are met. The GCC kafala system is being used to exploit poor workers from developing countries to receive hard work on the cheap.

PART THREE

PART THREE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Muhammad

My choice of Muhammad to lead the list of the world’s most influential persons may surprise some readers and may be questioned by others, but he was the only man in history who was supremely successful on both the religious and secular level.

—Michael Hart¹

I became more than ever convinced that it was not the sword that won a place for Islam in those days in the scheme of life. It was the rigid simplicity, the utter self-effacement of the prophet, the scrupulous regard for his pledges, his intense devotion to his friends and followers, his intrepidity, his fearlessness, his absolute trust in God and in his own mission. These, and not the sword carried everything before them and surmounted every trouble.

—Mahatma Gandhi²

Do you consider the providing of drinking water to the pilgrims and the maintenance of Al-Masjid-al-Haram (at Makkah) as equal to the worth of those who believe in Allah and the Last Day, and strive hard and fight in the Cause of Allah? They are not equal before Allah. And Allah guides not those people who are the Zalimun (polytheists and wrong-doers). Those who believed (in the Oneness of Allah - Islamic Monotheism) and emigrated and strove hard and fought in Allah’s Cause with their wealth and their lives are far higher in degree with Allah.

—Qur’an 9:19-20

Islam is defined by two sets of texts. Of the two, by far the shortest (less than a quarter of the total words) is the supposed revelation of Allah to his Prophet Muhammad given in the Qur’an. The remainder, known as the Sunna, contains the Sira, which are the accepted biographies of Muhammad (26 percent of the total), and the Hadith, which are collections of isolated sayings and deeds of Muhammad (the remaining 60 percent).³ Therefore, the overwhelming bulk of Islam’s meaning comes from the life of Muhammad. In a sense, Islam is Muhammad.

The Qur’an itself authorizes this identification of man and religion. Many dozens of times it calls the words and actions of Muhammad “the divine pattern for humanity.”⁴ Through the efforts of Muslims to replicate this “divine pattern,” Islam has become what might be the most enduring political system in history. For 1,400 years this pattern has regulated family life, business, education, government, and religious beliefs for millions—and now one billion—Muslims. Given the way Muhammad’s life still controls the lives of his followers, and given the content of the life he lived, it is more accurate to say his genius was not moral or religious—it was political.

ARABIC LIFE BEFORE ISLAM

Abū al-Qāsim Muḥammad ibn Abd Allāh ibn Abd al-Muṭṭalib ibn Hāshim—better known as Muhammad—was born in Mecca in 570 AD. He was orphaned at age five and raised by his uncle Abu Talib after the death of his grandfather when he was eight. Abu Talib was a powerful and prestigious member of the Quraysh tribe, which oversaw the religious life in Mecca, which was an important religious center for the polytheistic Arabian tribes. Their polytheism was mostly a jumble of deities, one of whom was a moon god named ‘Allah’. Pilgrims came to Mecca to engage in worship around a shrine called the kaaba, which the tribes regarded with religious reverence.

For much of his adult life, Muhammad worked as a caravan leader for a wealthy widow named Khadijah. He was shrewd but upright in his dealings and very successful as a trader. After a particularly successful trip, Khadijah proposed marriage to the 25-year-old Muhammad, who was 15 years younger than her, and in 595 they were wed. As a member of the Quraysh tribe, Muhammad would occasionally take month-long trips into the caves near Mecca to perform various religious obligations which were expected of the prominent members of his tribe.

When Muhammad was 40, he allegedly began to hear revelations from God through the angel Gabriel. This happened during the month of Ramadan, which Muslims now observe with a daytime fast. At first, Muhammad was concerned by these experiences and told his wife, who sent him to her cousin for a second opinion; the cousin told Muhammad he was a prophet.⁵ Muhammad’s wife Khadija became his first convert, and over the next three years Gabriel supposedly continued to reveal parts of what became the Qur’an to him. Three years after his first religious experiences, Muhammad began to publicly preach.

THE EARLY YEARS OF ISLAM

Muhammad’s teachings immediately put him at odds with the Arabs of Mecca. He publicly denied the existence of their gods and insisted that those who believed in them would go to Hell. Locals would challenge him to perform miracles or to respond to them with convincing arguments, but his method of reply consisted mainly of damning them for challenging the messenger of Allah. As a result, Muhammad wasn’t terribly convincing to most Meccans. Moreover, his preaching was bad for business. Only the prestige of his uncle kept the townsfolk from acting against him. When his uncle died in 619, Muhammad realized it was time to get out.

Three years later, with about 150 followers, Muhammad decamped for Medina, where a political alliance with one of the powerful local tribes soon elevated him to a leadership position. Once he had acquired some authority, Muhammad drew up a covenant for law and government. The covenant included both his followers and the other groups in the city and made Muhammad the final judge on all matters.⁶ This was the beginning of his political domination of the peoples of the Arabian Peninsula.

There was a brief effort to reconcile the new faith with the traditional religion of Mecca. Muhammad announced that three of the Meccans’ gods could intercede to Allah on their behalf. The Meccans and Muslims were pleased with this reconciliation, but Muhammad soon recanted. Instead, he declared that he had been deceived by Satan and the accommodation was not in accord with the will of Allah. These redacted lines were later referred to as the “Satanic Verses.”⁷

In Medina, Muhammad’s arguments with fellow Arabs extended to the large Jewish community in the town. Muhammad also began to turn his efforts from preaching to preparing for war. He organized raids on caravans heading for Mecca, including during a sacred month of peace, in violation of ancient Arabic tribal custom.⁸

The key turning point was the battle of Badr. Knowing that Muhammad planned to attack one of their caravans, the Meccans sent a small army to protect it. Leading an outnumbered force of Muslims, Muhammad was victorious over the Meccan army. After the battle of Badr, Islam increasingly became an armed political force with the religious motivation of jihad. It is in the accounts of this bloody battle that we get the first Islamic incitements to offensive martyrdom in order to achieve paradise, as well as the assumption that Islam’s worth is proven through violence.⁹

ISLAM’S POLITICAL SPREAD

Most of the biographies of Muhammad are concerned with the spread of Islam by violent means after the battle at Badr. Tribal groups who refused to ally with him were targeted, and members of those tribes who had converted to Islam willingly participated in attacks against their own families. After the defeat of his early opponents, the Quraysh tribe of Mecca, other Arab groups began to flock to Muhammad to make alliances.

What Muhammad had found is that nothing wins converts like military success. After 13 years of public preaching he had no more than about 200 followers. After ten years of conquest and political alliances, he could field an army of no less than 10,000 Muslims.¹⁰ This would become the dominant pattern of Islam’s spread over its first millennium.

The political aspect of Muhammad’s accomplishment became even clearer after his death. Abu Bakr, the first caliph, fought what is known as the Ridda Wars when he first came to power. Although ridda means “apostasy” in Arabic, there is little question that these wars were essentially political.¹¹ The various rebel groups argued that they had submitted to Muhammad who was the prophet of God and had no reason to follow Abu Bakr. Some rebel groups followed other men who claimed to be prophets. Abu Bakr’s response was to defeat the rebels on the battlefield and unite the peninsula under his combined political and religious authority.

Islamic religious doctrine served the purpose of cementing political ties beyond mere verbal agreements. Islam sought to remake all the social institutions of a tribe—including overriding customs where they conflicted with the aims or interests of Islam. Under the unity of Islamic religious practice, differing tribes became united into a single political entity. This quasi-theocracy would prove to be a very effective organization as Islamic influence spread beyond the Arabian Peninsula.

MUHAMMAD’S PERSONAL QUALITIES

Most of the recorded actions of Muhammad are more consistent with a warrior than with a holy man. As mentioned above, the bulk of his biographies are concerned with his military genius in his struggles against the kafirs. Thus, we learn a lot about how battle spoils are divided (Muhammad got 20 percent) and how political spoils are divided after a group signs a treaty with Muhammad or abandons its possessions. An entire section of the Qur’an is dedicated to Muhammad’s distribution of war booty.

One of the most prominent elements of the war booty were slaves. While slavery has existed throughout human history, Muhammad is the only founder of a major religious tradition who thoroughly embraced owning other human beings. While Muhammad forbids Muslims to own other Muslims, kafirs are unworthy of such protections. There are lengthy accounts of female captives and which ones became wives of Muhammad or other prominent Muslims. One famous example was a Coptic woman named Mary whom the Archbishop of Alexandria sent to Muhammad as a “present.” Over the objections of his 11 wives, Muhammad accepted Mary and kept her as a concubine until his death.

Muhammad seems to have been very interested in sex, and spent much of his time after the death of his first wife acquiring new wives and concubines. The Qur’an permits men up to four wives, but fortunately it makes an exception for prophets—who are permitted as many as 11. Coincidentally, 11 is the most wives Muhammad had at any one time. Over the course of his life he may have been married to as many as 15 different women and also had at various times four slave women to meet his sexual needs. Of the wives, his favorite was Aisha, the daughter of his friend and successor Abu Bakr. Muhammad was betrothed to Aisha when she was six, and consummated the marriage three years later (he was 52 years old at the time). Since Muhammad was the perfect man, this sort of pedophilic relationship has become more or less accepted in Islamic cultures.

During his life Muhammad regularly used marriage as a political tool to cement relationships among his followers and with new allies. Two of his wives, Aisha and Hafsa, were daughters of his most prominent followers—both men eventually served as caliph after his death. Indeed, three of the four caliphs who succeeded Muhammad in ruling the Muslim community (a group known as the Four Rightly Guided Caliphs) were connected to him by marriage. The third was Ali, Muhammad’s son-in-law.

Muhammad also made regular use of assassinations and executions. From the Sunna we learn of dozens of people killed on Muhammad’s orders for various offenses. Beginning around 624, the Prophet had a Jewish man and an Arab woman assassinated for writing poetry that mocked him.¹² More than two dozen others would face death for the same crime, although some were pardoned if they agreed to convert to Islam.

This divine pattern for human life was not above indulging in torture, either. One particularly brutal case involves eight men from Ukl who left Islam and attempted to make off with Muhammad’s camels. According to one witness, the men were captured and brought to the Prophet:

He then ordered to cut [off] their hands and feet (and it was done), and their eyes were branded with heated pieces of iron. They were put in Al-Harra and when they asked for water, no water was given to them.¹³

Which other religious founders have commanded limbs to be hacked off and eyes to be gouged out with hot iron? Such treatment is even explicitly sanctioned by the Qur’an:

The punishment of those who wage war against Allah and His Messenger, and strive with might and main for mischief through the land is: execution, or crucifixion, or the cutting off of hands and feet from opposite sides, or exile from the land.¹⁴

In the Christian Bible, the Savior of mankind endures crucifixion; for Muhammad, it is just another punishment to be used on one’s opponents. Torture is not merely used for “religious” purposes, either; in the case of a wealthy man named Kinana ibn al-Rabi, the Sunna records that Muhammad ordered him to be tortured to reveal the location of some hidden treasure. Kinana was eventually beheaded and his wealth taken by the Muslims.¹⁵

One of Muhammad’s bloodiest accomplishments came with the Banu Qurayza, a tribe of Jews who lived in Medina. After being besieged in their stronghold by the Muslims, the tribe surrendered unconditionally. When the Prophet asked one of his followers what should be done with the tribe, he received the answer that the adult males should be killed and the rest taken as slaves. Muhammad called this judgment divine.

With the help of the Prophet himself a great trench was dug into which the massacred Jews would be thrown. In batches, the condemned were brought before Muhammad and his 12-year-old wife Aisha and their heads chopped off. The parade of butchery took hours to accomplish. Aisha later recalled that a woman lost her mind watching her family being killed in this fashion. She began to laugh uncontrollably at the horrific sight, and was then executed along with the rest. In all, between 600 and 900 men were killed. This was such a holy act that details of it are recorded both in the Qur’an, where Allah is reportedly very pleased by the “terror” this action put into the hearts of the Jews, and in the Hadith.¹⁶

Muhammad was no indiscriminate killer. He made very savvy political use of killing. After negotiating his initial return to Mecca, for example, he issued death warrants for all of those in town who had spoken ill of him.¹⁷ This is consistent with the behavior of other tyrants who sought to suppress political dissent. Muhammad also forbade others to engage in killings outside of his authority. This included forbidding the practices of blood feuds, vengeance killings, and the payment of blood money, and also forbidding anyone (other than himself) from killing anyone in Mecca.¹⁸ By establishing a monopoly over violence, Muhammad was accruing political power to himself.

RELIGIOUS LEADERS AND PARADIGMATIC INDIVIDUALS

A German philosopher named Karl Jaspers devoted one of his works to the analysis of four “paradigmatic individuals,” men whose lasting influence over thought and experience distinguishes them as foremost examples of humanity. The four individuals Jaspers chose were Buddha, Confucius, Jesus, and Socrates. While other men may have had comparable influence over smaller groups of people, these four are hard to match in terms of breadth of influence over a comparable period of time. Certainly most of us can agree that all four are distinguished religious—or at least humanitarian—leaders. If these four are not religious or humanitarian figures, no one is.

Using these four as touchstones, we may ask how Muhammad measures up. For Jaspers, “Muhammad… might be comparable in historical importance but not in individual depth.”¹⁹ This difference in depth arises from the fact that Muhammad did not create new thought patterns in his listeners. Instead, he created a new system to provide order to a very familiar human desire for conquest and control. If we compare Muhammad to each of the four individually, it is easy to see what separates him from them.

Compared to Jesus, Muhammad’s system of ethics is a step backwards. The Qur’an includes advice on moral topics such as the proper way to beat one’s wife,²⁰ how to divide the spoils taken from defeated tribes,²¹ acceptable ways to deal with female slaves,²² and when to kill whole populations of people who do not agree with you.²³ This “divine pattern” for human life keeps slaves and concubines, consummates marriage with a nine-year-old girl, and enjoys bloody vengeance wreaked upon his enemies. Jesus on the cross implores God to pardon his enemies, “for they know not what they do.”

Jesus espoused love for all and the virtue of meekness—that is, controlling one’s power or force and accepting when others overstepped their bounds. Muhammad freely and openly hated his enemies and issued proclamations for their deaths. Jesus taught that love of wealth caused one to miss out on spiritual pleasures while living an ascetic life of poverty and sexual chastity. Muhammad embraced and enjoyed the acquisition both of wealth and women.

Compared to Confucius, Muhammad embraced the destruction of all societal traditions that ran counter to his wishes, even those which contributed to social stability. Confucius emphasized that everyone in a society is in some sort of relationship with all his fellows, and that these relationships were sacred paths to knowledge and social strength. Muhammad overturned Arabic customs wherever he could, placing obedience to him above loyalty to family, tribe, or tradition. The basic relationship in Confucian society was that of teacher and student. For Muhammad, the basic relationship is that of master (Allah and his prophet) and slave (Muslim). Confucius taught that one did not become virtuous simply by memorizing rules of behavior but by acquiring broad learning and acting in ways that promote the greater good. About 60 percent of Islam (the Hadith) consists of rules of behavior covering a wide variety of situations which Muslims are expected to learn and imitate.

Buddha taught that the purpose of human life was to relieve the suffering of others. The primary means by which Muhammad brought his religion to others was through violence, and openly enjoyed seeing his political enemies suffer. Buddha asserted that human suffering arose from chasing after material things, which are fleeting and temporary. Islam fully embraces the pursuit of wealth and material goods because such things were absolutely essential in its spread and survival. Violence is the antithesis of a moral life for Buddha; it is a cornerstone of what it means to be a Muslim.

Socrates presented his students with the example of a life lived in constant pursuit of the truth by means of free thought. At the center of his quest was his assertion that the unexamined life was not worth living. Nothing could be further from the spirit of Islam and its founder. Anyone who questioned Muhammad the way Socrates questioned the men of Athens was despised or put to death. For the Muslim, the only life worth living is one which copies the divine pattern of Muhammad. As Socrates’ investigations show, many of the most important issues of human life are difficult to answer and require diligent and earnest questioning to uncover and resolve. Muhammad believed that God spoke to him and revealed to him everything that he, and everyone, needed to know. When condemned by Athens, Socrates willingly laid down his life, accepting that society was greater than any individual, however great. Muhammad condemned anyone who imagined himself as great as or greater than he was.

The four paradigmatic individuals were all either celibate or men of ordinary sexual behavior. Both Jesus and the Buddha renounced family life and sexual relations in the pursuit of their religious missions. Although not much is known of Socrates’ family (aside from his wife being a bit of a scold), he encouraged erotic self-restraint in his students. Confucius led a quiet family life, and the most recent genealogy established two million descendants over eighty-three generations.²⁴

The contrast with Muhammad could not be sharper. The Prophet was a notorious sexual profligate who kept wives and concubines. He married young girls, setting a destructive pattern that his followers imitate into the present day. One of his wives, in fact, was selected from the most attractive captives after the slaughter of the Banu Qurayza tribe. None of the other four ever ordered or participated in a slaughter, much less took sexual slaves from a defeated enemy.

The four paradigmatic individuals were not generals or political leaders. Of the four, only Confucius wielded any sort of political power (as a civil servant). But he is remembered for his lofty humanitarian principles and approach to the education of rulers and civic leaders. Buddha renounced military and political power in favor of intellectual and spiritual development. The only power Socrates wielded was that of reason and dialectic. He advocated obedience to the laws of the city—an advocacy he lived up to by accepting the unjust death sentence levied against him. Jesus declared that his kingdom is “not of this world.” The authority these four men held was moral, not political.

Muhammad, on the other hand, was an absolute ruler who claimed divine sanction for his decisions. At his order, thousands were killed by assassination or execution or in battle. Others were tortured or made to suffer. He gained more converts through threats of death or suffering than he ever achieved by preaching. As the self-appointed messenger of god on earth, he demanded absolute, blind obedience. His kingdom was whatever on earth fell under the control of his followers’ swords.

Indeed, Muhammad’s true genius lay in developing a master political system. Islam encompasses every social institution by dictating to them what they must be. What the ruler must be like, what kind of laws are permitted, what kind of social habits are permitted or forbidden, the structure and practice of family life—all such questions are answered by Islam once it takes control. Take the modern example of Saudi Arabia, where the government has established Islamic sharia as the legal system. Civil law, religious law, criminal law, and family law are set by sharia. The ulema, the religious leaders of the country, regularly print textbooks covering their interpretations of what sharia declares about this or that particular issue. Saudi Arabia makes no distinction between the government and the religion or between the religion and any of its social institutions. Rather, Islam is society. Saudi Arabia is a state formed according to the dictates of Muhammad.²⁵

Jaspers says of his four paradigmatic individuals:

The demands they make on us are never fully expressed in instructions that need merely be followed. In order to understand them, one must experience some sort of transformation, a rebirth, a new awareness of reality, an illumination.²⁶

With all four men there is a door opened to critical thought and examination. Each of them opens the way to new possibilities of thinking, meditating, learning, and living. With Muhammad, the literal content of his message is everything. The words of Allah as revealed in the Qur’an are to be followed faithfully and without question.

One of the clearest connections between the four paradigmatic individuals lies in their treatment of the enemy or other. Jesus says to love one’s enemies, and to love one’s neighbor as one loves oneself. Socrates in Plato’s Crito insists that doing wrong in retaliation for wrong is unjust. Confucius does not go quite so far, saying one should requite kindness with kindness but enmity with justice. Buddha tells his followers to suffer ills with infinite patience and seek to do good to all living things.²⁷ Muhammad’s love for mankind is limited only to his followers. For everyone else, Muhammad exhorted his followers:

To annihilate the kafirs, to confiscate their lands and property, to enslave their women and children … The ‘jihad’ or holy war is supposed to be waged incessantly until all the kafirs are decimated and the whole earth taken over by the followers of Islam.²⁸

MUHAMMAD AND GENGHIS KHAN

We will find men like Muhammad not among religious and spiritual leaders but among the brutal conquerors of world history. Among these, Muhammad ranks highly indeed—though not so much for what he accomplished during his lifetime as for what his followers have done. Among the conquerors we find one quite like Muhammad in the Mongol warlord Genghis Khan.

Like Muhammad, Genghis was reportedly inspired on his mission by visions and ecstasies. Muhammad united fractious and warring Arab tribes and inspired them to jihad with promises of rich rewards. Genghis did the same with the fractious and warring Mongol tribes. Both leaders exhorted their troops to be merciless to the conquered. Both invoked divine sanction for their actions. Muhammad was a self-proclaimed prophet and executor of Allah’s will. Genghis declared himself to be an instrument of divine justice, god’s flail sent to punish the wickedness of the conquered.

One of the enduring records of Genghis Khan’s spirit is the quotation often attributed to him about happiness:

The greatest happiness is to scatter your enemy, to drive him before you, to see his cities reduced to ashes, to see those who love him shrouded in tears, and to gather into your bosom his wives and daughters.

As critically-minded scholars have noted, the Qur’an expresses the same exultation over plunder taken from kafirs:

In brief, the property of the infidel—his wealth, his women, his children—all without exception, is lawful plunder for the [holy warrior]. The merit of such plunder is indeed less than that of spreading Islam and looking upon the pleasures of the other world, but the Koran gives it its due recognition.²⁹

The difference between the Qur’an’s attitude toward plunder and Genghis’s is more of degree than of kind. There is even a passage which emphasizes the pleasures acceptable from captured women: “Also (forbidden are) women already married, except those (captives and slaves) whom your right hands possess.”³⁰ Being possessed by the right hand is a figurative expression for women who have been taken as captives or slaves.

What Muhammad offered his followers that Genghis did not was the promise of paradise. Perhaps it is fitting that some of the Mongol hordes would later embrace Islam and continue their rampages without missing a beat. One of the most infamous examples of this was Tamerlane, a 14th century conqueror who styled himself the “Sword of Islam.” During nearly 40 years of almost constant warfare across Asia and the Middle East, he subjugated a vast territory and killed millions of people. Tamerlane doubtless would have been murderous with or without Islam—but no Muslim can deny that what he accomplished followed the divine pattern of Islam’s founder.

SANKARA: A RELIGIOUS LIFE

The inaccuracy of the label of “religious” for the founder of Islam can be seen quite clearly by comparison to the life of Sankara. Born 150 years after Muhammad’s death in what is now the state of Kerala, Sankara was a man on a mission almost from birth. Islam was already knocking on the door of his native India and Arab armies were making incursions into the land looking for plunder. The Hindu religion was in a declining state. Sankara would lead an enormous spiritual revival and create a metaphysical system of unsurpassed excellence.³¹

At an early age Sankara began his travels across India, propagating the revival and spread of the Advaita Vedanta school of Hinduism. His method of conquest was verbal, not martial. On his journeys he held debates and conversations with Buddhists, Jains, and members of rival Hindu schools, overcoming each with dialectic rather than force. His philosophical tour took him on a journey—by foot, no less—of more than 3,000 miles across India. Along the way, he is also credited with founding four temples across India, which remain respected centers of learning and religious pilgrimage to this day.

Before he died at the young age of 32, Sankara had created a massive religious revival among the people. A celibate monk himself, he revived Hindu monastic practices at a time when they had fallen into disuse. He practiced vegetarianism. In his written works, Sankara expresses the ideal of achieving spiritual liberation through the pursuit of knowledge and purity of living. His teachings are founded on the belief that all the things of the world, both living and non-living, are manifestations of an underlying divine unity. We learn about this divine unity through direct intuition. Sankara believed that the purpose of life was to rediscover our connection to the divine.

Most significantly, Sankara established the preeminence of his thought through free discussions. There were no murders, no raiding parties, no massacres. Those who disagreed were free to debate with him or to walk away. There is no record of Sankara ordering one of his opponents to be killed. No one was threatened either with execution in this world or with divine retribution in the next. There are no stories of slaughter or carrying off the women and property of other people.

Islam would have us believe that Muhammad is a divine pattern for human life and that Sankara is an infidel worthy of death. Which of the two sounds more like a religious man? Which of the two lived a life worthy of Genghis Khan?

PART THREE

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The Qur’an, Sharia Law,
and The Mosque

And whoever seeks a religion other than Islam, it will never be accepted of him.

—Qur’an 3:85

Then kill the Mushrikun [pagans] wherever you find them, and capture them and besiege them, and prepare for them each and every ambush.

—Qur’an 9:5

The recompense of those who wage war against Allah and His Messenger and do mischief in the land is only that they shall be killed or crucified or their hands and their feet be cut off on the opposite sides, or be exiled from the land. That is their disgrace in this world, and a great torment is theirs in the Hereafter.

—Qur’an 5:33

One should accept the Sharia without any question and reject all other laws in any shape or form. This is Islam … By the Sharia of God is meant everything legislated by God for ordering man’s life; it includes the principles of belief, principles of [political] administration and justice, principles of morality and human relationships, and principles of knowledge … It also includes legal matters.

—Sayyid Qutb, Islamic revivalist¹

I have been commanded to fight people until they testify that there is no god but Allah and that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah, and perform prayer, and pay Zakat. If they say it, they have saved their blood and possessions from me, except for the rights of Islam over them.

—Muhammad²

On December 11, 2009, the residents of Burton upon Trent in Staffordshire, England awoke to find the words “Islam will dominate the world” spray painted in huge letters across the War Memorial honoring British veterans who had given their lives in defense of their country. A liberal apologist for Islam, Chairman of the East Staffordshire Racial Equality Council Dennis Fletcher, rushed to tell the local newspaper that it was all an act. Someone on “the far right” must have done the vandalism to “stir things up” and defame Muslims.³

DNA evidence found on a discarded can of spray paint led police to the culprit. To Mr. Fletcher’s eternal shame, it was a Muslim named Tohseef Shah who had defiled the memorial. And he had no remorse whatsoever about it. When Shah was brought before a magistrate in April 2010, the unflappable Brits were in for another shock. Prosecutors told the court they had concluded that Shah’s vandalism had no religious motivation whatsoever. It was “politically motivated” they said, and therefore could not be charged as a hate crime. Shah walked out that day with nothing more than two years’ probation and a fine of 500 British pounds.⁴

Ironically, those prosecutors got it exactly right. Shah’s crime was not religiously motivated, although there was certainly hatred behind it, because Islam is not a religion. It was politically motivated because Islam is an Arab nationalist and imperialist political movement dressed up in occult robes and rituals—a movement hell-bent on establishing a worldwide Islamic political state to dominate the world.⁵

INTRODUCTION

For the most part, our understanding of foreign cultures is shaped by things that are already familiar to us. Those of us who come from cultures shaped by Christianity look at the Qur’an, at Sharia law, and at the Islamic mosque and see them as roughly equivalent to the Bible, the Ten Commandments, and the church or cathedral, respectively. But making such comparisons hinders rather than advances our understanding—it obscures very radical differences between Islam and Christianity (or other religions, for that matter). The Qur’an, Sharia, and the mosque are not isolated elements of a private religion, they are indivisible and deeply political parts of a whole civilization which is essentially different from our own.

THE QUR’AN

The Qur’an is at its core a political manifesto. It is the declaration of the right way of life for all human beings to follow, and of the initial efforts taken by Muhammad to establish this way of life. It is both a prescription for morality and a description of how Muslims (and Arabs in particular) are supposed to take over the world.

The Qur’an teaches that the Arabs are the actual chosen people, the sons of Abraham chosen to reveal the final word of Allah to the world.⁶ According to Islamic teaching, Jews and Christians had deliberately altered Allah’s teachings.⁷ Because of these deliberate obfuscations, the teachings of the original prophets of Allah became lost or misstated.⁸ Therefore, Allah had to reveal the Qur’an to Muhammad to correct His message.

According to Islam, Allah wants the Muslims to take over the world so that His way of life will be the only game in town. Islam is not only for Arabs, but it is the vehicle by which the whole world will be brought under their control.⁹ As Islam expands, it will become the only political system in the world as well as the only religious system in the world. To accomplish this expansion, Islam requires all sane adult males to participate in jihad—the conquest of all political and religious obstacles to Islamic domination.¹⁰

The Qur’an divides humanity into two groups: those who have accepted its revelations and their prophet (Muslims) and everybody else (kafirs).¹¹ Accordingly, Muslim society and law is multi-tiered, with one level applying to the believers and another to those kafirs who have accepted dhimmi status—that is, who have agreed to pay a yearly jizya tax in exchange for second-class citizenship and freedom from summary execution. A third tier can also be identified: the slaves. A slave owner can do more or less as he likes with his slaves, although he is under an obligation to try to teach them Islam (Muslims cannot be held as slaves by other Muslims).¹² Being Muslim is requisite for full citizenship in this world and for Paradise in the next.

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia explicitly declares that the Qur’an (along with the Sunna of Muhammad)¹³ is its constitution.¹⁴ This means Saudi Arabia has made the authoritative texts of Islam, which all Muslims are bound to accept as the highest authority on earth, as its founding documents. In a very real sense, the kingdom can claim that all Muslims fall under its government, because its government is based on the Qur’an. Muslims who live outside of the kingdom must nevertheless be loyal to Saudi Arabia—to the extent that they are believers. If push comes to shove, their loyalties will not be with the U.S. Constitution, which originates in human beings, but with the Qur’an, which supposedly originates with Allah.

From the standpoint of the non-Muslim, the kafir, there is absolutely nothing holy or religious about the book. In this respect, we can compare it with texts from other religious traditions. For example, the Dhammapada is a collection of sayings of the Buddha. A central idea in Buddhism, one of the “Four Noble Truths” at its heart, is the idea that suffering comes from desire for the things of the material world. Consequently, one of the basic moral principles in the Dhammapada is the doctrine of ahimsa—which teaches that one should avoid offering violence to any living creature, particularly human beings. It teaches its followers to seek to alleviate suffering both in themselves and in their fellow men. Warfare and violence are the antithesis of holiness:

Hatred by hatred has been pacified

Never, in all of creation;

Through freedom from hatred does hatred subside,

This law is of ageless duration.¹⁵

Followers are encouraged to free themselves of attachment to physical things.¹⁶

The contrast with the Christian New Testament is equally stark. The Qur’an commands Muslims to hate the kafir as their enemies. Jesus knew this formula centuries before and condemned it:

You have heard that it was said, “You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.” But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven … For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others?¹⁷

Jesus teaches his followers to control their sexual urges rather than to indulge in them.¹⁸ Most tellingly, he teaches that his followers are blessed when they are reviled and persecuted falsely on his account: “Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven.”¹⁹ The Qur’an commands its followers to kill anyone who acts this way toward the believers.²⁰ Which document is more holy? Christians are taught to love God and their neighbor as they love themselves.²¹ The Qur’an teaches that such love is only for fellow Muslims; one must hate the kafir for Allah’s sake. Which teaching is more religious?

The Qur’an is a holy text only for those who believe in what it teaches. For everyone else, it teaches absolute barbarity and cruelty. It is a fundamental principle that Muslims must love the things that Allah loves and to hate the things which Allah hates. Chief on Allah’s hate list is the kafir. Accordingly, the Qur’an teaches that they can be attacked,²² that they can be plotted and schemed against,²³ that they can be terrorized,²⁴ that the Muslim should not befriend them,²⁵ and that they are evil.²⁶ The Qur’an teaches that there is glory in killing for the sake of Allah.²⁷

Muhammad plays a central role in the Qur’an primarily as a political and military leader. His book extends his conquests into the social and political sphere by laying down laws and a way of life which is meant to govern over all the people he (and eventually his followers) conquers. In short, Islam is an Arab nationalist and imperialist political movement masquerading as a religion, and the Qur’an is one of its founding documents—a Declaration of Submission rather than of Independence.

The Qur’an as a founding document requires that all previous institutions get a full makeover in the image of Islam. Therefore, it attacks the pre-Islamic bases of Meccan society. The ancestral forms of political and moral order are portrayed as flawed. At the heart of this order, from the Qur’an’s point of view, is the mishmash of polytheistic religions practiced by the individual tribes and clans of the region.²⁸ The solution to salvaging Arabic society lies in abandoning these religions and accepting the divinely revealed social order of the Qur’an.²⁹ Accordingly, the Qur’an is full of new rules. There are rules about warfare, how to incorporate different political communities, and even rules of taxation in the text.

Those who submit must live their lives according to the prescriptions of Sharia (discussed in detail in the next section). Those who do not submit are kafirs. However, as mentioned above, the Qur’an recognizes one special status for kafirs living in Muslim lands: dhimmis. The dhimmi is not a full citizen.³⁰ They are not permitted to publicly proclaim or celebrate or signify their religion. Even praying or mourning too loudly is forbidden, as that could offend Muslims. They cannot testify against or bring a lawsuit against a Muslim in court. They were also forced to wear distinctive clothing denoting their status.³¹ Later Muslim rulers can abrogate contracts with dhimmi populations, making them vulnerable to pogroms or extermination if their presence is deemed offensive.

Although all Muslims are supposed to be equal, Muhammad’s tribe, the Quraysh, enjoy a special status within Islam. Before Muhammad was born, this tribe had already controlled the polytheistic pilgrimage industry in Mecca for many generations. The Quraysh initially objected to Muhammad’s teachings, since they threatened to cut into their pilgrimage profits. But a peace was secured after Muhammad made a pilgrimage to Mecca (known as the Hajj) one of the pillars of his faith.

Even today, the Quraysh tribe still controls access to the central shrine in Mecca where all Muslims go to complete their hajj. The arrogance of the tribe, as well as the other inhabitants of the Arabian Peninsula, is a common complaint among non-Arabic Muslims. Although Muhammad officially taught that Muslims were equal, the later political and religious reality has been that Arabs, and the Quraysh in particular, believe themselves particularly exalted among the faithful. The fundamental sectarian split in Islam between the Sunni and the Shia essentially stems from a disagreement about who should be allowed to guide the ummah—with the Shia arguing that only descendants of Muhammad’s family are legitimate rulers.

At its root, the Qur’an is a written proclamation that society’s ills are to be overcome by replacing existing societies with Islam. This is not truly religious; it is a fundamentally political change, embracing the whole of human life. Ethics, law, family life—everything is to be reordered along Islamic lines. Because the Qur’an is supposed to be eternal and flawless, the human political order described within it is also flawless. The social order it seeks to impose is therefore hostile to change, existing traditions, and popular will. Once imposed, there is simply totalitarian rule by an oligarchic ruling class.

SHARIA LAW

Sharia law is the social mechanism by which the Islamic order is imposed. It is founded on the three books or groups of books which together comprise the teaching of Islam. In first place is the Qur’an, which Muslims regard as an expression of divine will and more perfect than any man-made law.³² Equal in importance, in influence, and authority is what is called the Sunna, which contains the Sira (accepted biographies of Muhammad) and the Hadith (collected sayings and doings of Muhammad).³³ The Sunna is of binding authority on Muslims when it comes to the question of how the principles of the Qur’an should be administered in an Islamic society.³⁴

On some issues, neither the Qur’an nor the Sunna offers much guidance. Here, the development of Sharia has relied on secondary sources. The two most common secondary sources are the ijma, which is a consensus of scholarly opinion, and the quyas, which are analogies drawn between contemporary legal issues and a principle or example found in the Qur’an or the Sunna. Only quyas made by the most highly respected Islamic scholars are acceptable. When it comes to quyas, no two Islamic groups are exactly alike on which ones they accept and which they do not. This is a key factor behind the enormous real-world variety of Sharia law.³⁵

Over more than a thousand years, Islamic scholars have been interpreting and applying the principles and examples of the Qur’an and the Sunna to real-world situations.³⁶ As a result, Sharia is not one clear code but a patchwork of makeshift and often ad hoc law. Nevertheless, some core principles are almost universally accepted and practiced, even if these core principles are not always officially recognized or even referred to as “Sharia.”

The principles of Sharia have enormous political implications, because wherever Sharia is established it seeks to regulate all aspects of human life. Many aspects of American life would require “correction” according to Sharia:

1) Sharia forbids freedom of speech and freedom of the press. Only certain speech is allowable under Islam. No criticism of Islam itself or its founder is permissible. Anyone, even an Islamic leader, may be punished by death for such criticism.³⁷ Sharia is diametrically opposed to the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

2) Sharia forbids freedom of religion. There is lip service and limited tolerance for non-Islamic religions, but history proves conclusively that in actual practice Islamic “tolerance” means non-Muslims at best accept second class citizenship (dhimmi status) and pay discriminatory taxes (jizya).³⁸ Free exercise of religion is permitted only to Islam. Here too, Sharia is diametrically opposed to the First Amendment.

3) Sharia forbids trial by jury and the right to due process. Anyone accused in a Sharia court will be tried by one or more Islamic jurists, who will decide the fate of the accused based on their understanding of Islamic law and how it applies to the situation. There is no jury, and certainly no protection against “cruel and unusual punishment.” Sharia recognizes punishments such as chopping off limbs, hanging, beheading, and stoning as normal because they were all approved of by Muhammad.³⁹ Sharia is diametrically opposed to the Fifth and Eighth Amendments.

4) Sharia sanctions slavery. Muslims themselves are described as slaves of Allah in Islamic tradition, and Sharia law commands them to obey the orders of their Islamic leaders. Although Muslims may not own other Muslims as slaves, kafirs may be enslaved. Sharia contains guidance for how Muslims should treat their worldly slaves, including captured women. Sharia is diametrically opposed to the Ninth and Thirteenth Amendments.

5) Sharia does not recognize the federal system of government employed by the U.S. Instead, an absolute central government is insisted upon for the purpose of instituting and enforcing Islamic laws and traditions. Sharia is diametrically opposed to the Tenth Amendment.

Sharia also denies the equality under the law which is fundamental to American and western societies. In the words of the European Court of Human Rights, the tenets of Sharia are simply “incompatible with the fundamental principles of democracy.”⁴⁰ Non-Muslims are unequal to Muslims. The Qur’an clearly directs Muslims to enact humiliating penalties on their conquered enemies so that they “feel themselves subdued.”⁴¹ Non-Muslims are made subject to jizya (only external political pressure has led to most Muslim countries abandoning this practice in recent times).

Most notably, women are not equal to men under Sharia law. The Qur’an mandates that men be placed above women.⁴² A woman’s testimony in court is worth only half that of a man’s.⁴³ Men may initiate a divorce for almost any reason, while women are limited to very specific complaints only. Spousal abuse is permissible, though “only” to a mild degree.⁴⁴ In Saudi Arabia, where Sharia governs the law of the land, we can see this law in action in the “blood money” murderers are required to pay to the families of their victims. A Muslim man’s life is worth $26,000 there, while a Muslim woman is only worth $13,000. Hindu women are a comparative bargain on this meat market, worth only $888.

In about half of Muslim-majority countries, Sharia law governs at least some aspects of the legal system. Additionally, 12 nations in which Muslims are a minority population allow Sharia courts for their Muslim inhabitants. The expectation among Muslims is that these distinctions will vanish as a worldwide brotherhood of Islam emerges, producing a single culture.

The presence of Islam in the West is part of a long-term struggle to impose Sharia, whether or not individual Muslims are actively engaged in this struggle. As a co-founder of the Council on American-Islamic Relations put it:

Islam is not in America to be equal to any other faiths, but to become dominant. The Koran, the Muslim book of scripture, should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on earth.⁴⁵

This is the real aim behind efforts to impose Sharia.

THE MOSQUE

Unlike other temples or places of worship, the Islamic mosque is used for much more than religious ceremony. From the very beginning, the mosque was also a “political and administrative base.”⁴⁶ This practice remained in place for later Muslims even as their community grew beyond just a few hundred. Important political affairs such as military planning and swearing allegiances would take place at the mosque. The implementation of Sharia law also often took place there, with hearings, imprisonment, and even the execution of some Islamic punishments taking place within the walls of a mosque.⁴⁷

Today, mosques are still used for much more than religious worship—most notably, they serve as front-line bases in civilizational conquest. Gavin Boby, an Englishman who has being trying to stem the creeping tide of Islamism in his native Britain, has described the process. A mosque will be built in a neighborhood in a working-class district, where the people are unused to dealing with zoning ordinances and officiousness. The neighborhoods might not even have much of a Muslim population at all. The mosque will rarely be called a “mosque,” it will be called an Islamic center or a community center or something innocuous-sounding. Once the building is up, life around it changes forever for the local residents. Members of the “community center” will park so as to block in or crowd out vehicles used by local residents. Anyone walking around the area may be told to leave or that the area is now under Islamic control. Homes and buildings in the neighborhood may be vandalized. Eventually, those who are able to do so move away.⁴⁸

Mosques are one of the primary means by which Saudi Arabia spreads its particularly virulent brand of Islam, known as Wahhabism, around the world. Between 1979 and 2006, Saudi Arabia has spent tens of billions of dollars on the building of mosques, madrasas (Islamic schools) and Islamic centers worldwide.⁴⁹ This money wasn’t simply given away. In the words of a Muslim leader in France, “When Saudi Arabia gives you one million Euros in one hand, with the other they give you a list of what you must or must not say.”⁵⁰

A prime example of Saudi Arabia’s “beneficence” is a 75-acre Islamic complex currently under construction in Kabul, Afghanistan. Once finished, the complex will have a mosque that serves 15,000 and housing for 5,000 students at the madrasa which will also be onsite. A Saudi spokesman says the purpose of the complex is to “ensure good relations between Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia.”⁵¹ Since the school will train thousands of students in Saudi religious doctrine over its lifetime, the complex is clearly an investment in the future.

The Afghanistan complex is only one of many the Saudis have planned. In 2005, the kingdom announced plans to build 4,500 madrasas across south Asia.⁵² Although the announced goal of these mosques is to promote “modern and liberal education with Islamic values,” the Islamic values Saudi Arabia holds are Wahhabi.⁵³ They do not mean what we mean when we say “modern” or “liberal.”

Of course, the Saudis have also exerted enormous influence on one of their top trading partners—the United States. More than 80 percent of mosques in America today are funded by Saudi Arabia, either directly through their government or indirectly through Islamic charity foundations.⁵⁴ Much more concerning than the funding, however, is the content of what is taught at these places. A study by Freedom House looked at the free literature provided by the Saudis at 15 large mosques around the country. What they found was over 200 books and pamphlets full of virulent opposition to anything that deviated from Wahhabi Islam (including other forms of Islamic practice).

All of these works were published in Saudi Arabia by a variety of government agencies there. Some of the texts were products of the Saudi school system. All are disseminated by the Saudi government through the mosques they fund. Central to these texts is the same fundamental division we noted above between the Muslim and the kafir. All non-Islamic lands are regarded as Dar al-Harb, the “House of War.” Muslims living in such lands are taught to behave as if they are behind enemy lines. They must either actively convert kafirs, acquire knowledge or money which can be used in jihad against them, or else return to Islamic lands at once. Above all, they must understand that Allah commands them to harbor animosity for kafirs and all their ways.⁵⁵

The Freedom House study uncovered texts which call it a religious duty for Muslims to cultivate enmity between themselves and the kafirs. Hatred becomes “proof that the believer has completely dissociated from [the kafir].”⁵⁶ The same text makes clear that interfaith harmony is a bad outcome because it means the end of jihad: “it breaks down the wall of resentment … so that there is no loyalty and enmity, no more jihad and fighting to raise Allah’s word on earth.”⁵⁷

Throughout the texts, the most frightening element is the constant demand for jihad. One Saudi Arabian high school textbook teaches: “To be true Muslims, we must prepare and be ready for jihad in Allah’s way. It is the duty of the citizen and the government.”⁵⁸ Jihad means fighting for the spread of Islam “until the nations of the world have functionally Islamic governments.”⁵⁹ Resisting this call for jihad is called sinful.

What mosques around the world represent is so many little embassies of Islam. If the mosques are funded by Saudi money, they are embassies of Saudi Arabia’s version of Islam. If the funding comes from Iran, it is a revolutionary Shi’ite version. Those who receive their funding from other sources in turn promote whichever brand of Islam those sources advocate. In all these cases, however, the goal is essentially the same: to displace all native governments and all native traditions in favor of Qur’an-based Sharia law. The mosque is a military outpost in an ongoing war against the freedom of the mind.

PART THREE

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The Ummah

Arabs are the most noble people in lineage, the most prominent, and the best in deeds.

—Al-Tabari 9:69

They wish that you reject Faith, as they have rejected (Faith), and thus that you all become equal (like one another). So take not Auliya’ (protectors or friends) from them, till they emigrate in the Way of Allah (to Muhammad). But if they turn back (from Islam), take (hold) of them and kill them wherever you find them.

—Qur’an 4:89

O you who believe! Obey Allah, and obey the Messenger (Muhammad) and render not vain your deeds.

—Qur’an 47:33

There is a notion in Islam that the Muslims of the world together constitute one nation called the ummah. The idea of the ummah is suggested in the Qur’an,¹ and in a famous declaration made by Muhammad on December 11, 629 AD. On that day, he and an army of 10,000 followers became masters of Mecca after a successful siege.² Upon taking control of the town, Muhammad declared the foundation of a new religious state to an audience of believers and vanquished Meccans:

A Muslim is the brother of another Muslim and all the Muslims are brothers of one another and constitute one hand as against all non-Muslims. The blood of every one of them is equal to that of others and even the smallest among them can make a promise on behalf of others.³

With these words, Muhammad declared that the foundation of his new nation would be ideological. All those who accepted his revelation were equal to one another.

Today, Muhammad’s ummah is a transnational empire of about 1.6 billion people. Its constitution, its laws, and its policies are written in Arabic, a language spoken as a first language by a mere 15 percent of its subjects and not understood by a majority.⁴ After 14 centuries of imperialistic expansion the ummah now spans 49 nation-states in which Muslims are the majority, although its members exist in significant numbers as minorities across India, Europe, and North America.⁵ Wherever members of this trans-national empire exist, they are expected to congregate at a regional or local headquarters for instructions and displays of loyalty. The headquarters are called mosques, and the men who provide the instructions are called imams. The details of the loyalty displays were established by Muhammad and involve ritual prostrations and the chanting of oaths of obedience.

But there are problems with the ummah. Despite Muhammad’s declaration of equality, there is a very real hierarchy among Muslims. Members of Muhammad’s bloodline are at the top, with the rest of the Arabs below, and all non-Arabs further down. The idea of the ummah also posits that the Islamic world is Dar al-Salaam, a House of Peace. Yet as we shall see, this House of Peace is full of exploitation and discrimination. In short, the idea of an Islamic ummah is full of falsehoods and contradictions.

THE SAYYIDS

Sayyid is an Arabic term used to denote Muslims who are of Muhammad’s bloodline. The term literally means “lord” or “my liege” in Arabic. Although there are different kinds of sayyid, the most important in Islam are those who descend from Muhammad’s daughter Fatima. These descendants are looked upon with special reverence by Muslims and have acquired various privileges amounting to de facto nobility despite Muhammad’s declaration of equality among Muslims.⁶

For centuries, sayyids have often denoted their special status through clothing. In Persia and the Ottoman Empire, for example, they wore green turbans to set them apart from other Muslims. In Iran today, sayyid imams wear black turbans (ordinary imams wear white) to mark their descent from Muhammad. In many Islamic countries sayyid have received funding so that they do not have to work for a living. This practice was already long-established when 19th century European travelers to Persia noticed that it had turned the sayyid into a lazy and dissolute bunch.⁷ Over the years, other privileges given to sayyid have included immunity from ordinary state regulations with the understanding that only a fellow sayyid can judge them. There is still pressure on sayyids to only marry their fellows so as to keep the bloodline pure—a practice hardly distinguishable from noble or royal families. Even today, there is an assumption among many Muslims that sayyids are particularly holy because of their descent from the prophet.

Sayyids are numerous in Iran, where the beliefs of Shia Islam make them of even more religious and political importance. But there is also an extremely large population of purported sayyids in South Asia, where asserting Arab ancestry became a point of pride for many Muslims eager to disavow their Hindu or Indian lineage. Ironically, a genetic study of self-identified sayyids in India showed:

Self-identified Syeds had no less genetic diversity than those non-Syeds from the same regions, suggesting that there is no biological basis to the belief that self-identified Syeds in this part of the world share a recent common ancestry.⁸

This should come as no surprise: during the Qajar Dynasty in Iran, it was quite common for men to claim sayyid ancestry falsely in order to gain social prestige and advantages.⁹ Yet no one would make such false claims if there were not significant advantages to be found—advantages that run directly counter to Islam’s claims of equality.

CASTE AMONG INDIAN MUSLIMS

In addition to the elevation of Muhammad’s bloodline, there is also an elevation of Arabs and Iranians over darker-skinned Muslims. This elevation is at its most prominent in the Indian subcontinent where it takes the form of an explicit caste system. Among Indian Muslims, there has been a general divide between “noble” castes (usually called the ashraf) and “inferior” castes (called by various names, but here we will use ajlaf) since medieval times. Far from being imposed by Hindus, this caste system developed along Islamic lines and has been defended using Islamic texts.¹⁰

Ideas of “caste-based superiority and inferiority still do play an important role in Indian Muslim society,” according to Indian scholar Yoginder Sikand.¹¹ Sikand identifies two characteristics of the caste divide which have been present since medieval times. One is the persistence of racial differences in marking the divide. To medieval Islamic writers, Muslims of Arab, Central Asian, Iranian, or Afghan origin were clearly superior in status to local Indian converts (and the former tended to be lighter-skinned than the latter). Another difference involves occupation. The ashraf have tended to belong to “dominant political elites”—wealthy landowners, court advisors, and such—while the ajlaf have long been associated with ancestral professions as artisans and peasants.¹²

A key illustration of the development of this system comes in the 14th century work of a Turkish scholar named Ziauddin Barani. Barani composed the only known “treatise exclusively devoted to political theory under the Delhi Sultanate.” In his treatise he develops a doctrine and social vision which he says should be held by an ideal Muslim ruler. Barani advises this Sultan, as Sikander describes, to regard it as “a religious duty to deny the ajlaf access to knowledge” on account of their being “mean and despicable” people. He also expounds on a theory of the innate inferiority of the ajlaf in which he claims that Allah assigned qualities—including baseness and moral character—into all human souls at the beginning of time. Because of this assignation, Barani argues, it would interfere with Allah’s plan to seek to elevate the ajlaf to a position of social equality with their betters.¹³

Although the Qur’an and early Islamic practice emphasized egalitarianism among believers, as the religion spread beyond Arabia and came to include more non-Arab groups this practice was increasingly abandoned. Notions of the importance of birth and wealth came to assume as much a role in determining the relative status of Muslims. As Sikand notes:

Actual Muslim social practice, including in India, points to the existence of sharp social hierarchies that numerous Muslim scholars have sought to provide appropriate “Islamic” sanction [for] through elaborate rules.¹⁴

In time, another element which played a role in determining social status was race.

RACISM IN ISLAM

One of Islam’s greatest acts of religious deception ever might be using America’s racist past to convince Black Americans to convert. Leaving aside the sheer enormity of black slavery in Islam (which will be discussed in detail in the next section), racism is alive and well in the Islamic world. Even today, many Arabs retain a centuries-old attitude of disdain and contempt for non-Arabs in general and black Africans in particular. One of the most common slurs for Africans in the Muslim world is “Abd,” an Arabic word meaning slave.

Although Islam does not officially sanction racial prejudice and inequality, such beliefs are often “baked in” to its textual traditions. For example, in the Hadith we see Muhammad signaling a man out for insult by associating his race with evil:

I heard the Apostle say: “Whoever wants to see Satan should look at Nabtal!” He was a black man with long flowing hair, inflamed eyes, and dark ruddy cheeks … Gabriel came to Muhammad and said, “If a black man comes to you his heart is more gross than a donkey’s.”¹⁵

In another story, Muhammad instructs his followers, “Listen and obey (your chief) even if an Ethiopian whose head is like a raisin were made your chief.”¹⁶ The Hadith also contains plenty of racist discussions of Noah’s son Ham being the origin of Africans and the justification for slavery. There was a similar tradition among European peoples about the “Curse of Ham” as a justification for black slavery. But the key difference here is that the European tradition was simply a fanciful interpretation. Since the account about the inferiority of Ham’s descendants is in the Hadith, it is considered authoritative in Islam.

As a result of such stories, there is still a mindset of racial superiority among Arabs. Islam officially commands racial equality, but for Arabs this equality does not quite extend to blacks.¹⁷ Samuel Cotton, a black American who investigated slavery in Mauritania in the 1990s observed this attitude up close:

The problem is that Mauritania’s Arabs sincerely believe that blacks are inferior and are born to be slaves. They believe that a black man, woman or child’s place in life is to serve an Arab master.¹⁸

In 2010, a Canadian diplomat kidnapped by al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghred (AQIM) terror group in Mali observed the same thing even among jihadists. “They preached equality,” he noted, “but did not practice it. Sub-Saharan Africans were clearly second class in the eyes of the AQIM.”¹⁹ In 2011, the AQIM split along racial lines over the issue.

Egyptian journalist Mona Eltahawy calls racism “the Arab world’s dirty secret.” It is not merely a case of discrimination, she points out, but has actually led to violence and death. In 2005, riot policemen in Cairo trampled or beat to death some 28 people while trying to clear a camp of 2,500 Sudanese refugees. Between 2007 and 2008, Egyptian guards at the Israel border have killed “at least 33 migrants, many from Sudan’s Darfur region, including a pregnant woman and a 7-year-old girl.”²⁰ Eltahawy accuses her fellow Egyptians of remaining silent in the face of such abuses.

Arab countries today are often criticized for running de facto apartheid regimes. This is the case in Mauritania. In Sudan, mistreatment at the hands of Arab rulers prompted a secession movement which led to the creation of South Sudan.²¹ In the chapter on the Gulf Cooperation Council in this book, I detailed the widespread mistreatment of non-Arab workers—even fellow Muslims—which is rampant on the Arabian Peninsula.

SLAVERY IN ISLAM

In order to appreciate the significance of slavery in Islam, it is necessary to recognize the differences between Islamic and New World slavery. The Arab world dealt in African slaves well before Islam and continued to do so for about a century after the European world had outlawed the practice for itself. Exact figures on the number of people involved are difficult to come by, but by one scholar’s estimate it could have been as many as 25 million.²² Historical estimates are largely agreed that “the total volume of African slaves acquired by Muslim masters is greater than the total acquired by Europeans in the Americas.”²³ Slavery was only outlawed on the Arabian Peninsula after pressure from President John F. Kennedy on Saudi Arabia inspired a change.²⁴ The last country in the world to outlaw slavery was the Islamic Republic of Mauritania in 1981. Also, unlike the Atlantic slave trade, the Islamic world also dealt in white slavery, with more than one million Europeans captured along the Barbary Coast alone between 1538 and 1780.²⁵ This figure does not include the numerous Eastern European people enslaved by the Ottoman Empire.

It is often emphasized that Muhammad’s teachings led to better treatment of slaves in the Islamic world. While this is true, the situation is comparable to the one discussed in the previous chapter on women’s rights. Islam may have represented an improvement over previous barbaric customs, but that one improvement was as far as it went. In the Christian West, the anti-slavery movement originated in grassroots religious teachings. In the Islamic world, slavery remained an acceptable institution because it was accepted as normal and right by Muhammad and is treated as such in the Qur’an and the Hadith.²⁶

In fact, the injunctions placed by Islam against enslaving fellow Muslims most likely encouraged the massive importation of slaves from outside the Islamic world.²⁷ By codifying the practice of slavery in religious edicts, Islam seems to have done more to allow the institution to expand and remain in place than to deter it.²⁸ For example, in Islam it was lawful for male masters to have sex with their female slaves and captives (regardless of their consent). Purchasing female slaves for the purpose of sexual gratification was perfectly acceptable in Islam, and as one scholar notes, “this was the most common motive for the purchase of slaves throughout Islamic history.”²⁹ This is most likely why the gender ratio in the Islamic slave trade was so imbalanced—two females were imported for every male, compared to the Atlantic slave trade where the opposite ratio was in effect.³⁰

In addition to their use in concubinage, slaves were used for labor and military service. The labor was quite brutal and carried a notably high death toll. As late as the 19th century, Western travelers in Muslim lands remarked upon the high death rate among the black slaves.³¹ Despite the practice having no religious or even legal backing, it was quite common for male slaves in the Islamic world to be castrated.³² Using slaves as soldiers was also common, with warrior castes such as the Mamluks in Egypt emerging to become powerful in their own right. After a slave rebellion in 1250, these soldiers governed Egypt and part of Arabia and the Near East as the Mamluk Sultanate until 1517.

Most importantly, slavery is not a distant memory in the Islamic world. As late as 1953, the sheikhs of Qatar attended Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation with slaves in their retinue. Among Salafist and traditional religious groups there is still marked support for the institution of slavery. In 2003, a high-level Saudi jurist named Shaykh Saleh Al-Fawzan issued a statement insisting that slavery was part of Islam. Another prominent Saudi cleric, Shaikh Saad Al-Buraik encouraged Palestinians to enslave Jewish women as part of their jihad. The U.S. State Department describes Saudi Arabia and much of the Arabian Peninsula as a destination for men and women being trafficked for the purpose of labor exploitation.

EXPLOITATION OF NON-MUSLIMS

In addition to slavery, the House of Peace has also seen (and still sees) considerable discrimination against non-Muslims. The treatment of non-Muslims in Islamic lands derives largely from the Pact of Umar, an alleged peace accord offered by the Caliph Umar to the Christians of Syria. Treatment of dhimmi (i.e., “protected persons”) in large part arises from this 7th century text and the inherent inferiority of non-Muslims evident in Islamic thought.

The “pact” involves a series of promises made by the Christians in exchange for protection. In this regard it is not unlike a protection racket run by the mafia. They promise “not [to] manifest our religion publicly nor convert anyone to it,” and to “show respect toward the Muslims, and we shall rise from our seats when they wish to sit.” They agree to wear distinctive clothing and hairstyles and to provide shelter and board to any Muslim who requires it. Significantly, they also give up the right to hold public office or to bear arms.³³ Not mentioned in the pact but required by the Qur’an was the payment of a jizya tax, which could be as much as 50 percent of income.

Even if the Pact of Umar represented an advance in its treatment of non-Muslims, it is important to recognize that further advances have not taken place since the 7th century. Across the Muslim world, persecution and violence have been increasing in recent years. In 2012, the U.S. State Department’s report on religious freedom showed an increase in abuse of Christians and Jews in Muslim countries. Egypt, Nigeria, Sudan, Iran, Libya, and Tunisia were among the countries cited:

In Sudan, Islamist rioters burned down an evangelical church compound. In Libya, terrorists burned an Orthodox church, and Muslim radicals murdered hundreds of Christians in Nigeria.³⁴

As a result, non-Muslims have been fleeing from Muslim countries in significant numbers. A century ago, Christians made up 20 percent of the populations of the Middle East and North Africa. These regions have been home to Christian populations since the first century. Yet today, the region is only 4 percent Christian and 1.6 percent Jewish.³⁵ In Egypt, a “climate of fear and uncertainty” has arisen for Coptic Christian families. Muslim radicals order Christian girls in the street to cover their hair and hit them if they refuse. An imam discussing this issue on television went so far as to say that any woman not wearing the hijab or veil in public was “asking to get raped.”³⁶ In Syria, Christians who attempted to flee Muslim persecutions were prevented by roadblocks. Armed Islamic militias set them up to target fleeing Christians for robbery, kidnapping, and slaughter.³⁷

Such actions are in keeping with the demands made upon Muslims by the Qur’an and the Hadith. The Qur’an enjoins Muslims not to be friendly with non-Muslims,³⁸ and explains that the towns and cities of the unbelievers have been destroyed as a sign to them.³⁹ Muslims are also told repeatedly that abuse of infidels isn’t really wrong. Killing an infidel in Muslim lands isn’t the same as killing a Muslim, after all.⁴⁰ Abusive or degrading treatment of dhimmis is acceptable.⁴¹

THE HAJJ

Even fellow Muslims are taken advantage of in the House of Peace. One of the biggest scams is called the Hajj. The Hajj is a pilgrimage to Mecca which all Muslims are supposed to make at least once in their lives. It is presented as a holy and necessary religious ritual—yet it is hard to ignore that the Saudis treat pilgrims like cattle and make out like bandits.

The Hajj is the largest annual pilgrimage in the world by attendance, with an average of around 2.5 million attending each year. The event has several rituals associated with it. There is a circumambulation around the Kaaba, the cube-shaped building towards which all Muslims turn in prayer each day. The pilgrims race between the twin hills of Al-Marwah and Al-Safa and drink from the Zamzam Well. They visit the plains of Mount Arafat to stand in vigil. There is a ritual stoning of the devil back in town and pilgrims shave their heads and perform an animal sacrifice.

Given the nature of the event, the Hajj has been the site of politically-motivated violence. The most notable example of this came during the 1979 Hajj, when, as mentioned in a previous chapter, hundreds of Saudi religious fanatics took over the Grand Mosque. Saudi Arabian troops besieged the mosque for two weeks. By the time the sect members were dislodged, 227 troops and fighters were killed. The incident was enormously unsettling to the Saudi regime, which began making concessions to its religious authorities in the years afterward. Another incident occurred in 1987 when about 400 people, most of them Iranian Shia pilgrims, “were killed in clashes with security forces during anti-Western protests.”⁴²

Some of the rituals involved in the Hajj, such as the race between the hills and the stoning of the devil, are potentially deadly. Pedestrian tunnels get filled with surging crowds and a stampede can break out resulting in dozens or even hundreds of deaths. The worst modern example came in 1990 when a tunnel stampede killed 1,426 pilgrims, many of them Muslims from Malaysia, Indonesia, and Pakistan.⁴³ Another deadly stampede came in 2006, where 345 people were killed and hundreds of others injured. This one began when pilgrims tripped over dropped luggage on their way to perform the stoning of the devil ritual.⁴⁴ Over 3,000 people have been killed by stampedes, demonstrations, fires, and even terror attacks at the Hajj since the 1979 Grand Mosque incident.⁴⁵

Since Mecca is a bit smaller than Nashville, Tennessee in surface area, cramming in over two million visitors produces a breeding ground for illness. In addition to the usual colds, flus, and infections passed around at such gatherings, the Hajj has also been ground zero for the appearance of new illnesses. Thanks to the practice of shaving the head, the Hajj also sees its share of transmission of blood-borne illnesses as well. Some pilgrims will engage in a communal head shaving, shaving each other’s heads using and reusing unsterilized blades—a common disease vector. Pilgrims are at risk of contracting HIV or one of various strains of hepatitis thanks to this practice.⁴⁶

Given the scale of the Hajj, it has become big business for Saudi Arabia and local business owners. For Saudi Arabia, the event can bring in some $10 billion or more in annual revenue.⁴⁷ Mecca landowners have consequently seen a significant boom over the past 30 years, with property going from around $3 per square meter in the 70s to $22,000 today.⁴⁸ Pilgrims can spend a great deal of money, as well. Travel groups specializing in the Hajj in North America say it can cost Muslims between $4,000 and $15,000 to make the journey.⁴⁹ It’s not unheard of for pilgrims in poorer countries to sell their houses or take out loans to make their mandatory spiritual journey. Prices have skyrocketed along with property costs as well, leading some to ask if the Mecca journey is only for the rich.⁵⁰

Despite the spirit of equality which is expected to prevail, the Saudi government has increasingly imposed restrictions arising from political and possibly ethnic motivations. The Saudis have imposed restrictions on Iranian pilgrims several times since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. In 2010, there was a blanket ban on women from Morocco coming into Saudi Arabia based on allegations that some women were coming into the kingdom to work as prostitutes. In 2012, hundreds of Nigerian women were taken from their trip to the Hajj and deported over concerns about illegal immigration.⁵¹

This last point has become a sore spot for Saudi Arabia. As many as 10 percent of pilgrims in the country on Hajj visas every year reportedly overstay their trip. While there are no official numbers, Saudi newspapers often have stories about arrests of dozens of illegal immigrants, some of them implicated in drug-running and prostitution schemes. Areas in Mecca and other nearby cities develop into slums of the forgotten. Despite repeated efforts to crack down on the practice and punish Saudis who shelter or hire illegal immigrants, many thousands continue to make a living in the country. “Feeding my children and keeping them away from starvation” is the reason one African migrant gave to a journalist investigating the phenomenon.⁵² According to another investigation, some inhabitants of “forgotten areas” of Saudi Arabia can end up living in legal limbo “for generations.”⁵³ The governor of Mecca Province in 2012 estimated that there were about one million illegal residents living in that province’s slums.⁵⁴

Despite Islam’s claims of equality and peace, it offers neither. West Pakistan fought a genocidal war against East Pakistan in which three million people were killed. These were both Muslim countries. Between 1980 and 1988 Iran and Iraq fought a deadly war that included the use of chemical and biological weapons. One million people were killed, almost all of them Muslims. Even today, the majority of the conflicts in Muslim nations—in Pakistan, Iraq, and Egypt for example—are conflicts between Muslims. Is this a house of peace?

On top of that, as we have seen in this chapter, there is persistent inequality among Muslim people. Muslims who are not Arabs are not equal to Arabs, and Arabs who are not descendants of Muhammad are not equal to those who are. Black Muslims are particularly looked down upon; for nearly 1,400 years Africa served as a chief supplier of slaves to the Islamic ummah. As a religion, Islam has inequality built in to its fundamental beliefs. Slavery is acceptable. Abuse and contempt for non-Muslims is acceptable and even mandatory. In modern times, traditional dhimmi protections have sometimes gone by the wayside, prompting a mass exodus of non-Muslims from Islamic lands. Even fellow Muslims are subject to exploitation.

But in one important sense, the concept of the ummah is correct. Wherever Muslims are, they identify primarily with this transnational “state” far more than the country where they reside. Their faith requires them to work to transform their nations into members of the ummah. Once this is accomplished, however, neither equality nor peace is established. What is established is a doctrine of Arab supremacy.

PART THREE

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Sufism

[The Hindus] totally differ from us in religion, as we believe in nothing in which they believe, and vice versa. On the whole, there is very little disputing about theological topics among themselves; at the utmost, they fight with words, but they will never stake their soul or body or their property on religious controversy.

—Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Biruni¹

It can be maintained that the strictly monotheistic religions do not naturally lend themselves to mysticism; and there is much to be said for this view. Christianity is the exception because it introduces into a monotheistic system an idea that is wholly foreign to it, namely, the Incarnation of God in the Person of Jesus Christ. Such an idea is repulsive to the strict monotheism of Islam as it is to that of the Jews.

—Professor R.C. Zaehner²

The general view is that most of the [Sufi] orders … can be classified as either un-Islamic or antimodern.

—Professor Annemarie Schimmel³

When Islam wishes to show a gentler, more tolerant side it will frequently make use of the Sufis. The Sufis present a kind of Islamic-themed mysticism, and have traditionally been in the vanguard when Islam sought to expand its influence outside the Middle East.⁴ By presenting a more open form of Islamic practice the Sufis show a compatible and tolerant face of Islam to the world. But Sufism itself is anomalous within Islam and is extremely vulnerable to accusations of heresy and attacks from the followers of literal Islam. The Sufis often find themselves on the receiving end of Islamist violence once their usefulness is at an end.

MYSTICISM AND ISLAM

It is difficult to define Sufism with precision because there is no set of beliefs or practices common to all self-identified “Sufi” communities in Islam. As religious scholar Carl Ernst puts it:

All that we describe as Sufism is firmly rooted in particular local contexts, often anchored to the very tangible tombs of deceased saints, and it is deployed in relation to lineages and personalities with a distinctive local sacrality.⁵

Thus, Sufis in Morocco may do things Sufis in Pakistan would never have any interest in, and Sufis who follow traditions laid down by Abu Yazid may hold beliefs which are very different from those held by the followers of Chishti.

With these reservations in mind, we can describe Sufism in general as Islamic mysticism. As a mystical tradition, it has certain qualities which it shares with other forms of religious mysticism. The most notable feature Sufism shares with mysticism generally is the search for a spiritual experience of union with God or what we might call ultimate reality. This experience relies upon a belief in the immanent existence of God or ultimate reality in all things.⁶ In the words of one of the great students of the world’s mystical traditions:

By this perpetually-renewed casting down of the hard barriers of individuality, these willing submissions to the compelling rhythm of a larger existence than that of the solitary individual or even of the human group … you are to begin with that first form of contemplation which the old mystics sometimes called the ‘discovery of God in His creatures’ … [until one finds] the ardent self-expression of that Immanent Being whose spark burns deep in your own soul.⁷

Mysticism builds upon this idea of something larger than the individual or group—a fundamental unity which underlies things. Nearly every world religion has a mystical tradition, and some have more than one.

In the case of Islam, the fundamental beliefs of mysticism run directly counter to the fundamental religious creed. Islam is radically monotheistic or what scholars sometimes call “dualistic.” This means that God (Allah) is understood as radically other and separate from man. The mystical notion of “discovering God in His creatures” contradicts the Islamic conception of God. Islam is also radically legalistic. This means that its focus is on right action as laid down by the authoritative texts of Islam (the Qur’an and the Hadith). The notion of a spiritual experience of oneness or unity with God is opposed to the Islamic view that man is the slave of God. When a 15th century Sufi poet expresses the view “that God is everywhere, inherent in everything,” this is close to heresy.⁸ For orthodox or literal Islam, it is heresy.

Nevertheless, as the perennial existence of mystical traditions demonstrates, there seems to be a common human desire for experience with the divine. Sufism is an attempt to address this perennial desire within an Islamic context. But by its very nature, this places Sufism beyond the pale of orthodox Islam. As Professor R.C. Zaehner argues, “[Sufism] is so radical a distortion of orthodox [Islamic] doctrine as to constitute a separate religion.”⁹

The question arises of where Sufism came from if it is such a distortion of or departure from ordinary Islam. One source is the mystical tradition of pre-Islamic Persia (many of the early masters of Sufism were Persians). But another major source of influence identified by Zaehner is India—specifically the mystical traditions of Advaita Vedanta and Mahayana Buddhism.

THE INDIAN INFLUENCE ON ABU YAZID

Abu Yazid (804-c874) was an early Sufi master and one of the most influential on later Sufism. His master, Abu Ali, is described as a man from Sindh. Zaehner argues that this description refers to the Sindh region in northwest India which was the first to be conquered by Islam in the 8th century. Through his master, Abu Yazid came under the influence of “a totally alien stream of mysticism,” and through Abu Yazid himself, Vedanta ideas, according to Zaehner, “became part and parcel of later Islamic mysticism.”¹⁰

In Abu Yazid’s day, the Hindu teachings of the Upanishads were passed down primarily by oral tradition from masters to their disciples. Anyone demonstrating knowledge or influence of the Upanishads must almost by definition have received it from studying with a master. In Abu Yazid’s case, there are two examples of this influence. One example is found in his sayings, which contain “closely parallel passages” which are found “nowhere else except in the Upanishads and are utterly characteristic of them.”¹¹ The other comes from Abu Yazid’s behavior. It is a saying in some of the Upanishads that the one who has attained wisdom may act like an idiot—that is, that a sage may behave in a defiantly unconventional or transgressive manner.

Zaehner points to the example of a later Sufi mystic, Abu Sa’id Abul-Khayr, who for 40 years was a strict observer of the religious law. But after he obtained liberation or what he himself called “freedom,” he began to demonstrate his transcendence of the religious law by his increasingly outrageous behavior. A similar pattern may be observed in Abu Yazid, whose early sayings are more conventionally pious, then give way to extravagant claims of being identical with God in his later years.¹² Not only that, Abu Yazid likewise presents himself as “beyond the religious law, beyond all ritual acts of piety. He does not go to Mecca, Mecca comes to him.”¹³

Buddhism was also an influence on Sufism. The penetration of Islam into India coincided with a flourishing period in Buddhism. Consequently, the religious influences upon Sufism involve a mixture of Buddhist literature as well. One notable example includes the famous story of the blind men and the elephant from the Buddhist Udana which appears in the works of Sufi mystics Tahwidi, Ghazali, and later in the poet Rumi. The point of the story in the Udana was to mock religious dogmatism—a viewpoint which suited Sufi interests quite well as they became increasingly impatient with dogmatic Muslim theologians.¹⁴

Another example includes a passage from the Udana which describes the liberated state of the sage by an analogy with streams flowing into the ocean. The streams do not shrink or overflow the ocean, and just so the monks who pass into a state of nirvana do not increase or shrink the state itself. Abu Yazid composed a paraphrase of this same passage:

You see how many rivers flow with a splashing, chattering sound, but when they draw near to the sea and mingle with it, their splash and chatter is stilled, and the sea has no experience of them nor do they increase in it … man is like the torrent and the sea.¹⁵

USING SUFISM AS A MEANS OF CONVERSION

Sufism was useful to orthodox Islam as a way of converting people raised outside the Abrahamic faith traditions. This was particularly notable in India, where Sufism’s impact came in the 12th and 13th centuries after the Sufi orders had been established and consolidated in the Islamic world. A key figure here was Chishti, a Sufi leader who arrived in Delhi in 1193 and later settled in Ajmer. Chishti and the Sufi order he founded “became a nucleus for the Islamization of central India.”¹⁶ Thanks primarily to Chishti saints, “whose simple and unsophisticated preaching and practice of love of God and one’s neighbor impressed many Hindus,” there were some conversions in this period.¹⁷

Once enough of a population had accepted Islam, the orthodox typically introduced Sharia law and exclusivist theology, demanding acceptance of this harsher brand of Islam on pain of death or oppressive taxation through jizya. In this way, Sufism was used as a Trojan Horse. Once enough people were converted within a given area, the game was up. And once Sufism had served its usefulness, the Sufis too were oppressed along with the rest.

At the same time, Sufis themselves have not been opposed to taking up the sword and participating in jihad. In India, for instance, Sufis were often some of the most fanatical and fundamentalist activists on behalf of Islamic imperialism. Not only did they raise no objections to the genocide of Hindus, they encouraged it. Amir Khusrau, who is sometimes presented as a “secular Sufi saint” of medieval India nevertheless wrote:

Happy Hindustan, the splendor of religion, where the [Islamic] law finds perfect honor and security … The whole country, by means of the sword of our holy warriors, has become like a forest denuded of its thorns by fire.¹⁸

The Sufi Shaikh Sirhindi (1564-1624) himself came to India with the explicit goal of “purifying” Islam from the influences of Akbar the Great. He wrote a number of letters to the Mughal emperor demanding him to return to the path of Sharia and expel all Shias and Hindus from his government. In one letter, he wrote, “They [the non-Muslims] should constantly remain terrified and trembling. It is intended to hold them under contempt and uphold the honor and might of Islam.”¹⁹ Another prominent Sufi from the 18th century, Shah Waliullah, actually wrote letters to the ruler of Afghanistan frantically begging him to invade India and put down the Hindus.²⁰

SUFISM AND ISLAM—SHANKARA AND MUHAMMAD COMPARED

To illustrate the limitations of the mystical tradition within Islam, we should consider the exemplars and founders of Advaita Vedanta and Islam, Sankara and Muhammad, respectively. Sankara is the great exemplar of classical Brahminical thought. Both men have a monotheistic conception of God. For Sankara, this is his doctrine of Brahman as “one without a second.” Brahman is the sole reality. The apparent separateness of all the things and beings of the world are understood as illusory or as an apparent transformation of Brahman, the true reality. The individual self and the ego are compared to an imagined perception of a snake where there is only a coil of rope. In other words, the self is a case of “mistaken identity.” Even God the creator himself is understood as part of the illusory order of existence. There is no creator separate from the creation—these words are merely superimposed upon the sole, monistic Brahman.

The image of pots made of clay is also used to describe the relationship between the self and Brahman. When a pot is broken, it reverts to its basic substance, clay. When the individual self is realized as Brahman, only Brahman remains. The position is summed up by Zaehner in these words:

In the Vedantin hierarchy of being, only the One exists absolutely: the Lord and all that proceeds from him are produced by cosmic “illusion” or “ignorance” and the proof of this is mystical experience which, it is maintained, is at its highest the realization of the absolute unity of being.²¹

In comparison with this view, Islam simply has no equivalent to Brahma. Allah is essentially an active God—a God who deals with men rather than a timeless absolute into which the human soul can be absorbed in mystic rapture.²² Islam reiterates the Old Testament view of God as absolutely other, who created the world at the beginning of time and will judge it at the end. The proper relationship of man to God in Islam is one of submission and obedience to the divine will. There is no scope for identity between the devotee and Allah.²³

Sankara relegates god and all deities to a relative and ultimately illusory order of existence. Nevertheless, he retains the ideal of loving devotion to a deity as an appropriate preparatory move on the spiritual path. Compare this view with the Sufi doctrines of Abu Yazid and others. Once Abu Yazid had attained revelation, he had no hesitation in saying:

Verily all creatures are beneath the banner of Muhammad, but, by God, my banner is more exalted than the banner of Muhammad. My banner is of light, and beneath it are all the prophets that have ever appeared among Jinn or men.²⁴

Such a view is simply blasphemous in Islamic terms, but Abu Yazid’s statements make perfect sense from the standpoint of Sankara’s non-dualist philosophy.

An even more significant contrast can be drawn between Sankara and Muhammad over the question of epistemology. For Sankara, knowledge—specifically self-knowledge—was paramount. He states the case for primacy of knowledge over action:

Action cannot destroy ignorance, for it is not in conflict with ignorance. Knowledge alone destroys ignorance, as light destroys dense darkness.²⁵

But for Muhammad, jihad in the service of Allah was paramount, and knowledge consisted in being cognizant of and obedient to the commands of Allah:

Let those fight in the way of Allah who sell life of this world for the other. Whoso fighteth in the way of Allah, be he slain or victorious, on him we shall bestow a vast reward.²⁶

The lives lived by these two men illustrate their difference in outlook. Sankara was a celibate monk who spent his life in meditation and discourse—that is, seeking knowledge. Muhammad was a trader and a warlord who spent his life in acquisition of women, wealth, and worldly power. His life was virtually the opposite of a mystic’s life.

OPPOSITION TO SUFISM WITHIN ISLAM

From its beginnings, Sufism has been viewed skeptically by orthodox and literalist forces in Islam, which have traditionally been the most dominant. One of the great early Sufi figures was al-Hallaj, a Persian seeker and poet who made a journey to India and points east in the late 9th century. He returned to Islamic lands with teachings about personal sanctification and poems about the immanence of God in the human heart. He was apprehended by the authorities in 912 and executed ten years later, becoming one of the earliest Sufi martyrs.²⁷

Another key figure in Sufism is Ibn Arabi, a 12th century author whose writings became the very “apex of mystical theories” in Sufism. From the very start his writings were targeted by orthodox Muslims and they “have never ceased attacking him.”²⁸ Despite Ibn Arabi’s personal reputation for piety, his writings were unable to persuade the orthodox simply because their beliefs left little room for “independent theological thought” like his.²⁹

Efforts to moderate Islam motivated by Sufi beliefs have likewise run into problems. Akbar the Great tried to foster a religious eclecticism in the Mughal Empire partly based on Sufi ideas, but his efforts didn’t survive him. In the end, “Akbar’s religious tolerance was, in its practical consequences, scarcely compatible with Muslim law, and the orthodox became highly suspicious.”³⁰ Dara Shikoh, the son of later Mughal emperor Shah Jahan, was himself highly reputed as a mystic and religious pluralist. But Dara fell prey to his orthodox Muslim brother, the emperor Aurangzeb, who had him executed.³¹

Sufism has produced features in Islam that contradict its own stated official beliefs. One example concerns venerations of the Prophet and Islamic demands against idol worship. Through Sufi influence, certain extra attentions are sometimes paid to things concerning the person of Muhammad.³² One example involves a shrine in Srinagar that has been built up since the 17th century around the veneration of an alleged hair from Muhammad’s beard. Thousands of Muslims visit this shrine every year to offer their prayers and catch a glimpse of the hair. When the relic disappeared for a week back in 1963 there were riots and street protests over it.³³

Another example involves grave worship and prayers to saints. The Hadith explicitly forbids Muslims to build places of worship over the graves of religious men (that is, shrines).³⁴ Nevertheless, the practice of making pilgrimages to shrines of saints and scholars is common in Sufism, particularly in South Asia. The Sufi master Chishti’s tomb in Ajmer, India is a popular destination. Sufi shrines are often targeted by adherents of literal Islam on the grounds that they are forbidden.

In recent years, adherents of literal Islam have launched repeated efforts to destroy Sufism. As a general rule, wherever Islamists gain power Sufism is persecuted or driven underground.³⁵ Many of those who follow literal Islam see their religion as in crisis, corrupted from within by Sufism and other “innovations” and from without by secularism and the West.³⁶ In Tunisia, the so-called “Arab Spring” uprising led to the destruction or desecration of 39 Sufi shrines between 2011 and the start of 2013.³⁷ In Sudan in 2012, there was a violent exchange between Sufis marking the birthday of Muhammad and Islamists who objected to the practice as un-Islamic.³⁸ As mentioned above, Pakistan has seen particularly violent anti-Sufi activity in recent years. In October 2010, 17 pilgrims to Sufi shrines were killed and 100 others injured in multiple bombing attacks by the Pakistani Taliban.³⁹ In a particularly brutal 2010 atrocity, suicide bombers killed 42 and injured 180 at a Sufi shrine in Lahore.⁴⁰

In the early 20th century, a revivalist Islamic scholar named Muhammad Iqbal produced a very influential essay called The Development of Metaphysics in Persia. In this work, he discusses the history and legitimacy of Sufism. In doing so, Iqbal advances several of the claims also made in this chapter. He acknowledges that Sufism is the product of non-Arab influences such as Advaita Vedanta, Buddhism, and non-Islamic Persian mysticism. He describes the Arab mind as non-speculative and legalistic—a view which is reflected in the Qur’an and the Hadith and which contrasts sharply with the metaphysical and speculative nature of Indian and Greek thought.

Most interestingly, however, Iqbal goes on to defend Sufism as orthodox on the basis of a verse in the Qur’an which refers ambiguously to some sort of wisdom imparted to Muhammad which was not included in the Qur’an because of its esoteric nature. The Sufi claim to Islamic legitimacy rests, Iqbal says, upon this vaguely-defined wisdom. It was a clever attempt by Iqbal, but it has never found much acceptance among Islamic theologians. Instead, any departures from the literal words of the Qur’an and the Hadith are considered suspicious at best and blasphemous at worst.

Despite Iqbal’s claims, literal Islamists such as Yusuf Hijazi have no problem characterizing Sufi practices as “pagan” with “little resemblance to the Islam left by our Prophet.”⁴¹ Quoting an influential imam, Hijazi insists, “That which was not religion at the time of the Messenger and his companions … is never to be religion today.”⁴² This is the viewpoint of literal Islam, and a few fanciful interpretations cannot help Sufism stand up against this critique. Wherever literal Islam gains power and influence, Sufis and Sufism end up being purged.

PART THREE

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Universal Jihad

The Prophet Muhammad was asked: “What city will be conquered first, Constantinople or Romiyya?” He answered: “The city of Hirqil will be conquered first”—that is, Constantinople … Romiyya is the city called today “Rome,” the capital of Italy. The city of Hirqil was conquered by the young 23-year-old Ottoman Muhammad bin Morad, known in history as Muhammad the Conqueror, in 1453. The other city, Romiyya, remains, and we hope and believe [that it too will be conquered]. This means that Islam will return to Europe as a conqueror and victor, after being expelled from it twice—once from the South, from Andalusia, and a second time from the East, when it knocked several times on the door of Athens.

—Dr. Yusuf Qaradawi, citing a hadith¹

How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live … the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world … were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilization of ancient Rome.

—Winston Churchill²

The practice of social distancing that Ottoman theocracy prescribed for Muslims in relation to the non-Muslim nationalities had a special ingredient that charged this practice with a lethal animus: scorn blended with latent hatred.

—Vahakn Dadrian³

The Islamic calendar does not begin with the birth of the Prophet Muhammad or with the year in which he first began to recite the words he claimed came from the angel Gabriel. Instead, it begins with the hijra, Muhammad’s journey in 622 to a town called Yathrib to become its leader. In becoming the leader of that town, which he renamed Medina, Muhammad also became its lawgiver, laying down in a document known as the Charter of Medina the duties of the competing tribes of Arabs and Jews as well as those of his fledging Islamic followers.

After a brief attempt to woo the three Jewish tribes living there he expelled two of them and, after suspecting them of collaborating with his Meccan enemies, annihilated the third. As many as 800 men were beheaded, their land was stolen, and their wives and children were sold into slavery.⁴ Within a year of securing Medina, Muhammad turned his attention to another wealthy tribe of Jews near the town of Khaybar. The motivation here seems to have been primarily plunder and prestige, as there was no breach of covenant or overt hostility on the part of the Khaybar Jews.⁵ Again men were killed, women and children taken as slaves, and the abundant booty distributed among the faithful—with Muhammad receiving his customary 20 percent.

But Muhammad’s real aim was his hometown of Mecca, which still clung to its pagan affiliation. Raids on Meccan caravans brought wealth to Medina and humbled the pagans. Then in 630 Muhammad returned to Mecca at the head of an army of 10,000 Muslims. The town capitulated.

Two years after his triumphant return to Mecca, Muhammad was dead. But the foundation and pattern of Islamic empire had been laid. On his deathbed, he commanded that the land of the Arabs be made synonymous with the land of the Muslims. His followers would carry forward this mandate under the name of jihad—an unlimited religious obligation “to bring the world under Islamic law.”⁶

Central to the pattern established by Muhammad was the expectation of power. “I was ordered to fight all men,” he told his followers in a valedictory address, “until they say there is no God but Allah.”⁷ The community he forged at Medina was political as well as a religious—a small nation with himself as its Prophet-king.⁸ From the lips as well as the example of their Prophet, Muslims have received a solemn injunction to take by force that which they believe rightly belongs to them. And in the years immediately following their leader’s death we can see how they carried out this agenda.

THE SPREAD OF ISLAM UNDER THE FIRST CALIPHATES

The first task undertaken by the followers of Muhammad after his death was a campaign of territorial conquest.⁹ The thinking was that once Muslims took control over an area they would be free to impose Islamic law on its people. Conversion was always secondary to rule. Although the migration of Muslims into other lands also played a role in the spread of Islam, the indispensable element in its growth was violence. Islamic scholar Efraim Karsh explains:

Islam envisages a global political order in which all humankind will live under Muslim rule as either believers or subject communities. In order to achieve this goal it is incumbent on all free, male adult Muslims to carry out an uncompromising struggle “in the path of Allah,” or jihad. This in turn makes those parts of the world that have not yet been conquered by the House of Islam an abode of permanent conflict (Dar al-Harb, the House of War) which will only end with Islam’s eventual triumph.¹⁰

The Islamic community filled the vacuum left by the death of Muhammad by appointing as successor a Caliph, a position combining absolute spiritual as well as temporal authority, to lead the believers on their jihad. Tellingly, all of the first four men to hold the position were related to Muhammad by blood and/or marriage). Three of the four also had their caliphates cut short by assassination.

Abu Bakr, the first Caliph, was also the first to turn his attention to the regions outside of the Arabian Peninsula. To the north, the area was roughly divided between two empires. On the western side, the last vestige of the old Roman Empire (which historians refer to as the Byzantine Empire) ruled a wide expanse of territory that included the modern-day states of Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, and Egypt. In the east the Persian Sassanid Empire governed an equally impressive expanse that included modern Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, parts of central Asia and the Indus Valley. Both were of ancient standing with long-enduring cultures of learning and religious faith (Christian and Zoroastrian, respectively).

In the 30 years prior to Muhammad’s death, the two empires had been locked in a series of military campaigns that resulted in a bloody stalemate. The wars “ruined some of the richest provinces of both empires, and the taxation to pay for them had impoverished the rest.”¹¹ In 634 Islamic armies began to sweep into the lightly defended and vulnerable borderlands between the two empires. In 636, the soldiers of jihad perpetrated “one of the great military massacres of antiquity,” killing some 50,000 soldiers in the Battle of Yarmuk.¹² With that battle, all of Syria was lost. A year later, Jerusalem was also taken. Although the Byzantines would bounce back and resist for another 800 years, they never recovered from the loss of territory during this first onslaught.¹³

The Sassanid Empire, on the other hand, was completely wiped out. After the pivotal battle of Qadisiyya in 637, all of Mesopotamia fell under Arab-Islamic control. A century later, the Mesopotamian city of Baghdad, more developed and hospitable than either Mecca or Medina, would become the new capital of the Muslim empire. Masses of Zoroastrians in the former religious centers of the Sassanids were massacred, and surviving adherents faced intense persecution.¹⁴

In the 7th century, Egypt was a Christian nation, governed under the Byzantine Empire. It was one of the original patriarchates, with a community of believers who stretched back to the time of the Apostles. The inhabitants spoke the Coptic language, which descended from the language of the ancient Egyptians. The Coptic Church was the first in Christendom to adopt and develop a monastic system, which would later prove instrumental in the preservation and transmission of learning. In 639, an army of Arabs crossed into Egypt from Palestine. By 642, Alexandria was conquered and the library destroyed. The conquerors gave their subjects three options: convert to Islam, accept dhimmi status (essentially paying protection money to their Islamic overlords), or be destroyed. The Egyptians chose the second option.

The Egyptian option is an excellent illustration of the fate that befell every people who lived in a territory conquered by Muslims. The Coptic Christians found their lives to be full of continual legal and economic subjugation. Everyone was banned from criticizing the Qur’an, Islam, or its Prophet. Christians were not allowed to hold public funerals, to build homes higher than those of Muslims, or to hold certain positions of public authority.¹⁵ Christian men were forbidden from marrying Muslim women, although Muslim men could marry Christian women. Muslims could own Christians as slaves, but the reverse was unacceptable. Christians were also forced to wear clothing that distinguished them from the Muslim populace.¹⁶

The oppression only continued over the years. Depending on how “pious” a Muslim ruler was, regulations concerning dhimmis would be enforced with varying regularity. By the 15th century, one of the oldest Christian communities in the world had become a minority in their own country.

The invasions and deprivations of Islamic armies during the early Caliphates are too numerous to be included in full. Nevertheless, we must take note of some of the most significant advances made during the first centuries of Islamic expansion. It is fashionable among some historians to emphasize the religious tolerance of the Caliphs, as if they were beacons of multiculturalism. In reality, this period featured a mass extinction of ancient cultures. With the Sassanids of Iran it came in a sudden apocalypse. For others, it was a slow, grinding process.

After Egypt, the armies of jihad began to extend their authority across the whole of North Africa. In the words of historian Philip Jenkins, the Christianity established along the Mediterranean shores “did not simply fade away through lack of zeal or theological confusion: it was crushed, in a welter of warfare and persecution.”¹⁷ Along the way, the advancing tide also put an end forever to the glories of Carthage and the long-established Greco-Roman civilization that had flourished there for centuries.¹⁸

In the 8th century, Islamic armies made two significant encroachments upon Europe. The first was a full-scale invasion of Sicily in 740 after almost a century of raiding and pillaging expeditions. Over the course of the next 150 years, Muslim forces gradually wrested control of the island from its Byzantine rulers. Between 965 and 1060 Sicily was ruled as an independent Emirate until the Normans invaded and gradually expelled all Muslim influence.

Further west, Spain endured a far longer period of conquests and raiding. Fortunately for the Spaniards, their Muslim rulers were often more occupied in fighting against one another than they were in fighting the infidel. In the 9th century, the ruler al-Hakam in Toledo decapitated at least 700 of his Muslim subjects in a single day after becoming suspicious of a planned rebellion. Later, he crucified 300 more in Cordoba for demonstrating against high food prices.¹⁹ After military setbacks in France and northern Spain, the Muslims were unable to penetrate further into Europe. We should remember that when the conquistadors set sail for the New World, the Spaniards had just spent several centuries of hard fighting in retaking their land.

Beginning in the 8th century, Muslims began to encroach eastward as far as the Indus Valley. They first came looking for Buddhist shrines to loot.²⁰ The Hindu Kush and the Indus Valley, geographical areas that form the backbone of the modern nations of Pakistan and Afghanistan, were formerly home to ancient civilizations marked by religious pluralism and advanced learning.²¹ As described in more detail in the chapters on Pakistan, India, and Afghanistan, the existing cultures of these regions were smashed, the lands militarily subdued, and the peoples enslaved and oppressed.²²

THE RISE OF THE TURKS

The success and scope of the Islamic empire expanded the conflicts and problems associated with its direction and rule. By the 10th century two significant developments had taken hold. The ruling caliphate was losing its power over the Islamic nation as real power increasingly devolved to local governors who, although nominally serving under the Caliph’s authority, mostly made their own decisions.²³ And Turkish slaves who had been imported into the caliphate to serve as soldier-slaves were becoming a force in their own right: “As the military became predominantly Turkish, and as the regimes of Islam became predominantly military, the Turks established a domination that lasted a thousand years.”²⁴ The influx of Turkish influence, far from weakening the cause of jihad, gave it a new burst of fanatical energy. The soldier-slaves of Islam became its most militant advocates.²⁵

In the 11th century the armies of the Seljuk Turks seized the torch of jihad. They wrested control of Mesopotamia, Palestine, and Syria from their fellow Islamic rulers and extended Islamic dominion over most of Byzantine Anatolia (which is present-day Turkey).²⁶ The decisive moment came at the Battle of Manzikert in 1071, when a Seljuk victory over the Byzantines opened the way for two centuries of Turkish migration into Anatolia.²⁷

What marked Turkish Islam from the very beginning was its fanatical devotion to defending and advancing the faith and power of Islam by the sword.²⁸ A 12th century Syrian recorded the fate of one of his people’s cities in 1057 where victorious Turks “began to massacre without pity.”²⁹ For ten days, the Turk soldiers plundered and pillaged and finally burned the venerable metropolis. In similar fashion Edessa, one of the original centers of Christian civilization in the Middle East, was obliterated. The Turks massacred 30,000 inhabitants and enslaved 16,000 (almost the entire surviving population). In the year-long plunder that followed, numerous sites were destroyed beyond retrieval even for future archaeologists.³⁰

In the light of this series of conquests we can more properly assess the accusations leveled against Europeans for the Crusades. Far from being a “long European onslaught,”³¹ it might be more accurate to see the Crusades as “an attempt to recover by holy war what had been lost by holy war.”³² The Middle East does not belong by rights to Islam; it was taken by force and converted by enormous social and political pressure. The original inspiration for the Crusades came from an exhausted and beleaguered Byzantium appealing to the Catholic west for aid.³³ In response to these pleas, Pope Urban II in 1095 sought to rouse the first of the crusades to the so-called Holy Land.

At the time of the First Crusade, Muslim empires in the east were more interested in their struggle with one another for dominion over the caliphate than a small incursion into the Levant.³⁴ If the Crusades were such an unforgivable wound to the heart of Islam, that seems to have eluded the Muslims who were actually around at the time. It was only a century later that Saladin led his successful campaign against the Crusaders.³⁵ In fact, it was 19th century translations of European books about the Crusades which sparked interest in the period in the Islamic world. The first major treatment of the Crusades by an Islamic scholar came in 1899.³⁶

THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE—THE LAST CALIPHATE

The Seljuk dynasty fell apart in the wake of the Mongol invasions of the 13th century, but that wasn’t the end of the Turks. After the collapse of the Seljuks, Turks broke up into small societies animated by an enthusiasm that “combined the love of fighting and its spoils … with unwavering religious commitment to world conquest through perpetual raiding and colonization.”³⁷ Rising from out of these societies, and coming to dominate them all, were the Ottomans. The Ottomans took a two-fronted stance which has since become familiar to modern observers of Islamic jihad. On the one hand, they believed it fell to them to unify the House of Islam under their sole command. On the other, they regarded it as their duty to fight against the West to destroy all opponents of Islam.³⁸

Their rule of the Islamic world was opposed primarily by the Mamluk sultanate which had come to rule over Egypt, Syria, Palestine, and most of the Arabian Peninsula. Within their domains they had enacted a series of “ever-more draconian penal laws” designed to convert or destroy the remaining non-Islamic religions.³⁹

The first significant move against Europe came in 1354 when the Ottomans occupied Gallipoli. In the 1380s Bulgaria was subjugated. Finally, the fate of the Balkans was sealed at the Battle of Kosovo with the crushing defeat of Serbian forces. Almost all that remained of the former Byzantine Empire was the capital of Constantinople. The grand city finally fell in 1453—an event which ironically aided the Renaissance in Europe, as fleeing Byzantines took what they could of the works of ancient Greece and Rome with them. With this victory, the Ottoman sultanate became the most prestigious power of the Islamic world.⁴⁰

In 1480 the Ottomans made a play for southern Italy, dropping an invasion force of 18,000 troops at the walls of Otranto. After a 15-day siege in which a small garrison and the townsfolk struggled together to keep the invaders at bay, the Turks broke into the city. Troops broke into the Cathedral of Otranto, where they found Archbishop Stefano Agricolo waiting for them, crucifix in hand. The archbishop was beheaded at the altar and the priests and men with him were sawed in half.

According to tradition, at this time 800 adult males were told to convert to Islam or be slain. The men defiantly refused. The group was then taken to the Hill of Minerva (since renamed the Hill of Martyrs) and beheaded to the last man. Their resistance was not in vain, either. The Ottomans were delayed so long in taking Otranto that a force led by Alfonso of Aragon was able to gather and retake the city the following year. When the liberators discovered the bodies of the executed Otrantines, they were moved to the church and later honored. The “Martyrs of Otranto” were eventually canonized as saints in May 2013 by Pope Francis.

For a time, Islam’s further spread into Europe was only halted by the Kingdom of Hungary and its legendary sovereigns John Hunyadi and his son Matthias. But after the absorption of Mamluk territory into the Ottoman Empire in 1517, the Turks refocused their energies on Central Europe. The strategically critical city of Belgrade was captured in 1521, and five years later Hungarian strength was decisively broken at the Battle of Mohacs. This victory was followed by the usual Ottoman atrocity. The two thousand prisoners taken on the battlefield were first humiliated and then executed. The soldiers then headed north to plunder the royal city of Buda before setting their sights on the main prize: Vienna.⁴¹

Fortunately for European civilization, the campaign against Hungary would prove to be the Ottoman Empire’s high-water mark. Their first siege of Vienna in 1529 failed to win the city. In 1683 they suffered a decisive defeat there. Nevertheless, they remained the masters over a vast territory until World War I. No one in Europe bore this domination as heavily as the Christian populations in the Balkans. Orthodox churches everywhere were turned into mosques, and the people lived under constant threat of religious subjugation and enslavement.⁴² Even the nature of the people itself was degraded as the Ottomans forcibly removed the most promising Christian youths to serve as elite slave-troops (known as janissaries) for the Sultan.

The case of the Serbian people may stand as an example for the region. Under Ottoman rule the Serbs suffered from discrimination, loss of political and religious freedom, and economic and cultural isolation.⁴³ Still, that didn’t stop the Serbs from engaging in a series of uprisings against Ottoman rule, the first coming between 1804 and 1813. In 1809 a band of 3,000 Serbians fought a desperate battle against a much large Turkish force near the city of Nis. The Turks lost thousands of men attempting to dislodge the Serbs, and finally managed to overwhelm them with numbers. Knowing that the fate of any captured Serbs would be death by impalement, commander Stevan Sindeliće fired his pistol into a gunpowder magazine, killing himself and the surrounding Serbians as well as all the Turkish soldiers in the area.

The Ottomans made a regular practice of building towers out of the skulls of their enemies to terrorize opponents. They did so with Sindeliće and his men, building Skull Tower, a ten-foot high tower with 952 Serbian skulls embedded on the four sides. Unfortunately for the Ottomans, Skull Tower had the opposite effect to what they intended. Instead of terrorizing the people, it became a symbol of their desire for independence and a place of pilgrimage.

Visiting the site in 1833, the French poet Alphonse de Lamartine recorded his impressions of Skull Tower:

My eyes and my heart greeted the remains of those brave men whose cut off heads made the corner stone of the independence of their homeland. May the Serbs keep this monument! It will always teach their children the value of the independence of a people, showing them the real price their fathers had to pay for it.⁴⁴

Lamartine’s wishes were fulfilled. The Serbs in 1833 had been gradually asserting more autonomy for several years. In 1867, the Western powers successfully pressured the Ottomans into accepting reality and withdrawing their forces from Serbian territory for good.⁴⁵

Although liberation from the caliphate was a blessing to the Serbs, the consequences of their long subjugation were not readily dispelled. The introduction of Muslim settlers to the region created demographic issues which persist even today. Through forced migrations, Serbs were driven away from the Kosovo region in favor of Muslim Albanian settlers who came with the blessing and support of Ottoman authorities.⁴⁶ When Serbia gained independence from the Ottomans, Kosovo was regarded as part of their nation although it remained under the caliphate’s control. After the First Balkan War of 1912-3 Kosovo was united with the rest of Serbia—an event which eventually led to the Kosovo War in the late 1990s.

Beginning in the 18th century, Western Europe entered a period of social, economic, and scientific development that would again change its relationship to the Islamic world. Freed from prior limitations, the populations of European countries soared. Technological breakthroughs transformed warfare. In large part, the Islamic world lagged behind. By the mid-19th century, the Ottoman Empire was the “sick man of Europe,” still ruling over a wide territory but much of it depopulated and in obvious decline. The Ottomans sided with the Central Powers during World War I, and proved unable to survive their defeat.

Even on its way out, the Ottoman caliphate had one last crime up its sleeve: the Armenian Genocide. It began in 1915 in Constantinople with the arrest of about 250 leaders of the Armenian community on the trumped-up charge of aiding the Allies. A series of government-directed actions against the Armenian people followed. These included mass burnings of whole villages,⁴⁷ mass confiscation of property followed by deportation⁴⁸ and death marches.⁴⁹ These death marches involved the uprooting of hundreds of thousands of Armenian people who were forced into the Syrian deserts. Along the way, many died of sickness, disease, and exhaustion. Ottoman troops escorting the Armenians reportedly allowed others to rob, kill, and rape their charges—sometimes even getting involved in such activities themselves.⁵⁰ In all, between half a million and 1.5 million Armenians died as a result of policies and actions carried out by the Ottoman Empire between 1915 and 1918.⁵¹

Following the military defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I, a military officer named Mustafa Kemal led a successful Turkish War of Independence against the Allied forces. Out of the ruin of the Ottoman Empire, Kemal was instrumental in forging the new nation of Turkey. Inspired by a vision of Turkey as a modern European-style democracy, Kemal instituted wide-ranging reforms aimed at transforming the nation from an Islamic to a secular nation. Following his lead, the Republic of Turkey was declared in 1923 and the old caliphate abolished a year later. This was the end of the last caliphate (so far) of the Islamic world.

DHIMMI STATUS IN ISLAMIC LANDS

It is impossible to understand the way Muslims treated the infidels within the realms they conquered without understanding what dhimmi status means. Those people who were not destroyed or converted to Islam became dhimmi. Some apologists for Islam have tried to portray this as a benign form of protection, but this obscures the true nature of the relationship between Islam and its conquered peoples. As 20th century Islamic revivalist Abdul Ala Maududi explained, the whole purpose of fighting non-Muslims is “to put an end to the sovereignty and supremacy of the unbelievers so that the latter are unable to rule over men … unbelievers who do not follow this true faith should live in a state of subordination.”⁵²

Maududi’s statement is in line with sentiments expressed in the Qur’an, which directs Muslims encountering unbelievers, “blows to the neck shall it be until, once you have routed them, you are to tighten their fetters.”⁵³ Dhimmi status was a way of institutionalizing those fetters and confirming the dominion of Islam.

Crucial to dhimmi status was the paying of the jizya tax. Jizya is established in the Qur’an, which directs Muslims to fight against unbelievers “until they pay the jizya tax out of hand, degraded.”⁵⁴ This last word provided what became an essential part of dhimmi status as a whole and the jizya in particular. As one Islamic law expert explains, jurists interpreting this passage “prescribed ways for the Muslim collector to convey a sense of insult and humiliation to the non-Muslim.”⁵⁵ For example, a 12th century Syrian jurist wrote these instructions:

When the muhtasib [the market inspector] or his agent come to collect the jizya, he should stand the dhimmi in front of him, slap him on the side of the neck and say: “Pay the jizya, unbeliever.” The dhimmi will take his hand out of his pocket holding the jizya and present it to him with humility and submission.⁵⁶

A 15th century Moroccan jurist went even further:

The acting officials representing the Law shall be placed above them and shall adopt a threatening attitude so that it seems to them, as well as to the others, that our object is to degrade them by pretending to take their possessions. They will realize that we are doing them a favor (again) in accepting from them the Jizya and letting them (thus) go free … When paying, the dhimmi will receive a blow and will be thrust aside so that he will think that he has escaped the sword through this (insult); this is the way that the friends of the Lord, of the first and last generations, will act toward their infidel enemies, for might belongs to Allah, to His Apostle, and to the Believers.⁵⁷

In imagining the effect such calculated demeaning of non-Muslims must have had, recall that for many years it was a burden placed by a foreign minority on the backs of a tyrannized majority. The same people who had invaded and seized power were now demanding signs of humiliation from a conquered people. This is hardly anyone’s idea of tolerance.

Besides being a mark of inferiority, the jizya was a serious financial burden. “The tax was the largest budget item,” one scholar notes, “for [families] whose wage earner was a teacher or a laborer, for example.”⁵⁸ The hardship was made worse by the fact that even those who were supposed to be exempt could have the tax demanded from them:

Nine- or ten-year-old boys could be considered responsible, giving poor fathers of large families a substantial bill to pay, and poverty did not necessarily excuse payment of the tax as a matter of practice.⁵⁹

The jizya helped ensure that non-Muslims were economically as well as socially beneath Muslims.

The jizya also had a curious double effect on the new societies where it was levied. On the one hand, it provided a strong motivation for conquered peoples to convert. On the other, it provided an economic justification for leaders to “allow” the people to continue practicing their old religions.⁶⁰ In 724, when 24,000 Egyptian Copts converted to Islam because the jizya was driving them to poverty, the Islamic government responded by extending the jizya tax to include new converts as well.⁶¹ In Mesopotamia, when local peasants converted “en masse” and tried to leave the land, they were often rounded up and returned to their servitude.⁶²

One of the most vulnerable peoples granted dhimmi status in the Middle East and North Africa were the Jews. Despite their protections, thousands of Jews in Granada were killed by their Muslim “protectors” in 1066.⁶³ The Jewish intellectual Maimonides was one of the most respected figures in Islamic Spain for his learning and his accomplishments in medicine, philosophy and theology. Yet in a letter to his fellow Jews in Yemen, Maimonides has this to say about Islamic tolerance:

God has hurled us into the midst of this people, the Arabs, who have persecuted us severely, and passed baneful and discriminatory legislation against us … Never did a nation molest, degrade, debase and hate us as much as they.⁶⁴

The treatment Maimonides complained of wasn’t limited to Spain. We have records of pogroms against Jews in Morocco in 1728, 1790, 1875, and 1884; in Tunisia in 1864 and 1869; in Persia in 1839 and 1867; in Iraq in 1828; in Libya in 1785 and 1860; in Algeria in 1805; in Syria in 1840; and in Egypt in 1882.⁶⁵ The British Vice-Consul in Jerusalem reported in the 1830s that Jews in the city were treated as little better than dogs by their Ottoman rulers:

Scarcely a day passes that I do not hear of some act of tyranny and oppression against a Jew … In two instances, I have succeeded in obtaining justice for Jews against Turks. But it is quite a new thing in the eyes of these people to claim justice for a Jew.⁶⁶

SLAVERY IN ISLAMIC LANDS

An assessment of the Islamic conquest is also incomplete without some consideration of the practice of slavery in Islamic lands. Despite the enormous scope and scale of the slave trade and the use of slaves in the Islamic world, the subject has received little attention in the West. With modern narratives more focused on depicting western culture in a negative light, there is little interest in studying a slave trade that both pre-dates and post-dates that of the western world—and dwarfs it in scope by several orders of magnitude.⁶⁷

The enslavement of non-Muslims is authorized and sanctioned by the Qur’an. From the very beginning, Muslims showed themselves eager to engage in the practice. The example of Muhammad provided ample justification for taking slaves as war booty. As the forces of jihad spread beyond the Arabian Peninsula, their use and need for slaves expanded with them.

One of the vilest applications of Islamic slavery was the practice of claiming an annual “youth levy” from the children of defeated peoples. This was the practice used by the Ottomans to construct their janissary troops from eastern European peoples. The Zaranj people in what is now south-west Afghanistan were forced to pledge an annual tribute of a thousand boys to their conquerors.⁶⁸ By means of this practice, Muslims essentially appropriated future generations of the people they governed and molded them into weapons for the propagation of Islam.

Ironically, the Ottoman practice of levying white Europeans to serve as their elite troops ended up having a destabilizing effect on its empire. According to Ottoman expert Caroline Finkel:

The governing class of the Ottoman Empire was largely composed of men who had entered Ottoman service through the youth-levy imposed upon the sultan’s Christian subjects … Albanian, Bosnian, Greek, Bulgar, Serbian and Croatian boys were preferred.⁶⁹

The janissary army became such a feared and integral part of Ottoman military campaigns they could hardly be dispensed with. That indispensable quality led the janissaries to assume enormous social privileges which the Empire was hard pressed to reign in.

By no means were such levies the sum of Islamic slavery. At the beginning of the 9th century a brisk slave trade was well-established in Islamic lands. Traders dealt in “Turkic nomads captured in warfare and the Slavs of the eastern European forests and agricultural zones, taken in slave raids.”⁷⁰ Even as conventional warfare brought in a steady supply of Slavic captives in the east, “surprise razzias against the Christian seaboard” brought an equally steady supply from the west to Islamic North Africa.⁷¹ Slaves were “the primary commodity by far” in the Caliphate for centuries.⁷²

Whole Islamic kingdoms owed their existence and prosperity to the slave trade—none more than the notorious Barbary states. The “Barbary Corsairs” made their name plundering the coastlines of Europe in constant efforts to resupply their stock of white slaves. Fueled by contemptuous hatred of Christian infidels, these pirates raided and pillaged everywhere their ships could reach from Greece and Italy to Spain to England and Ireland and even as far as Norway.⁷³ Spain received the brunt of their attention for its temerity in pushing out its Islamic invaders. Along the Atlantic coast of Spain, “entire villages … were sold into slavery.”⁷⁴ By one estimate, the Barbary state enslaved around 5,000 white Europeans a year over a period lasting more than two centuries.⁷⁵

Distance provided but little protection. Between 1609 and 1616 Muslim pirates captured 466 English trading vessels. In 1625 the same pirates began to raid England’s vulnerable southwest coast, dragging English adults and children from their fishing villages to lives of brutal and degrading treatment.⁷⁶

European involvement in the African slave trade is well known, but few in the West realize that Muslims were the major players there—and remained so long after the Europeans had abandoned slavery. “So thoroughly were many parts of [East Africa] combed by Arab slavers,” as one scholar puts it, “that whole areas were depopulated.”⁷⁷ The need for soldiers in particular drove the Africa slave trade. During the Abbasid Caliphate, hundreds of thousands of black Africans were bought and sold to fill the ranks of Islam’s armies.⁷⁸ Social prestige also played a role in the Islamic slave trade. Hence, many were driven to jihad as much for the slaves it brought in as for the religious imperative to extend the frontiers of Islam.⁷⁹

But we cannot neglect what could be “the most common and enduring purpose for acquiring slaves in the Arab world”—namely, sexual exploitation.⁸⁰ There was always a huge demand in the Islamic world for female concubines, a practice which—along with polygamy—was authorized by Islamic law. Young women and girls were popular among slave traffickers, and no slaves commanded higher prices save for the male eunuchs that wealthy slave masters put in charge of their harems.⁸¹

The harems of Muslim sheikhs and sultans were filled with thousands of female slaves who were subjugated to match every whim of their allegedly pious captors. White women in particular were extremely highly prized. An English merchant sent to Algiers in the 1640s to buy back British slaves paid an average of £38 apiece. To put it in perspective, £38 was about what a moderately successful merchant could make in a year at that time. This same English merchant had to shell out nearly £3,300 for three British female slaves.⁸²

Muslim pirates were finally put down by a British fleet in 1816. But even as forces were gathering in England that would put the worldwide slave trade to an end, the Islamic world was gathering to resist. When western nations persuaded the Ottoman Empire to restrict the practice of slavery in the mid-19th century the Ottomans were faced with religious outrage:

The head of the Mecca clerical establishment delivered a juridical opinion excoriating this and other … reforms which he considered contrary to sacred law, and holy war was declared against the “Turks.”⁸³

This same cleric asked Muslims to join in battle against the Ottomans, saying that those who fought against them would be assured of heaven.

ISLAMIC CULTURAL IMPERIALISM

Islam did not maintain control over its empire merely through physical coercion. A look at the modus operandi of Islamic conquerors reveals two parallel patterns. On the one hand, we find appropriation of the forms, structures, practices, and achievements of their predecessors and subjects so as to make them appear to be Islamic. On the other, we find the imposition of replacement forms and practices.

We can begin with the Qur’anic description of Christians and Jews as “People of the Book.” Although this is sometimes taken to indicate a brotherhood or kinship between Islam and the other Abrahamic faiths, it is actually an imposition upon Christians and Jews of an epistemology they do not share. The Islamic conception of prophecy is that God gives an eternal book of his own words verbatim to particular prophets at certain times. “People of the Book” are those who attempt to follow the words given in previous books (by prophets such as Moses, David, and Jesus). But because there are obvious differences between Islamic and Jewish or Christian practice, Islam holds that Christians and Jews have distorted their own religious records. The whole reason Muhammad was necessary, according to Islam and the Qur’an, is that the previous recipients of God’s revelation messed it up.

“People of the Book” is not a formula for religious pluralism and equality. It is an accusation against Christians and Jews for failing to keep to the eternal truth of Islam. The prophets and heroes of the other traditions are retroactively turned into Muslims. Christian and Jewish history, to the extent that Muslims accept it as true, is reinterpreted as stages of Islamic history. Robert Spencer has called this appropriation of Christian and Jewish belief “a kind of theological imperialism that can serve as a useful analogy and paradigm for the true nature of the tolerance that Islamic jurists envision for the world.”⁸⁴

Consider the example of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. This structure was built by the Caliph Abd al-Malik at the end of the 7th century. Choosing to build such a thing in Jerusalem was a calculated move in the strategy of undermining and replacing a civilization which preceded Islam. Note that Jerusalem is never mentioned in the Qur’an, and although a later hadith claims that Allah supernaturally transported Muhammad there one night, this story was unverified and likely did not exist during al-Malik’s lifetime. Islam, as al-Malik knew it, had nothing to do with Jerusalem. But he knew that Jerusalem was the site of the ancient Jewish temple, and building an Islamic religious structure on the Temple Mount was an obvious statement of one religion physically replacing another.⁸⁵

A hallmark of Islamic cultural dominance is the enforced linguistic hegemony of Arabic. One scholar describes how Islamic culture bloomed from the 9th to the 12th century “as scholars translated philosophy and science from Greek to Arabic,” little realizing that what he intends as praise sounds like simple cultural appropriation.⁸⁶ It was certainly wise of Islamic rulers to absorb what they could from those who had come before them. What we know of as “Arabic numerals,” for example, are actually of Hindu origin. The early Arabic conquerors certainly found Persian standards of imperial administration and political organization useful.⁸⁷ But these can hardly be called Islamic accomplishments.

Western civilization provided by far the richest source of material for Muslims to appropriate. In the words of one scholar:

Countless Hellenistic sources and fields of learning were incorporated en masse into the nascent Islamic civilization: medicine and pharmaceutics, botany and zoology, mineralogy and meteorology, mathematics, mechanics, and astronomy, and above all, Philosophy.⁸⁸

Any benefits that may have later arisen from this cultural absorption should not distract us from recognizing its nature and purpose. Persian, Indian and Hellenistic achievements were just one more case of booty to be taken possession of, not multicultural influences to be honored:

As far as Muslims were concerned, there was no fundamental difference between the material and the intellectual properties of the vanquished peoples. Both were legitimate spoils of war that could readily be appropriated by the conquerors without attribution and regarded as an indigenous part of the House of Islam.⁸⁹

It is one thing to see the benefits in, and make use of, what others have done. It is quite another to take the credit and ownership for yourself.

What reputation Islam has for sophistication often is the reflection of qualities possessed by its conquered peoples. One example is Syriac, a linguistic variant of Aramaic which was the lingua franca of the Middle East prior to Islamic invasion. Syriac scholars were the ones largely responsible for keeping the works of Aristotle and other ancient authors alive. After the Arabs came, Syriac Christians were also responsible for translating these works into Arabic, making them available for later Muslim scholars. An 11th century Syriac-speaking bishop could claim in a debate with his Muslim counterpart, without fear of refutation, that “Arabs had learned most of their science from Syriac sources, while the reverse had seldom occurred.”⁹⁰

Another example can be found in Persian culture. Unlike the Syriac-speaking culture or even the Egyptian Copts, Persia has retained much of its language and culture in the face of tremendous pressure toward Arabization. In the 11th century, Persian scholars translated into Arabic works that would later make their way to the West in Latin. Even the philologists who established and recorded an Arabic grammar were Persian.⁹¹ Although these Persian scholars were likely Muslims, their training and outlook relied on a sophisticated culture than long predated the Islamic takeover.

It would be a grievous mistake to assume that Islam’s universal jihad has ended in the 21st century. The attacks on September 11, 2001 were part of this jihad, as the chapter on 9/11 describes in detail. Since 9/11, Islamic terrorists have carried out 23,259 terror attacks—and counting.⁹² Islam has not changed: only its tactics have changed. Unable to prevail militarily against the West, Islam has increasingly turned to terror and to the logic of demographic jihad. Former Algerian president Houari Boumedienne described the latter during a 1974 speech to the UN:

One day, millions of men will leave the Southern Hemisphere to go to the Northern Hemisphere. And they will not go there as friends. Because they will go there to conquer it. And they will conquer it with their sons. The wombs of our women will give us victory.⁹³

These words may have seemed fanciful in 1974; today, they could be prophetic.

Today, one of the fastest-growing communities in Germany is its Turkish population. A detailed 2012 study of how this community saw its relationship to Germany uncovered sentiments Boumedienne might have well approved of. Almost every Turk surveyed considered it “absolutely necessary” to preserve their Turkish identity. 87 percent believed Germany had to change to accommodate them (rather than the other way around). 90 percent described themselves as “religious” or “highly religious” Muslims, with young Turks on average holding more radical religious views than their parents. Nearly half expressed the hope that one day Germany would have more Muslims than Christians.⁹⁴

This same pattern can be found everywhere in Europe. There are now 50 million Muslims living across Europe (not including 16 million in Russia alone). Many refuse to assimilate. They reproduce in great numbers, taking full advantage of the liberal social assistance provided to them. As detailed in the chapters on demographic jihad, the Muslims in Europe (and increasingly in the United States) are slowly fulfilling Boumedienne’s prophecy. The gates of Vienna are under Islamic assault once again, but this time—from within.

PART FOUR

PART FOUR

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

What Islamic Civilization?

Islam is unusual in that it’s the only one of the great world religions which was born inside recorded history. That there’s an enormous amount of factual historical record about the life of a prophet and about social conditions in Arabia at that time. So it’s possible to look at the origin of Islam in a scholarly way.

—Salman Rushdie, novelist¹

Since the Muslims were relatively unlettered at first, it is hardly surprising that many of the scholars and scientists active within [their] civilization were Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, or recent converts to Islam whose ideas still bore the stamp of their former religions.

—Arthur Goldschmidt Jr., historian²

Islam was not a torch, as has been claimed, but an extinguisher. Conceived in a barbarous brain for the use of a barbarous people, it was—and it remains—incapable of adapting itself to civilization. Wherever it has dominated, it has broken the impulse towards progress and checked the evolution of society.

—Andre Servier, historian of Islam³

On June 4, 2009 President Barack Obama delivered a speech aimed at redefining the relationship between the United States and the Muslim world at Cairo University in Egypt. The president called for a “new beginning… based on mutual interest and mutual respect.” As has become typical of such speeches, his words included glowing praise of Islam’s contributions to world civilization:

As a student of history, I also know civilization’s debt to Islam. It was Islam—at places like Al-Azhar—that carried the light of learning through so many centuries, paving the way for Europe’s Renaissance and Enlightenment. It was innovation in Muslim communities … that developed the order of algebra; our magnetic compass and tools of navigation; our mastery of pens and printing; our understanding of how disease spreads and how it can be healed. Islamic culture has given us majestic arches and soaring spires.⁴

Had the president been a better student of history, he would have known that algebra was extensively developed by Mesopotamians millennia before Islam was even born and that it is absurd to give Islam the credit for developing it at any stage. He would have known that the magnetic compass was developed by the Chinese Han Dynasty in the third century BC and was mostly developed in Western Europe. He would have known that the most significant contributions to medicine made in Islamic lands came from non-Muslims. That the majestic arches and soaring spires of Islamic culture were developed by Babylonians and Assyrians and built in imitation of Byzantine Christians. He would have known that the Renaissance and the Enlightenment owe nearly nothing to Islam.

Of course, President Obama’s goal in Cairo was not an honest assessment of Islamic contributions. His goal was to flatter his Muslim audience. Unfortunately, the terms of his flattery have become far too widely accepted in the West by well-meaning people who want to believe that Islam is something other than it is. Since the 9/11 attacks, there has been a marked tendency among Western elites to go out of their way to praise Arab or Islamic civilization the way President Obama did. The claims that get made about Arab-Islamic contributions to world civilization are usually tossed around without any critical examination.

Five years after President Obama’s speech we can well ask what such flattery has achieved. Since his speech the Egyptians have deposed a secular dictator in favor of an Islamic one—only to repent of their decision and remove the Muslim Brotherhood from power. The country now stands on the brink of civil war, with Islamist radicals and the Egyptian military in the thick of it. If we are to understand what is going on in Egypt and the Muslim world we need to look beyond empty flattering words.

THE MYTH OF ARAB-ISLAMIC CIVILIZATION

President Obama’s Cairo speech didn’t arise on its own. It was based in part on a popular academic myth about the glorious “Golden Age” of Arab-Islamic civilization during the European Middle Ages. The central pillar of this myth is the idea that while Europe was languishing in cultural decline, the Islamic world was a model of pluralism and enlightenment within which the achievements of classical Greece and Rome were preserved.

A typical expression of this myth can be found in the work of Professor of Islamic Studies Jane Smith, who writes in The Oxford History of Islam:

It has long been recognized that one of the most significant and lasting contributions of the medieval Muslim world to Christendom was to provide access for western scholars to the great classics of Greece and Rome by their translation into Arabic, from which they were rendered into European languages. Most of the works of Plato and Aristotle were known to Arab Muslims.⁵

Another example can be seen in the work of Professor Salim al-Hassani, a notable contributor to a National Geographic exhibition on Islamic civilization. Professor al-Hassani claims:

For centuries after the fall of Ancient Rome, scientific progress in western Europe slowed almost to a standstill. In the developing Muslim world, however, a golden age of discovery flourished from the seventh century until the sixteenth century.⁶

Studies by scholars such as Smith and al-Hassani are the origin of the myth President Obama’s Cairo speech was based on.

Unfortunately for the scholars and the president, the claims they make are inaccurate. An investigation by the Skeptical Inquirer uncovered that most of the “thousand and one inventions” Professor al-Hassani’s exhibit are based on were either “purely fictional elaborations” or which contribute to a “mass of distortions.” And as we shall see below, most of the transmission of classical knowledge that took place during Islam’s “Golden Age” was carried out almost entirely by non-Arabs and non-Muslims.

Most of the claims that are raised on behalf of Arab-Islamic civilization boil down to cases of plagiarism, appropriation, and simple transmission rather than genuine cultural production. The classical wisdom allegedly preserved in the Islamic world went largely unused and unheeded and could be more accurately described as plunder than as original work. With all due respect to Professor Smith, even if the works of Plato and Aristotle were known to Arab Muslims, those works had almost no impact on their culture.

CULTURAL APPROPRIATION

As is described in detail in the chapter on Universal Jihad, Islam was spread primarily through the sword—by conquering territory and imposing harsh sanctions (such as the jizya tax) upon the survivors to induce conversion or impose submission. What is remarkable about this process is the enduring desire among Muslims both to claim credit for the accomplishments of conquered peoples while at the same time erasing the distinct (i.e. pre-Islamic) existence of those peoples.

Take the case of Islamic architecture. The forms we associate with Islamic building styles were derived from the two major empires Islam first attacked in the seventh and eighth centuries—the Persians and the Byzantines.⁷ As Oleg Grabar explains, a key motivation behind the use of the art and architecture of conquered peoples was to emphasize their Islamization:

One first motivation to be detected in the formation of Islamic art was that of symbolically or practically expressing the appropriation of a given territory with its body of traditions.⁸

The Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, an enormously symbolic and influential building in Islamic architectural history, is a case in point. The Dome was built using Byzantine Christian artists to create its mosaics and follows the pattern of contemporary Christian architecture.⁹

Or take the case of Arabic translations of classical texts. “The most celebrated of all the translators of Greek scientific works into Arabic was Hunayn ibn Ishaq,” an Assyrian Christian who learned Arabic late in life and whose linguistic skills allowed him to make the corpus of Greek medical scholarship available to his region’s new Islamic masters.¹⁰ In doing so, he was following the pre-Islamic Nestorian traditions of his people. The Nestorians had been engaged since the 5th century in preserving Greek texts, including those of Galen and Hippocrates.¹¹ It was texts preserved and translated by Assyrian Christians according to their own traditions which were later translated from Arabic into Latin by a Benedictine monk.¹² Giving Islam credit for this “preservation” is rather far-fetched.

We see a similar story with Arab-Islamic literature. The standards for classical Arabic were set by a Persian convert, Abu Muhammad ibn al-Muqaffa. His contribution was a rich collection of fables and folk tales translated from Persian into Arabic. The collection itself, however, was based on ancient works originally written in Sanskrit. Perhaps the two best-known works of Islamic literature are the prose and verse collection known as The Thousand and One Nights and the poet Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh. The former is a collection of tales taken from cultures ranging from Egypt to India and cannot be called a product solely of Arab-Islamic civilization. Indeed, many of the tales rely on elements which are forbidden in literal Islam—drinking alcohol, men and women conversing together freely, and so on. Ferdowsi’s poem is a Persian epic chronicling the pre-Islamic history of the kings of Iran. It contains more than one expression of dismay at the way Islamic culture is displacing Persia’s native traditions. Therefore, neither work could simply be called an expression of Islam or Islamic culture.

The origins of some cultural contributions were obscured or erased by Arab-Islamic conquest. This is what happened to some of the most remarkable peoples of Mesopotamia, the Sumerians, the Babylonians, and the Assyrians. Around 2000 BC the Sumerians developed a sexagesimal system (i.e., a numeral system with 60 as its base) which has retained usefulness down to our own time, evolving into our division of time into 60-second minutes and 60-minute hours.¹³ The Sumerians and Babylonians made enormous advances in mathematics between 3000 and 1500 BC, including algebraic methods, geometrical rules for measuring volumes and areas, and arithmetic rules for calculating fractions and exponents. Fundamental rules of mathematics mastered by the Mesopotamian peoples thousands of years before they were expropriated by Arab Muslims. It was only after the 19th century discoveries of numerous clay tablets dating back to around 1800-1600 BC that these contributions were truly recognized.

In some cases, Arab-Islamic civilization is given credit simply because it transmitted learning from Asia to Western Europe like cultural middlemen. Perhaps the greatest example of this is the common number system that Western people typically refer to as “Arabic numerals.” The system was actually developed by Indian mathematicians sometime in the 6th century AD. The efficiency of the Indian system was so clear, it soon spread across Asia and into the Middle East. By the 9th century, the “Hindu numerals” system was used throughout Islamic lands. While living in Muslim Spain in the 10th century, a French monk (who later became Pope) named Gerbert of Aurillac encountered the numeral system. Finding it much more flexible and useful than the cumbersome Roman system, Gerbert spread word of what he knew as “Arabic numerals” throughout the West.¹⁴

The Islamic move toward cultural appropriation is deeply rooted. It is part of Islam’s scriptural tradition, which retroactively views Jewish and Christian religious traditions as Islamic or as deviations from Islam. Abraham being described as the first Muslim is an example of this kind of retroactive appropriation at work. M.A. Khan describes this as a drive to replace the past of other peoples with the past of the Arab people:

The cruelty of Islamic fundamentalism is that it allows only [the Arabs] … a past, and sacred places, pilgrimages, and earth reverences… It is the most uncompromising kind of imperialism.¹⁵

The pride Pakistan’s Muslims take in having last names of Arabic rather than Hindu origins is another example of this kind of imperialism of the mind.

THE MYTH OF THE CULTURAL MIDDLE-MEN

The contention that the Islamic caliphates form a necessary bridge between a forgotten classical past and the later advances of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment is based on a number of false ideas. Chief among them is the assumption that classical knowledge was simply lost to the European civilization of the Middle Ages. This common misconception is actually proof of the success of Islamic jihad in appropriating and erasing the Byzantine Empire from our cultural memory. The classical learning of Greece and Rome was well known to the Greek-speaking and highly cultured Byzantine scholars.¹⁶ In fact, it was after the Muslim conquest of Constantinople that many volumes of the classical wisdom that Christian Byzantium possessed came streaming into Western Europe. It came on the backs of refugees from Islamic jihad. In most cases, European scholars were able to translate classical works directly from Greek to Latin; it was only a few portions of the classical tradition which survived only by Arabic preservation.¹⁷

The bulk of the classical tradition preserved by Arab-Islamic society consisted of texts involving medicine, physics, and mathematics. Almost the entirety of the poetic, dramatic, political, and historical texts were ignored.¹⁸ Homer’s epics weren’t translated into Arabic until the 20th century. The only Platonic work translated into Arabic was The Republic, and this work (along with the rest of the Platonic corpus) was translated into Latin from Greek manuscripts produced and preserved by the Byzantines.¹⁹ Roman works were almost entirely unknown in the Arab-Islamic world. Professor Smith’s above-mentioned claim that Islamic scholarship provided access to the great classics of Greece and Rome is simply inaccurate.

An instructive example of Western scholarship bringing classical works from little-known Greek into widely-used Latin is the 13th century Flemish monk William of Moerbeke. William had access to Greek manuscripts which he used to produce Latin translations of authors such as Archimedes, Galen, Ptolemy, Proclus, and Aristotle. Many of the works he translated hadn’t even appeared in Arabic when he was working.²⁰ William’s landmark translation of Aristotle’s Politics was enormously influential on St. Thomas Aquinas. It was his translations and Aquinas’ commentary which became widely diffused among European centers of learning.²¹ Simply put, Renaissance Europe did not suddenly discover a forgotten treasure trove of classical texts in Arabic translation. When Renaissance scholars sought more and more accurate Greek knowledge, they found it not in Islamic Spain or in Baghdad but in Constantinople. In 1205, when Pope Innocent III encouraged the learned of Paris to revive the study of literature he asked them to go to Greece. The king of France at the time sought to add to his nation’s prestige by building a college on the Seine to attract Byzantine Greek scholars to come learn Latin.²² It was only after the forces of jihad finally toppled Byzantium and captured Constantinople that the stream of classical learning heading to the West became a flood.

In 1453, the Ottoman Empire seized Constantinople after a month-long siege. Thousands of Greek refugees poured into the West seeking refuge from the Islamic armies that had destroyed their homeland. Venice was a favorite stop. One great scholar, Cardinal Basilios Bessarion, brought an enormous collection of 600 Greek manuscripts with him and donated them to the Venetian Senate—a generous bequest which formed the basis of a public library.²³ In short order, Venice became the home to several such collections of manuscripts and a haven for the Greek scholars, editors, and copyists who could make full use of it.²⁴

The influx of Greek manuscripts coincided with the development of a crucial Western invention: the printing press. Around 1450 Johannes Gutenberg perfected the use of a movable type press that would lead to massive and widespread dissemination of knowledge. Before the end of the century, Greek grammars and manuscripts were being edited and printed, allowing for wider knowledge of Greek among Western scholars. According to historian William McNeill, “the learning of Western Europe was fundamentally and permanently enriched by the easy access to the Greek classics.” This enrichment was made possible through a combination of text availability, widespread knowledge of the language, and the publishing and commercial acumen of the Venetians.²⁵

Put simply, the notion that Arab-Islamic scholarship was a necessary intermediary for the preservation of classical knowledge is a myth. It ignores the many and multifarious intra-European connections which persisted throughout the so-called golden age of Islamic scholarship. The majority of the classical corpus became accessible in Western Europe not due to but in spite of Islamic practices. Indeed, the most significant contribution to widespread dissemination of classical texts was not Islamic scholarship but Islamic jihad.

FAILURE TO DEVELOP

Even if one allows the Arab-Islamic world more credit for preserving and disseminating classical knowledge than the facts warrant, an inconvenient problem remains. If Islamic civilization was so essential in building the modern world, why did modernity develop so prominently outside of that civilization? Why were Islamic scholars unable to build upon, correct, or develop the classical thought available to them? Merely translating texts is not nearly as significant, culturally speaking, as developing a constructive relationship with them. It was just such a constructive relationship to the classical past which characterizes the Renaissance and Enlightenment in Europe. In large part, this relationship did not develop in lands under the sway of Islam.

Consider the example of medical knowledge preserved in Greek scholarship. The works of Galen form the core of this knowledge, and some of Galen’s works were preserved in Arabic translation. But Galen’s medical data was gathered from actual observations—including observations collected from dissected human cadavers. Islamic culture placed a taboo on dissection even of the dead, meaning that it had to take most of what Galen had to say (including his errors) on faith.²⁶ By contrast, at the universities of Padua and Bologna in Renaissance Italy, the emphasis was not on memorization of texts but on empirical observations. When Vesalius (a Bolognese professor) dissected human and animal corpses in the 1530s he soon discovered a number of discrepancies between Galen’s text and observed reality. Vesalius published his improved understanding of human anatomy in a textbook which transformed anatomical knowledge in Western Europe.²⁷ Europeans like Vesalius did not merely rely on textual authorities, they made systematic empirical investigations of their own. These investigations enabled them to modify and correct authorities such as Galen—and eventually to transcend them.

When the Muslim world did make progress in medicine, it was due in large part to the efforts of the (Christian) Assyrians. Beginning in the 4th century AD, the Assyrians began a systematic translation of Greek knowledge into their own language. After the Arab conquest, this translation effort was extended from Assyrian into Arabic. It was Assyrian translations into Arabic that the Muslims brought with them into Spain and from there into Western Europe.

In order to make academic progress, a high degree of freedom of inquiry is necessary. With some individual exceptions, such freedom has never been a hallmark of Arab-Islamic civilization. While some Islamic philosophers, such as al-Farabi, Avicenna, and Averroes made productive intellectual use of classical learning, none of these was Arab, and none founded a philosophical school along the lines of Plato or Aristotle. Instead, their most influential contributions were almost inevitably contributions to Islamic metaphysics or theology. Their attempts at philosophical syntheses of ideas never took root in the Islamic world.

Averroes represents the typical fate of Islamic efforts at philosophical synthesis. He spent most of his life’s work combating the scathing attack against philosophy and rational thought launched by a Muslim scholar named al-Ghazali. Al-Ghazali was inspired by a notion which has popularly recurred throughout Islamic intellectual history: the idea that everything people need to know is contained in the Qur’an and the Hadith.²⁸ Living in supposedly “enlightened” 12th century Islamic Spain, Averroes tried to argue that there was no necessary opposition between rational inquiry and revealed religion. In 1195, his home town of Cordoba banned and burned his books and banished him to a Jewish village.²⁹ After his death, Averroes’ seminal commentaries on Aristotle were available only in Latin translation.³⁰ It was Western philosophers, not the Islamic world, which saw value in Averroes’ teaching about rational inquiry and faith. The opinions of al-Ghazali, by contrast, were almost universally accepted as completely orthodox and even admirable.

It is instructive to compare the epistemological rigidity of Islamic thinkers such as al-Ghazali with the relative freedom of religious philosophers such as Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas was able to use the concept of “secondary causes” to allow good Christians to believe in the sovereignty of God while also believing that there were many things they could best learn by observing the workings of nature. For Aquinas, the world was run according to fixed laws (secondary causes) established by God (the first cause). Because these laws were eternal, it was possible to learn about them through observation and reasoning.

Islam did not develop such a notion. For al-Ghazali and other orthodox believers, a notion such as Aquinas’s was unacceptable because it would “limit the absolute freedom of Allah to bring about whatever events he wills. Effects are brought about, not by causes, but by the direct will of Allah.”³¹ This view is known as “occasionalism”—the belief that the world is eternally subject to the creative and unpredictable power of God. In Islam, belief in God entails a more fatalistic view of the world, where God acts as he will and no man can really affect the course of events.

The ultimate effect of such notions has been to freeze Islamic thought in dogmatic stasis. With the orthodox view established as occasionalism, as Jonathan Carson explains, “science in the Islamic world could only develop in opposition to a fundamental tenet of Islam.” Modern science instead arose in the West, where thinkers were able to delve much deeper into scientific inquiry while remaining acceptably orthodox. Islam has maintained a view that makes life’s occurrences ultimately inscrutable, making counter-factual speculation of equal validity to rigorous empirical observation.³²

CULTURAL WILDERNESS

Given the above, it is unsurprising to find contemporary Islamic societies lagging behind much of the world in both intellectual achievement and cultural development. When Arab-Islamic forces first spread across the Middle East and beyond, they typically replaced urban-based cultures with the hegemony of a backward and tribal people. Regarding science, “the Arabians had no previous knowledge on which to build.”³³ Therefore, on many matters involving worldly learning the Arab-Islamic world was largely dependent on the skills and heritage of the peoples they subjugated.

According to the pioneering scholar of Arab culture Philip Khuri Hitti, “in no branch of pure or physical science was any appreciable advance made after Abbasid days.”³⁴ When the West was exposed to classical knowledge, it sparked an explosion of intellectual activity. With Islam, the tendency was always to slip back into comfortable isolation. Consider the extensive record of intellectual and cultural activity throughout Mesopotamia, the Cradle of Civilization. For more than two millennia prior to the coming of Islam, this region was the center of enormous activity in every field of human endeavor. During the so-called Golden Age of Islam this enormous cultural wealth was well spent—but did Arab-Islamic civilization replenish the stores? Today, what does Arab-Islamic civilization in Syria and Iraq produce?

The centers of learning which developed in the Arab-Islamic world were not in Mecca or Medina—the spiritual home and birthplace of Islam. Instead, it was the captured capitals of infidels, places like Baghdad or Cordoba, which became centerpieces. Even today, Mecca and Medina make a sorry showing when it comes to displaying the supposed grandeur of Islamic civilization. Yet these cities are probably more accurate as representing the civilizational achievements of Islam.

The true cultural legacy of Arab-Islamic civilization can be seen in the orientation of the Arabs today. For some, enormous oil wealth has produced a veneer of sophistication. But this veneer hides a culture in which tribal loyalties and religious affiliations remain paramount and which together produce a singular rejection of outsiders and unbelievers.³⁵ Where oil wealth is limited or nonexistent, Arab societies are often reduced to crude zero-sum games in which domination and revenge preclude possibilities of pluralism and power-sharing.³⁶

The vision of an Arab-Islamic civilization that is compatible with democracy and modernity is really a pipe dream. Arab-Islamic civilization itself is primarily a chimera. Its grandest achievements are borrowed or stolen from conquered peoples—and the fact that such achievements are usually rejected by Islamic societies testifies to a backward and ossified culture that rejects pluralism in favor of coerced compliance in an epistemological echo-chamber.

The most notable building blocks of Arab-Islamic civilization are three: Muhammad, the Qur’an, and jihad.

PART FOUR

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Suicide Bombers

Verily, Allah has purchased of the believers their lives and their properties; for the price that theirs shall be the Paradise. They fight in Allah’s Cause, so they kill (others) and are killed.

—Qur’an 9:111¹

Jihad (holy fighting in Allah’s Cause) is ordained for you (Muslims) though you dislike it, and it may be that you dislike a thing which is good for you and that you like a thing which is bad for you. Allah knows but you do not know.

—Qur’an 2:216

I will cast terror into the hearts of those who have disbelieved, so strike them over the necks, and smite over all their fingers and toes.

—Qur’an 8:12

God is great! The stupid woman did it.

—Iraqi insurgent, 2008²

Iraqi police arrested a woman named Samira Jassim, the self-proclaimed “Mother of the Believers,” in early 2009. Prior to her arrest Jassim had been a top recruiter of female suicide bombers, with at least 80 women successfully recruited, 28 of whom went on to launch deadly suicide attacks. Since women often go unsearched by male security personnel and can hide explosives fairly easily beneath their robes, they have become popular for use in suicide bombings. In 2007 there were only eight suicide attacks launched by women in Iraq; in 2008, there were 32.³

Jassim described the recruitment process in detail in an interview and a taped police confession. In the confession, she reveals that insurgents often raped women she targeted for recruitment. The targets would be ashamed and vulnerable afterward, and Jassim would come and work on their consciences, persuading them to redeem their lost honor through martyrdom. Jassim describes her work with two poor, downtrodden women in detail. She describes how she manipulated them psychologically, playing on their sense of hopelessness and holding out the potential glories for themselves and their families if they agreed to blow themselves up. In one case, a woman whose brothers were squabbling with her in-laws proved vulnerable to Jassim’s prolonged wheedling.⁴

To many in the West, Jassim’s story can seem incredible. Why would a middle-aged mother of six participate in such a scheme? Her story illustrates many of the questions and misunderstandings that still surround the phenomenon of suicide bombing. Who becomes a suicide bomber? How are they recruited? What do they or the organizations who send them expect to accomplish? Do suicide attacks really have religious sanction?

SUICIDE BOMBERS—OVERVIEW AND MISCONCEPTIONS

Politicians and media outlets in the West prefer to promote the idea of suicide attacks being carried out by cowards or madmen, driven by poverty and poor education to desperate measures. The only problem with this picture of the problem is that it’s simply inaccurate. After three decades of study, we now know that suicide bombers tend to have a higher social background, higher income status, and higher education level than the people they live among. There is no meaningful link between poverty or psychological disorders and choosing to become a suicide terrorist. The unsettling reality is that suicide bombers are by and large normal enough people.⁵

Several details provide a rough profile of the average suicide bomber. Most are single men of about 25 (although women are now being used more often) without children. By and large they are normally educated with slightly better than average economic prospects.⁶ Some have argued that suicide terrorism may even be more of a middle class than a lower class phenomenon. An example of this would be Hanadi Jaradat, a 29-year-old Palestinian lawyer. Wishing to avenge the deaths of her brother and fiancée, who were killed by Israeli Defense Forces, she blew herself up in a restaurant in Haifa, killing 20 other people.⁷

When it comes to identifying motivations, suicide bombers are particularly hard to pin down. For some, like 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta, religion is a factor but is also only part of the story. Atta was by all accounts extremely introverted and unfriendly and had difficulty making connections (or even keeping roommates) while he pursued a graduate degree in Germany in the early 90s. He lived a life without much in the way of romance or ordinary human connections, but he was not poor or uneducated. In fact, his education level was part of what made him appealing to al-Qaeda recruiters looking for participants in the 9/11 plot.⁸

For other suicide bombers, like Iraqi Hasna Maryi, the primary motivation may not even be religious at all. Maryi was drawn into the world of terrorism when her brother attempted a suicide mission but failed. Although Maryi was not deeply religious herself, she was very attached to her brother and sought redemption on his behalf.⁹ This is not uncommon for female suicide bombers, for whom redemption or revenge (as in the case of Hanadi Jaradat) can be a common motivating factor.¹⁰

There are also cases where suicide bombers are simply unwitting dupes, manipulated by terrorists to serve a cause they may not even believe in. One of the most outlandish examples of this was Anne-Marie Murphy in 1986. Murphy was an Irishwoman who had become pregnant by her Jordanian Arab boyfriend. The boyfriend promised to marry her back in his homeland and arranged for a flight to send her on ahead of him via Israel. The helpful fellow even went to the trouble of packing Murphy’s bags for her. When her luggage was checked in, however, the weight triggered an extra security check. Murphy was arrested for bringing several pounds of high explosives in her suitcase. The so-called boyfriend turned out to be a Syrian intelligence agent who was planning to blow up Murphy’s flight, killing all 370 on board.¹¹ If his plot had gone forward, Murphy might have been classified as a suicide bomber. There is no way to tell exactly how many successful bombers may have been put in a similar spot. Researchers are still not fully agreed on how to classify or even count the suicide bombers who were deceived, drugged, or blackmailed into carrying out their attacks.¹²

The general consensus among terrorism researchers is that we are better off trying to understand the motivation of the organizations which make use of suicide terrorism than the motivation of individual bombers themselves.¹³ Suicide terrorism is still an ongoing phenomenon, and the scientific investigation of it is always contingent upon new developments. For example, the social scientist Robert Pape produced a highly respected analysis of suicide bombing just prior to the Iraq invasion. Then in 2004 there was a rash of suicide attacks by insurgents in Iraq which completely threw off the dataset Pape had been working with.¹⁴

The train bombing in Spain in 2004 illustrates some of the problems we have in classifying suicide attacks. Terrorists planted bombs on the trains and killed 191 people, making this one of the most destructive terror attacks since 9/11. When the perpetrators were later cornered by police, they blew themselves up. Not everyone agrees that the train bombing should be counted as a case of suicide terrorism since the plotters simply planted the bombs and may even have planned to carry out another attack later.¹⁵ Different scholars have different approaches to such questions, so it’s not hard to find conflicting reports about exactly how many “suicide attacks” have taken place. It all depends on how you define them.

ISLAM AND SUICIDE TERRORISM

There is also some debate in the Islamic world about whether suicide terrorism is in accord with the faith. Some insist that Islam has nothing to do with suicide bombing, and that the killing of innocents is explicitly forbidden by the Qur’an. There are certainly passages which seem to support this view, such as: “And do not kill the soul which Allah has forbidden [to be killed] except by [legal] right.”¹⁶ In the Hadith, there is a well-known example of Muhammad seeing a woman being killed during the course of a war and greatly disapproving of the killing of women and children.¹⁷ Also, no one disputes that Islam expressly condemns the act of suicide.¹⁸

Despite these arguments, terrorists continue to assert that they are fully justified by religion. One approach starts from explicit statements that Islam must be defended from anyone who wishes to attack it.¹⁹ By extension, it is argued that anyone who does not promote Islam is an enemy and is therefore not an innocent. This was the argument, for instance, used to justify the murder and attempted dismemberment of unarmed British soldier Lee Rigby in London. The killers insisted they did so out of self-defense—as a way of acting on behalf of Muslims in Afghanistan who were being killed by British soldiers. Another approach begins from the fact that dying in the course of a battle for Islam is a widely celebrated act of martyrdom.²⁰ This approach is what leads terrorists to interpret suicide bombing as dying in the course of battle; Hamas uses the phrase “martyrdom operations” to describe suicide attacks for this reason.

A critical text in understanding the religious support for suicide bombing is The Islamic Ruling on the Permissibility of Self-Sacrificial Operations. Produced by a top al-Qaeda operative, this work expresses considerable approval for “martyrdom or self-sacrifice operations”:

As for the effects of these operations on the enemy, we have found, through the course of our experience that there is no other technique which strikes as much terror in their hearts, and which shatters their spirit as much.²¹

The author uses the textual tradition of the Qur’an and the Hadith to find evidence supporting Islamic fighters charging into battle against overwhelming odds (or even single-handedly), knowing they would be killed. Going out and dying for the sake of Allah or Islam is acceptable.²²

The author also points to Islamic scholarship defending this very approach to the issue. A notable example comes from the 12th century Muslim theologian Al-Ghazali, who announced that it is forbidden for Muslims to throw their lives away—by which he means for Muslims to die without taking infidel lives with them. It is permissible, however, to risk one’s life if there is a reasonable expectation that infidels will be killed or their morale significantly weakened. Terror, in al-Ghazali’s reckoning, is the justification for martyrdom; creating it is religious mitigation. Actions which demonstrate to infidels that Muslims do not fear death but love martyrdom for the sake of Allah are considered praiseworthy. Al-Qaeda agrees.²³

A crucial hadith used to provide religious support for suicide bombing involves a Muslim boy and an infidel king who wishes to make him abandon his faith. Through the course of this long story, the boy is protected from death until he instructs the king to take his life with an arrow from the boy’s own quiver. The result of this miraculous little tale is that all of the king’s subjects converted to Islam.²⁴ Al-Qaeda is one of several Islamist groups which make use of this tale:

The boy, in this hadith, ordered the killing of himself as a sacrifice in the interest and benefit of the [Muslim faith], and this indicates that such a deed is legitimate, and not considered suicide.²⁵

The position can be summed up in this way: suicide is forbidden, but martyrdom is glorious.

A key idea to keep in mind here is the Islamic principle of ijithad (independent interpretation). By tradition, Muslims cannot condemn another Muslim’s interpretation unless it is unambiguously contradicted by the Qur’an or the Hadith. Because of this principle, vague rationales—such as the above rationales for suicide bombing—cannot be authoritatively rejected. Bad logic is allowed to carry the force of divine decree, and texts can be manipulated to suit almost anyone’s agenda. There is virtually no solid ground in Islam to criticize the behavior of suicide bombers. When Grand Ayatollah Khomeini announced that suicide attacks were permissible in 1983 virtually the entire Shiite world took that as justification. Although the Sunni world is more divided on the issue, the principle of ijithad means there cannot be a definitive decision against it.²⁶

Given the somewhat roundabout way in which suicide terrorism is accepted, different Islamic groups and countries have different approaches to using it as a technique. For example, Saddam Hussein’s regime made key distinctions between different categories of attacks and provided funding to the families of suicide terrorists based on which category they fell into. One distinction they used was whether someone was a “regular” martyr or a martyr who died on a suicide mission. Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, does not seem to distinguish between suicide terrorists and martyrs who actually die in combat.²⁷ Other differences involve classification of legitimate targets. Hezbollah has denounced al-Qaeda’s indiscriminate targeting of civilians, for instance.

SUICIDE BOMBING AS A TECHNIQUE

Suicide attacks have been around for many centuries as an instrument of policy. The Islamic Order of Assassins made use of targeted suicide attacks in the 12th and 13th centuries. In the 19th century, Russian anarchists used suicide bombings to sow fear and spread terror. Toward the end of World War II, Japanese kamikaze pilots made suicide runs to destroy and delay U.S. naval shipping. But the modern use of suicide bombing began with Hezbollah in Lebanon in the 1980s. Hezbollah targeted embassies, military headquarters, convoys, and even a Jewish Cultural Center, but their attacks were almost always aimed primarily at military targets.²⁸

Between 1980 and 2003, more than 80 percent of all uses of the suicide attack as a technique occurred as part of the Arab jihad against Israel or as part of a separatist movement on the island of Sri Lanka.²⁹ Following the U.S. invasion, however, Iraq became the third major location for suicide attacks. Between 2003 and 2010 there were 1,003 documented cases of “suicide bomb events” impacting civilians in Iraq, killing 12,284 civilians and injuring more than 30,000. These attacks were a leading cause of death, responsible for nearly 11 percent of all civilian casualties nationwide.³⁰ To give an idea of how big an increase this really was, consider that between 1980 and 2003 there were a total of 315 suicide attacks committed worldwide.³¹ Pakistan has lately emerged as another key site for suicide bombings.

The most noteworthy element of suicide attacks as a technique of terrorism is their extreme lethality. Suicide attacks represent only about three percent of total terrorist attacks, but they are responsible for a third of all deaths due to terrorism.³² An al-Qaeda text on the topic mentions with approval that in addition to inflicting the heaviest losses suicide attacks are also the most inexpensive to carry out.³³ In addition to being lethal, suicide attacks can also be successful in changing government policy. For example, al-Qaeda regards the use of suicide attacks in Israel as a “major factor in convincing the Jews to grant self-rule to the Palestinians.”³⁴

Even though examples such as the kamikazes and the Tamil Tigers can be brought up, the fact is that outside of Islam examples of suicide terrorism are very limited in scope and duration. To be a suicide bomber one must be very dedicated to something outside oneself like a kamikaze being dedicated to the Japanese Emperor. Or one must be extremely lacking in critical introspection. That was the case with Mohamed Atta, for instance. It is also why terrorist organizations have been increasing their use of children to do their dirty work—children are more likely to believe stories about going to Paradise, and they don’t have a precise understanding of what a suicide attack really means for them.

Take the case of Umar Fidai in Pakistan. Umar was a 14-year-old boy trained by the Taliban for a suicide attack, but he survived when his vest failed to detonate properly. He later told BBC interviewers:

All I was thinking was that I had to detonate myself near as many people as possible. When I decided it was the right time, it was a moment of happiness for me. I thought that there would be a little bit of pain, but then I would be in heaven.³⁵

As Umar explained, he wasn’t really thinking about the issue, he had simply accepted what the Taliban told him. He grew up surrounded by Taliban, saw them praying and reading the Qur’an and assumed they were “good people.” When they directed him to attack the shrine of a Sufi saint, he was reluctant since the victims would be fellow Muslims. Yet when his Taliban handlers explained that people who pray to the dead at shrines were “even bigger infidels” he accepted this. It was only after his vest failed to detonate that Umar realized how he had been taken advantage of.³⁶

The biggest spike in the use of suicide bombing has come from the practice of groups such as al-Qaeda. That is, it comes from groups which adhere to a literal, fundamentalist view of Islam. As seen above, these groups have little trouble finding justification for their “martyrdom operations” in the behavior and beliefs of the 7th century Islamic community. Now, they are trying to engage in these operations for the sake of bringing the entire Islamic world back to the 7th century. The key point is that there is no definitive reason within Islam itself why one can say they should not be doing what they are doing.

THE USE OF SUICIDE BOMBING

Islamist groups make use of suicide bombing for three main reasons. One is to compel nation states to change their policies (this is one of the primary goals of suicide bombing in Israel). A second goal is to gain prestige, money, and recruits for the organization itself (this is partly how Hezbollah has made itself a major player in Lebanon).³⁷ A third goal, which is typical of organizations like al-Qaeda and the Taliban, is the victory of their particular brand of Islam.³⁸

Suicide missions “work” to achieve these ends in several ways. First and foremost, as noted above, is the lethality of suicide attacks. By killing large numbers of people, whether civilian or military or both, terror groups may force governments to recalculate or change strategies while simultaneously raising their public profile. Not many people knew what al-Qaeda was until the U.S. embassy bombings in Africa. Such attacks also signal willingness on the part of the groups to carry out future attacks.³⁹

With groups such as al-Qaeda, a suicide attack is also a tremendous demonstration of faith. It is not only a demonstration to the world, but a demonstration to the Muslim world of al-Qaeda’s commitment to a very literal, fundamentalist conception of Islamic piety.⁴⁰ Civilians are legitimate and effective targets because the enemy is conceived of as the whole world of unbelievers—and Islamic doctrine and texts are quite clear, as we have seen elsewhere in this book, moral rules that apply to Muslims do not apply to unbelievers. When al-Qaeda carries out a suicide attack they are in effect advising like-minded organizations and individuals to go and do likewise.⁴¹

However, we should note that terrorist organizations often make cynical use of people who don’t know any better to further their own goals. This was the case with Samira Jassim, mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. The willingness of Iraq insurgents to rape women to make them more amenable to becoming suicide terrorists should be ample demonstration that there is nothing “religious” about their interests at all. But nowhere is the cynical manipulation of would-be suicide bombers more evident than in the use of children.

Take the example of Neaz, an Afghan boy who was orphaned at age eight by a helicopter raid. The Taliban abducted him after the raid, and plied him with chocolate and promises of money. When the boy questioned what use he would have for money if he was dead, they simply promised he would go to Paradise. Taliban leaders showed him how to use guns and make IEDs. They also provided him with a suicide vest laden with bullets and grenades. Neaz escaped from the compound and walked nine miles to the nearest police station to turn himself in. Clearly, boys like Neaz do not exactly have a “motivation” to become suicide bombers.⁴²

In Pakistan, the Taliban attempted a more aggressive approach with an eight-year-old girl. The girl was kidnapped on her way to school and drugged. The abductors kept the girl drugged and strapped on a suicide vest with 20 pounds of explosives. Then they drove her to a checkpoint and pushed her out of the vehicle. The girl managed to indicate to the guards what she was wearing and got the vest removed. The kidnappers escaped.⁴³ If the attack had gone as planned, this girl would hardly have been a motivated suicide bomber.

The use of suicide bombing in some places has become so routine that it’s even used for completely banal purposes. In one infamous case from Bhakkar, Pakistan, a man paid for a suicide bomber and explosives simply to settle scores over delays in a loan repayment.⁴⁴ Life is apparently so cheap in Pakistan now that suicide bombers can be hired for personal grievances.⁴⁵ This is about as far removed from anything that could be described as “martyrdom” as one could possibly imagine.

Suicide bombers, at least the most educated among them, have one thing in common. They want to return Islam to its origins—to 7th century Arabia and the life and times and practices of Muhammad. Along the way to this, they have no room in their thoughts for self-criticism or examination of evidence. No critical thinking takes place. Instead, the authority of the Qur’an, Muhammad, and sharia law is accepted without question and anything contrary to that authority is to be defeated and destroyed. In doing this, suicide bombers do not deviate from Islam or the Qur’an, they are following it in its most literal sense.

On one point suicide bombers and modern Western politicians have something in common. The politicians also refuse to examine Islam or the Qur’an in a critical fashion. Instead, they dismiss suicide bombers and radical Islamic thinkers as simply outside the mainstream of an otherwise peaceful religion. By refusing to challenge the worldview and epistemology of Islam, and by refusing to challenge Islam’s content and its sources, Western leaders are essentially encouraging suicide bombers by default.

To defeat Islamic imperialism, its core doctrines and teachings must be examined critically. Suicide bombers and their mentors refuse to conduct such an examination. So do our own politicians.

PART FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY

Women’s Rights in Islam

“I also saw Hellfire, and I have never seen such a terrible sight. I saw that the majority of the inhabitants were women.” When asked why this was so, Mohammed replied, “They are ungrateful to their husbands and to good deeds. Even if you are good to one of them all of your life, whenever she sees some harshness from you she will say, ‘I have never seen any good from you.’”

—Sahih Bukhari 2.18.16

The women asked, “O Allah’s Apostle! What is deficient in our intelligence and religion?” He replied, “Is not the evidence of two women equal to the witness of one man?” They agreed that this was so. He said, “This is the deficiency in her intelligence. Isn’t it true that a woman can neither pray nor fast during her menses?” The women replied that this was so. He said, “This is the deficiency in her religion.”

—Sahih Bukhari 1.6.301

The Prophet said: If I were to command anyone to make prostration before another I would command women to prostrate themselves before their husbands, because of the special right over them given to husbands by Allah.

—Sunan Abu-Dawud 11:2135

On October 9, 2012, a Taliban gunman climbed on board a school bus in Pakistan’s Swat Valley. He was looking for a 15-year-old girl named Malala Yousafzai. The gunman threatened to shoot everyone on the bus unless Malala was identified. When she was pointed out, he fired. The bullet went through her head and neck and lodged in her shoulder near the spinal cord.

The injured teenager was taken to a military hospital in Peshawar, where doctors performed delicate operations to remove the bullet and remove pressure from the swelling of Malala’s injured brain. On October 15, she was transported to the United Kingdom for specialized treatment at a hospital skilled in treating injured military personnel. Within two days, she had come out of her coma and was responding well to treatment. She was discharged to continue rehabilitation at home in January, but underwent another operation on February 2, 2013 to reconstruct her skull and restore her hearing.

What prompted this attack and Malala’s long recovery ordeal? She had been blogging in favor of education for women and girls. Along the way, her comments had been deemed insulting to Pakistan’s Taliban, which had been exerting tremendous effort to destroy girls’ schools in the Swat Valley where she lived. In the eyes of the Taliban, their attack was justified both by the Qur’an and by sharia law. Since the Taliban deemed Malala’s efforts to be opposing Islam and Islamic forces, they believed it was right to target and kill a girl.

The assassination attempt on Malala was not an isolated incident. Rather, it was a very public demonstration of the treatment of women under Islam which Westerners find difficult to wrap their minds around. Similar public demonstrations include a 2007 incident where a Pakistani man shot a female government minister who appeared in public with her head uncovered, and a 2002 tragedy in Saudi Arabia where 15 teenage girls died in a school fire because the religious police wouldn’t permit them to leave the building without their full Islamic dress.¹ What all these cases have in common is religiously-sanctioned subjugation of women by violence.

RELIGIOUSLY SANCTIONED DIFFERENCES

To discover the Islamic view of women we must look not at what contemporary politicians say, but at what the highest religious authorities in Islam say. Those authorities are three: the Qur’an, the Sira (accepted biographies of Muhammad), and the Hadith (traditional stories and sayings of Muhammad). Following Bill Warner we will refer to these authorities collectively as the Trilogy.² As we have seen in other chapters, the Trilogy promotes a dualistic view of the world where the primary division is between the believers and the unbelievers (kafirs). The dualistic view of the world is also applied within Islam itself. Within Islam, the primary division is between men and women.³

This dualistic view means there is one set of rules for men and another set for women. The key principle in Islam is, as its name implies, submission. Muslims must submit to Allah, while kafirs must in turn submit to Muslims. Women must submit to men. The only area where men and women will be treated equally, according to Islam, is on Judgment Day. At that time, they will both be judged alike on how well they have followed the rules of submission. Of course, the rules women are expected to follow are rules enjoining them to submit to their husbands, fathers, and brothers.⁴

As Bill Warner’s investigations showed, more than 90% of the Trilogy which addresses the status of women implies or directly states their inferiority to men. It is reported on multiple occasions that most of those in Hell will be women. Women are understood to be inferior intellectually and spiritually to men. Muhammad commands women to have their religious practice directed by their husbands or fathers.⁵ The Qur’an declares that women “have rights … similar (to those of their husbands) … but men have a degree (of responsibility) over them.”⁶

Muslim men are taught that they have duties toward women, such as providing them with material support. But these duties are not much different from those of a master over his slaves. Again, the Qur’an makes this clear:

Men are the protectors and maintainers of women, because Allah has made them to excel the other, and because they spend (to support them) from their means. Therefore the righteous women are devoutly obedient (to Allah and to their husbands) … As to those women on whose part you see ill-conduct, admonish them (first), (next), refuse to share their beds, (and last) beat them (lightly, if it is useful).⁷

The fact that men are required to support women is included here not just as a duty of the man but as a mark of female subservience to men. Being subservient to men is described by Muhammad elsewhere as a sign of excellence in women:

When Allah’s Messenger was asked which woman was best he replied, “The one who pleases (her husband) when he looks at her, obeys him when he gives a command, and does not go against his wishes regarding her person or property by doing anything of which he disapproves.”⁸

The veil, or hijab, or niqab or whatever other form of covering for women is used as a fundamental sign of submission to men. In multiple hadith, the veiling or seclusion of women is repeatedly described as a way to separate them from public society.⁹ The assumption in Islam is that the primary connections for a woman are either familial or sexual. This is why being alone with a male non-relative is worth a beating or worse for a Muslim woman. It is also why women may be unveiled among their relatives—the sexual relationship is not involved.¹⁰ Finally, once a woman is past childbearing age the use of the veil is no longer compulsory if she is unmarried.¹¹ Far from being a symbol of liberation as some Muslim apologists claim, the veil or hijab is a sign that the woman accepts the Islamic view of her role in society—and the need to obscure her sexuality. It is a sign of submission.

It is sometimes claimed that Islam preaches the equality of men and women or that Islam marked a significant advance in women’s rights. On the first point, the equality is only equality before Allah and still requires that women accept an inferior position to men. On the second, while Islam may have been an advance for women from barbaric or tribal customs of the 7th century, the problem is that the advances have remained essentially static ever since. The Trilogy governs what Muslims are supposed to think about the proper relations between men and women, and the Trilogy is not subject to advancement or correction because it is of divine origin.¹²

Author V.S. Naipaul illustrated the fundamental issue with these claims for “women’s rights” in Islam 30 years ago. Describing an Iranian woman he saw on television speaking out in favor of the Islamic revolution, Naipaul observed:

Fourteen hundred years ago in Arabia, she said, girl children were buried alive; it was Islam that put a stop to that. Well, we didn’t all live in Arabia (not even the woman with the covered head); and many things had happened since the sixth century. Did women—especially someone as fierce as the woman addressing us—still need the special protection that Islam gave them? Did they need the veil? Did they need to be banned from public life and from appearing on television?¹³

In Islam, such questions must be answered according to the Trilogy. The Trilogy’s answer is that of course women must still be veiled and so on. That is what the Qur’an and the Prophet demand. Anything else would be un-Islamic

THE MATHEMATICAL VALUE OF A WOMAN

Islam places a value on women roughly equal to one half of a man. The Trilogy makes this valuation clear in several places. The Qur’an directs Muslims to use Muslim witnesses at court, and if two men can’t be found you can substitute one man and two women in a pinch.¹⁴ This valuation is confirmed in the Hadith quoted at the beginning of this chapter.¹⁵ In inheritance, male heirs are to receive a portion equal to that of two females.¹⁶ For women who behave in an indiscrete manner sexually, their inheritance can be cut off as punishment.¹⁷ In one of the hadith, Muhammad’s favorite wife Aisha complains that the true value of women in Islam is much less than half a man, telling the Prophet, “You have made us equal to the dogs and the asses.”¹⁸

This valuation is taken quite seriously in Islam. Perhaps the most significant modern example can be found in Saudi Arabia. Following Islamic law, the Saudis require those found guilty of murder to pay diyyah (blood money) to the family of the deceased. The blood money owed to the family of a killed woman is half the amount extracted from the killer of a man.¹⁹

MARRIAGE AND DIVORCE

Marriage in Islam is not a religious sacrament; it is a civil contract like any other business contract. Marriage is encouraged and celibacy condemned. Men are permitted between one and four wives (the Prophet was permitted more wives as a special dispensation from Allah), but they can enjoy as many slave-girls as they wish.²⁰ If the woman obeys her husband and never acts in a sexual manner toward another man—including being alone with one—she is due food and shelter from her husband.

A common Islamic term used for the wife’s vagina translates as “plowed field” (or tilth). Consequently, the Qur’an addresses men: “Your wives are a tilth for you, so go to your tilth … when or how you will.”²¹ In the Hadith it is made clear that the woman’s most significant contribution to the marriage is sex and children, and the husband’s right to enjoy his wife’s sexual favors should not be abrogated.²² Control of a woman’s sexuality at all times is considered to be crucial—and is a common component of honor killings, as we shall see in more detail below.

Once married, a Muslim woman is expected to submit to her husband as she previously did with her father. The man decides who is allowed to come into the house and how it will be run. Women are discouraged from leaving the home unless they are accompanied by a male relative—a rule which is enforced in Saudi Arabia today by the morality police.²³

Among Shia Muslims women are also involved in the phenomenon of Nikah al-Muah (literally, “pleasure marriage”). This is a temporary marriage arrangement between a man (who can be married or unmarried) and an unmarried woman for a time and price agreed on between them. Since this institution amounts to religiously sanctioned prostitution in practice, “temporary wives” tend to congregate in Shiite holy cities where they offer their companionship.²⁴

The example of Muhammad being betrothed to the six-year-old Aisha provides religious justification for child marriage in Islam. The places where child marriage is pushed to the greatest extremes tend to be those Muslim countries where women generally are most vulnerable. For example, a 2002 study of five refugee camps on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border found that over half of the women and girls between the ages of 8 and 13 were married. In one extreme case, a 10-year-old girl was engaged to a man of 60. A wealthy Saudi man in his 60s received international attention in 2005 when he got married for the 58th time—the latest to a 14-year-old girl.²⁵

Women are also subject to exploitation in Islamic divorce. For men, getting a divorce is as simple as telling your wife “I divorce you” (or some similar verbal formula) three times. This is particularly significant because after divorce the man has no further obligations toward his former wife. There is no alimony, no child support—indeed, child custody almost invariably is given to the father. Since divorces are so easy for men, they can be capricious.²⁶ After a divorce, a woman must wait for a certain period of time before she can remarry.²⁷ A man is under no such obligation.

RELIGIOUSLY SANCTIONED VIOLENCE

The beating of women is sanctioned throughout the Trilogy. In addition to the verses cited above, Qur’an 38:44 contains an instruction directly from Allah to Job concerning his wife: “And take in your hand a bundle of thin grass and strike therewith (your wife), and break not your oath.” Although the injunctions usually emphasize that women are to be beaten “lightly,” the reasons justifying it are numerous. Above all, men are not to be questioned with regard to how they treat their wives: “The Prophet (peace be upon him) said: A man will not be asked why he beat his wife.”²⁸

The real-world consequences of such beliefs are startling. The Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences has reported that more than 90% of Pakistani women have been beaten or even sexually abused for offenses to their husbands, fathers, or brothers. “Offenses” include cooking unsatisfactory meals or giving birth to female children.²⁹ Very young women are particularly vulnerable. Studies a decade ago showed that in Egypt 29% of married adolescent girls are beaten, while in Jordan 26% of domestic abuse cases were committed against wives under 18.³⁰

Islam also provides sanction for the hideous practice of female circumcision—a practice which amounts to genital mutilation, as the clitoris is cut off. Somali women’s rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali has described her own experience with this practice in her book Infidel:

Then the scissors went down between my legs and the man cut off my inner labia and clitoris. I heard it, like a butcher snipping the fat off a piece of meat. A piercing pain shot up between my legs, indescribable, and I howled.³¹

Although the practice is not directly required by Islam, parts of the Trilogy demonstrate that it has been clearly assumed as normal.³² Sharia law makes it obligatory for men and women, Bill Warner has argued, despite purposefully misleading translations which sometimes obscure this obligation in order to forestall criticism.³³ The Grand Imam of Cairo’s al-Azhar University—the oldest and most prestigious religious training center in Sunni Islam—described female circumcision as a “laudable practice that [does] honor to women.”³⁴ An estimated 170,000 women in the United Kingdom have undergone female circumcision despite the practice being outlawed and Muslim women representing a small minority of the total population.³⁵

Because of Islam’s dualistic morality, non-Muslim women are viewed as beneath non-Muslim men. This means a number of outrages are permissible for Muslims. For Muhammad, rape was a supreme tactic of war—one which humiliated kafir men and crushed the spirits of kafir women.³⁶ But even Muslim women are vulnerable to rape. By Islamic law, they must bring four male witnesses to testify in order for a rape accusation to be accepted as such. Otherwise, a woman who cries rape in Islamic society may quickly find herself imprisoned on charges of adultery. To take one example, in Pakistan 75% of the women in prison are in on charges of adultery.

The use of rape as a tactic of war is still very much alive and well in Islamic society. It has been part of the Islamist struggle against the ruling regime in Syria. Early in 2013, Islamist militiamen targeted women in particular as part of a reign of terror against towns and villages in Syrian Kurdistan. Women were kidnapped, forced into marriage, ransomed, and raped according to local women.³⁷

One of the most egregious forms of violence against women in Islam is what we sometimes refer to as “honor killings.” It is important to recognize that this form of violence is not directly sanctioned or mandated anywhere in Islam. Instead, the phenomenon arises from a key Islamic concept known as ghira. Ghira means jealousy, pride, honor, self-respect. Violence in defense of one’s ghira is assumed as natural in Islam.³⁸

Because of these attitudes, efforts to regulate or punish honor killings are typically opposed in Islamic countries. In 2003, Jordan’s parliament voted down a law that would have stiffened penalties on honor killings. Opponents said the law would violate religious traditions and “destroy families and values.”³⁹ The situation leads to cases like that of Ali Jasib Mushiji in Iraq. In 2003, the 17-year-old Mushiji shot his mother and half-brother to death after he suspected them of a sexual affair and killed his own 4-year-old sister because he thought she was their child. He told reporters he “wiped out his family to cleanse its shame.”⁴⁰

Even women can be involved in carrying out honor killings. In 2003, a Palestinian Arab girl named Rofaya Qaoud became pregnant after being raped by her own brothers. Her mother demanded that Rofaya kill herself, and when the girl refused she did the job herself. Using a plastic bag, razor blades, and a wooden stick, Rofaya’s mother suffocated, slashed, and beat her daughter to death. The mother later explained, “This is the only way I could protect my family’s honor.”⁴¹

Muslims bring these attitudes with them when they emigrate to the West. In a 2005 case in Germany, a Turkish girl named Hatin Surucu was gunned down by her own brothers while waiting at a bus stop. When Hatin’s case was brought up to young Turks at a Berlin high school near where the incident occurred, the students insisted that Hatin “had only herself to blame.” According to one, she “deserved what she got—the whore lived like a German.”⁴²

WOMEN WHO HAVE SPOKEN OUT

A number of women from Muslim communities have tried to speak out against the treatment of women under Islam. Ayaan Hirsi Ali is one of the best-known in the Western world. She is most famous for her work on the controversial film Submission, which depicts scenes of abuse of Muslim women interspersed with passages from the Qur’an. Director Theo van Gogh was stabbed to death in the street over the film. For an extra macabre touch, the Muslim murderer pinned a death threat against Hirsi Ali to van Gogh’s body with a knife.

Hirsi Ali has received a lot of criticism from both Muslim and non-Muslim sources for alleged generalizations and one-sidedness in her views of Islam. Nevertheless, she has stuck to her guns, observing in an interview:

That the husband has the right to beat his wife is in the Koran. That a woman has to dress a certain way is in the Koran, that she must stay in the house is also there. And on it goes.⁴³

It is all the more remarkable that she has continued to speak out in the face of death threats.

Wafa Sultan is another courageous proponent of women’s rights. Born in Syria, Sultan emigrated to America after witnessing atrocities carried out against innocent countrymen by Islamic extremists in 1979. She describes as a turning point the assassination of one of her professors by gunmen crying out “God is great!” Following this incident, she turned against Islam and co-founded the organization Former Muslims United. Sultan has been outspoken on the role of Islam in the treatment of women:

Muslim education has stunted women to the point of depriving them of their mind and their conscience … Women have seen themselves relegated to the status of men’s animals.⁴⁴

Sultan has explained that discriminatory practices are not based on a misreading of Islamic texts but are fully sanctioned and condoned by them. Instead, she provocatively argues that Islam was created to serve the carnal desires of its founder:

I firmly believe that the Islamic faith was created to serve Muhammad, and to legitimize his desires and urges … Islam allowed men to marry infants in order to justify Muhammad’s marriage to Aisha. Islam forbade adoption in order to justify Muhammad’s marriage to the wife of his adopted son—a thing forbidden by the pre-Islamic moral values of the Arabs. Islam permitted taking women captive and violating their honor in order to justify Muhammad’s marriage to Safiya after killing her husband, her father, and her brother that same night.⁴⁵

Of course, after providing such an interview Sultan found herself on the receiving end of censure and death threats. In the face of this, she has continued to advocate for Islamic women.

Another admirably courageous and vocal feminist and former Muslim is Nonie Darwish. The author of two books, Now They Call Me Infidel and Cruel and Unusual Punishment, Darwish is also the Director of Former Muslims United. She was born in Egypt, where her father was killed in a 1956 assassination. She blames Islamic culture and the violence it promotes for her father’s death. In 1978 Darwish moved to the United States and converted to Christianity. As with the previous two women, Darwish has also been criticized for failing to go along with the idea that oppression of women is merely a failure of individual Muslims.

In 2006, Darwish had an invitation to speak at Brown University rescinded because of her controversial opinions about Muslims. Instead of backing off, she reiterated her positions in an interview later that year:

The majority of Muslim women are oppressed and that is due to Islamic sharia law which severely discriminates against women. Even the most educated and powerful Muslim women are faced with a legal system that is very discriminatory against women. Muslim women start the marital relationship from a weaker position … Polygamy has a devastating impact on families. There are chronic social ills and tragedies stemming from this single right. The court system is designed to oppress women, without a doubt.⁴⁶

In the same interview, she explains how the Islamic-sanctioned concept of pride or honor (that is, ghira) produces violence against women:

Arab culture is based on pride and shame and a Muslim man cannot survive with this kind of shame unless he kills the source of that shame which is the female relative who have had sex [sic] outside of marriage. It is not known how common this crime of honor killing happens since it often goes unreported and the police often looks [sic] the other way.⁴⁷

All three of these women ran counter to a politically correct ideology which prefers to see the abuse of women in Islam as a matter of individual extremists rather than anything to do with the culture itself. But it cannot be denied that there is ample religious justification for oppressive treatment of women in Islam. And because the Trilogy is divine and perfect, it is not subject to revision or improvement. Any attempts to improve women’s rights from where Muhammad left them are bound to run into objections and deadly resistance from religious conservatives. Not surprisingly, all three of the most outspoken proponents of women’s rights have been forced to leave Islamic countries and even the religion itself. Women’s rights in any post-7th century sense are not compatible with Islam.

PART FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY - ONE

Islam is Arab Imperialism

The recompense of those who wage war against Allah and His Messenger and do mischief in the land is only that they shall be killed or crucified or their hands and their feet be cut off on the opposite sides, or be exiled from the land.

—Qur’an 5:33

O Prophet! … Strive hard against the disbelievers and the hypocrites, and be harsh against them, their abode is Hell, - and worst indeed is that destination.

—Qur’an 9:73

And the Jews say: ‘Uzair (Ezra) is the son of Allah, and the Christians say: Messiah is the son of Allah. That is a saying from their mouths. They imitate the saying of the disbelievers of old. Allah’s Curse be on them, how they are deluded away from the truth!

—Qur’an 9:30

Allah’s Apostle said, “The Hour will not be established until you fight with the Jews, and the stone behind which the Jew will be hiding will say, ‘O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, so kill him.’”

—Sahih Bukhari 4:52:177

O Prophet! … Exhort the believers to fight.

—Qur’an 8:65

President Barack Obama has been desperately trying to get America out of the “War on Terror” since he took office. One of the curious consequences of this policy is the case of a man named Sabir Ali Khan. According to the United States, Khan was a key conspirator behind the death of 39 Americans in Afghanistan’s Kunar province in 2010. He allegedly smuggled weaponry from Pakistan and helped organize a suicide attack against an American base.¹ Since the U.S. Military is no longer engaged in detaining terrorists, as journalist Massimo Calabresi observes, “this means when U.S. authorities find a suspected terrorist, they have three options: kill him, leave him in the field or work with the local government to detain him and perhaps eventually bring him into the U.S. court system.”²

In Khan’s case, none of those options seems to have worked. He’s a Dutch citizen, so after Pakistani officials detained him, they shipped him to the Netherlands. He was arrested when he got off the plane, but at his extradition hearing his lawyer alleged that the U.S. was complicit in his client’s torture while in detention in Pakistan. In July 2014, the Dutch Supreme Court blocked Sabir Ali’s extradition to the U.S. “because the Dutch Government had declined to look into the alleged U.S. role in Khan’s arrest.”³ Meanwhile, the accused terrorist sits at home collecting welfare checks and playing video games.

The Sabir Ali Khan situation is only one in a long line of absurdities the Obama administration is party to on the issue of Islam. In February 2014, the Department of Homeland Security issued new exemptions to a law that prevented terrorist supporters from seeking asylum in the United States. The exemptions now allow people who have provided “limited” material support to be eligible for asylum. In addition to security questions raised by the changes, which a former State Department official called “extremely broad and vague” and “sure to be exploited by those seeking to game our generous refugee admissions program,” there are questions about the legality of the administration deciding to change the law as written by Congress.⁴

In Syria, radical jihadists have massacred and terrorized people.⁵ A YouTube video captured the leader of one militant group tearing the heart out of a dead supporter of Bashar al-Assad’s regime and taking a bite. These are the same people the Obama administration is now providing with weapons to continue their fight. Senator John McCain, who supports this—and even more intervention in Syria if he could get it—fatuously claims that America can tell the difference between which Syrian rebels are “good guys” and which are not. Were it not for widespread popular opposition, Obama would have ordered the bombing of Syrian army assets in support of the jihadists.

President Obama has willingly fed some of the worst, most virulent beliefs of the very jihadists he supposedly opposes. On June 4, 2009, he gave a speech in Cairo addressed to the Muslim world in which he accepted many jihadist claims. For example, jihadists claim they are responding to an “attack” on Islam from the West which began in the age of European colonialism. In his speech, Obama claimed that tensions between the West and Islam “ha[ve] been fed by colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims.”⁶ In a later 2012 speech to the United Nations, the President insisted that “The future must not belong to those who slander the Prophet of Islam,” which is a curious charge for him to make given that the traditional defense against slander is if what one says is the truth.⁷

The President also provided cover for Islam, attributing terrorist attacks to “violent extremists … a small but potent minority of Muslims.” In so doing, he completely ignored the large number of Muslims who agree with the terror attacks on the United States, and the absolute majorities of Muslims who doubt that the 9/11 attacks were even carried out by Muslims. In his speech, Obama called for a “new beginning between the United States and Muslims,” based upon the supposed “truth that America and Islam are not exclusive.”⁸ As this book has conclusively shown, America and Islam are mutually exclusive. One is founded on “We the People,” and the other is founded on the revelations of Muhammad.

In his speech, the President makes a number of errors. He speaks of how Islam supposedly “paving the way for Europe’s Renaissance and Enlightenment,” which this book has shown to be based on a mistake. He credits Islam for “innovation” which developed algebra, the compass, and printing—all of which have nothing to do with Islam. Stretching the bonds of credulity he credits Islam with demonstrating “the possibilities of religious tolerance and racial equality.” As we have shown in this book, the actual history of Islam presents a much different picture. Most tellingly and offensively of all, Obama went as far as to say “Islam has always been part of America’s story,” insisting that somehow Islam, which has until very recently had only a negligible presence in all of North America, somehow has shaped America into what it is today.⁹

Above all, President Obama’s speech demonstrated the fundamental problem facing all politicians who have attempted to grapple with the issue of terrorism: he failed to define the enemy. After insisting that “America is not—and never will be—at war with Islam” he referred vaguely to “violent extremists who pose a grave threat to our security.”¹⁰ This definition is incoherent. It is as if America had said the Cold War was not about opposing Communism but only “violent extremists” like Joseph Stalin. Yet when Stalin died, Communism was still around. In the same way, Osama bin Laden was killed and al-Qaeda disrupted and tens of thousands of “violent extremists” killed in Iraq and Afghanistan—yet Islamic terrorism is still around.

By ignoring or misunderstanding the ideology that produces men like bin Laden, America and the West are risking a disastrous failure. Some, like Obama, believe they can make peace with Islam as with any other religion. This attitude of softness or complacency will not work anymore than President Bush’s approach.

THE FAILURE OF THE “WAR ON TERROR”

The War on Terror has failed. What’s more, Americans and their allies know it. In an early 2014 survey, 52 percent of Americans rated both the Afghanistan and the Iraq wars as mostly failing to achieve their goals.¹¹ Some politicians, such as Britain’s Lord Ashdown, have openly admitted the failure, going as far as to say the war in Afghanistan is “not worth the life of one more soldier.”¹² The Iraq and Afghanistan wars claimed more than 6,656 service members killed and 106,000 injured. Civilian deaths totaled over 200,000. U.S. government spending on the wars since 2001 is at $3.3 trillion and counting. Future spending obligations, such as medical care for injured soldiers and debt servicing, will likely push the total to well over $4 trillion.¹³

The end results in Afghanistan and Iraq bear out the grim assessment of the American people. Even before the 2013 troop withdrawals, Afghani security forces across the country were already cutting deals with the Taliban. After 13 years of fighting, the Taliban is still present and still a force in Afghanistan while much of the country is as much a lawless haven for terrorists as it was before 9/11.¹⁴ On top of all this, our alleged ally in the war, Pakistan, has been providing detailed assistance and shelter to our enemies from the start.

In Iraq, a secular (albeit tyrannical) leader and government have been replaced with a shaky Shia regime. The new constitution calls sharia law the highest law of the land. Fundamentalist Iran has taken on greater influence due to the power of Iraq’s Shia majority. Instead of replacing a secular tyrant with a secular democracy, we have replaced him with a religious theocracy masquerading as a democracy. Law and order have broken down along religious lines, as sectarian violence has become commonplace. One million of its people are still internally displaced and corruption is rampant.¹⁵ Hundreds of billions of dollars were completely lost to corruption in the aftermath of the Iraq invasion. All this for a country that had no involvement in 9/11 at all!

What the U.S. and other western governments completely fail to grasp are the reasons for our failure in the War on Terror, first and foremost being a lack of ideological clarity. Our enemy in Afghanistan was not terrorism, or Osama bin Laden, or even the Taliban. It was literal Islam. Terrorism is only a technique—a means to an end. Osama bin Laden and the Taliban are only soldiers. Literal Islam is what produces bin Laden and the Taliban and encourages young men to engage in terror attacks. Killing bin Laden or any number of terrorists will not stop this production.

While fighting a bunch of guerilla soldiers in Afghanistan, America has remained friendly with those who are those soldiers’ masters: Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. These two nations provide the ideology and the funding that drives our opponents, and yet we call them allies. Afghanistan and Iraq had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks. But Saudi Arabia provided 15 of the hijackers and funded and disseminated the deadly ideology which motivated all of them. Pakistan provided funding and training for a generation of jihadists, as well as the chief architect of the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Muhammad. If America had attacked Saudi Arabia and Pakistan after 9/11, we might have accomplished something meaningful. Even forcing Pakistan to dismantle the Taliban—which they created in the first place—would have been more significant than what we did.

The war we should be waging is not a War on Terror but a war on literal Islam. That is, on those who seek to live their lives (and force others to live their lives) in accord with the literal words of the fundamental Islamic texts. These same texts command them to hate and kill the infidel and spread their ideology across the face of the earth. Islam must be reduced to a personal faith of individuals, not established as a national religion.

ISLAM IS ARAB IMPERIALISM

We began this book with the claim, “Islam is not a religion.” Instead, it is now what it always has been—a creed of domination. Remarkably, despite its bloody and brutal history of conquest, murder, and oppression, Islam still receives cover and protection from any number of apologists. Whether they are well-meaning or intentionally deceptive, such people whitewash past crimes and conceal present dangers through their actions. Any honest assessment of Islam, as this book has shown, can only conclude that it is at its core a unique Arab imperialism.

What makes Islam particularly successful as an imperialist ideology is that it dupes non-Arabs into doing its dirty and difficult work. At the same time, it erases or appropriates the history of the nations under its sway, replacing them with its own ideology and values far more thoroughly than European imperialism ever did. It is currently fashionable in the Muslim world and among Leftists to blame the world’s current ills on the West and its relatively brief period of colonial and imperial rule. But history shows quite clearly that the only imperialist dogma to survive through the ages down to today is Islam.

Islamic history itself begins with its ascent to power. The Islamic calendar begins in 622, the year when Muhammad the founder was appointed to wield communal power in Medina. Muhammad quickly consolidated this power base by killing or expelling the Jewish communities from the city and raiding the rich caravans of the pagan Meccans. By the time of his death in 632, the authority of Islam had been extended across the Arabian Peninsula.

The pattern Muhammad set in Medina was imperialist. It involved slaughter of opponents, appropriation of wealth, and replacement of existing cultures with Islamic culture. The non-Islamic Arab culture was violently and irrevocably replaced in favor of Muhammad’s teachings. Once Arabia was secure, the Arabs expanded this imperialist ideology beyond its borders. After them, non-Arab Muslims, most notably the Turks, would take up the mantle and do the same.

Among the first victims outside the Arabian Peninsula were the Persian Sassanid Empire and its Zoroastrian civilization and the ancient Christian cultures of the Middle East. In both cases, the Arab conquerors immediately went to work appropriating not only the wealth but the cultural accomplishments of the conquered. Persian clerks and administrators were utilized organizing the burgeoning empire. In Jerusalem, Caliph Abd al-Malik arranged for the construction of the Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount. The structure used Byzantine Christian designs and architects, but was then plastered over with anti-Christian propaganda. The imperialist appropriation of the city has been so thorough that today apologists will actually claim that Jerusalem is a sacred city for Islam. It was originally nothing of the kind: Jerusalem is never mentioned in the Qur’an and is only referenced in a later hadith, which may or may not be genuine.

The cultural appropriation of Islam extends to the religion of others. Rather than admit its textual and theological debts to Jewish and Christian scriptures, Muslims claim that these religions were originally forms of Islam but the texts were corrupted. Muhammad was sent to revise and correct these corruptions. Central religious figures of Judaism and Christianity such as Abraham and Jesus are retroactively defined by Islamic texts as good Muslim people.

This appropriation extends down to the modern era. Even today, Muslims claim that there were never Jews in Palestine. A university lecturer on Palestinian Authority television declared the Jewish Temple “fictitious,” adding “There is no remnant of it. It’s a myth.”¹⁶ It is even claimed that Arabs have been living in Jerusalem since 3000 BC. One lecturer at an Egyptian university explained to a television audience that the Biblical King Saul was a Muslim leader who achieved “the first Palestinian liberation through armed struggle.”¹⁷

Such claims would be laughable if they were not the pretext to what often follows them in the logic of Arab imperialism—genocide. Another Palestinian university professor, Dr. Ahmad Abu Halabiyah, makes the connection:

[Jews] do not have any moderates or any advocate of peace. They are all liars. They must be butchered and must be killed … It is forbidden to have mercy in your hearts for the Jews in any place and in any land. Make war on them anywhere that you find yourself. Any place that you meet them, kill them.¹⁸

Islamic imperatives are constantly used in the context of Palestine to seal Arab claims to the land. This is clear in the constant references to the Al-Aqsa mosque and in describing all of modern Israel as ribat, meaning sacred Islamic territory.¹⁹

The same mixture of rapacity supported by a religious blank check also lies behind the Arab imperialist invasion of the Indian subcontinent. Although this era is described extensively earlier in this book, a couple of points must be emphasized about the fundamental nature of Islamic Arab imperialism. First, in their invasions of India Muslims found justification for their violence and destruction from the Hadith, in which they read that “participants in the holy war against al-Hind [India] are promised to be saved from hell-fire.”²⁰ In the eighth century, a jihad was proclaimed against India and Arab armies poured into the heartlands of Buddhist and Hindu civilization. In the immediate consequences we find three things which completely characterize the Islamic assault on Indian civilization which has been going on for 1,300 years: the destruction of non-Muslim places of worship, the looting of riches, and the mass enslavement of the local population.

The story of the Arab empire is a story of stolen goods, armies, harems, and workforces filled with slaves. Its so-called religious dogma was enforced at the point of a sword and established through coercion and demographic spread. It is not the story of a religion. All religions have had their share of bad people and bad deeds to apologize for. But the attainment and exploitation of power has been the prime modus operandi for Islam from its beginnings, and it makes no apologies for it. From the Islamic perspective, it is their God-given right to steal, kill, and enslave the infidel.

Some might argue that this description of Islam as a system of Arab imperialism only applies to its first two centuries. While it is true that non-Arab peoples took up the mantle of Islam, in doing so they have abandoned their earlier cultures and identities. This is quite evident in Pakistan, whose people despise their Indian ancestry and past and long for nothing so much as the discovery of Arab ancestry in their family trees. Islam insists that its original language and culture are definitive for all its followers. A translation of the Qur’an from Arabic is no longer really the Qur’an. All over the Islamic world one finds people following Arab rules and customs, speaking Arabic, worshipping in Arabic, kneeling daily in the direction of the Arabian Peninsula, and saving their money to make the required pilgrimage to Mecca. At the same time, these people are taught that the heritage and traditions of their people before the arrival of Islam are evil and despicable. What else can one call this but imperialism?

Others argue that Islam is not necessarily an imperialist system and that the only danger it poses comes from extremists. This is the favored explanation of politicians who are guided by considerations of political correctness and short-term advantages. Tellingly, those who dare to criticize Islam are often silenced—sometimes by murder, sometimes by political or social ostracism. In the Netherlands, a man named Pim Fortuyn dared to publish a book in 1997, Against the Islamization of Our Culture. He attacked the influence of Islam upon the secular and tolerant foundations of Dutch society. His views had gained supporters, putting him on the verge of electoral success in 2002 when he was murdered by an assassin who claimed to be “protecting” Muslims. Two years later, a friend of Fortuyn’s named Theo van Gogh was butchered on the streets of Amsterdam by a Muslim. His crime was producing a film named Submission which exposed the misogyny rampant in Islam.

Muslims living in the West bring their imperialist views with them. Unlike most other immigrant groups, Muslims reject the societies which welcome and house them and instead claim sovereignty over the areas where they predominate. For example:

In Britain, imams have pressed the government to designate part of Bradford as being under Muslim law. In Belgium, Muslims in the Brussels neighborhood of Sint-Jans-Molenbeek consider it to be under Islamic jurisdiction. In Denmark, Muslim leaders have sought similar control over parts of Copenhagen. In France, an official met with an imam at the edge of Roubaix’s Muslim district out of respect for his declaration that it was Islamic territory.²¹

Such claims come with the threats and the realities of violence. In 2004, bombs killed 191 passengers on Spanish trains. In 2005, 52 Londoners were killed by mass transit suicide bombers. Three of the four men involved in the London bombing were British-born and lived lives which were neither ignorant nor economically deprived. They were not driven to kill by oppression but by the claims of Islam. In 2005, the suburbs of Paris exploded in riots by Muslim immigrants, prompting months of handwringing from European liberals about how Europe had failed its Muslim immigrants. Yet the riots were set off by two young men who tried to hide from police in an electrical transformer station. When police were sent to get them out, local Muslims saw this as an invasion of “their” domain. As one journalist concluded, “these riots, in short, are early battles in a continent-wide turf war.”²²

Ignorance of the threat posed by Islam could be forgiven if it were a new or unfamiliar phenomenon. But as author Gregory Davis has pointed out, it is all-too-familiar:

What is occurring in western Europe has occurred at other times in other places with calamitous results … all of the Muslim world today comprises territories in which other civilizations once flourished but which succumbed—sometimes quickly, sometimes gradually—to the genocidal effects of jihad and dhimmitude.²³

The histories of Iran, North Africa, Syria, Mesopotamia, and Anatolia all provide ample evidence for Davis’s assertion. The suffix “-stan” which is applied to most of the Central Asian nations (like Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Pakistan) is a Sanskrit word. These places were all formerly Buddhist and Hindu states, but their former culture was wiped out by Islam. In 2001, the Taliban blasted apart the Bamiyan Buddha statues—1,500 year old legacies of Afghanistan’s Buddhist past which were nearly 200 feet high. The statues were destroyed because the Taliban regarded them as idols forbidden by Islam.

Saudi Arabia is the face and the banker of Arab imperialism. Thanks to the Saudis and the other oil-rich Gulf states, funding continues to flow toward the spread of this ideology through the mosques and madrassas and Islamic charities and media outlets which promote it. Thanks to their funding, the terrorist groups around the world have the money they need to wage jihad.

The Afghan insurgency against the Soviets was backed to the tune of at least $4 billion from the Saudi government in addition to the considerable support by “charities” and individual members of the royal family.²⁴ Along with Pakistan, the Saudi government was responsible for the funding and support which promoted the Taliban. Most of the Taliban’s leaders were educated in Saudi-funded madrassas. In India, a jihadist group known as Jamaat-i-Islami used Saudi money to wage jihad in Kashmir, killing hundreds. In Central Asia and Russia itself Saudi money built Wahhabi schools and mosques with the specific aim of radicalizing the local populations. The Saudi-led World Muslim League has declared the Russian republics of Chechnya and Dagestan “Islamic Territories.” Another Saudi proxy, the World Assembly of Muslim Youth, is known to have provided arms, supplies, funding, and fighters in the Balkan wars over Bosnia.²⁵

The atrocities of 9/11 brought much of this activity to light, and the Saudis have since exerted tremendous effort and spent a great deal of money to achieve plausible deniability for their support of global jihad.²⁶ Lawyers representing the victims of 9/11 managed to uncover “evidence of extensive financial support for al-Qaeda and other extremist groups by members of the Saudi royal family,” and back in 2003, 28 pages of the Congressional report on 9/11 were classified—the secret section “is believed to discuss intelligence on Saudi financial links to two hijackers.”²⁷

Despite this exposure, the situation has not significantly altered. In a leaked 2009 memo from then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton it was revealed that Saudi Arabia is still the “most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide.” Recipients of Saudi largesse include al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and Lashkar-e-Taiba (the group responsible for the deadly series of massacres in Mumbai in 2008).²⁸ Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood group committed to the annihilation of Israel, has also been a top recipient. In 2004, the Council on Foreign Relations suggested that “individuals in Saudi Arabia contributed approximately $5 million to Hamas each year, or approximately half its annual operating budget.”²⁹ While Saudi support has waned a little in recent years, oil sheikhdom Qatar has gladly picked up the slack. The Qatari emir was the first foreign head-of-state to visit Hamas-controlled Gaza and even pledged $400 million in support of the jihadist enclave.³⁰

While the connections between supposed American allies and terrorist groups around the globe may be clearer, we must recognize that the enemy we are facing does not consist of individual terrorists, groups, or even nations. These are only manifestations of the underlying problem. While defeating al-Qaeda or Hamas would be welcome, the enemy would remain. The enemy is 1400-year-old Arab imperialism, which is far more resilient than groups or parties or even nations. Its name is literal Islam.

THE TRUE CLASH: ISLAM VERSUS WORLD CIVILIZATIONS

The enormously influential work of scholar Samuel Huntington theorizes that the major world conflicts of the post-Cold War era will be driven by culture, which is in turn largely defined by religion. The fault lines of the future, Huntington believes, will not be national boundaries but wider civilizational differences. In one critical respect Huntington’s analysis is absolutely correct. There is a coming clash, not between civilizations, but between Islam and non-Islamic civilizations. The clash is already here.

Huntington’s basic idea is that “civilizations are the ultimate human tribes, and the clash of civilizations is tribal conflict on a global scale.”³¹ He believes that intra-civilizational conflict is likely for several reasons, including fundamental differences in culture and religion, the pressures of modernism, and global resistance to modernizing changes. There is a basic split in his theory between “the West and the rest,” meaning the civilization of Europe and the United States and the various other civilizations of the world.³²

Our primary objection to Huntington’s thesis is that we believe the fundamental issue is one of reconcilable and irreconcilable differences. Huntington does recognize this distinction, but his recognition is insufficient. We argue that the conflicts among non-Islamic civilizations can be reconciled or solved without violence. Just as Catholic and Protestant nations overcame their differences and no longer war with one another, the bloc of Orthodox Christian nations and Western Christianity can also be reconciled. Hindu civilization (India and Nepal) is willing to embrace Western values such as individualism, free speech, human rights, parliamentary democracy and so forth. Conflicts between China and its neighbors or between China and the West are also reconcilable because the key differences are essentially economic. Chinese culture does not require that China take over the world or that it convert everyone to Confucianism. The Chinese are not interested in destroying Hindu civilization, nor are the Hindus interested in destroying Chinese civilization. Any conflicts between them, and between almost any of the world’s civilizations, can be negotiated.

In the case of Islam, however, there are differences which are completely irreconcilable. Between Islam and the West, Islam and the Hindus, Islam and Africa, Islam and the Orthodox word, Islam and the Confucian world there are differences which cannot be negotiated or solved. Islam, as Huntington admits, demands universal conquest. All non-Islamic cultures must be made Islamic, without exception or reservation. As the Islamic scholar Majid Khadduri explains:

In Muslim legal theory, Islam and shirk (associating other gods with Allah) cannot exist together in this world; it is the duty of the imam as well as every believer not only to see that God’s word shall be supreme, but also that no infidel shall deny God or be ungrateful for His favors (ni’am). This world would ultimately be reserved for believers; as to unbelievers, “their abode is hell, and evil is the destination.”³³

Only Islam mandates that its followers pursue a course of world political domination. Only Islam insists that church and state must be one, and that religious texts become the basis of political constitutions and all political law. Only Islam provides a dual ethics, with one standard for the treatment of fellow believers and another for non-believers. Only Islam allows crippling taxes on non-believers who live in its dominions and encourages its followers to destroy other religions’ houses of worship, use force against non-believers, or even use terror tactics for religious expansion. Only Islam regards its adherents as part of a de facto religious nation that transcends geographical or political boundaries. No other world religion shares these features. While some Westerners pretend that Muslims don’t “really believe” these things, as Huntington says: “Fourteen hundred years of history demonstrate otherwise.”³⁴

Most importantly, it is not possible to adopt a “live and let live” posture with regard to Islam. The mere existence of non-Islamic people is an affront in Islam, and it is considered a duty to fight against such people. Fighting them is always justified—it is the supreme example of the good war to fight infidels.³⁵ For most peoples of the world, the only choice offered is between Islam or jihad. The so-called People of the Book have a third option, where they may pay the jizya tax in exchange for being allowed to survive as second-class citizens. Conversion, oppression, or warfare: these are the only possible means of “reconciliation” Islam recognizes for non-Islamic peoples.³⁶

Within the Islamic world, religion is a unifying feature such that we can speak of Islamic civilization as a bloc as Huntington does. Huntington himself makes a good case for it:

Wherever one looks along the perimeter of Islam, Muslims have problems living peaceably with their neighbors. The question naturally arises as to whether this pattern of late twentieth century conflict between Muslim and non-Muslim groups is equally true of relations between groups from other civilizations. In fact, it is not. Muslims make up about one fifth of the world’s population, but … they have been far more involved in intergroup violence than the people of other civilizations. The evidence is overwhelming.³⁷

The evidence he marshals in support of this contention is impressive. He finds “three times as many intra-civilization conflicts involving Muslims as there were conflicts among all non-Muslim civilizations.” Within Islam itself there were more conflicts than within any other civilization, including tribal conflicts in Africa. There is a clearly established pattern of Islamic conflict with other civilizations as well as within itself. In short, he concludes, “Islam’s borders are bloody, and so are its innards.”³⁸

Muslim societies are also comparatively highly militarized. In a 1980s study, James Payne found that the military force ratios (that is, the number of military personnel per 1000 population) of Muslim countries were on average double the size of those of Christian countries.³⁹ Muslim societies also have a stronger propensity to resort to violence in international crises. Out of a total of 142 crisis situations between 1928 and 1979, Islamic nations chose war or violence in 76, far higher than for any other civilization.⁴⁰

The evidence cited by Huntington establishes that there is no widespread inter-civilizational conflict, but a well-established pattern of conflict both within Islamic states and between Islamic states and other civilizations. The question is why. Huntington offers several reasons which agree substantially with the arguments put forward in this book:

First, the argument is made that Islam has from the start been a religion of the sword and that it glorifies military virtues. Islam originated among warring Bedouin nomadic tribes and this violent origin is stamped in the foundation of Islam. Muhammad himself is remembered as a hard fighter and a skilful [sic] military commander.⁴¹

The doctrines of Islam, as we have repeatedly shown, dictate war against unbelievers. History shows that when the expansion of Islam tapered off, the overwhelming tendency was for Muslim groups, contrary to their own doctrines, to war amongst themselves.

Another source of conflict mentioned by Huntington concerns the “indigestibility” of Muslims. While this is certainly a cause, we argue that indigestibility works both ways. Western nations are unable to assimilate their Islamic populations, and Islamic peoples are unwilling to be assimilated. There are far fewer problems getting Buddhists, Hindus, and Christians to live among one another than there are getting any of these groups to live among Muslims—and vice versa. Anti-Chinese riots are almost unheard of in Buddhist Thailand or Catholic Philippines. They have occurred several times in Muslim Indonesia and Muslim Malaysia.

What emerges most clearly from a look at the world is that there is indeed a fault line of conflict which has existed historically, exists at present, and threatens to erupt volcanically in the future. That is the fault line between Islam and the other world civilizations. Alone among the world civilizations, Islam is immune to reform and seeks to impose upon the whole of humanity the rule of a global Islamic caliphate administered according to the medieval code of sharia law.

The first battles in this conflict between Islam and non-Islamic civilizations are already being fought. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were both part of this conflict, and they have failed. They failed because they were waged against individuals like Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden or groups like the Taliban. The real enemy, literal Islam, was never identified or opposed.

The so-called Arab Spring opened up new fronts in this conflict. Formerly secular governments in Egypt and Tunisia have been replaced by Islamists. Although in Egypt the military regained control, the situation remains fluid and the Islamists are still strong. Other secular nations such as Libya and Syria have become battlegrounds.

The 21st century will be a century of conflict between Islam and the non-Islamic world. The 9/11 attacks and subsequent attacks in London, Madrid, Mumbai, and Chechnya, the failed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the ongoing demographic conquest of Europe, India, and America all point toward this conclusion. This will be a century of Universal Jihad, which the liberal democracies of the world cannot avoid. This fight pits freedom against fanaticism, reason against dogmatic faith. The self-governing spirit of the United States Constitution is the antithesis of the Qur’an, which can never be altered. The very existence of the Statue of Liberty is as offensive to Muslims as the Bamiyan Buddhas were in Afghanistan. We are in an existential struggle against Islamic Arab imperialism.

PART FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY - TWO

Islam in the 21st Century

Verily, Allah has purchased of the believers their lives and their properties; for the price that theirs shall be the Paradise. They fight in Allah’s Cause, so they kill (others) and are killed. It is a promise in truth which is binding on Him in the Taurat (Torah) and the Injeel (Gospel) and the Qur’an. And who is truer to his covenant than Allah? Then rejoice in the bargain which you have concluded. That is the supreme success.

—Qur’an 9:111

The Holy Quran lays the highest emphasis on the preparation for war. It wants us to prepare ourselves for war to the utmost. The test . . . lies in our capability to instill terror into the hearts of our enemies.

—Brigadier S.K. Malik¹

Allah gave the Prophet Muhammad four swords (for fighting the unbelievers): the first against polytheists, which Muhammad himself fought with; the second against apostates, which Caliph Abu Bakr fought with; the third against the People of the Book, which Caliph Umar fought with; and the fourth against dissenters, which Caliph Ali fought with.

—Mummmad al-Shaybani²

The universalism of Islam, in its all-embracing creed, is imposed on the believers as a continuous process of warfare, psychological and political, if not strictly military … The Jihad, accordingly, may be stated as a doctrine of a permanent state of war, not continuous fighting.

—Majid Khadduri³

In April of 2014, more than 300 young female students were kidnapped from a government school in Chibok, Nigeria. Less than a month later, the leader of the group responsible for the kidnapping produced a video proclaiming his intention to sell the captive girls at a slave market. The video provoked outrage in Nigeria and abroad, turning the kidnapping into a story with global reach. What few people in either the media or their Western audiences knew was that the kidnapping was just the latest episode in an ongoing war between Islam and the Nigerian people.⁴

The group responsible for the kidnapping is an Islamic group called Boko Haram, a name which literally translates to “western education is religiously forbidden.” Far from being a random event, the kidnapping was part of Boko Haram’s ongoing war against what it perceives as the “Westernization” of Nigeria—a country in desperate need of education given its exploding population growth and dangerous levels of poverty. Boko Haram believes what Nigeria needs is not education but more Islam. They have backed these beliefs with deadly violence: according to Amnesty International, the group was responsible for 1,500 deaths in Nigeria in the months prior to the April 2014 kidnapping alone.⁵

Too few realize that Boko Haram in Nigeria is not an anomaly in the Islamic world. The most populated Muslim country in the world, Indonesia, has also endured its share of religious violence. One of the deadliest examples came in 2002, when two bombs placed outside popular nightclubs on the island of Bali killed 202 people and injured 240 more. Three members of the Islamist group Jemaah Islamiyah were found responsible for the bombings and executed in 2008. This group is believed to be aiming at an overthrow of the Indonesian government in order to replace it with a strict Islamic state. The investigation of the attack uncovered an al-Qaeda financing link, with the plot mastermind receiving $30,000 (USD) to cover expenses.⁶

Despite its close links to the United States, few Americans are aware that the majority-Christian Philippines has also been a regular target for terror. One of the worst attacks there came in 2004 at the hands of Abu Sayyaf, an Islamist guerilla organization. Known as the “SuperFerry 14 Bombing,” this attack involved a bomb which scuttled a transport ferry, killing 116 people. Because of the fire triggered by the explosion and the difficulty of reaching the ferry on the ocean floor, only 63 bodies were ever recovered.⁷

Sharing borders with several majority-Muslim nations, Russia also knows the deadly danger presented by Islamist groups. In 2002, Russia endured its own mass kidnapping when Islamist Chechens seized the crowded Dubrovka Theater in Moscow, taking 900 hostages and demanding the removal of Russian troops from Chechnya. After a nearly three-day standoff, Russian special forces raided the theater, resulting in the deaths of all 40 kidnappers and 130 hostages. Islamist military commander Shamil Basayev promised afterward that his next goal would be to inflict maximum damage on the Russian people. This promise was fulfilled in 2004 with a series of suicide bombings against civilian targets.⁸

In 2004, at the Beslan school of North Ossetia (near the Russian border), Islamic fighters took the violence a step further. A band of fighters took more than a thousand people, many of them children, hostage at a school for three days. After the incident ended with a raid by Russian security forces, 334 hostages were found dead (including 186 children). Nearly 800 others suffered non-fatal injuries. According to local reports, many of the victims suffered severe burns, with 100 or more of the total fatalities being burned alive.⁹

The motivation of Basayev and the Chechens is often described by the politically innocuous term “separatism.” But it must be emphasized that the crucial issue between the Chechens and the Russians is not political administration but religion. Russia is a staunch Orthodox nation which resists attempts to Islamize its culture. The response of some Muslims within its borders has therefore been to demand that Russia give up its territory so they can have their own country. A letter from Basayev to Russian President Vladimir Putin after the Beslan attack offered peace in exchange for independence. His promise to Putin is telling: “We can guarantee that all of Russia’s Muslims will refrain from armed methods of struggle against the Russian Federation, at least for 10-15 years, on condition that freedom of religion be respected.”¹⁰

Despite a much smaller Muslim population, Western Europe is also enduring Islamist violence within its borders. One of the deadliest strikes came in 2004 with the coordinated bombings of commuter trains in Madrid. Coming three days before Spain’s general elections that year, the explosions killed 191 people and wounded about 1,800. At the time, it was the worst terror attack in Europe since the Lockerbie Bombing in 1988. The motivation of the Islamic terrorists responsible was reportedly payback against Spain for supporting the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.¹¹

A year later, commuter rail in Europe was struck again—this time in London. Four Muslim men detonated three bombs aboard subway cars and a fourth on a double-decker bus, killing 52 civilians and injuring 700 others. This was the first-ever suicide terror attack in the United Kingdom, and it was carried out by three British-born sons of immigrants from Pakistan (the fourth was a convert born in Jamaica). Two of the attackers left behind videotapes describing the reasons and motivations for their attacks. One declares:

Our religion is Islam, obedience to the one true God and following the footsteps of the final prophet and messenger. Muhammad … Your democratically-elected governments continuously perpetuate atrocities against my people all over the world …We are at war and I am a soldier. Now you too will taste the reality of this situation.¹²

In 2007, Islamist violence directed at a national leader produced carnage in Karachi, Pakistan. A motorcade carrying former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was attacked in a bombing that killed about 150 people and injured hundreds more. Although Bhutto survived this attempt, another attack later that year would claim her life.

India has long been a flashpoint for Islamic violence, with one of the deadliest attacks coming in Mumbai in 2008. Members of the terror group Lashkar-e-Taiba, acting with the support of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, conducted a four-day campaign of bombings, shootings, and hostage-taking which ended in a deadly police raid. The attacks were planned in Pakistan, and fueled by Islamist ideology and drug use (attackers took cocaine to stay awake longer and inflict more deadly damage). At the end, about 164 were killed, including ten attackers, and many hundreds of others injured.¹³ It was the deadliest Islamic rampage in Mumbai since a 1993 terror bombing had killed 257 people.

Africa is also routinely beset by Islamic violence. Few people in the West realize that central African nations are religiously split between Christians and Muslims, and that this is an ongoing source of conflict there. Boko Haram in Nigeria, mentioned at the beginning, is one of the worst offenders. In January 2012 the organization carried out a series of assaults on Christian churches and businesses, then followed up with attacks on police stations and government offices several weeks later. The outbreak left more than 200 dead—most of them civilians.¹⁴

These attacks are only a fraction of the total. In any given year, most terrorism comes at the hands of Sunni Muslims, often against other Muslims.¹⁵ In 2011, for instance, “Sunni extremists” were blamed for 70 percent of terror-related fatalities worldwide (8,886 out of 12,533). By contrast, that year only 77 fatalities worldwide—less than one percent of the total—were attributed to “Neo-Nazi/Fascist/White Supremacist” groups.¹⁶ Yet to hear the U.S. government tell it, white Americans represent the most serious terror threat in the country.¹⁷

JIHAD AND THE SUBVERSION OF THE WEST

As Islam becomes more of a presence in non-Islamic countries the realities of jihad become a presence as well. There are two forms in which jihad is taking place in the Western world today. One is the all-too-familiar form of violent jihad; the other is the more insidious and little-remarked form of demographic jihad (explored in detail in Part 5 of this book). As Islamic scholar Sam Solomon has shown, subverting non-Islamic societies via immigration and procreation is actually an age-old technique in Islam. The first example comes from Muhammad himself, whose immigration to Medina along with his Muslim followers ultimately undermined and transformed the city. The same concepts and strategies he used to change that one Arab city are still in use by Islamic leaders around the world and have the same end: to expand the penetration and conquest of Islam further into the world.¹⁸

Free and democratic societies are particularly vulnerable to demographic jihad, since once Muslims make up a sizable voting bloc they can use the institutions of their host societies against the host. The end result can be massive separatist campaigns such as the one seen in Bosnia in the 1990s, in Chechnya in the 2000s and in southern Thailand and in the Philippines today. Islamists use Britain’s famous freedom to openly proclaim their intention to turn that country into an Islamic nation; given current demographic trends and Islamic history, this claim could become reality in our lifetimes.

In seeking to undermine other cultures, whether by violence or by demographic pressure, in the name of Islam, Muslims are merely following the expressed will of the founder of Islam. Muhammad’s sayings and deeds are so often on the lips of terrorists that we should pay close attention to what he proclaims:

I have been commanded to fight all men until they testify that there is no god but Allah and that Muhammad is the messenger of Allah, and perform prayer and pay Zakat. If they say it, they have saved their blood and possessions from me, except for the rights of Islam over them.¹⁹

Osama bin Laden justified his attacks on the United States by repeating these words. This is not just an isolated statement, either. The supposedly holy Qur’an declares, “whoever seeks a religion other than Islam, it will never be accepted of him.”²⁰ It exhorts all Muslims to “kill the [kafirs] wherever you find them, and capture them and besiege them, and prepare for them each and every ambush.”²¹ Apologists claim that such statements are meant figuratively, but as this book has shown, they have been understood and applied quite literally throughout the history of Islam to justify enormous barbarities.

Westerners who have been raised in a culture shaped by Greek rationality and Christian charity find it exceedingly difficult to understand that the Muslims who engage in rape and murder and strive to undermine western societies are doing exactly what their religion commands them to do. The fact that many Muslims do not do these things is a testimony not to Islam but to the basic humanity of most people, who find such actions terrible.

The idea of Islam making peace with the non-Islamic world is ahistorical and completely antithetical to the demands of Muhammad. Islamic scholar Efraim Karsh explains the Islamic view of its relation to the world with great clarity:

Islam envisages a global political order in which all humankind will live under Muslim rule as either believers or subject communities. In order to achieve this goal it is incumbent on all free, male adult Muslims to carry out an uncompromising struggle “in the path of Allah,” or jihad. This in turn makes those parts of the world that have not yet been conquered by the House of Islam an abode of permanent conflict (Dar al-Harb, the House of War) which will only end with Islam’s eventual triumph.²²

Islamic scholar Majid Khadduri explains how anything less than a global Islamic political order is unacceptable:

In Muslim legal theory, Islam and shirk (associating other gods with Allah) cannot exist together in this world; it is the duty of the imam as well as every believer not only to see that God’s word shall be supreme, but also that no infidel should deny God. This world would ultimately be reserved for believers, as to non-believers, “their abode is hell, and evil is the destination.”²³

The Qur’an makes clear that mere performance of pious actions is explicitly lower in religious value than active fighting on behalf of Islam:

Do you consider the providing of drinking water to the pilgrims and the maintenance of Al-Masjid-al-Haram [the mosque at Mecca] as equal to the worth of those who believe in Allah and the Last Day, and strive hard and fight in the Cause of Allah? They are not equal before Allah.²⁴

As the example of Muhammad’s own life and the subsequent 1,400 years of Islamic history have shown, “fight[ing] in Allah’s cause” has always been understood and intended quite literally. Muhammad was a warlord who found his greatest missionary success not with preaching but with caravan raids and power-brokering from his base in Medina. During his lifetime, Muhammad arranged for raids on caravans, personally participating in many of them. These raids were essentially cases of low-level banditry given the gloss of religion because the spoils were taken by “the faithful.” As a leader, he famously put to death an entire tribe of Arabian Jews (the Banu Qurayza) along with hundreds of pagan Arabs—including many men and women of Mecca who he felt had slighted him when he was just a street preacher.²⁵

Under the caliphs who followed Muhammad, Islam continued to be spread by the sword.²⁶ This included wars to convert the entire Arabian peninsula followed by wars of conquest against Persia, Mesopotamia, the Levant, and soon India. Egypt, home to one of the earliest and largest Christian communities in the world, was taken by force and slowly and brutally Islamized over the course of centuries. In 700 AD, the idea that Egyptian Christianity was threatened was absurd. A century later, Christians there were second-class citizens—a position they still hold today, outnumbered 9-to-1 by an increasingly hostile Sunni majority.

The same pattern of conquest has continued to today. With a few exceptions, such as the Spanish Reconquista, the recovery of Sicily from the Moors, and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, Islam’s history has been one of steady increase by means of violent seizures and demographic replacement. Because of the military and technological superiority of western nations today, Islam is unable to seize territory as it once did. But the demographic approach is still available—and thanks to multiculturalism and politically correct western policies, it has been able to proceed in Europe to a dangerously high level.

Two flashpoints of violence in the world today illustrate the danger if demographic replacement continues unimpeded. In Israel, conflict between Israeli Jews and Muslim Palestinians has been constant and almost uninterrupted since the foundation of Israel after World War II. Despite enormous genetic and cultural similarities between Palestinians and Jews, who can be described fairly as Semitic cousins, violence continues to claim lives in the region.²⁷

In India, the danger is even more apparent. Formerly, the countries of Pakistan and Bangladesh were also part of India, but due to the large Islamic populations there a separatist movement led to a partition of the country (a civil war later tore the Muslim nation into two separate nations). The country that is now Pakistan was formerly 25 percent Hindu. But whereas the vast majority of Hindus left for India during the partition, many Muslims remained in India, where they are still about 14 percent of the population. Even the partition isn’t enough—many Muslims want it all. Despite 1,300 years of violence and a bloody partition, the conflict between Muslims and everyone else in India continues.

Compare the conflicts in Israel and India with the two World Wars or America’s Vietnam War. The latter conflicts, however bloody and devastating, nevertheless had an end. Driven by theology, the conflicts in Israel and India have continued for decades if not centuries and show no sign of stopping. If demographic and terror threats are allowed to continue in the west, the same conflict will come there, too. India’s past (and present) will be Europe’s future. So far, western political and cultural leaders have been unwilling to identify the problem, let alone come up with solutions. It has therefore fallen to ordinary citizens to stand up and do something before it is too late to act.

THE FREE WORLD’S COMING CONFLICT WITH ISLAMIC IMPERIALISM

The 21st century will be a pivotal moment in human history—the moment when human freedom battles its bloodiest and most dangerous enemy, Islamic imperialism. The key struggles of the 20th century were against totalitarianism. From the right, the liberal democracies of the West fought the Fascist governments of Hitler and Mussolini. From the left, they fought the Communist states of the Soviet Bloc. But the battle against Islamic imperialism will be an even tougher test.

This war will be fought on many fronts. The greatest threat currently posed by Islamic imperialism was mentioned above: the demographic jihad. All across Europe the same pattern holds—native-born populations are shrinking in size while Islamic immigrants are still coming and reproducing in greater numbers. Initial evidence suggests these immigrants do not assimilate. The children are more likely to be religious and less likely than their parents to adopt the languages and customs of the host countries. So long as European nations allow Muslims to arrive on their shores en masse, the demographic threat will only increase.

Terrorism is the second-greatest threat posed by Islam. As the Boston Marathon Bombing showed, large organizations and lavish funding are unnecessary when it comes to producing terror on a devastating scale. Two individuals working with limited funds managed to bring the entire city of Boston to its knees for several days, killing or injuring hundreds and inflicting millions of dollars of economic damage. Defeating Islam means defeating the ideology which radicalizes people like the Tsarnaev brothers. No other approach can succeed.

The threat posed by Islam dwarfs the threat of Nazism and Communism combined. Nazism lasted less than 15 years and died with its creator. Communism held on for little more than 70 years before collapsing due to economic inefficiency. Neither system had the demographic strength or the transcendental metaphysics which has allowed Islam to remain a potent threat for 1,400 years.

On top of that, the authoritarian dictators of the 20th century could be reasoned with. The conflict between Communism and Capitalism was economic, not cultural. Russian civilization is still essentially Western, and Russians do not immigrate to the West to form rape gangs and terrorize the local populations. Muslims do. President Nixon and his aide Henry Kissinger were able to establish trade and friendly relations with China, despite the fact that the Chinese were Communists with a totalitarian worldview. The Cuban Missile Crisis reached a peaceful resolution because Soviet Communists and Americans shared a preference for life over death and for society over destructive chaos.

Despite this, for decades America followed an irrational and self-destructive foreign policy of supporting Islamists to spite and injure the Soviets. The most famous example is the decade-long nurturing of violent jihad in Afghanistan to oppose the Soviet invasion, but America was also encouraging Islamic radicals throughout central Asia to keep the Soviet state destabilized. Now the USSR is no more, but the radicals remain. The Soviets made efforts to reach a rapprochement with the U.S. During the Cold War, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev argued for peaceful coexistence between the Soviet Union and the West:

What, then, is the policy of peaceful coexistence? … In its simplest expression it signifies the repudiation of war as a means of solving controversial issues. However, this does not cover the entire concept of peaceful coexistence. Apart from the commitment to non-aggression, it also presupposes an obligation on the part of all states to desist from violating each other’s territorial integrity and sovereignty in any form and under any pretext whatsoever. The principle of peaceful co-existence signifies a renunciation of interference in the internal affairs of other countries with the object of altering their system of government or mode of life or for any other motives.²⁸

This offer was rejected.

Instead, during the Cold War the United States was committed to a policy of containment. In practice, this meant providing support to anti-Communists around the world. Due to this policy, America supported the most conservative and Islamist Muslim states (Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and the other Gulf Cooperation Council nations) against the secular Arab states (Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon). Thanks to Cold War priorities, America treated secular Arabs as potential Communists and jihadist Muslims as reliable allies.

Compare the Islamic jihadists in the Middle East today with the Soviet Communists. No one doubts that if Osama bin Laden had had access to nuclear weapons, 9/11 would have ended with a far higher body count. What deterrence can there be with a determined Islamist who believes that dying in war with the infidel will send him to Paradise? And this is not merely speculation. In 2003, a prominent Saudi cleric named Nasir al-Fahd issued a fatwa permitting the Islamic use of weapons of mass destruction. “If a bomb were dropped on them, destroying ten million of them and burning as much of their land as they have burned of Muslim land,” Fahd said, “that would be permissible without any need to mention any other proof.”²⁹ Fahd’s arguments were embraced by bin Laden’s successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri. Another prominent jihadist, Mustafa Setmariam Nasar, further declared in a 2004 manifesto:

The ultimate choice is the destruction of the United States … through weapons of mass destruction, namely nuclear, chemical, or biological means, if the Muhajidin [sic] can achieve it with the help of those who possess them or through buying them.³⁰

No one should be lulled into thinking that only “extremists” would resort to genocidal violence given the opportunity. Former Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad declared in 2008, “Israel’s days are numbered … the peoples of the region would not miss the narrowest opportunity to annihilate this false regime.”³¹ While some dismiss such statements as “extremism,” they are actually completely conventional in Iran and around the Muslim world. The allegedly moderate former Iranian President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani delighted the crowds of Tehran a month after 9/11 by declaring:

If a day comes when the world of Islam is duly equipped with the arms Israel has in its possession, the strategy of colonization would face a stalemate because the application of an atomic bomb would not leave anything in Israel.³²

The jihadist threat was first unleashed on the world 1,400 years ago. Following in the footsteps of their warlord founder Muhammad, the early Islamic community quickly brought jihad from Arabia to Asia, to Africa, and even into the heart of Europe. As this book—and countless studies, histories, and documented records—have shown, the effect of this conquest was brutal and absolute. Millions were killed. Cultures and religions which had endured for millennia were crippled or destroyed outright. Coptic civilization in Egypt, Zoroastrian civilization in Persia, Christian civilization in North Africa and Turkey, and Hindu and Buddhist civilizations on the Indian subcontinent all were desecrated, deformed, and destroyed by the Islamic onslaught.

As the example of India shows, there is no end to jihad. Even if the Islamists achieve their goal of Islamizing a country—as has been the case with Pakistan, which was once part of India—the jihad only continues against “heretics” who do not follow the proper form of Islam. For 1,300 years Islam has been at war with India. In like fashion, it will be at war with Israel over Palestine for 1,300 years or more. Islam never seeks peace. When it is weak, it will sue for a truce. When it is strong, the jihad begins again. In the 19th century, Islam was weak compared to the Western powers, which were aided by modern technology and weaponry. In the 21st century Islam feels itself strong enough to raise the sword of jihad again.

Islam means submission—submission to Arab supremacy and Arab imperialism. We of the West have no choice but to fight back. The alternative is death or slavery. Following their Prophet, Muslims divide the world into two groups: believers and infidels. One group will win and the other will lose. If Islam wins, it will be the death of the West. It will be the death of Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, Confucian, African, and Native American civilizations. All the accomplishments of freedom and equality—the end of slavery, equality for women, the memories of the classical past—all will be lost. Islamic imperialism must be defeated and Islam itself must be reformed.

PART FIVE

PART FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY - THREE

India Before Islam

Perhaps in return for conquest, arrogance and spoliation, India will teach us the tolerance and gentleness of the mature mind, the quiet content of the unacquisitive soul, the calm of the understanding spirit, and a unifying, a pacifying love for all living things.

—Historian Will Durant¹

If I were asked under what sky the human mind has most fully developed some of its choicest gifts, has most deeply pondered over the greatest problems of life, and has found solutions of some of them which well deserve the attention even of those who have studied Plato and Kant, I should point to India.

—Philologist Max Müller²

The key Hindu concept of dharma—the right way, the sanctioned way, which all men must follow, according to their natures—is an elastic concept. At its noblest it combines self-fulfillment and truth to the self with the ideas of action as duty, action as its own spiritual reward, man as a holy vessel.

—Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul³

To us the most striking feature of ancient Indian civilization is its humanity.

—Historian A.L. Basham⁴

Contact (between religions) is good. One should listen to and respect the doctrines professed by others. Beloved-of-the-Gods, King Piyadasi, desires that all should be well-learned in the good doctrines of other religions.

—Edicts of Ashoka #12⁵

Those nanny goats, ewes and sows which are with young or giving milk to their young are protected, and so are young ones less than six months old. Cocks are not to be caponized, husks hiding living beings are not to be burnt and forests are not to be burnt either without reason or to kill creatures. One animal is not to be fed to another.

—Edicts of Ashoka #5

From delusion lead me to Truth

From darkness lead me to Light

From death lead me to Immortality.

—Brihad-Aranyaka Upanishad⁶

In speaking of the India that existed before the Islamic invasion it is probably best to conceive of it not as an individual nation but as a polyglot continent like Europe. It was an enormous territory, more than half the size of Europe, which had developed a distinct civilization all its own.⁷ Furthermore, it was a civilization which had been in continuous existence and development for more than 4,000 years. Even in the 21th century, Indian Brahmins still memorize and recite hymns which were composed more than a thousand years before the birth of Christ. Ordinary people still remember shadowy figures out of legend from even earlier.⁸

One of the hallmarks of this ancient civilization was, as numerous travelers remarked upon, its relative humanity. The words of A.L. Basham may stand for an impression shared by many:

Yet our overall impression is that in no other part of the ancient world were the relations of man and man, and of man and the state so fair and humane. In no other early civilization were slaves so few in number, and in no other ancient lawbook are their rights so well protected as in the Arthaśāstra. No other ancient lawgiver proclaimed such noble ideals of fair play in battle as did Manu. In all her history of warfare Hindu India has few tales to tell of cities put to the sword or of the massacre of non-combatants.⁹

Nature provided the people of India a great bounty of simple pleasures and luxuries. Perhaps in response to this, the civilization which developed there also developed impulses toward both self-denial and asceticism and occasional strenuous effort.¹⁰ As a general rule, Indian civilization was not acquisitive—a quality which shows up in various ways over the centuries, and not always to India’s benefit.¹¹

In this chapter we will focus on the India governed by the Gupta Empire and immediately after. This period, which occurred between the 4th and 6th centuries AD, is commonly regarded as India’s Golden Age. It is the era when much of what we know of as Hinduism acquired its fullest and freest development. We will also consider the empire of Harsha Vardhana, who ruled a large expanse of northern India in the 7th century, a half century prior to the Muslim invasion. The civilization which Islamic invasion changed radically over fourteen centuries was shaped decisively by the Guptas and Harsha.

GOVERNANCE AND POLITICS

The Gupta Empire was ruled by kings, but the concept of kingship was much different from what emerged in Europe or Arabia. One critical difference is that the king was thought of primarily as a protector, not a figure concerned with human laws and regulations. Law was regarded as something provided by divine authority and social custom. A king who infringed upon social custom could quickly find himself in trouble with the Brahmins or the common people. The protection a king was expected to provide was both physical and moral—a king defended the social order and the proper way of life which was laid down in the sacred texts (the Vedas).¹²

A critical concept here is the idea of dharma. This word is difficult to translate with any precision, but it refers to what one might call cosmic justice—the sense of a “divinely ordained form of good conduct.”¹³ The king was expected to protect the dharma, or as we might call it, the sacred law. Dharma is part of the basis of Indian ethical thought. Dharma was essentially looked upon as inviolable, and a king’s commands were merely applications of sacred law rather than new law. Some remarkable rulers such as Asoka did issue orders which amounted to new law, but this is quite rare in Indian political history.¹⁴

The expectation that kings would rule in an ethical manner amounted to a practical limitation on kingship. Indian history provides examples of kings being overthrown by their councilors after failing to heed their advice and running into disaster. Moral perversity could prevent an heir to the throne from succeeding his father. One of the great Gupta rulers, Samudra Gupta, actually came to the throne for this reason after his father nominated him to succeed over other rival claimants.¹⁵

Another critical difference between Indian civilization and European or Arabian involves political conquest. According to custom and most of the sacred texts, three forms of conquest were recognized. One of these, known as “righteous conquest,” meant that one king defeated another then forced the defeated king to pay him homage and tribute. The defeated kingdom became a vassal of the victor, still ruled by the same ruler or his bloodline, but existing in a kind of feudal relationship of lord to king. A second form of empire was regarded as greedy conquest. The victor demanded booty and portions of territory from the defeated king. A third, known as “demoniac conquest” involved the political annihilation of the defeated kingdom and the complete incorporation of his territory into the kingdom of the victor. Almost all Indian sources and time-honored custom disapproved of the latter two types.¹⁶

As a result, pre-Islamic India was typically governed by patchworks of kingdoms existing in various complicated relationships as vassals. A vassal kingdom could range in influence from petty lords of the manor who were kings only in name to mighty lords in their own right who still mustered armies in their own name and posed significant threats to their overlords.¹⁷ Under strong rulers such as the Guptas and Harsha a unity of governance was imposed upon a wide area and vassals were comparatively unimportant, but under weaker kings the old patchwork of petty squabbling kingdoms would reemerge. When the Muslim invasions began in the 7th century, northern India was in one of these periods of disarray.

Some kings ignored the customary disapproval of absorbing conquered states. Samudra Gupta notably waged the second type, “conquest for gain,” upon several rivals and added them to the enormous Gupta Empire. By and large, however, the doctrine was that war should be waged for glory and homage rather than wealth and power. Righteous conquest “was the ideal which Hindu kings were expected to follow, and it is evident that they usually did so.”¹⁸

Rulers were also expected to hold to certain ideals of fair play and quasi-chivalric order in combat. Targeting of civilians, women, and children was almost unheard of. Execution of prisoners was shameful. While it was understood that in the heat of battle soldiers would infringe upon the rules out of expediency or necessity, by and large war was not particularly harsh as compared to other ancient civilizations.¹⁹

In one important respect the practice of ancient Indian government could be described as unfortunate based on later events. Taxes and other government income were typically stored for use in dire emergencies. As a result, even small kingdoms could accumulate significant hoards of wealth. Their reserves in turn became tempting targets for their rivals. It is certain that reports made by Muslim travelers of the royal treasures they saw in India were a significant factor “in encouraging the invasions which ultimately destroyed Hindu India.”²⁰

CULTURAL ADVANCES

During the Gupta period and after it was expected that kings would be great patrons of art, letters, and learning. Some of the kings were creative themselves and left behind works of poetry and drama. Samudra Gupta was famous in his time as a talented musician.²¹ One of the greatest Gupta kings, Chandra Gupta II, gathered a circle of poets, philosophers, artists, scientists, and scholars to his capital.²² The emperor Harsha was also a patron of the arts who wrote three dramas which still survive.²³

Consequently, the Gupta period was a time of great civilizational advance. So-called Arabic numerals, which can be found on the Rock Edicts of Ashoka (c256 BC, 1,000 years before Muhammad was born), were developed into a clear decimal system by Hindu scholars. A great Hindu mathematician named Aryabhata who lived during the Gupta period in the fifth century is credited with comprehending the number zero. He also divined that the earth rotates on its axis and explained solar and lunar eclipses by scientific methods.²⁴ Algebra was also developed in India simultaneously with Greek developments.²⁵

The prototype of chess was also developed in the Gupta empire. Four pieces corresponding to the modern pawn, knight, bishop, and rook were used. The pieces were made in imitation of the four basic divisions of the Hindu military: infantry, cavalry, elephants, and chariots (respectively).²⁶ Like modern chess, the Indian game, which dates to the 6th century (although early precursor games have been found as far back as 2600 BC), features pieces with different abilities and victory depended upon the fate of one piece (the modern king).

In this period two of the great literary achievements of Hindu poetry acquired their final form. The epic Mahabharata became an enormous work of 107,000 octameter couplets built up by a series of poets over centuries. The Baghavad-Gita is a late addition to this poem—a text Will Durant refers to as “the New Testament of India, revered next to the Vedas themselves, and used in the law-courts like our Bible.”²⁷ Interestingly, in this part of the poem the warrior prince Arjuna expresses the lofty religious goal of being unwilling to fight, while the god Krishna advocates that Arjuna fulfill his duty by entering combat. Durant speculates that the poem may be an attempt “to shake the Hindu soul … into a willingness to fight for India.”²⁸ The romantic epic Ramayana also attained its final form just before the Gupta era, around the second century AD. Somewhat like Homer’s Odyssey, it tells the tale of a hero’s hardships and wanderings and his wife’s patient waiting to reunite with him.²⁹

India made particularly notable advances in medicine and medical treatment. A Chinese traveler named Fa Xian who visited during the Gupta period to acquire Buddhist manuscripts remarks on the existence of free hospitals and other charitable institutions in the Gupta empire.³⁰ In one of the religious texts, Arthava-veda, we find a list of diseases with their symptoms among the religious hymns and ceremonies.³¹ Hindu physicians were so well respected, Caliph Haroun al-Rashid imported several to organize hospitals and medical schools in Baghdad.³²

Unfortunately, some of India’s most magnificent cultural creations from the Gupta period no longer exist. When Muslim invaders sacked the former Gupta capital of Kanauj in 1018, they reportedly destroyed 10,000 temples there.³³ Northern India received the brunt of the damage, particularly during the first few centuries of Islamic invasion. Most of the architectural achievements of the fifth and sixth centuries were completely destroyed.³⁴ Durant has said, “We shall never be able to do justice to Indian art, for ignorance and fanaticism have destroyed its greatest achievements, and have half ruined the rest.”³⁵

THE IMPORTANCE OF ETHICS

One of the most-remarked upon features of ancient Indian civilization was the relatively law-abiding nature of its people. The Greek traveler Megasthenes in the third century BC observed this quality. The Chinese Buddhist Fa Xian noted the same, in particular “the peacefulness of India, the rarity of serious crime, and the mildness of the administration.” He even claimed he was able to travel from one end of the country to the other without being molested or needing to provide a passport. Early Arab travelers reported similar aspects of the culture.³⁶

Fa Xian traveled during the reign of Chandra Gupta II (c380 – 413 AD), when the Empire was at its peak. During that time, humanitarian ideals seem to have moderated the formerly fierce legal punishments of earlier days. Whereas before there were provisions for the death penalty, Fa Xian noted that it was never used during his stay and that most crimes were punished by fines (although repeat offenders were subject to having their right hands cut off).³⁷ Legal affairs were taken very seriously. Brahmins, who were normally exempt from significant punishments, could have their property seized if they were unjust or corrupt judges. Interestingly, the sacred texts also provide psychological tests to be used on witnesses to determine their validity; Basham reported these tests are quite sound.³⁸

A guiding theme was that it was better to do one’s own duty (that is, fulfill one’s dharma) badly than to do another’s well. Society was conceived of as an ordered hierarchy of classes of people each doing their assigned duties. Brahmins were to worship and uphold the sacred law. Kshatriyas were to fight and govern. Vaisyas were to work and trade. Sudras were tradesmen and handicraft workers who operated much like the later European guilds.³⁹ Calling the system a caste system is somewhat inaccurate, as many scholars have noted. It may be more accurate to think of these four “castes” as social classes.⁴⁰ As Basham has argued, it was really after Muslim invasions that Hindus began to cling mightily to the caste system as a way of maintaining their cultural identity:

The Hindu, living under an alien political order imposed from above, retained his cultural individuality largely through his caste, which received most of the loyalty elsewhere felt towards king, nation and city.⁴¹

Interestingly enough, the caste system was used by ancient Indians to accommodate invaders and visitors of all races and walks of life. Prior to the Muslim invasions, it was possible for any invader to be adopted into the social order of India via addition to the rank of Kshatriya. The great Hindu lawgiver Manu describes the warlike peoples on the fringes of Indian civilization—the Greeks, Scythians, and Parthians—as Kshatriya people who could be re-incorporated into Indian society by returning them to their dharma.⁴²

Particularly noteworthy, given the changes that Islamic invasion would bring, is the role of the slave in ancient India. Virtually every ancient civilization made use of slavery, but nowhere else was it such a mild and little-used institution as in India. Slaves were not simply chattel in India. Masters owed duties to them and did not have a right over their lives or to abandon them in old age as often happened elsewhere in the world. Some of the Indian books on dharma severely limit the master’s right to punish his slave physically.⁴³

In the Arthaśāstra, there are particularly liberal regulations laid down for slaves. Composed by the Brahmin lawgiver Chanakya in the third or fourth century BC, this text grants rights to slaves almost unheard of in the ancient world. Slaves are allowed to own and inherit property and to spend their own money as they wish. Slaves of the upper classes were not forced to perform duties which would defiled them. Significantly, the chastity of slave girls was protected. A master who raped his slave must set her free and pay compensation. If she were to have a child by this act, both mother and child were to be set free.⁴⁴

Under the emperor Harsha northern India experienced a great humanitarian age. The eating of meat was discouraged or forbidden. Harsha himself instituted a charity festival to be performed at five-year intervals. All the leaders in Harsha’s territory were invited, and the surplus wealth in the state treasury was distributed amongst the needy. A Chinese traveler who witnessed one of these festivals describes his astonishment at the sheer amount of wealth involved.⁴⁵

THE HINDU RELIGION

It would take far too long to explain all the ins and outs of Hindu religious and philosophical thought. We will focus therefore on several of its most defining characteristics and the qualities which are most at odds with Islam. One particularly noteworthy quality is how the religion spurred interest in sciences. Indian astronomy and mathematics were initially developed by Brahmins eager to learn more precise methods for the performance of their religious duties. Grammar and philology were also highly developed as scholars sought to better understand the Vedas and other religious texts left behind by their predecessors.⁴⁶

Another feature is the proliferation of different systems of thought in Hinduism. Durant identifies six prominent systems which he considers “orthodox.” All six make assumptions which he describes as the bases of Hindu thought: that the Vedas are inspired, that reasoning is less reliable as a guide to reality and truth than direct perception or feeling, that the purpose of knowledge and philosophy is release from the world not control of it, and that the goal of thought is freedom from suffering.⁴⁷ Two prominent schools of Hindu philosophy are Yoga and Vedanta.

At the same time, there is no distinct sense of “heresy” in ancient Hindu thought. Hindus themselves arranged the systems of philosophy in two categories, Astika systems which affirm, and Nastika systems which deny. But what the systems are affirming or denying is the authority of the Vedas. Nastika systems include religions such as Buddhism, which were still generally accepted in Indian culture. Durant concludes that Hindu philosophy placed no significant barriers against free thought. A thinker always had wide latitude for speculation—the only practical requirement for intellectual respectability being that one follow the dharma.⁴⁸

The focus of Hindu philosophy and religion was on epistemology and ethics rather than dogmatic or exclusivist theology. Thinkers tried to address questions such as how do we know what we think we know and what constitutes a believable authority. Disputations were much enjoyed. In the Upanishads we read about a king who set apart one day during a religious festival for a philosophical competition. The winner received 1,000 cows and a pile of gold.⁴⁹ Simply put, this approach to philosophy was destroyed by the Islamic invasions.⁵⁰

Learning was so prized that ancient India developed several major universities and provided funds to maintain them. One of the most famous of these was the Buddhist university of Nalanda. Founded soon after the death of the Buddha, this university received state support to conduct its inquiries. At its height, it had 10,000 students, 100 lecture areas, immense libraries full of books, and six large dormitories four stories high. Candidates for study were presented with philosophical problems as a barrier to entry. Those who were admitted received free tuition, room, and board. But they also had to hold to a rigid monastic discipline. Interactions with women were forbidden and celibacy was required.⁵¹ Almost every university in northern India was destroyed by Muslim invaders. In 1197 Nalanda was burned to the ground and its monks butchered.⁵² Its library was left burning for six months.

The importance of the temple in Hindu culture is also worth noting. Most cities were built around two primary points of interest: the palace and the temple. In some cases, the temple could be quite elaborate, forming a “city in miniature.” Temples were major employers and paid people from the wealth provided to them from pilgrims and the faithful who donated it. Temples also maintained schools and refuges for sick men and animals. They provided charity for the poor.⁵³ In later chapters, you will read a lot about the destruction of these temples. Keep in mind the importance of each to the religious and cultural life of the people who lived in the area.

ORDINARY LIFE

Government in ancient India took an active interest in organizing and regulating the lives of its people. Many resources such as mines, pearl fisheries, and large forests were either directly worked by criminals or serfs under government observation or kings would hire out entrepreneurs to work them and collect a percentage of their profits in return. Large-scale farming was carried out on a share-cropping basis and proceeds stored in state granaries. During the Gupta Empire, the state owned manufactories for the production of finished goods such as textiles. These manufactories would often be staffed with poor women in need of money, not unlike the houses of industry established to help the indigent in Elizabethan times.⁵⁴

As a rule, people were well-educated. Durant estimates that literacy was higher under Ashoka than in the India of 1938.⁵⁵ Most students would attend school for reading, writing, and arithmetic as one would expect, but the focus of ancient India education was on the development of moral character rather than intellect. Children would study at a grammar school from age five to age eight then if they wished would apprentice to a guru until age 20. During the latter education they would learn arts and crafts, medicine, logic, grammar, and philosophy. There were public provisions to help poor children attend school and learn.⁵⁶ Women were also educated, and most women of the upper classes were literate.⁵⁷

The family was the basic unit of society, and the Indian family was typically large. Anyone who was in line to inherit property was typically included as a member of the family under a patriarch. Although in most places the family was patriarchal and patrilineal, women were not excluded from inheritance. Elder sons did not receive the whole of the estate as happened often in Europe, but would typically get only a small bonus.⁵⁸ The picture of children is that they were pampered and much humored by doting parents.⁵⁹ Most ordinary people were monogamous, with only kings or very wealthy men having multiple wives. Even then, polygamy was discouraged by the sacred law.⁶⁰

Ancient Indian civilization was not perfect or Utopian, but by any standard it must rank high for sheer humanity and peacefulness. However, some of its qualities left it particularly vulnerable to the Muslim invasions which began in the 7th century. One such quality is the relative lack of central authority outside of the passing presence of strong kings. When Harsha was crowned emperor of northern India in 606, he ruled with wisdom and tact. He would travel the breadth of his empire with a small roadside pavilion and listen to the suits and complaints of his people. He spent the entire 41 years of his reign holding a fractured mass of petty states together by personal magnetism and force.⁶¹

When Harsha died, northern India again became a patchwork of conflicting kingdoms. The same thing had happened during the Gupta Empire in the mid-sixth century under the pressure of invading barbarians who may have been an offshoot of the Huns. Indian civilization put a premium on vassalage rather than conquest and acquisition which made it difficult to build and maintain a large empire. As Muslim invaders began pouring into the Sindh full of religious fury and old-fashioned greed, there was no unified nation to meet them.

PART FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY - FOUR

Jihad in India

The Mohammedan conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. The Islamic historians and scholars have recorded with great glee and pride the slaughters of millions of Hindus, forced conversions, abduction and rape of Hindu women and children to slave markets and concubines and the destruction of thousands of temples carried out by the warriors of Islam during 800 AD to 1700 AD. Millions of Hindus were forcibly converted to Islam by sword during this period.

—Historian Will Durant¹

The Muslims could not rule [India] except by systematic terror. Cruelty was the norm – burnings, summary executions, crucifixions or impalements, inventive tortures. Hindu temples were destroyed to make way for mosques. On occasion there were forced conversions. If ever there were an uprising, it was instantly and savagely repressed: houses were burned, the countryside was laid waste, men were slaughtered and women were taken as slaves.

—Historian Fernand Braudel²

The Muslim heroes who figure larger than life in our history books committed some dreadful crimes. Mahmud of Ghazni, Qutb-ud-Din Aibak, Balban, Mohammed bin Qasim, and Sultan Mohammad Tughlak, Tipu Sultan, Akbar, Aurangzeb …. all have blood-stained hands that the passage of years has not cleansed. Seen through Hindu eyes, the Muslim invasion of their homeland was an unmitigated disaster.

—Muslim historian Irfan Husain³

The Koran and the Mussulman legislation emanating from it reduce the geography and ethnography of the various people to the simple and convenient distinction of two nations and of two countries; those of the Faithful and of the Infidels. The Infidel is “harby,” i.e. the enemy. Islamism proscribes the nation of the Infidels, constituting a state of permanent hostility between the Mussulman and the unbeliever.

—Philosopher Karl Marx⁴

Somnath Temple offers a unique glimpse at the real consequences of Islamic jihad in India. Standing near the port city of Veraval, it has been a site of pilgrimage for more than 2,000 years. It is one of 12 sites on the Indian subcontinent where the Hindu god Shiva is believed to have revealed himself in different forms. For centuries prior to the arrival of Islam in India, the idol at Somnath had been especially venerated by the sailors and traders of Gujarat (the province where Somnath is located), who amassed enormous quantities of wealth and paid some of those riches into the temple out of gratitude. To illustrate the wealth that could be found at a major temple such as Somnath, consider that the secret, untouched coffers of the comparatively small and not particularly noteworthy Padmanabhaswamy Temple in Kerala. Recently, this temple was discovered to hold more than $20 billion worth of gold and precious jewels.⁵

To invading Arab forces, temples such as Somnath offered two provocations. On the one hand, they were easy targets with a great deal of stored wealth. Such buildings were made for worship and communal religious life, not for defense. The subcontinent had very little internal experience of military assaults on religious structures. On the other hand, Hindu temples seemed to Muslims as the very essence of idolatry. Destroying them and raising mosques in their stead was regarded as religiously praiseworthy—after all, the Prophet Muhammad had done a similar thing himself at Mecca.

The first destruction came in 725, not long after the Arabs had made themselves masters of the province of Sindh (which lies a few hundred miles east of the Iranian plateau). After the invaders were turned back by the Hindu Rajputs, the temple was rebuilt in 815. In 1024, Mahmud of Ghazni made his own assault on Somnath. This destruction of the temple was remembered with particular bitterness, as Mahmud added the butchery of some 50,000 priests, soldiers, and local residents and broke the stone idol or lingam at the heart of the temple.⁶ Unbowed, the Hindus rebuilt Somnath as a great stone outwork (replacing the former wooden structures) over the next four decades.

This cycle of destruction and rebuilding would continue from the 13th through the 17th centuries. Again and again, Muslims would loot and demolish the temple, and again and again the Hindus would rebuild. The last destruction came at the hands of Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb, probably at the beginning of the 18th century.⁷ The partial ruins of Somnath stood for three centuries.

In 1922 Gujarati leader K.M. Munshi visited the ruins of Somnath and penned these reflections:

Desecrated, burnt, and battered, it still stood firm—a monument to our humiliation and ingratitude. I can scarcely describe the shame which I felt on that early morning as I walked the broken floor of the once hallowed sabhamandapa, littered with broken pillars and scattered stones.⁸

Less than three decades after these remarks were recorded, the government of the newly liberated nation of India would rebuild Somnath once more—for the seventh time. Today, the temple stands on its ancient site, a monument to the worst of jihad—the slaughter, the greed, and the intolerance—as well as the resilience of the people of India.

THE BEGINNINGS OF INDIAN JIHAD

Muslim invaders came to India looking for plunder and jihad. According to Islamic tradition, Muhammad himself had promised that any Muslims who fought jihad against the idolaters of “al-Hind” would be absolved of their sins and go straight to Paradise.⁹ And when it came to plunder, India offered an abundance both of riches and of potential slaves. When later Muslim rulers began to build dynasties in India, a third mode of plunder became available through the collection of the jizya tax.

The first invasions began during the Umayyad Caliphate in the late 7th century. The Umayyad governor of Iraq, al-Hajjaj, took exception to raids from a group of pirates based out of the port city of Debal. After two failed expeditions to punish the pirates, the governor sent Muhammad bin Qasim, an 18-year-old tribal chieftain, in command of a sizable army.¹⁰ Bin Qasim’s retribution upon Debal was severe—after a three-day orgy of blood and violence the town was razed, its temples looted, and most of its inhabitants killed or enslaved.

A letter sent to bin Qasim from governor al-Hajjaj illustrates the basic military strategy of his campaign:

Kill anyone belonging to the combatants, arrest their sons and daughters for hostages and imprison them. Whoever does not fight against us, grant them aman (safety) and settle their tribute (amwal) as dhimmah (protected person).¹¹

Since the Muslims were outnumbered and their supply chains extended, bin Qasim’s policy was generally more lenient after Debal. Cities which surrendered without a fight were treated with comparative leniency. Nevertheless, bin Qasim killed more than 40,000 men between Debal and Multan and established a veneer of Islamic rule over Sindh. So long as the jizya was paid, bin Qasim’s policy was conciliatory. If the natives paid their money and accepted their new masters, he agreed not to interfere in their religious practice. By and large, Hindus and Buddhists administered the state while their Muslim masters reaped the profits.

In several respects bin Qasim’s invasion was unlike any the Indian subcontinent had seen before. The killing of civilians, the mass capture of slaves, execution of men-at-arms after combat, and the plunder and destruction of temples had all hardly been seen before. Jihad itself was a concept almost impossible to grasp for a people steeped in belief in the virtue of ahimsa (nonviolence). Fortunately for India, bin Qasim died young and the invaders were decisively defeated by the Hindu Rajputs at the Battle of Rajasthan in 738. The Muslims would get no further than Sindh for two centuries.

JIHAD RE-LAUNCHED: THE GHAZNAVIDS

The second major jihad on India was directed by a man known to history as Mahmud of Ghazni. Mahmud styled himself as a Sunni warrior, fighting heterodox Shias and Ismailis (a then-numerous sect within Shia Islam) as well as Indian idolaters. Between 1001 and the year of his death 1030, Mahmud invaded northern India 17 times, taking a great abundance of plunder and slaves. He seems to have seen it, as historian Andre Wink observes, as his historic mission “to raid and conquer ‘the infidels of al-Hind.’”¹²

Among Mahmud’s favorite targets was wealthy Hindu temples such as Somnath. A Muslim chronicler records the destruction of one such temple in Kanauj:

Many of the inhabitants of the place fled and were scattered abroad like so many wretched widows and orphans, from the fear which oppressed them, in consequence of witnessing the fate of their deaf and dumb idols … many of them thus effected their escape, and those who did not fly were put to death.¹³

In plundering the temple at Thanesar, the same chronicler records, “the blood of the infidels flowed so copiously, that the stream was discolored … and people were unable to drink it.”¹⁴

Although Mahmud helped establish the Ghaznavid Empire, his multiple expeditions into India do not seem to have been concerned with adding those territories to it. For the most part, Mahmud contented himself with plundering and killing infidels and destroying their temples. His numerous expeditions included assaults on Muslims he regarded as heretics as well as on Hindus and Buddhists.

The lasting effects of Mahmud’s campaign were recorded by the scholar al-Biruni. As Biruni observed, “Mahmud utterly ruined the prosperity of the country, and performed wonderful exploits by which the Hindus became like atoms of dust scattered in all directions.”¹⁵ Although his personal reign of terror ended with his death in 1030, his multiple strikes into India acted like an illness that weakens the immune system allowing for later infection. In this way Mahmud prepared a path “for the final conflict, that—two centuries later—was to destroy the kingdoms of the Ganges plain.”¹⁶

THE ESTABLISHMENT OF ISLAMIC EMPIRE IN INDIA

The Afghan conqueror Muhammad Ghori was the first to take advantage of a weakened northern India after the Ghaznavid Empire’s collapse. The key difference between Ghori’s invasion and earlier efforts is that Ghori came looking for empire in addition to plunder. His first effort was turned back by the Rajputs, but in 1192 he scored a pivotal victory over the Rajputs and his armies swept across northern India as far as Bengal in the east. Ghori chose Delhi to be the seat of his new Indian empire, and the Delhi Sultanate was born.

By Ghori’s time, most schools of Islamic thought favored extermination for all idolaters, which Hindus and Buddhists were both held to be. Luckily, as a practical matter, the Muslims of Delhi were still far outnumbered by the idolaters they ruled over. Therefore, the Sultanate did not follow an entirely consistent policy with regard to their non-Muslim subjects. Mostly, non-Muslims were oppressed severely or left alone.¹⁷

The establishment of the Delhi Sultanate radically changed the economic basis of society. Before, the economy was based on the agricultural production of many independent and self-sufficient villages. The Sultanate was based on conquest, and acquired its wealth by plundering petty Hindu kingdoms and acquiring slaves.¹⁸ At least a third of the Sultanate’s total population was enslaved.¹⁹ It was political policy to enslave non-Muslims who couldn’t afford to pay their taxes—a policy which was maintained through the Mughal era—and the Sultanate ran a brisk business in Indian slaves.²⁰

It was during this Ghorid period that many of the universities of Hindu and Buddhist learning were destroyed. As described in the previous chapter, Nalanda was one of these schools. For centuries, it had been a center for Buddhist thought which nevertheless accepted students of all sects and religions.²¹ Muslim invaders “destroyed the university, butchered the monks, and burnt its priceless collection of books.”²² It was only after archaeological investigation in later centuries that the former glories of Nalanda were rediscovered.

Some scholars claim the Delhi Sultanate was “tolerant” of Hindus because it agreed to leave them unmolested if they paid the jizya tax. Note that this tax could run as high as 50 percent or more of a man’s yearly income. We have the words of one of the Sultan himself as to the nature of this tolerance:

These people now erected new idol-temples in the city and the environs in opposition to the law of the Prophet which declares that such temples are not to be tolerated. Under divine guidance I destroyed these edifices and I killed those leaders of infidelity who seduced others into error, and the lower orders I subjected to stripes and chastisement until this abuse was entirely abolished.²³

One of the bloodiest of the Delhi sultans was Ala-ud-din Khijli. By the time of his reign in the late 13th and early 14th century, the sultanate was governed largely by Muslim Turks. The Turks brought with them to India a burning Islamic faith and a doctrine of their own racial supremacy. Feeling themselves more powerful, the leaders of the Sultanate took a heavier hand over the people they ruled.²⁴

Ala-ud-din himself came to the throne by murdering his predecessor, and soon proved willing to engage in far bloodier acts. In 1297 and 1298 he sent his armies to plunder and slaughter their way across the Gujarat plains. In just one day at Rajasthan, he oversaw a massacre:

Even after the surrender, Alauddin carried out a frightful massacre of the Rajputs. According to the great poet and scholar, Amir Khursau, who was present on the occasion, 30,000 people were killed in one day under orders from the Sultan.²⁵

Ala-ud-din’s example was followed by 14th century sultans of Delhi such as Muhammad bin Tulghaq. A contemporary chronicler describes the sultan as “not slack in Jihad,” assuring his readers:

[He has] achieved victory, supremacy, conquest of countries, destruction of the infidels, and exposure of magicians. He has destroyed idols by which the people of Hindustan were deceived in vain.²⁶

Tulghaq’s cousin and successor, Firuz Shah earned similar accolades. In fact, Firuz exceeded his predecessor’s oppression by extending the jihad to Shiites and imposing the jizya tax on Brahmins who had previously been exempted from this official mark of submission and humiliation.²⁷

Firuz is noteworthy for his efforts in recording for posterity his exercises in anti-Hindu destruction. He boasts of destroying temples and killing the “leaders of infidelity.” Particularly revealing is the record of an incident in the city of Gohana:

Some Hindus had erected a new idol-temple in the village of Kohana and the idolators used to assemble there and perform their idolatrous rites. These people were seized and brought before me. I ordered that the perverse conduct of the leaders of this wickedness should be publicly proclaimed, and that they should be put to death before the gate of the palace. I also ordered that the infidel books, the idols and the vessels used in their worship, which had been taken with idols, should all be publicly burnt. The others were restrained by threats and punishments, as a warning to all men, that no [dhimmi] could follow such wicked practices in a [Muslim] country.²⁸

Firuz was also notable for his promotion of slavery. Since Islamic law forbade the enslavement of Muslims, Islamic rulers like Firuz would set up slave markets in Indian territories under their control for the buying and selling of Hindus and other infidels. Firuz himself owned as many as 180,000 slaves obtained from across the subcontinent.²⁹

Although the Delhi sultans spread fear and extended their power far and wide, their brutality also bred inevitable opposition. As Daniélou reflects, “The sultan was an absolute autocrat, using religious pretexts to justify his conquests, massacres, and violence.” Their methods of imposing Islam by the sword met with “profound bitterness” among the people. Furthermore, their approach was economically draining since the conquerors simply lived off of the wealth that had been accumulated before their arrival and established no long-term foundations for later prosperity. Previously affluent regions of India were bled dry and left impoverished—a poverty which persists even into the 21st century.³⁰

Also, as Shiite Muslims had already learned on many occasions, the Islamic drive to attack and despoil non-Muslims did not preclude violence against rival Muslim powers. So, in the late 14th century the sultans of Delhi found themselves targeted by other ambitious Islamic powers who wanted a piece of the pie. The fiercest of these rivals was the legendary warlord Tamerlane.

TAMERLANE’S WHIRLWIND JIHAD

Tamerlane’s own account of his invasion of India places Islam as the primary motivation and justification for a spectacularly brutal campaign of mass murder. He utilized Islamic doctrine to portray his atrocities as not only necessary but even glorious, pious, and commendable. With reference to a passage from the Qur’an, Tamerlane records the idea that “the slayer of infidels is a Champion and… if he is slain, he becomes a martyr” as the foundation of his plan to attack India.³¹

His armies began their attack in 1398, first surmounting the Hindu Kush mountains and crossing the Ganges River. In order to subjugate a particularly resistant force early on, he records his orders “to kill the men, imprison the women and children, and plunder and lay waste their property.” This done, he “directed towers of the skulls of those obstinate unbelievers to be built on the mountain.”³² The early degradations imposed upon the Hindus pale in comparison with what happened on the eve of Tamerlane’s attack on Delhi. As was typical of Muslim invaders, the army accumulated large numbers of slaves as it cut its way through India. There were 100,000 Hindu captives among the soldiers in their encampment outside Delhi. After concerns were raised about security, Tamerlane gave the order, “that every man who had infidel prisoners was to put them to death, and that whoever neglected to do so, should himself be executed and his property given to the informer.” All 100,000 of the “impious idolaters” were slain.³³

Delhi fell to Tamerlane’s assault, but the warlord was little interested in its administration. After two weeks of feasting on the riches of the city while his Muslim troops murdered and pillaged the city’s Hindu population, Tamerlane felt himself called forward to further killings:

I had put to death hundreds of thousands of infidels and idolaters, I had dyed my proselyting sword with the blood of the enemies of the Faith, and now that I had gained this crowning victory, I felt that I ought not to indulge in ease, but rather to exert myself still further in warring against the infidels of Hindustan.³⁴

The remainder of his memoir of Indian conquest reveals that he did exactly that, taking the city of Mirat by storm and slaughtering its inhabitants, doing the same in Hardwar, and continuing to devastate the territory along the Ganges.

After this whirlwind jihad, Tamerlane returned to his base in Samarkand in central Asia. His primary interest had been killing infidels and snatching up booty. He didn’t even establish political control over the territories he had taken; instead, he moved through and laid waste to whatever he could.³⁵

THE MUGHAL EMPIRE

The founder of the Mughal Empire was not a conventionally pious man. But there was one area of Islamic practice in which Zahir-ud-Din Muhammad Babur excelled, and that was jihad. From his base in Kabul, Babur’s armies swept across northern India between 1526 and 1530. By the time of his death in 1530, he had established an empire stretching from Kandahar in the west to the edge of Bengal in the east.³⁶ Like Tamerlane, he left behind a prideful record of the devastation and slaughter he wreaked upon the Hindus of India. He also shared a penchant for stacking the skulls of its victims into trophy piles.³⁷

Apologists for Islam often point to the rule of Babur’s grandson Akbar as a kind of benevolent or enlightened despot. But it is easily shown that Akbar is much more the exception than the rule when it came to Islamic governance of India. For one, the politically astute Akbar kept Hindu Rajput elites on his side by inter-marrying, giving them a stake in his rule.³⁸ More significantly, Akbar was notoriously unorthodox and at times even heretical in his adherence to the Islamic religion. Historians dispute whether the religious innovations he introduced constitute a new religion or merely a series of heretical practices within Islam. There is much less dispute over the shift during his reign whereby “Islam lost its privileged position” and the practices of the Mughals began to vary widely from normal Islamic practices.³⁹

In the end, Akbar’s more enlightened rule was not a harbinger of things to come. The fundamental dogmas of Islam, and the attitudes of supremacy over and antipathy towards non-Muslims which they inculcate, do not lie dormant for long. An empire founded on the basis of jihad, as the Mughal Empire was, will stand or fall by the application of that principle. After Akbar had reigned for half a century, he was succeeded by his dissolute son Jahangir, who soon turned to oppressing the Sikhs.⁴⁰

Even Akbar himself was not as enlightened as his reputation suggests. He collected three hundred wives and a harem of 5,000—including many slaves who lived to serve his whims.⁴¹ And although he released his non-Muslim subjects from the burden of paying the jizya (a reform his great-grandson would reverse), he showed conventional disregard for the lives of Hindus defeated in battle. After a 1567 victory in Rajasthan, he ordered the massacre of the defeated army, resulting in the murder of 30,000 men. Like his predecessors, he extended Mughal dominion by the sword, conquering Bengal and parts of southern India.⁴²

Akbar’s grandson, Shah Jahan also enjoys an undeservedly romantic reputation. He is best known for the magnificent mausoleum he created for his favorite wife—the building known in the west as the Taj Mahal. Yet Shah Jahan ascended to the throne after a series of machinations that included the deaths of two his brothers and a rebellion against his own father. The Taj Mahal, as journalist William McWhirter rightly notes, serves as “a chill reminder to millions of Indians of an age of vanity and repression.”⁴³ The Taj Mahal is certainly a testimony to Shah Jahan’s opulence, but it pairs jarringly with the famine-stricken poverty of many of Jahan’s subjects.⁴⁴ It is telling that the most noteworthy monument left behind by the Mughal Empire in India is a mausoleum.

Shah Jahan also launched devastating wars against independent sultanates in Bihapur and Golkonda in southern India and against the rebellious province of Bendelkhand. This historic heartland of Indian culture had already suffered greatly at the hands of Muslim invaders, and in 1635 Shah Jahan sent his son Aurangzeb for a repeat. After the victory, the Mughal victors plundered the riches of the Bundelkhand province, enslaved the women of its ruling family, forcibly converted two of its Prince’s sons to Islam, and killed a third who resisted. As a coup-de-grace, Aurangzeb’s forces destroyed the temple of Orchha and replaced it with a mosque.⁴⁵ Shah Jahan himself ended his life as the captive of his own son Aurangzeb, who, like his father, murdered his own siblings to secure sovereignty.

The Mughals were notoriously extravagant and dissolute. This is most evident in their tendency toward drunkenness and drug addiction. In spite of bans on the public sale of alcohol, rulers and nobles in the Mughal Empire frequently indulged in bouts of excessive drinking. The memoirs of Babur are replete with stories of the Mughal founder drinking and taking drugs until he was completely incapacitated. Two of his sons were notorious opium users. A third son, his successor Jahangir, seems to have had an attendant whose only role was keeping him supplied with opium. The historian Lisa Balabanlilar records Jahangir in 1621 appointing “a new steward for opium and another for wine.”⁴⁶ In keeping with the sexual indulgences of Mughal elites, “several of the drugs and stimulants used in Mughal times derived their popularity… from their supposed aphrodisiac potency.”⁴⁷ Such was the moral hypocrisy of Mughal rule: public oppression and private debauchery.

SHAH JAHAN AND MUGHAL INDULGENCES

Shah Jahan had the world-famous Taj Mahal built in memory of his third wife. Yet this romantic gesture often overshadows a very dark and twisted history. The enormous structure was built in part with the Hindu slave labor of 20,000 workers. And although Shah Jahan was supposedly broken up about his third wife, he somehow managed to have many adulterous relationships. His eldest daughter, who took on many of her mother’s responsibilities, even helped procure his new mistresses.⁴⁸

A contemporary of Shah Jahan, the European physician and traveler Francois Bernier reports that the Mughal emperor enjoyed more than ordinary family relations with this same daughter:

It is painful to allude to the rumor of his unnatural attachment, the justification of which he rested on the decision of the moollahs, or doctors of the law. According to them, it would have been unjust to deny the king the privilege of gathering fruit from the tree he had himself planted.⁴⁹

Less famous than the Taj Mahal—but arguably an even grander extravagance—was the so-called Peacock Throne. Shah Jahan commissioned this work when he first became emperor. It took seven years to build, but once it was done it was a magnificent sight to behold:

[It was] more a miniature gazebo than any conventional western throne: eight feet deep, seven wide and fourteen feet to the crest of its golden canopy. It was created of more than two thousand six hundred pounds of solid gold—worth more than two million rupees—beaten and molded into shape. Into it were fitted nearly nine million rupees worth of gems.⁵⁰

The emperor wanted the throne to show off the numerous precious jewels in the imperial treasury—all of them stolen from the former Hindu rulers of India. It was inlaid with diamonds, pearls, rubies, sapphires, and all manner of other precious stones. The Peacock Throne in fact cost twice as much to make as the entire Taj Mahal.⁵¹ This extravagant display of stolen Mughal wealth was itself stolen by the Persian ruler Nader Shah when his forces sacked Delhi. It has been lost to time ever since.

AURANGZEB’S REIGN OF TERROR

Of the Mughal emperors, however, Aurangzeb might be the greatest monster of them all. Even his path to the throne was covered in infamy. The elder son and rightful heir of Shah Jahan was Dara Sikoh. Prince Dara was a religious mystic who embraced the varied and ecumenical religious traditions of the Indian subcontinent. Of course, this made him a heretic in the eyes of his younger brother, Aurangzeb, who was a staunch Islamist. Despite Shah Jahan’s preference, Aurangzeb engaged in a bitter struggle with his elder brother for the control of the Mughal throne.

In 1658, Aurangzeb’s armies defeated Prince Dara at the Battle of Samugarh. In a week, Shah Jahan was deposed and Aurangzeb’s reign as emperor had begun. But the new emperor was not yet finished with Prince Dara, who enjoyed considerable popularity among the common people and therefore posed a threat to his rule. In 1659, an Afghan chieftain whom Prince Dara had sought refuge with betrayed him and turned him over to Aurangzeb’s army. The prince was brought back to Delhi, mounted on an elephant in a degrading fashion, then paraded through the streets to emphasize Aurangzeb’s victory.⁵² Following this episode, Aurangzeb had the prince killed, then arranged for his severed head to be delivered to their father, whom Aurangzeb held in prison.⁵³

The new emperor quickly proved himself eager to oppress non-Muslims living in his domains. He established moral censors, banned non-Islamic festivals, and re-established the jizya tax.⁵⁴ He also launched a new campaign of religious desecration and destruction. In the course of a single year in northwest India his forces destroyed 252 Hindu temples.⁵⁵ In Hyderabad, the emperor “plundered and desecrated the temples, and killed the Brahmins, he destroyed all newly built or rebuilt Hindu temples and replaced them with mosques.”⁵⁶ He even changed the name of the city of Mathura to Islamabad (not the same city as the current capital of Pakistan) to emphasize the cultural appropriation that had taken place.

Aurangzeb’s entire reign was marked by nearly continual warfare. His armies were continually engaged in attempting to expand the Mughal Empire’s borders. At the same time, there was also a long list of rebellions within the empire. The fact was, despite his efforts Aurangzeb was unable to force the conformity or conversion to Islam that he desired. In the end, Aurangzeb devoted 26 years of his life to battling for the Deccan. Although successful in the field, the Mughal Empire itself was on its last legs. In the words of historian Stanley Wolpert:

The conquest of the Deccan … was in many ways a Pyrrhic victory, costing an estimated hundred thousand lives a year during its decade of futile chess game warfare. The expense in gold and rupees can hardly be accurately estimated.⁵⁷

His efforts made the Mughals highly unpopular among the people. Even the aged Aurangzeb would confess to his son, “I came alone and I go as a stranger. I do not know who I am, nor what I have been doing.”⁵⁸

THE MASSIVE USE OF SLAVERY

From the very beginning, slavery was a key source of profit for Muslims in India. The first successful invasions under Muhammad bin Qasim were reportedly very lucrative in terms of human chattel. We know that when one large batch of prisoners was tallied up so that a fifth could be sent back to the Caliph as per Islamic law, bin Qasim’s forces sent back thousands of Hindus taken in the conquest of Sindh.⁵⁹ Mahmud of Ghazni reportedly netted 500,000 slaves during one of his 17 invasions of the subcontinent—a number so enormous some later historians have been tempted to deny it. Again, we know that when Mahmud attacked the Punjab in 1010, “slaves were so plentiful that they became very cheap; and men of respectability in their native land [India] were degraded by becoming slaves of common shop-keepers in Ghazni.”⁶⁰

The Muslims used an interesting little rule to determine how they would handle slaves and converts. If a soldier on the battlefield embraced Islam his life would be spared and he would be a free man. Anyone who was made a captive, however, was counted as a slave. Even if they later embraced Islam, this change in creed would not lead to a change in status. Because women and children were invariably made prisoners outside the battlefield, they never even had the option—they were slaves from the start.⁶¹

Under the Delhi Sultanate and Mughal Empire, fewer Indians were exported as slaves in favor of keeping them in-country. The sheer scale of slavery under the Islamic empires is difficult to convey. To illustrate, Ala-ud-din had 50,000 slaves just in his personal service and an additional 70,000 who served as laborers on his buildings. Just about anyone who held any kind of status in the Islamic empires typically owned slaves. Furthermore, since it was a matter of political opinion that wealth bred insurrection, Muslim rulers typically took steps to impoverish their Hindu populace. Peasants were often forced to sell their own children into slavery to match their rulers’ demands for payment.⁶²

It was also common for Muslims to debauch and mutilate their slaves. One means of doing so was the practice of keeping ghilman—which means effeminate boys used for sexual favors. Although religion frowned upon it, the practice was so widespread among Muslim nobility as to constitute a fashionable practice. Traces of the practice can still be found in the use of dancing boys in Afghanistan, in fact. The keeping of such slaves at times produced political disaster.

Although Islam was not technically in favor of eunuchs (regarding it as mutilation), the making of eunuchs was widespread—particularly in India. “A Muslim king was unthinkable without his harem; a harem was inconceivable without eunuchs.”⁶³ They were so much needed that even though Aurangzeb tried to forbid the practice for religious reasons, 22,000 men were emasculated in Hyderabad in 1659 to satisfy the demand. It was not unheard of for fathers to turn their own sons into eunuchs and hand them over to Muslim governors in order to get out of paying their taxes.⁶⁴

The fate of female slaves was to be used as sex objects. Islam limited men to only four wives, but there was no limit on the number of sex slaves a man could own. Consequently, it became a measure of opulence and power for rulers to maintain extensive harems. Akbar himself was said to have 5,000 women in his harem.⁶⁵

The capture and enslavement of women throughout India for sexual slavery was systematic and extensive. “The special interest of Muslims in sex slavery was universal and widespread and a plethora of evidence is available in contemporary Persian chronicles.”⁶⁶ In times of prosperity the harem would continue normally, but as soon as misfortune struck it was common for slave girls to flee the premises without remorse. Hindu women who had been taken from their families or husbands were known to take their own lives—sometimes doing so en masse—when given the change.⁶⁷

As Muslim rule entered its final decline in the early 18th century, the old system broke down with tragic results. The harems were no longer supportable financially. Slave girls would leave and take up as dancing girls or prostitutes in the nearest cities to fend for themselves. Eunuch guards likewise took to the streets as petty criminals or male prostitutes.⁶⁸ The consequences of Islamic rule are never so disastrous as when its victims are left to fend for themselves—with little left in terms of skills or dignity.

RESISTANCE

The story of Indian civilization in the face of Islamic invasion is not merely a tale of victimhood. It is important to highlight the atrocities committed in the name of jihad over more than a millennium because we live in a climate where such things are often whitewashed. Yet it would be a mistake to forget that many of the thrusts of jihad met with heroic resistance. In the face of a brutal and unscrupulous enemy which baffled Hindus by providing religious sanction to some of the worst in human behavior, many Indians deserve recognition for their resistance to oppression.

The Sikh Martyrs are an example of such resistance. Sikhism is a monotheistic religion that began in the 16th century in the Indian Punjab, led by a series of ten gurus and a holy scripture compiled by its fifth guru, Guru Arjan. That same Guru Arjan became the first of the Sikh Martyrs and a key turning point in their religious history in 1606 when the Muslim emperor Jahangir had him tortured to death for stirring up religious “trouble” (many Muslims were converting to Sikhism at this time).

Later, during the reign of Aurangzeb, the ninth guru Tegh Bahadur made public opposition to efforts to convert all the people of Kashmir to Islam by force. The guru and three of his followers were seized and put in chains. The Sikhs were tortured to induce conversion, but when they refused they were executed. All four are still seen as martyrs to the religious freedom of Sikhs, Hindus, and all other non-Muslims in India.

Another force of resistance was the Hindu Marathas, led by their great warrior Shivaji. Using guerilla tactics and great daring, Shivaji made things miserable for the Mughals in the Deccan. In 1672, Shivaji achieved one of the great Hindu military victories over a Muslim army at the Battle of Salher. Aided by a magnificent cavalry charge, Shivaji’s army routed Mughal forces in the open field.⁶⁹

Shivaji was famous as a resourceful figure. Once, he was treacherously seized by the emperor while under a flag of truce and held in the Mughals’ great fort at Agra. Shivaji feigned sickness and began to send large baskets with gifts to the Brahmins as if made by a man hoping for a recovery of health. After many days of this, his guards became accustomed to seeing the large baskets leaving the home where he was staying and stopped examining them closely. Shivaji and his son then stowed away in two of the baskets and so made their escape.

After a millennium of fighting against the gradual encroachment of Islam, Shivaji demonstrates that the religious and cultural pride of the Indian people still prospered and could inspire great victories against the usurpers.

THE BRITISH EMPIRE AND MUGHAL DECLINE

Through the East India Company the British Empire had held economic interests in India since the early 1600s. In 1757, the company found itself exercising political authority over part of India after a British military force protecting company interests defeated the forces of the Nawab of Bengal in battle. By this point, the old Mughal Empire was well in decline and from this one key shift many more would soon come. In 1765, the company received the right to collect revenues on behalf of the Mughal emperor in three provinces.⁷⁰

The India the British were dealing with by this point had been suffering from 1000 years of Islamic invasion and poor governance. All the British knew was that the Islamic rulers they dealt with were little better than despots with almost no concern for the welfare of their inhabitants. When the British began to see it as their duty to introduce civilized monarchy and notions of fair play to India, they didn’t realize they were reintroducing the concepts.⁷¹

By the 19th century the Mughal Empire was alive in name only. As the governance of various territories grew corrupt, inept, or indifferent, the East India Company acquired the true exercise of power. An unusual situation developed where portions of the country were administered by a private company while troops representing the British crown were on hand to ensure good order. By mid-century the British military was relying heavily on companies of native troops (called sepoys) in its Indian administration. A series of cultural misunderstandings and loose rumors led to an armed rebellion among select sepoy units in 1857—a complex event known as the Sepoy Mutiny.

The Sepoy Mutiny marked the official end of the Mughal Empire. The Mughals had long since declined to practical irrelevance, with little influence beyond ceremonial functions in Delhi. But some leaders of the rebellion turned to emperor Bahadur Shah as a symbolic figurehead. For his part, Bahadur Shah went along with it. After the British military restored order in 1858, Bahadur Shah was arrested, tried, and found guilty of sedition for his connection to the Mutiny. The last Mughal emperor spent his final years in exile, and India officially became a crown colony of the British Empire.

This political shift led to greater Indian—particularly Hindu—involvement in government affairs. Eventually, in the early 20th century this involvement produced nationalist agitation toward independence. As described in the chapter on Pakistan, Indian independence came with a deadly and destructive partition. Even today, in the 21st century, the jihad against India and Hindu civilization marches on with renewed vigor and fanaticism, while prospects for a lasting peace diminish.

The full measure of the Islamic destruction of India has not yet been taken. By one estimate, the period saw the destruction and death of some 80 million people. A land once famous for its natural bounty and enormous wealth was reduced by slavery, conquest and spoliation, and ruinous taxation into a backwards land which is still coping with modernization in the 21st century. Many of its greatest treasures have been defaced or destroyed by invaders filled with a mad hatred for its civilization.

What has Islam added to India? Prior to the Islamic invasions there were some 20 large centers of learning in India. Almost every one of them was destroyed, and the invaders did not establish a single one to take their place. Islam attempted to ban dancing, music, and wine—though many sultans enjoyed such pleasures, along with their opium. The greatest works of art Islam left behind in India are all mausoleums, mosques, or fortresses. The most famous of them all is the Taj Mahal. Islam did not enrich India—it plundered and denuded it of the wealth it already enjoyed.

Although India became independent of British control in 1947, it has yet to become free from jihad.

PART FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY - FIVE

The Partition of India

There is not an inch of the soil of India which our forefathers did not once purchase with their blood. We cannot be false to the blood of our fathers. India the whole of it is therefore our heritage and it must be reconquered for Islam … Our ultimate ideal should be the unification of India, spiritually as well as politically under the banner of Islam. The final political salvation of India is not otherwise possible.

—Author F. K. Khan Durrani¹

However painful it may be, the fact is that it is impossible to observe Islam faithfully and still be a good citizen of India.

—Indian diplomat M.R.A. Baig²

Muslims should have ruled India after the departure of the British, and not the Hindus. Population growth helped Muslims to annex a large part of India for creating a separate Islamic State of Pakistan. Such efforts on the part of the Muslims should be continued to gradually convert the rest of India into Dar-ul-Islam.

—Indian ex-MP Syed Shahabuddin³

With God as witness, we Hindus, and Mahomedans declare that we shall behave towards one another as children of the same parents, that we shall have no differences, that the sorrows of each shall be the sorrows of the other and that each shall help the other in removing them. We shall respect each other’s religion and religious feelings and shall not stand in the way of our respective religious practices. We shall always refrain from violence to each other in the name of religion.

—Mahatma Gandhi⁴

At the dawn of the British rule of India, as the nation was emerging from the remains of the decaying Islamic Mughal Empire, the old Islamic elite suddenly found themselves without their former power and privileges in society. No longer were the Muslim elite masters of the fate of the Hindu majority. No more could they rely on military conquests, Hindu slave labor, or crippling taxation of “infidels.” For the first time in more than a millennium, they had to work for a living. During their long years of royal parasitism, the Muslim elite had not acquired skills aside from soldiery or political administration.

During Islamic rule, Indian society was feudal. Most members of both the Hindu and the Muslim communities were desperately poor. Then in the 19th century the nation found itself under the rule of a very different colonial power—one infinitely more secular and just than the Islamic elite had been. The Muslim elite found themselves unemployed and unemployable. The days of royal violence and hedonism in the Mughal court were gone. Hindus were no longer afraid of being Hindus.

Under British rule, the majority Hindu community found itself to be more energetic, quicker to adopt European ways, and quicker to learn the official language of English, which replaced the Persian spoken by the Mughal court. The British would govern the Indian subcontinent for another hundred years.

During this period, the Islamic community became more withdrawn, deeply suspicious of the Hindu majority and their new colonial masters, the British. For centuries, the Islamic ruling class had enjoyed social elevation based on a system of taxation, imperial conquest, and mass slavery. Under the British, that was no longer possible. Hindus became more willing to work within the British system while Muslim society withdrew and became more introverted.

Under the British system, the old feudal ways were no longer viable and the Hindus were free from genocidal wars carried out by the likes of Aurangzeb. Muslims who were unable to adapt to the new system soon became destitute, while Hindus who could were able to build a name and even a fortune for themselves. In time, enough Hindus had done so to constitute a class of capable administrators under their British colonial masters.

When the Indian National Congress formed in the 1880s, its leading figures were Hindus looking for an increased say in the government and administration of their country. Members gathered to discuss issues of civil rights and opportunities in government for well-educated natives. By 1900 the Congress had emerged as an all-India political organization. By and large, Muslims were not represented in the Congress.

Over the course of the early 20th century the relationship between Britain and India began to shift significantly. World War I represented a major inflection point. India contributed significantly to the British war effort in terms of men and resources and hoped for compensation in the form of greater political independence. The Government of India Act in 1919 handed control of many affairs to India, though matters of finance, taxation, and the maintenance of law and order remained under British control.

Beginning in this era, one figure looms large in the story of Indian independence—Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. He returned to India in 1915 after a long period in South Africa, where he had emerged as a major political leader in the large Indian community there. Upon his return, Gandhi brought along strategies of nonviolent civil disobedience and an idea of complete political independence.

Gandhi’s strategy was based on an ideal of nonviolence and non-cooperation, whereby anyone working to keep India going could participate simply by refusing to do his job. This approach allowed the movement to become broadly popular. Whereas before it had been mainly elite members of Indian society agitating for political freedom, Gandhi’s approach brought in people from all walks of life. The ideal of nonviolence added a dimension of religious appeal. Led by Gandhi, the drive for independence became a mass movement in India.

Efforts at using civil disobedience enjoyed some success, and the British continued to make efforts to conciliate between their political governance and Indian desires for independence. One last effort in this direction came in the Government of India Act of 1935. This Act granted a certain political autonomy to the Indian provinces. Although the Muslim League attempted to position itself as the sole party representing Muslim interests in British India, it suffered disaster at the polls in the 1937 elections stemming from the Act. The Indian National Congress became the dominant political party.

A watershed moment came with the outset of World War II in 1939. India’s Viceroy Lord Linlithgow brought India into the war without consulting Indian leaders—an action which deeply offended Gandhi and the Indian National Congress. In response, the INC asked all its representatives to resign in protest. Led by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the Muslim League took advantage of this opening and persuaded its members to adopt the Lahore Resolution in 1940, which called for a partition of India into two separate sovereign states. As the INC position weakened, the notion of political separatism along religious lines took hold.

In 1942, Gandhi launched another civil disobedience movement, the Quit India movement. The idea was to force the British to the negotiating table over the issue of Indian independence by threatening a civil strike during wartime. The British responded bitterly to this. Tens of thousands of INC leaders, including Gandhi and all the main national and provincial figures, were arrested and thrown in jail. Several leaders, including Gandhi, were not released until 1944.

Again, Jinnah and the Muslim League took full advantage of the sudden vacuum in leadership among the Hindus. The League offered its support to the British and saw its membership and stature increase dramatically. When Lord Mountbatten became the last British Governor-General of India, the Muslim League’s interest in a sectarian division of the country had fully taken root. The new Labour Party government in England was eager to resolve the India Question as soon as possible. In June 1947 Mountbatten announced that India would be partitioned. In August 1947, following the passing of the Indian Independence Act in the British parliament, Pakistan and India were created as separate nations.

As India divided, violent clashes between Hindus (and Sikhs) and Muslims followed. As many as one million were killed as enormous numbers of people migrated to one side or the other of the new national boundaries. Between 1947 and 1951, about 14.5 million in the subcontinent left their home for another part of India, with most of the movement happening on the western border between India and West Pakistan.⁵ It was one of the largest mass-migrations in human history. At the same time, in defiance of the “two-nation theory” which lay behind the partition in the first place (that is, the belief that religion alone made Hindus and Muslims constitute separate nations), millions of Muslims stayed put in the newly-created nation of India. In East Pakistan, millions of Hindus remained as well.

Gandhi enjoyed only a pyrrhic victory with India’s independence. His vision came to failure in three respects. He had been adamantly opposed to the partition of India, but it took place anyway. He had hoped for Indian independence to come without violence, but more than a million people were killed—mostly Hindus and Sikhs at the hands of Muslims. He had believed in Hindu-Muslim brotherhood, yet today, after seven decades, there is still no peace between India and Pakistan. In a sense, Gandhi was living under self-deception and delusion, thinking the whole world was like him.

One thing is certain: Gandhi’s tactics of non-cooperation, nonviolence, and civil protests worked only because his opponents, the British, were very civilized. Such tactics could not have succeeded against Mao, or Aurangzeb, or Muhammad. He would simply have been beheaded and his followers killed or scattered. And as history since 1947 has shown, the Islamic state of Pakistan has no intention of peaceful coexistence with secular India.

JIHAD CONTINUES IN KASHMIR

During the years of the Raj, not all parts of British India were ruled directly by the British crown. There were hundreds of so-called Princely States under the direct control of local rulers. The rulers of the Princely States were given the choice of aligning with India or Pakistan after independence. One of these states was the Princely State of Jammu and Kashmir.

Pakistan claims Kashmir belongs to it because the majority of its population is Muslim. This claim is pure chutzpah. Kashmir has been part of India since the region was inhabited. Before Islam came to Kashmir, it had been a stronghold of ancient Vedic Brahmanism, Buddhism, and Shaivism for 5,000 years. In the pre-Islamic philosophical milieu of Kashmir, the only strife came from debates between the different religious-philosophical systems. The ancient culture of Kashmir was renowned for being “open-minded, liberal and humane … culturally advanced, intellectually alert and aesthetically conscious.”⁶

All that changed with the arrival of Islam. Between 1389-1413, the Muslim ruler Sikandar earned the name of “Butshikan” (meaning idol-breaker) for his persecution of non-Muslims in Kashmir. Several historians have recorded the destruction of many temples, shrines, hermitages, and holy places of Hindus and Buddhists throughout Kashmir. A Muslim chronicler named Hasan observed that Sikandar laid out a city named after himself on the ruins of the destroyed Hindu temples, and forcibly converted Hindus to Islam—or massacred those who refused to convert.⁷ He imposed sharia law upon all inhabitants, levied an enormously high jizya tax, and banned all non-Islamic activities, including music and dancing. He even prevented Hindus and Buddhists from cremating their dead according to ancient custom. In one place, so many Hindus were killed and tossed into Dal Lake that the region “is still known as ‘Bata Mazar’, grave-yard of Hindus.”⁸ Due to Sikandar’s reign of butchery, many Hindus were killed or fled in fear. This is how Islam was spread to Kashmir.

As it had elsewhere in India, the jizya tax became the major cause of a demographic revolution. The tax was heavy and regressive and therefore affected the poor the hardest. This is the purpose of the tax, in fact—to induce conversions in some while degrading and diminishing the rest.⁹ A mass exodus of Kashmiri Hindus around the time of Sikandar and the forced conversion of many who remained behind became the foundation of a major demographic change. By the 15th century, a peace-loving and gentle society had been transformed into a brutal and parochial society of Islamic believers.

For Pakistan to claim that Kashmir was a “Muslim” province is completely ahistorical. Such a claim shows that the kind of demographic conquest Kashmir endured is the most permanent form of conquest. When India was partitioned in 1947, Kashmir was still governed by a Hindu maharajah. Pakistan was not satisfied with allowing the political process to move forward, but instead sent in agitators to stir up the people of Kashmir to force the maharajah’s hand. This meddling worked against them in one sense, as the ruler signed an Instrument of Accession granting sovereignty to India. But in another sense, they were successful. By moving in forces Pakistan created a potentially explosive situation that prevented the province from moving to Indian control as it should have. Instead, a zone of control was created, dividing Kashmir into Indian and Pakistani controlled zones. Since 1947, Pakistan and India have fought three wars over Kashmir, and the region remains a volatile flashpoint for terror activity.

Islamic jihad has been 100 percent successful in Afghanistan and Pakistan and perhaps 90 percent successful in Kashmir. Jihadists are feverishly working to finish the job, after which they will turn their attention back to the entire Indian subcontinent. Since they are unlikely to achieve this victory by military campaigns (having failed on several occasions already), the Islamic supremacists have resorted to other means. The way to final victory that was so successful in Afghanistan and Pakistan—and also in Bangladesh and Indonesia—is demographic conquest. By means of demographic conquest Islam has spread itself across the Middle East, North Africa, and into the Balkans. The jihadists hope to do the same to all of India.

THE NIZAM OF HYDERABAD

Of the Princely States, the story of Hyderabad best illustrates the effect of Islamic rule on India. The last Nizam (Muslim king) of Hyderabad was a notorious miser who may have been the richest man in the world in the 1930s, with personal wealth totaling about two billion dollars.¹⁰ The wealth of his state was provided almost entirely by the 16 million Hindus (out of a total population of 18 million) who actually performed the productive work. As Time Magazine put it in 1970:

While the peasants lived in abject poverty, the princes had grown rich on land taxes and the sale of mineral rights. They indulged in lavish whims—concubines, opulent palaces, bejeweled elephants, retinues of servants, strings of polo ponies, sumptuous celebrations. The Nizam of Hyderabad, who was the richest of all with wealth estimated at $2 billion, collected mountains of pearls.¹¹

Much of the Nizam’s life was taken up with his four legal wives and his harem containing hundreds of women.¹²

Hyderabad was incorporated into India in 1948 by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. The Nizam had refused to disband his private Muslim army of about 22,000 men and refused to hand over his territory. The Nizam and his ancestors had been notoriously brutal rulers over their majority-Hindu portion of India, and he wasn’t interested in giving up his privileged position without a fight—so long as others did the actual fighting.¹³ The Indian General involved promised no harm would come to anyone who did not resist, including the Hyderabad army. In the end, over a period of four days Hyderabad’s 15th century fortresses capitulated without serious engagement and his army surrendered. The cost to satisfy the Nizam’s demand for resistance was several hundred killed. His vanity appeased, the Nizam settled in to enjoy his enormous fortune.¹⁴

As a ruler, the Nizam had generally appointed Muslims to look over his people. By custom, he never met with any of his subjects, no matter their wealth, unless the subject appeared with “a cash present for His Exalted Highness.”¹⁵ On the occasion of his Silver Jubilee in 1937, the Nizam reportedly received somewhere around one million dollars in cash gifts from his subjects. The richest man in the world wasn’t above taking handouts from poor Indians.¹⁶ But it was not to last. The Nizam’s grandson and final successor famously squandered much of the family wealth on failed investments such as sheep farms in Australia.¹⁷

Nizami rule relied heavily on the complicity of the Deshmukh (landed gentry) class, which served as tax collectors and administrators. For two centuries the Deshmukhs received large landed estates as a reward for running the Nizam’s feudal administration. Their ranks included many Hindus—notably the Reddys and Velamas, two castes and classes of Hindus. The wealthiest among these groups lived like dukes and barons. Without this class of venal collaborators, the oppressive and exploitative rule of the Nizami would have been difficult.

ONGOING JIHAD: ISLAM’S CLAIM ON INDIA

One of the most difficult concepts for non-Muslims to accept is the jihadist notion that all lands conquered by Islam are considered to belong to it for all time. This means that India, in the eyes of jihadists, belongs to Islam by right. Just as Islamic terrorists would not be satisfied even if Israel were destroyed and a Palestinian state established on its ruin, they would not be satisfied if Kashmir were given to Pakistan, either. Scholar Walid Phares explains this remarkable dictum:

In the eyes of the Salafists, India was subdued by the advancing forces of the caliphate and was ruled under a legitimate Islamic state, and thereby became part of the dar al-salaam or dar al-Islam. Inescapably, it should return to the caliphate.¹⁸

Once under the dominion of Islam, forever under the dominion of Islam: this is the civilization-destroying logic that continues to point a dagger at the heart of India.

This logic explains the otherwise inexplicable anti-India diatribes we find in the mouths of the world’s most famous jihadists. Osama bin Laden and his successor Zawahiri both vented about “Crusader-Zionist-Hindu” plots against Muslims.¹⁹ It is also why jihadists conducted widespread massacres against Indian civilians in 2003, 2006, and 2008. The ultimate goal of such attacks, as Phares summarizes, is “a Talibanization inside India… to devastate the country’s rising economy and eventually to hit its military, including (worrisomely) its nuclear weapons.”²⁰

Although they get little attention outside India, there are two dangerous jihadist organizations based in the Indian heartlands: the Student Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) and the Indian Mujahideen (IM). SIMI was founded in 1977 as an offspring of Jamaat-i-Islami, the group founded by jihad’s ideological godfather Maulana Maududi. Following Islamic precepts expounded by Maududi, SIMI rejects cooperation with or tolerance of a non-Muslim state in India. They regard the establishment of a caliphate as a basic religious duty. Even fellow Muslims who are happy to live in peace with Hindus are regarded as backsliders who have earned a place in hell, in SIMI’s eyes.²¹

The Indian Mujahideen (IM) is a front group for Pakistan-based terror group Lashkar-e-Taiba. Since 1993, this group has been behind a number of high-profile terror attacks in India. Attacks for which IM has claimed responsibility include: nine marketplace bombings in May 2008 that killed more than 60 people in Jaipur; 16 synchronized explosions in the city of Ahmadabad that killed 38 people in July 2008; and a September 2008 atrocity in which five bombs in crowded New Delhi locations murdered 30. In another attack in 2007, IM targeted lawyers in three Uttar Pradesh cities with simultaneously detonated bombs because the lawyers had refused to take on the cases of suspected terrorists.²²

Members of the IM working with terrorists from Jaish-e-Mohammed were also responsible for the 2001 attack on the Indian Parliament in New Delhi. 12 people were killed in this attack, which also led to a dangerous standoff between Pakistan and India in 2001-2. IM was responsible for the Mumbai train bombings of 2006 that killed 209 and injured more than 700 people. Again, the ISI was accused of involvement in this attack for its role in planning the bombings. IM was also responsible for a coordinated marketplace bombing in May 2008 that killed 60 people as well as a series of synchronized explosions in Ahmadabad that killed 38 people that same year.²³

In 2008, members of Lashkar-e-Taiba trained in Pakistan captured an Indian fishing boat and rode it into Mumbai where they carried out a four-day series of gun attacks and bombings that killed 164 and injured more than 600. All but one of the ten terrorists involved were killed during the attack. Although Pakistan initially denied involvement, it was later proved that several of the terrorists were Pakistani nationals and the whole team had received extensive training at a mountain camp in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir.

The threat seems to be intensifying, and India—which has already borne the brunt of jihad for longer than almost anyone—may become the locus of still more jihadist activity. Interrogations of two high-level IM personnel in October 2013 suggest that the organization has grown considerably and established links with both the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Future suicide attacks against prominent government officials and more mass murder bombings are almost certainly in the plans for the future. One captive IM member made it clear that nothing short of complete Islamization of India is his group’s goal.²⁴

In 2014, the Islamic jihad against India that began with Muhammad bin Qasim in 712 is still going strong. Mohandas Gandhi’s dream of Hindu-Muslim unity has failed. India and Pakistan were partitioned, yet the religious conflict continues. After one thousand years of continued residence in India, Muslims have not been peaceably assimilated into the fabric of Indian life. After 1,300 years, Islam has no interest in merging with India or engaging in dialogue—it wants to finish the job by destroying Indian civilization completely as it has done in Pakistan and has nearly done in Kashmir.

PART FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY - SIX

India:
Islam, Independence,
and the Misguided Mahatma

Pakistan, according to [Jinnah], in a nutshell, is a demand for carving out of India a portion to be wholly treated as an independent and sovereign state … If Pakistan as defined above is an article of faith with him, indivisible India is equally an article of faith with me. Hence there is a stalemate.

—Mahatma Gandhi in Harijan, July 26, 1942

The Position of the Communist Party is clear and emphatic. We declare that in a free India, all nationalities, Muslims or otherwise, having a contiguous territory as their homeland, common language, culture, common economic life and psychological make-up have the right to form sovereign states which will come together in a joint Indian Federation or Union. Each unit must have the right to secede if it so desired.

—Communist Party of India Manifesto, 1942

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure.

—Abraham Lincoln, “Gettysburg Address”

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

—George Santayana¹

For more than 5,000 years Kashmir was Hindu land. It was home to many great saints and scholars. A branch of Hindu philosophy known as Kashmir Shaivism was born in the region around the eighth century AD. When Buddhism arose and spread across India, many people of the Kashmir valley embraced the new faith. Even today, Kashmir has a substantial minority of Buddhists, particularly in Ladakh. For 2,000 years Kashmir was home to all manner of Sanskrit learning—particularly historical texts, philosophy, and romantic fables.

All this was transformed utterly by the arrival of Islamic rule in the 14th century. Islam became the religion of the court, and the spread of Islam was encouraged in the land. Toward the end of the century, the Muslim rulers began to make concerted efforts to eliminate what they saw as religious and political opposition from the Hindu majority.² Persecution of Hindus became systematic, particularly under the rule of Sikandar, who destroyed many temples and drove Hindus out of the major cities by threatening them to convert or flee or else be killed. Sikandar strictly enforced Sharia law on Kashmir, banning a host of cultural activities and imposing the jizya tax on non-Muslims. He even forbade Hindus from applying tilak to their foreheads.³

Through forced conversions, influx of foreign Muslims, and simple breeding Islam used demographic conquest to wear away at the former Hindu majority in Kashmir, eventually reducing them to minority status in their own country. By this same process Islam also replaced the Hindu and Buddhist populations of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Central Asia—all countries whose very names (the –stan ending comes from Sanskrit, not Arabic) indicate their Indian origins. In Kashmir, the process of demographic conquest is not 100 percent complete as it is in Afghanistan, but it is close.

In other parts of India, this same process of demographic conquest is underway—although it is not as far advanced as in Kashmir. In Kerala, in the state of Assam, and in Eastern India the outbreeding of Hindu populations by Muslims is slowly producing a replacement of the people that will change the character of those regions just as it has already done with Afghanistan and Kashmir. As these regions experience this shift, the likelihood of violent confrontation increases dramatically. India and Pakistan have already fought at least three wars over Kashmir itself. A future confrontation could easily include nuclear weapons: Pakistan has over a hundred nuclear warheads in its arsenal, India somewhat fewer. Should a future conflict between the nations go nuclear, the fallout in death, disease, and forced migration would be a disaster of incalculable proportions.

The analogous situation in Israel between the Israelis and the Palestinians does not bode well for lasting peace between India and Pakistan. In both conflicts, which are two of the longest-running in the world today, there is the same intractable and implacable enemy: Islam. There is no end to jihad. Islam wants all of India just as it wants all of Israel.

INDIA’S FAILURE AGAINST ISLAMIC JIHAD

From the invasion of Bin Qasim in 712 to 2014, India has been subject to Islamic jihad. By military and demographic means, Muslims have strived to replace Hindus across the subcontinent. In some countries, such as Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh—all once part of India—they have almost completely succeeded. While Hindus have fought valiantly against this 1,300-year conquest it has never been enough.

The primary difficulty for the Hindus has been to understand their enemy. Islam teaches a dualistic ethic which has no analogy within the Hindu worldview. The Islamic ethical system, as this book has shown earlier, teaches that fellow Muslims are to be treated ethically, while non-Muslims must be treated poorly—even cruelly. When Islam is in a weak position, it downplays these qualities and pretends to be just another religion like Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, or Sikhism. Unlike those other religions, however, when Islam is in a strong position it becomes an imperialist ideology with a single goal: conquest and annihilation of non-Islamic religions. It always offers the same excuses—the other religions are idol worship, their metaphysical systems are in error. There is no sense of “live and let live.”

The Islamic conquest of India was largely put on hold by the arrival of the British Empire. Under the Raj, Hindus were able to reach levels of economic and political success that were largely denied to them under Muslim rule (particularly under the Mughal Empire, which dominated much of India in the centuries before the British assumed control). One man looms large in the independence movement which arose in the late 19th century and eventually resulted in India’s emergence as an independent modern nation: Mohandas Gandhi.

GANDHI’S FAILURES AND DELUSIONS

More than 65 years after his death Gandhi remains an almost saintly figure globally. The reverential term applied to him, “Mahatma” (meaning “Great Soul”), is typically assumed by most to be his first name. The struggle for Indian independence he championed is regarded as the culmination and vindication of his political efforts. But in fact Gandhi was a complete failure, and the independence movement he backed only replaced a mostly benign and light-handed ruler with a corrupt state while also liberating and empowering India’s existential enemy, Islam. Gandhi’s independence movement has replaced security with genocide and destruction.

His failure first became obvious on the issue of the partition of India. Prior to India’s independence, there was a debate over the idea of dividing the country between a Hindu-majority portion and a Muslim-majority portion. Gandhi strongly opposed the idea, famously claiming, “If the Congress wishes to accept partition, it will be over my dead body.”⁴ In the end, he acquiesced to the inevitable. Prior to independence, 25 percent of the population of what is now Pakistan was Hindu—many of them wealthy landowners. Now, there are only about one percent there and they are among the poorest people in the country.

The promise of partition was that it would bring peace to India. Instead, it has produced greater conflict. There have been four wars between India and Pakistan since 1947 (in 1947, 1965, 1971, and 1999). There is now a threat of nuclear confrontation between the two powers. The partition that Gandhi’s errors produced was a catastrophe; hundreds of thousands were killed or injured in the mass movement of Hindus and Muslims between the newly created nations in 1947.

Gandhi was right to oppose Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s opportunistic and delusional “two nations” theory. At the same time, he naively ignored the aggressive and destructive nature of Islam. Out of complacence he argued that tension between Hindus and Muslims was caused by British rule—an astonishing misreading of reality.⁵ Muslims had been massacring Hindus and destroying their cultural creations for 1,300 years, yet Gandhi still insisted that nonviolence could achieve the same results with Muslims as it could with the British. “We can achieve everything by love,” he advised Hindu friends in 1945, “If you behave with Muslim brethren in this spirit, their anger will go.”⁶ This sentiment sounds lovely on a poster, but if nonviolent tolerance is not reciprocated it becomes no better than civilizational suicide.

It would be too generous to accuse Gandhi of naïve passiveness in the face of Islamic imperialism, because he participated in promoting it. At the end of World War I he was an outspoken and vociferous supporter of the Khilafat movement, which opposed the breakup of the Ottoman Caliphate. As Christopher Hitchens remarked of this quixotic campaign, it “was by definition taking place in the realm of illusion, since by that time even the Turks themselves had rejected the rule of the sultan.”⁷ Gandhi’s defense of the moribund caliphate led to his first non-cooperation campaign against the British in India. Yet the Khilafat movement he was backing was nothing more than age-old Islamic imperialism—based on the insistence that any lands once conquered by Muslim invaders are rightfully Islamic for all time.⁸

In the end, Gandhi’s support for this movement was the product not of wisdom but of illusions. The unity he hoped to build with Muslims on the principle of nonviolence could not last. As Historian Stanley Wolpert explains:

Gandhi’s earlier South African experience and success, so heavily dependent as it had been on Gujarati Muslim mercantile support and cooperation, made him mistakenly assume that India’s Muslim majority would adhere to the same principles.⁹

As it turned out, most Muslims shared neither Gandhi’s principles nor his priorities. His doctrine of nonviolence crumbled to irrelevance in the bloodbath that preceded and followed India’s partition. His credibility may well have followed, but a realistic reassessment of his legacy was indefinitely postponed when he was martyred by a Hindu extremist.

Looked at from the present situation, it is clear that Gandhi (and Nehru, following in his footsteps) did not serve India’s interests by fixating on the issue of British sovereignty. In fact, they got things completely the wrong way around. The enemy of India was never the British but Islamic imperialism because, in Muslims’ eyes, if a territory has ever been conquered by Muslims, it is Islamic until the end of the world (as was explained by scholar Walid Phares in the previous chapter).¹⁰ Terror activity in India shows how chillingly true to life this idea truly is. In 2003, 2006, and 2008 jihadists conducted massacres against Indian civilians with the ultimate goal of “a Talibanization inside India.”11 In 2013, a captured member of the Indian Mujahideen terror group made it clear that his group’s goal was nothing less than the complete Islamization of India.¹²

While the British had their faults and their own brand of cruelty, they also brought great benefits to India. It is revealing that Gandhi regarded many of these advances as threats: “India’s salvation consists in unlearning what she has learnt during these past fifty years,” he wrote. “The railways, telegraphs, hospitals, lawyers, doctors and such like have all got to go.”¹³ Today, no one seriously suggests that India’s salvation lies in giving up its advances into the modern world. The railways and hospitals Gandhi seemed to find so threatening are being expanded and increased. Muslims in Pakistan are armed with tanks and nuclear weapons, bringing the specter of mass slaughter and even genocide into the picture. The British never posed such an existential threat to India’s existence.

Gandhi’s misguided idealism must be abandoned. This does not mean meeting Islam on its own terms or reverting to medieval barbarity. But it does mean recognizing that Gandhi’s love and tolerance for Islam was not reciprocated. Hindus must base their policies on the basic reality that Islam is their enemy, not a potential ally. Coexistence is a two-way street, but Islam demands submission from all other faiths—a position diametrically opposed to coexistence on any but the most brutal terms.

THE FAILURES OF GANDHI’S FOLLOWERS

In the years after Gandhi’s death, the illusion was perpetuated that independence had strengthened India. Under Nehru’s leadership, that illusion was first exposed for what it was. During the 1962 war between India and China it became obvious. Nehru’s foreign policy had been a contradictory mixture of idealistic moralizing about remaining non-aligned and pure during the Cold War and hard-headed realism about power relationships between nation states. After the humiliating defeat of India’s armed forces at the hands of the Chinese, it became obvious that something was wrong. Many Indian elites rightly concluded that the debacle was a direct consequence of “Nehru’s altruistic policy of Non-Alignment, forged in response to the superpower dynamics of the Cold War and his failure to take a realistic stance vis-à-vis China.”¹⁴

Also exposed in the years after India’s independence was the disastrous legacy of Nehru’s centralizing socialism: inefficiency and political corruption. India’s greatest successes after independence have come when entrepreneurs and businesses have been allowed to respond and adapt to the free market. There is no lasting prosperity or economic growth in an economy of strangulation by a combination of state regulation and state-run monopolies. In the same way, India’s outdated political system, in which entrenched and unaccountable parties exercise disproportionate control is ripe for change.

The recent election of Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party to power in the Indian government represents a welcome shift away from Nehru and the corruption of the Indian National Congress. Decades of almost uninterrupted power and a flawed political system have allowed the INC to grow extremely corrupt. Gandhi’s party today uses their inspirational one-time leader not as an idea but an excuse. Finally, in 2014 the excuse wore thin with the Indian people.

INDIAN COMMUNISTS—USEFUL IDIOTS OF ISLAM

Today, Gandhi’s level of misguided idealism has been matched and surpassed by Indian Communists. There was a term for such people in the Soviet Union. Well-meaning middle class liberals who spoke out on behalf of Soviet Communism without even being aware that Soviet Communism was completely opposed to their existence and dedicated to eradicating them as a class would be called “useful fools.” Today we call “useful idiots” anyone who propagandizes for a cause without really understanding its goals—all while being cynically used by the leaders of that cause. In India, Communist groups such as the Communist Party of India—Marxist (CPI-M) are the useful idiots of Islam.

This has been the case since before India’s independence. In 1940, the All India Muslim League produced a document known as the Lahore Resolution, in which they declared , “the areas in which the Muslims are numerically in a majority, as in the North-Western and Eastern Zones of India [today, these are Pakistan and Bangladesh, respectively], should be grouped to constitute ‘Independent States.’”¹⁵ This was a blatant statement that India was not one nation. In 1942, Indian Communists agreed: “nationalities having Muslim faith [have] the right of autonomous state existence and of secession.”¹⁶

Author C.I. Isaac has noted the connections between Indian Communism and Islam from an early date. “The first Indian Communists,” he notes, “were the Khilafat Jihadis, who were on their way to Turkey to fight for the cause of the Caliphate.”¹⁷ The Soviets caught them, retrained them, and sent them back home to spread the glories of Marxism. In the 1940s, Communists E.M.S. Namboodiripad and A.K. Gopalan were leading processions of Muslims in Kerala shouting slogans aimed at independence. In 1969, when Namboodiripad was Chief Minister of Kerala, he carved out a Muslim-majority district in the province, which is today, according to Isaac, “the epicenter of all jihadi enterprises” in the region.¹⁸

M.N. Roy, the founder of the Communist party in India, was nearly sycophantic in his praise of Islam:

Learning from the Muslims, Europe became the leader of modern civilization. Even to-day, her best sons are not ashamed of her past indebtedness. Unfortunately, India could not be fully benefited by the heritage of Islamic culture, because she did not deserve the distinction. Now, in the throes of a belated Renaissance, Indians, both Hindus and Muslims, could profitably draw inspiration from that memorable chapter of human history.¹⁹

This book has already debunked Roy’s specious claim that the European Renaissance owed much to Islamic culture, and anyone familiar with the history of the Islamic conquest of India could hardly look to it for “inspiration.” Roy’s suggestion that India did not “deserve” to receive the full benefits of Islam reveals some bitterness in his assessment of India.

In 2014, the situation is the same between Communists and Islam. Communists see evil in Hindu nationalist parties such as the BJP and the RSS and see absolutely no evil in Islam. Communists, Leftists, and secularists in general will never criticize Muslim groups and scarcely seem to notice Muslim terrorism in India. A simple survey of their news releases shows this: “Against RSS-BJP Communal Agenda,” “Bringing Narendra Modi would encourage communalism, capitalism,” “Unite against Modi Menace,” “BJP, RSS fanning anti-Muslim violence,” “Modi presiding over hate campaign.” Always the Hindus are wrong, responsible for violence and hate, while the Muslims are hapless victims. CPI-M politician Prakash Karat expresses this narrow view quite obviously: “The country should not be allowed to experience another bout of communal discord and violence nor should the unity of the people and communal peace be disrupted.”²⁰ No word from Karat about jihadist violence in India. Instead, the Congress of the CPI-M held “’hate propaganda’ of the RSS and its many fronts responsible for the rise of Hindutva terror groups.”²¹ One might expect from such an article that Hindutva terror groups outnumber jihadists in numbers and killings, but it is not so.

Indian Communists shield Islam and jihadist terror from blame or responsibility but actively and readily criticize any Hindu groups that organize for their own safety. They do so for several main reasons: above all, fear. Muslims will retaliate violently against criticism, while Hindu right-wing groups—despite the fevered imaginations of the Communists—will not burn down the houses or kill the families or their critics. Furthermore, it is fashionable to criticize right-wing nationalist groups. To do so looks tolerant, liberal, and intellectual on the world stage. Intellectuals in Europe and the United States do the same with their own home-grown nationalist groups. Finally, it keeps the money coming in. No one is getting praise or kickbacks from wealthy Muslims and Arabs by criticizing jihadists, but criticizing Narendra Modi can earn a valuable paycheck.

INDIAN MUSLIMS—USEFUL IDIOTS OF ARAB IMPERIALISM

Indian Muslims themselves are useful idiots on behalf of Islam. Where they believe themselves to be advocating on behalf of a religion, what they actually support is Arab imperialism. Nobel Prize-winning author V.S. Naipaul has beautifully described the reasons for this state of affairs:

Islam is in its origins an Arab religion. Everyone not an Arab who is a Muslim is a convert. Islam is not simply a matter of conscience or private belief. It makes imperial demands. A convert’s worldview alters. His holy places are in Arab lands; his sacred language is Arabic. His idea of history alters. He rejects his own; he becomes, whether he likes it or not, a part of the Arab story. The convert has to turn away from everything that is his. The disturbance for societies is immense, and even after a thousand years can remain unresolved; the turning away has to be done again and again. People develop fantasies about who and what they are; and in the Islam of converted countries there is an element of neurosis and nihilism. These countries can be easily set on the boil.²²

One can see the proof of Naipaul’s words today in the nations of the Gulf Cooperation Council. Even fellow Muslims from Bangladesh and Pakistan are not accepted by the Arabs there; rather, they are abused and exploited and treated like any kafir. Yet there is still no greater pride for a Pakistani or an Indian Muslim than to discover Arab ancestry somewhere in his or her past.

THE REALITY OF ISLAM IN INDIA

In the end, Mahatma Gandhi’s worldview was flawed. He believed in Hindu-Muslim unity against the oppression of British Colonialism. But in fact there was no true unity between Hindus and Muslims, there was enmity which had from before Gandhi was born been suppressed and submerged by British rule. The British posed no demographic threat to India or to Hindu civilization. Islam presents an ever-present demographic and terroristic threat. The first enemy of the Indian people was Islam. The second was caste prejudice among the Hindus. Colonialism was third on the list.

The flaw in Gandhi’s view had deadly consequences. He believed in nonviolence and Hindu-Muslim brotherhood, but more than a million people died during the partition of India in 1947. Since then, Muslims in India have been waging a jihad against the majority Hindu community. Meanwhile, the Indians who left India for Pakistan have waged war repeatedly on their former homeland and today threaten India with nuclear weapons and near-constant terrorism.

Gandhi is praised for his nonviolence, but Abraham Lincoln presents a better example for national leaders. Rather than allow a division of the country that has only festered and produced more violence over a longer period, he should have insisted on unity. If men like Nehru had been willing to compromise their desire for a centralized socialist state, then this could have been possible. There may have been civil war and violence, but it would not have been perpetual. The consequences for the world have been enormous. With no Pakistan, there would have been no 9/11, and there would be no nuclear threat to India today.

Even Gandhi’s independence movement was a mistake. If India had not become free in 1947 it would certainly have come of its own accord in 1977 or 2017—exactly when does not matter. What India needed at that time, and now, was free minds and free markets. Political independence is a product of those things, as the example of America shows. Yet in the name of freedom and political independence India has been saddled with one of the most corrupt political systems in the world for decades. Indian elites amass ill-gotten wealth in Swiss banks, buy property in the West, and send their children to elite Western universities all while singing the praises of the nonviolent Mahatma.

We should ask what independence has meant to the mass of humanity in India. In 2014, 600 million Indians live without toilet facilities and must defecate outside in the fields.²³ India has a serious pollution issue on its hands, with 13 of the 20 worst cities in the world for air pollution being located in India (New Delhi tops the list).²⁴ Nearly a fourth of India’s 1.1 billion people suffer from hunger, and it has the highest number of undernourished people in the world at 230 million.²⁵ Children are particularly vulnerable, with an estimated two million children each year dying due to hunger or malnutrition.²⁶ Lack of health care and crushing poverty are blamed for this exceedingly high rate. Nearly 60 years after independence, India has trouble providing basic needs to its citizens. Nearly half of its children are malnourished, and 100 million families live without running water in their homes.²⁷ More than 100 million are facing an impending crisis over water access, as groundwater supplies are being depleted faster than nature can replace them.²⁸ Even providing electricity to the country has proven elusive to India’s ruling class:

Electrification was central to how early nationalists and planners conceptualized Indian development, and huge sums of money were spent on the project from independence until now. Yet despite all this, nearly 400 million Indians have no access toelectricity. Although India has less than a fifth of the world’s population, it has close to 40 percent of the world’s population without access to electricity.²⁹

It is easy to wonder why independence has not produced much in the way of material benefit for the vast majority of the Indian population.

Significant blame for India’s horrific situation lies squarely at the feet of Gandhi’s modern followers—the corrupt political class which has mismanaged India for decades. India is among the most corrupt nations in the world, scoring 94th out of 177 countries on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index 2013. With a score of 36 out of 100, India is estimated to be very corrupt politically.³⁰ Because of this corruption, India has more people in poverty—an estimated 400 million—than the total population of most other nations. This is despite having had a growing economy for many years.

Corruption was so bad at one point, “³⁰ percent of lawmakers across federal and state legislatures faced criminal charges, many for serious crimes such as rape, murder and kidnapping.”³¹ In 2011, an anti-corruption watchdog was forced to resign when he himself was hit with corruption charges.³² The situation was so out of hand, in 2014 the opposition BJP scored a major electoral success by completely overtaking the ruling Indian National Congress for control of Parliament. BJP ran on a platform of reducing corruption. It is easy to ask whether independence was worth it. For the vast majority of Indians, it matters little if fellow Indians are running the country if their rulers are taking vast sums of money for themselves.

Here it is crucial to emphasize that India was historically a nation of enormous wealth. The tens of thousands of Hindu temples across the subcontinent were typically well stocked with gold and gems brought by the pious and grateful travelers. It was the great wealth of India that attracted Muslim conquerors (along with the religious benefits of laying waste to infidels). During the European Middle Ages, the southern Indian kingdom of Vijayanagar was one of the wealthiest countries in the world. Contemporary reports from European and central Asian visitors paint the picture of cities full of arcades and bazaars and gardens. A Portuguese visitor named Paes in 1522 claimed of the main city of Vijayanagar that it was as “large as Rome and very beautiful to the sight … the best-provided city in the world.”³³

Vijayanagar was under constant attack by Muslim rulers. Although Indian rulers exercised Hindu principles of tolerance, generosity, and chivalry toward Muslims until the last days of Islamic domination of India, Muslim invaders were responsible for great cruelty and destruction. Forty years after Paes saw the great city of Vijayanagar, four neighboring Muslim sultanates combined forces to destroy it. After a five-month siege it was utterly destroyed in 1565. A Muslim historian remarked that Hindus fleeing the city were massacred:

The river was dyed red with their blood. It is computed by the best of authorities that above one hundred thousand infidels were slain during the action and in the pursuit. The plunder was so huge that every private man in the allied army became rich in gold, jewels, tents, arms, horses, and slaves.³⁴

Author M.A. Khan’s historical examinations are full of similar stories about jihad in India. Consider just one example from the 18th century:

The Persian ruler Nadir Shah, in his invasion of India in 1738, killed some 200,000 people and returned with a huge quantity of booty and a large number of slaves, including a few thousand beautiful girls … “he went back to Iran taking with him precious furniture, works of art, horses, the Kohinoor diamond, the famous peacock throne, and 150 million rupees in gold.” The plunder was so huge “that Nadir Shah stopped taxation in Iran for a period of three years, following his triumphant return.”³⁵

Muslim invaders like Nadir Shah were notorious for their zeal for looting and destroying Hindu temples. Author Francis Watson has described this zeal:

Their minds filled with venom against the idol-worshippers of Hindustan, the Muslims destroyed a large number of ancient Hindu temples. This is a historical fact, mentioned by Muslim chroniclers and others of the time. A number of temples were merely damaged and remained standing. But a large number—not hundreds but many thousand—of the ancient temples were broken into shreds of cracked stones.³⁶

This has been the reality of the Islamic impact on India—a reality Gandhi and the Communists forget or prefer to ignore.

The fact of the matter is that Islam wants to destroy India and Hinduism. Hindus are pagans and idol-worshippers—the worst kind of kafirs, according to Islam. Muslims may speak soothing words about getting along and peacefully coexisting when they are outnumbered. Many Muslims may even believe those words. But history and present facts show that when Islam has enough of a presence in a place, there is no question of peaceful coexistence—the non-Islamic civilization must submit or be destroyed. This is the situation in Kashmir today. Many, and perhaps most, Muslims there would be happy simply to coexist with Hindus and Buddhists. But the most serious and literal Muslims can never accept this. Thus, in all places where Islam has a strong presence yet is not officially preeminent, there is an ongoing struggle. Unless Hindus understand the truth about Islam, how it actually is rather than how they would wish it to be, they will be annihilated.

Gandhi may be a great saint, but no nation should emulate his example if it wishes to continue to exist. Perhaps it is true that no nation but India and no religion but Hinduism could have produced a Gandhi; but it is also true that no nation but the Arabs and no culture but one of the Semitic peoples could have produced a Muhammad. The values of his followers are diametrically opposed to those of the Gandhians. Before Gandhi, some Indians fully understood that Islam had to be resisted, that it posed an existential threat to their way of life. Over 1,300 years of jihad there were many valiant efforts to resist. Maharana Pratap and Shivaji from Maharastra were gifted adversaries of Islam. The great Gurus of the Sikhs—men such as Guru Tej Bahadur and Guru Gobind Singh—were noble warriors. The last Sikh king, Maharaja Ranjit Singh, was another.

The assessment of Gandhi in this chapter may seem unduly harsh to some of his modern followers and admirers. Such people are accustomed to more respectful—even hagiographic—descriptions. Nothing said here has been motivated by envy or malice. For the most part, I share their warm regard for Gandhi’s numerous and impressive personal virtues. As a man and as a political leader, he was remarkable and worthy of his high global regard.

But no man is above critical examination. In Gandhi’s case we have nearly 70 years of hindsight to consider the fulfillment of his political dreams. Given the current situation in India, those dreams must be reconsidered. The Hindu-Muslim unity he imagined has not materialized; rather, the opposite has been shown to be the case, as the continual conflict between Pakistan and India and the ongoing jihadist strikes within India amply attest. The nonviolence Gandhi insisted upon and followed to great success with the British has not achieved similar success with Muslim adversaries.

In the end, even Gandhi’s dream of independence itself is open to reconsideration. For a minority of wealthy Indians, this has been indeed a great material advantage. Many of these newly wealthy people have brought part of this wealth to the West, where they purchase luxury properties in London’s Mayfair district, seek expensive and prestigious schooling for themselves and their children, and keep their money in Swiss banks. Meanwhile, 80 percent of the country’s population lives on less than half a dollar a day.

We must ask what independence and freedom means to that 80 percent of Indians. They live without adequate access to food, to electricity, to toilets, and even to running water. After 1,300 years of slavery to Islam, were Hindus capable of self-government? That 80 percent must watch as wealthy elites steal money from the state and stop at nothing to escape the country to live happily and comfortably in the West. Many of the leaders of this 80 percent are self-proclaimed Gandhians. What is it that Gandhi provided for this vast majority of the Indian people? A third of the nation of India was lost in the name of independence and almost all Hindus were removed from those places. Not a single issue between Hindus and Muslims has been resolved by partition. Today, Hindus face the prospect of nuclear conflict with former Indians who now inhabit the nation of Pakistan. What has independence brought?

For the West, India represents a warning. India’s past and present will be the future for Europe and America. The Hindus did not know how to fight Islam, but the West is already making the same mistakes: assuming that Islam is a religion, that it can be peacefully assimilated, and that its demographic warfare is of no consequence for the future. As for the Hindu civilization: after 1,300 years of attacks by Islam it is time to ask ourselves if independence in 1947 was the right thing to do. Are Hindus capable of self-government?

PART SIX

PART SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY - SEVEN

America: The Civilizational Jihad

It is to this religion that we call you; the seal of all the previous religions. It is the religion of Unification of God, sincerity, the best of manners, righteousness, mercy, honor, purity, and piety. It is the religion of showing kindness to others, establishing justice between them, granting them their rights, and defending the oppressed and the persecuted. It is the religion of enjoining the good and forbidding the evil with the hand, tongue, and heart. It is the religion of Jihad in the way of Allah so that Allah’s Word and religion reign Supreme.

—Osama bin Laden¹

According to Muslim teachings, God first revealed His word in the Holy Qur’an to the prophet Muhammad, during the month of Ramadan. That word has guided billions of believers across the centuries, and those believers built a culture of learning and literature and science. All the world continues to benefit from this faith and its achievements.

—President George W. Bush²

America and Islam are not exclusive and need not be in competition. Instead, they overlap, and share common principles of justice and progress, tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.

—President Barack Obama³

Those who stay in America should be open to society without melting, keeping Mosques open so anyone can come and learn about Islam. If you choose to live here, you have a responsibility to deliver the message of Islam … Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faiths, but to become dominant. The Koran, the Muslim book of scripture, should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on Earth.

—Omar Ahmad, CAIR co-founder⁴

O you who believe! Take not the Jews and the Christians as Auliya’ (friends, protectors, helpers, etc.), they are but Auliya’ to one another. And if any amongst you takes them as Auliya’, then surely he is one of them. Verily, Allah guides not those people who are the Zalimun (polytheists and wrong-doers and unjust).

—Qur’an 5:51

It is the nature of Islam to dominate, not to be dominated, to impose its laws on all nations and to extend its power to the entire planet.

—Hasan al-Banna, Muslim Brotherhood founder⁵

Before September 11, 2001 it was hard to get Americans to take the threat of Islamic terrorism seriously. Although that has changed, the so-called War on Terror launched by the Bush administration has mostly been an outward-facing approach that neglects to address the true threat. In fact, terrorism is a technique used by our enemy. Since 9/11, we have devoted tremendous time, money, and effort to fighting a technique rather than an enemy. The question which American officials have been answering wrongly in this time is simple: who is the enemy?

A clue to the answer was made public in a 2007 trial against an Islamic charity known as the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development. The HLF was accused of providing money and resources to a foreign terrorist organization, money laundering, and engaging in financial transactions that threatened national security. During the trial a number of documents were presented as evidence, including one called “An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America.”

Formulated in 1987 but not formally written down until 1991, the Memorandum is the work of the American branch of a radical Islamist organization called the Muslim Brotherhood (MB). The Memorandum outlines the purpose of the MB in the United States and Canada. That goal is nothing less than the destruction of our civilization and our way of life from within so that Islam will become dominant and sharia law established as the law of the land. This work is variously described as a “grand Jihad” or a “civilizational-Jihad process.” Unlike the 9/11 attacks, however, this jihad is not one of violent attacks but of gradual Islamization. Muslims are urged to “settle” in North America and adopt a superficially tolerant and benign attitude. Then, once they have obtained public acceptance, Muslims are directed to garner political and social power in order to effect a radical transformation of society.⁶

The approach advocated by the Memorandum is similar to a Communist technique known as “boring from within.” The key difference, however, is that Communism was an ideology based on empirical data. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the demonstrated failures of central economic planning, the ideology has largely collapsed as a political force. The ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood, on the other hand, is based on fanatical dogma. It is not subject to falsification or disproof. It does not require money or political power to exert influence over people—yet when it acquires these things it becomes a serious threat indeed.

What has been missed since 9/11 is that the terror attacks and the civilizational jihad of the Muslim Brotherhood are both children of the same ideology. Instead of recognizing this, American leaders have resorted to the mantra that Islam was only tangentially related to the 9/11 atrocities. Some—usually those on the political Left—have even used the attacks as motivation for acts of penance or appeasement toward the Islamic world. Faced with uncertainty on one hand and self-abasement on the other, people in America and the Western world remain unaware, even 13 years later, of the extent to which militant Islam has infiltrated their countries and institutions—and unaware, too, of the threat this infiltration poses.

While it is true that many American Muslims are peaceful people who mean their country and their neighbors no harm, this is by no means true of all. For decades, militant Islamic groups have used the cover provided by their well-meaning brothers to further the cause of civilizational jihad as outlined in the Memorandum. Using America as a safe haven, they have planned, funded, and orchestrated jihadist attacks against non-Muslims. Many put on a public face of moderation and religious pluralism while privately pursuing goals radically opposed to American ideals and principles. Too often, critics who dare to call out this hypocrisy are silenced by charges of racism and bigotry. In the name of high-minded tolerance and understanding, public officials have gone along with the hypocrisy; in so doing, they provide cover to the bitterest enemies our nation has ever faced.

This is not a tale inspired by bigotry or paranoia—it is well-documented and long-established fact.

THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD

The story begins with the group which authored the “Explanatory Memorandum,” the Muslim Brotherhood. The MB is not like the stereotypical terrorist groups one thinks of when jihadists or radical Islamists are mentioned. Their difference with al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden could be called a difference of tactics rather than beliefs. Like bin Laden, the MB wants to see the whole world submit to Islam and the rule of sharia law. But the MB prefers to pursue this goal—in the Western world, anyway—by different means than mass murder.

The MB was founded in 1928 by an Egyptian named Hassan al-Banna. He was fueled by a vision of a restored caliphate, a political and religious union of Muslims that would continue the work of Islamizing the globe. Although his aims were radical, al-Banna was no hothead. The approach he favored for restoring Islam to its “rightful” place involved the gradual replacement of secular forms of government with Muslims who secretly favored Islamic political dominion.⁷

Because al-Banna’s MB movement favors gradual takeover and careful preparation, some Western observers ignorantly or fancifully imagine that the group is anti-jihadist or moderate. In fact, the MB has no qualms about engaging in terrorism whenever they believe it will further their aims. It only opposes terrorism when it “reverses gains hard won by other jihad strategies: propaganda, education, indoctrination, communication, ingratiation, and infiltration.”⁸ When necessary, however, the MB must be ready to kill as a religious duty, as al-Banna made clear:

The Quran has commanded people to love death more than life. Unless the philosophy of the Quran replaces the love of life which has consumed Muslims, they will reach naught. Victory can only come with the mastery of the art of death.⁹

Following in the footsteps of their leader, MB members learned to conceal their hostility to western culture and western democracy. When members of the Brotherhood began to arrive in North America in significant numbers in the 1960s, they were already well practiced in presenting themselves in acceptable and respectable forms. Former FBI Special Agent George Sadler, who spent years investigating the Brotherhood, writes:

The Muslim Brotherhood has figured that they can be successful promoting radical change from within the U.S. while supporting the armed struggle outside the U.S., primarily through fundraising and closely associated Palestinian terrorist organizations.¹⁰

Sadler’s words are confirmed by the “Explanatory Memorandum.” The document reaffirms the MB’s commitment to the “global Islamic movement” which it says was originally begun by Muhammad himself and then revitalized by Banna. It also emphasizes the importance of either creating Islamic organizations or subverting existing ones to its own ends wherever possible.¹¹

The authors of a powerful 2004 exposé of the MB in the Chicago Tribune noted that the organization’s approach in America “reflected a long-standing Brotherhood belief: First you change the person, then the family, then the community, then the nation.”¹² Thanks to organizational prowess and Saudi financial support, the MB have gained control over hundreds of American mosques and established dozens of new facilities and institutions of their own. For example, the Bridgeview Mosque in the Chicago suburbs originally catered to a community of moderate Palestinian Muslims on the South Side. Members of a Brotherhood-affiliated organization took over the leadership, got the deed to the property turned over to a front group, and transformed the community mosque into a hotbed of jihadist preaching.¹³

One of the best-known creations of the MB is the Harakat al-Muqawamah al-Islamiyah, the Islamic Resistance Movement, which readers will know by its more popular name, “Hamas.” Hamas was founded in 1987 by leaders of the MB in Gaza with the ultimate goal of annihilating Israel and replacing it with an Islamic state.¹⁴ In its 1988 charter, Hamas claims that Jews are responsible for everything from the French Revolution to freemasonry to both of the World Wars. America’s branch of the MB has worked tirelessly in support of this movement, its hateful ideology, and its genocidal plans from the very beginning.

Three MB organizations in the U.S. have been particularly prominent in working to fund and support Hamas. In the words of one researcher, Hamas “has developed the most sophisticated American infrastructure.”¹⁵ The Holy Land Foundation mentioned at the beginning of this chapter was one of those organizations. Its connection to Hamas and terrorism was demonstrated in federal court.¹⁶ A particularly influential MB member in this line of work was Mousa Abu Marzook, who came to the U.S. in 1982 as a doctoral student.¹⁷ Marzook helped raise funds for Hamas in America, and then in 1989 became its effective leader following the arrest of its previous leader. Marzook was made head of the organization’s Political Bureau when it was formed in 1991 and proceeded to raise and distribute funds for terror operations from his home in suburban Virginia. He even directed the recruiting and training of new Hamas operatives.¹⁸

The American MB response to the 1993 Oslo Agreement between Israel and Palestine provides an excellent look at the organization. Most Americans at the time were immensely pleased by the agreement, thinking peace between Arabs and Israelis was finally at hand. At the same time, leaders of two MB organizations were gathering in Philadelphia to discuss their own take on the situation. Thanks to an FBI wiretap which was later declassified, we have full access to their plotting.¹⁹

The wiretap reveals that MB leaders in America viewed Arafat as a traitor, calling him a “pure Jew” for making peace with the enemy. They were concerned that the agreement undermined and delegitimized acts of terrorism against Israel.²⁰ Faced with the prospect of becoming sidelined, the MB leaders discussed ways to aid Hamas in its jihadist campaign in order to undermine both the agreement and the new Palestinian Authority. Leaders agreed that they would maintain public respectability on this issue by emphasizing “humanitarian suffering, refugees’ rights and [other] issues which the Americans will agree with you on.” Another leader explicitly said, “[we will] send two messages; one to the Americans and one to the Muslims.”²¹ American jihadists had to walk a fine line between supporting Hamas on the one hand while being able to publicly deny any accusations of involvement in terrorism on the other. The leaders found it increasingly difficult to manage this balancing act, so the idea of creating a new organization to carry out the double game of jihad with a respectable face was floated. This idea was the seed of what would become the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).²²

THE COUNCIL ON AMERICAN-ISLAMIC RELATIONS

Officially incorporated in 1994, CAIR presents itself publicly as an advocate for the Muslim community and its civil liberties. In reality, the organization has been named several times as a co-conspirator in the support of known terrorist organizations.²³ In one high-profile case, leaders of the HLF acting as a front for the Muslim Brotherhood were convicted in 2008 on multiple counts of money laundering and providing funds, goods, and services to a known terrorist group. CAIR was named, along with several Muslim charity groups, as an unindicted co-conspirator in the case. When CAIR sued to have its status as co-conspirator legally removed, the U.S. government successfully argued that CAIR’s conspiracy “was confirmed by testimony and documentary evidence admitted at trial.”²⁴

CAIR has just managed to remain on the edge of legal respectability, but many individual officials within the organization have not been so lucky. Federal and local authorities have characterized the group’s offices “as a virtual turnstile for terrorists and their supporters.”²⁵ For example, Randall Royer was a top official with CAIR from 1997 until 2001, during which time he traveled to Pakistan to train at the same terrorist camp which produced the Mumbai attacks. From his home in Northern Virginia Royer was the head of a cell of Virginia-based jihadists plotting a chemical and explosive weapons attack in the Washington, D.C. area. Royer’s plot was exposed, and in 2003 he was sentenced to 20 years in prison.²⁶ Also in 2003, CAIR’s director of community affairs was sent to prison for bank and visa fraud in connection with an al-Qaeda affiliate in North America.²⁷ In 2005, the founding director of CAIR’s Texas chapter was convicted of using his business to launder money for Hamas.²⁸ The founder and first president of CAIR, Omar Ahmad, made no secret of his intentions: “Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant … The Quran should be the highest authority in America.”²⁹

Despite such connections, CAIR has been effective in extracting money from various organizations by raising absurd claims of victimhood. One of the most financially lucrative cases was the Nike incident from the late 1990s. CAIR charged that a new design for the Nike Air bore an offensive resemblance to the word ‘Allah’. Faced with negative press, Nike apologized, recalled the offending shoe, and offered corporate donations to mosques hand-picked by CAIR.³⁰

CAIR has also raised the specter of alleged hate crimes perpetrated against Muslims. Yet even in the wake of 9/11, the number of violent incidents against Muslims has never exceeded the number of similar incidents reported against Jews. In 2011, for instance, there were 157 “hate crime” incidents targeting Muslims compared to 771 targeting Jews.³¹ There are no crime statistics supporting a wave of “Islamophobia” in America, so CAIR manufactures its own. Readers may be surprised to learn that CAIR classified the arrest of Hamas leader Mousa Abu Marzook and the trial of the so-called Blind Sheikh for plotting mass murder in New York City as hate crimes.³² Even criticism of jihadist activity is a hate crime as far as CAIR is concerned.³³

Any journalist attempting to reveal negative details about Islam in America has been subjected to smears. Stephen Emerson was one of the first to receive such treatment after his 1994 investigative documentary, Jihad in America. The documentary, which aired on PBS, received a number of prestigious accolades. CAIR was at the forefront of the Muslim groups which replied with a “brutal campaign of vilification and defamation,” calling Emerson an anti-Arab racist. These attacks were successful, and Emerson was blacklisted by NPR.³⁴

Writing for US News and World Report, journalist John Leo characterized CAIR’s approach this way:

Why do CAIR and other groups push the “bias” button so hard? Well, the victim stance works. It attracts press attention and has made the “bias against Muslims” article a staple of big-city dailies. It encourages Muslims to feel angry and non-Muslims to feel guilty. It raises a great deal of money, garners a lot of TV time, and gets the attention of Congress. And by pre-positioning all future criticism as bias, it tends to intimidate or silence even the most sensible critics.³⁵

Muslims who do not go along with the ideology of the MB are not spared the same treatment. CAIR founder Omar Ahmed was clear on this: “As for the organizations which want to dissent from the Islamic position for personal interests or out of fear … We must pressure them and embarrass them by various means until they adhere to our position or, at least, remain neutral.”³⁶ When the head of the Islamic Supreme Council of America, Muhammad Hisham Kabbani, denounced fundamentalist Islam, he too was subjected to accusations that he had insulted all Muslims. He even received death threats.³⁷

CAIR’s approach has not only undermined law-enforcement efforts against terrorism, it has resulted in a widespread waste of resources. By repeatedly responding to terror-fighting actions with accusations of discrimination, racism, defamation, and racial-profiling, CAIR has been allowed to actively shape the investigation process. According to investigators, CAIR has been invited by both the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security to conduct sensitivity training seminars for agents—“a dangerous disinformation campaign designed to desensitize police to the threat from Islamic terrorism.”³⁸ In short, CAIR manufactures an “Islamaphobia” crisis, then sets itself up as an indispensable bridge between Muslims and the government.

The Justice Department banned formal contact with CAIR after the 2008 case which showed its conspiracy with a terror organization. Yet the FBI has continued its policy of outreach to the group under the illusion that this is somehow beneficial to the FBI. Despite evidence that this collaboration is actually beneficial to the terrorists the FBI is purportedly trying to combat, political correctness has kept the agency on the same suicidal track.³⁹

In fact, the FBI has a new policy in place that allows agents to associate even with groups that support violence if those groups are also involved in legitimate activity. Imagine the FBI coordinating with Al Capone’s mob on the grounds that Capone was still donating hundreds of thousands of dollars to charity! From its association with groups like CAIR, the FBI purged former training materials which were deemed prejudiced against Muslims. One journalist remarked on the policy shift:

The net result of the U.S. government’s Muslim outreach has not just been the empowerment of extremists at the expense of marginalizing authentic moderates. Now the Obama administration has institutionalized these relationships where the very extremists they have empowered and embraced are now dictating inherently dangerous public policy.⁴⁰

Words such as ‘jihad’ have been purposefully removed from government pronouncements. As a result, Major Nidal Hasan’s massacre of fellow soldiers at Fort Hood has been classified not as an act of jihad but as a case of “workplace violence.”⁴¹

INFILTRATION OF HIGHER EDUCATION

In 1988, an informant inside the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood network revealed the organization’s six-phase plan to get inside government and university organizations.⁴² Through front groups such as the International Institute for Islamic Thought (IIIT), the MB has managed to spread its influence into a number of universities.⁴³ This influence comes in a variety of forms. At George Mason University, the IIIT provided $1.5 million to endow a professorship in Islamic Studies. At Hartford Seminary, it has provided $1 million to establish a chair in Islamic Chaplaincy. At other schools, such as SUNY Binghamton, the IIIT sponsors lectures. Shenandoah University signed an agreement to designate an instructor (presumably one the IIIT approves of) to co-teach a course in Islamic civilization.⁴⁴

It’s not just the Muslim Brotherhood, either. The Alavi Foundation, an alleged component of Iran’s propaganda machine, has also invested heavily in North American academia. The group proudly lists 30 academic institutions in the United States and Canada which it has provided funding for. Meanwhile, the Foundation has been accused of funneling money to an Iranian bank linked to that country’s nuclear program. The president of the Foundation has already pled guilty to destroying evidence before it could be submitted to a grand jury. In the words of a journalist covering the case, “The Foundation’s purpose is not only to launder money for the regime, but to become subtly engaged in the ideological war. U.S. officials told the Washington Post that the Foundation ‘promotes Tehran’s views on world affairs.’”⁴⁵

Perhaps the single largest influence on university campuses is Saudi Wahhabism. Over the past 30 years, the Saudi government has spent about $70 billion dollars to spread Wahhabi propaganda around the world. In the United States, partly as a result, college curricula and public opinion have been steered toward the Wahhabi view of the Middle East, which depicts Israel as a cancer and American influence as hateful “crusaderism.”⁴⁶

One of the biggest success stories for Saudi money is the Middle East Studies program at Columbia. Palestinians dominate the teaching of the modern Middle East and present a decidedly anti-Israeli view of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Academics in the program are often known more for their political activism than their scholarship. A case in point is Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said Chair of Arab Studies, an activist who is on record as describing the killing of Israelis as justifiable resistance to occupation. Columbia’s head of International Studies has admitted publicly that Middle East studies at her school—and nationwide—aren’t even close to balanced.⁴⁷

The University of California system has also received its share of Saudi financing. The head of Middle East Studies at UC Santa Barbara holds a chair named after the previous king of Saudi Arabia. The Center for Middle East Studies at UC Berkeley has received more than $5 million in grants from a pair of Saudis connected to groups which were later recognized by the U.S. government as front groups for al-Qaeda. UC Berkeley later became the origin of a petition (supported by faculty members) asking the federal government to divest itself of all investments and funding in Israel. The head of the Muslim American Society has conceded that, “Saudi gifts oblige their recipients to favor Wahhabism: [the Saudis say] ‘We’re gonna give you our money, then we want you to … prefer our school of thought.’”⁴⁸

Most Americans don’t realize that some of the propaganda funding comes right out of their own pockets. After 9/11, the government directed more funding toward the Title VI program—a program begun during the Cold War to facilitate analysis of the Soviet regime and its intentions. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, Congress strengthened the program’s shift toward funding Middle East Centers at American colleges and universities to teach Arabic and provide cultural education necessary for improved analysis of jihadists and their plans. Instead, partly through Saudi influence these centers are frequently hotbeds of anti-American and anti-Israeli propaganda.⁴⁹

THE PRISON SYSTEM AND ISLAMIC RADICALIZATION

One route Islamic radicals have taken to gain rapid influence in American society has been through the prison system. Law enforcement, prison officials, journalists, politicians, and academics have made extensive study of prison radicalization—one of the most fertile sources of homegrown jihadist activity in the country. In the words of two political scientists from Roosevelt University, “The threat produced by the introduction of radical Islam into the U.S. and other democratic states’ prison populations is very real although the severity of the threat is up for debate.”⁵⁰ Factors complicating the assessment of the problem include the secretive nature of terror recruitment and the diversity of Islamic teachings offered within prison walls.

Despite difficulties with assessment, prison populations almost by definition are full of violent young men with a predisposition toward anti-social behavior. Some of these men consider themselves victims of society, and are accordingly receptive to being converted to ideologies espousing retribution while offering personal and political meaning.⁵¹ According to a Los Angeles police lieutenant who studied the problem:

Prisons literally provide a captive audience of disaffected young men easily influenced by charismatic extremist leaders. These inmates, mostly minorities, feel that the United States has discriminated against them or against minorities and Muslims overseas. This perceived oppression, combined with a limited knowledge of Islam, makes this population vulnerable for extremists looking to radicalize and recruit.⁵²

Islam is the fastest-growing subculture in U.S. prisons, with significant numbers of prisoners converting. Given that the U.S. has the highest prison inmate population in the world, with 2.24 million incarcerated as of 2015, this is cause for concern.⁵³ Testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee, a professor who has studied the problem estimated that as many as 350,000 Muslims were currently housed in American prisons, with an additional 30,000-40,000 more being added each year, mostly by conversion.⁵⁴ An FBI counterterrorism expert has also revealed that radicalized prison inmates have been involved in homegrown terrorist plots in complete isolation from international terrorist organizations. According to this expert, while most prison converts have not emerged as threats to national security, there are “instances where charismatic elements within prison have used the call of Global Jihad as a source of inspiration to recruit others for the purpose of conducting terrorist attacks in the United States.”⁵⁵ The notorious “shoe bomber” Richard Reid was converted to radical Islam during his term in a prison in the United Kingdom.

The purpose of radical recruiters in prison is to build a pool of potential terrorists from which they can handpick individuals for future attacks. Such recruits need not become part of a larger organization like al-Qaeda—and many don’t. Instead, they bond with like-minded individuals and form autonomous terror cells. There is no way of knowing which cells or how many will later go operational.⁵⁶ Jihadists in prison typically focus on one potential convert at a time. The recruiter will paint a picture of the global Islamic community under threat from aggressive infidels and their apostate allies. The antidote to the threat he presents is jihad, not as spiritual quest but as armed insurrection.⁵⁷

Jihadist recruiters are also active in prison as part of an effort to shift the profile of Islamist attackers. Western and non-Muslim prisoners are preferred targets for recruiting efforts because such individuals simply do not fit the terrorist profile.⁵⁸ A 2010 study found that, of 139 Muslim-Americans connected with violent terrorism between 2001 and 2009, the plurality were Arabs, but 24 percent were African American and 20 percent were Caucasian.⁵⁹

A case in point is Kevin James, a prison convert from California. James and three cohorts conducted a series of gas station robberies over several years to fund a bombing plot hatched in Folsom Prison. The plot was foiled when one member of the gang was caught in connection with a holdup, but the FBI Director described the group as well on their way toward pulling off the attack. If not for a chance arrest, the group might have pulled off a mass killing without any direction from a large terror group like al-Qaeda.⁶⁰ Such homegrown terror cells are extremely difficult to uncover, as the Boston Marathon Bombing by the Tsarnaev brothers later demonstrated.

Another problem contributing to prison radicalization is a shortage of qualified Muslim chaplains throughout the prison system. Through the efforts of Senator Chuck Schumer, the Bureau of Prisons was revealed several years back to be relying heavily on Saudi-funded Wahhabi clerics, who promote “an extremist exclusionary form of Islam.”⁶¹ Several researchers into the problem have advocated the promotion of moderate Muslim prison ministry to counteract efforts to spread an ideology of violent jihad.

RADICAL MOSQUES AND ISLAMIC CENTERS

Another route jihadists use to gain influence in American society involves the infiltration of mosques and Islamic centers. Contrary to the wishful thinking of politicians who prefer to dismiss terror atrocities as isolated events, jihadist beliefs are nurtured by very well-funded networks. These networks tend to cluster around popular mosques and prominent leaders. The Bridgeview mosque in Chicago was taken over by MB elements and ended up connecting local Muslims with the planning and funding of mass murder attempts in Israel. But an example which hits closer to home involves the Dar al-Hijrah mosque and Islamic Center in the Washington, D.C. suburb of Falls Church, Virginia.

Dar al-Hijrah was opened in 1991 thanks in part to funding from the Saudi embassy, and its deed is owned by a MB financial organization. A large and successful center with thousands attending its worship services, Dar al-Hijrah also has broad and deep connections to jihadist teaching and activity. Imam Mohammed al-Hanooti was heard in 1998 remarking (in Arabic, of course) that Israel and the United States were planning to destroy Muslims and praying for “Allah [to] rain his curse on the Americans and the British.”⁶² Al-Hanooti was an associate of convicted American terrorist Omar Abdel Rahman and a prominent fundraiser for Hamas.⁶³

Al-Hanooti was replaced by a San Diego imam named Anwar al-Awlaki—a dedicated terrorist who would eventually meet his demise in 2011 during a drone strike in Yemen. When Awlaki arrived at Dar al-Hijrah in 2001 he was already under FBI investigation for his connections to an Islamic charity suspected of funneling money to terrorists. Awlaki reconnected with two men from San Diego in Virginia, and through Dar al-Hijrah he managed to get them housing and identification in Virginia.⁶⁴ On 9/11, these two men were part of the five-man team that flew American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon.

During his leadership of Dar al-Hijrah, Awlaki met with a U.S. Army officer named Nidal Hasan. The two men established an email correspondence after Awlaki had left the country. They exchanged messages right up until Hasan went on a jihadist rampage at Fort Hood in 2009. On his website, Awlaki proclaimed Hasan a hero and a man of conscience after the attack. A month after Hasan’s attack, another “man of conscience” tried to blow up his Christmas Day flight as it approached Detroit. The so-called underwear bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, was sent on his mission by none other than Anwar al-Awlaki.⁶⁵

For 20 years, Dar al-Hijrah has been a recruiting ground and networking center for jihadist indoctrination and activity. It has been under the direction of Muslim Brotherhood leaders committed to jihad in America and abroad. But Dar al-Hijrah is far from being alone.

The al-Farooq mosque in Brooklyn has also been a popular site for jihadists to teach, recruit, and raise funds. One particularly infamous member was Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian jihadist and one-time mentor of Osama bin Laden. Azzam taught members of the al-Farooq mosque bluntly, “Whenever jihad is mentioned in the Holy Book, it means the obligation to fight. It does not mean to fight with the pen or to write books or articles in the press or to fight by holding lectures.”⁶⁶ Another key member was imam Omar Abdel Rahman (nicknamed the Blind Sheikh). One of Rahman’s followers was responsible for the 1990 murder of Rabbi Meir Kahane in Manhattan.⁶⁷ But Rahman had a much bigger spectacle in mind: he and nine co-conspirators, after moving to a new mosque in Jersey City, planned a catastrophic “Day of Terror” involving bombs at UN headquarters, in the Lincoln and Holland tunnels and the George Washington Bridge, and at the main government building in Manhattan. Thankfully, the plot was exposed and all ten men were arrested in 1993 before they could carry out their attack.

The Islamic Society of Boston is where the Tsarnaev brothers attended mosque services before carrying out the Boston Marathon Bombing. Before the Tsarnaev brothers were on the scene, there were already connections between this Islamic center and terrorist activities. One member of the Islamic Society was Aafia Siddiqui. Also known as “Lady Al Qaeda,” Siddiqui was captured in 2008 in Kabul, Afghanistan with plans to target Americans both in that country and in New York City. Another Islamic Society attendee, Tarek Mehanna, was convicted in 2012 of conspiring to aid al-Qaeda and sentenced to 17 years in prison. One of the founders of the Islamic Society of Boston, Abdurahman Alamoudi, was himself a fundraiser for al-Qaeda and was sentenced to 23 years in prison for providing funds to terrorist organizations. Prior to his conviction, Alamoudi was an Islamic Affairs adviser and State Department “goodwill ambassador” to Muslim countries under the Clinton administration and was part of a group of Muslim leaders that publicly met with President Bush a few days after 9/11.⁶⁸

Based on testimony by a former Muslim religious leader, as many as 80 percent of U.S. mosques are led by Wahhabi clerics or other radicals. Opponents claim this number is overblown, but their arguments rest upon a deceptive idea of what constitutes “radical” Islam. A review of literature freely available at mosques across the country shows that the promotion of Islamic supremacy, sharia law, and a view of jihad as armed struggle on behalf of the faith is common. Imams do not have to preach that their followers should go out and kill Americans in order to contribute to radicalization. There also remain many prominent and gullible people who too easily fall for the duplicity and deception that jihadists and Islamic supremacists have been employing in America for 50 years.

BIASED HISTORY TEXTBOOKS

Another route jihadists use to gain influence in American society involves the manipulation of what is taught about Islam in school textbooks. In 2008, a non-profit, non-partisan research organization called the American Textbook Council put together a report on some of the most commonly used history textbooks in the country. The report found that, while many political and religious groups have tried to use the textbook process to their own advantage:

The deficiencies in Islam-related lessons are uniquely disturbing. History textbooks present an incomplete and confected view of Islam that misrepresents its foundations and challenges to international security.⁶⁹

The key problem was not clear falsehoods, but the inclusion of disputed conclusion as well as a sugar-coating of Islam that other religions and beliefs do not enjoy. Even when publishers were informed about such contested details, their response was to ignore them or to double down by removing material which might be deemed offensive to Islam. The report found that a combination of Islamic activism and political correctness on the part of publishers contributed to the situation: “Islamic activists use multiculturalism and ready-made American political movements, especially those on campus, to advance and justify uncritical Islam-related content makeover in history textbooks.”⁷⁰

Researcher Daniel Pipes has encountered the same situation. A discussion of the 9/11 hijackers in one textbook refers to them merely as a “team of terrorists” without referencing their religion or al-Qaeda. Like the American Textbook Council, Pipes attributes the situation to a combination of “Islamic groups that are urging to have these unpleasant topics not discussed” and “activism on the part of the educational establishment which tends to see Muslims not in any kind of threatening posture but as victims … who need to be reached out to.”⁷¹

Due to the work of researchers such as Pipes and the American Textbook Council, the Texas School Board took up the debate of pro-Islamic bias in textbooks. Investigations by the Board found that many history books being considered for use by the state contained “sanitized” definitions of jihad and ignored the active persecution of non-Muslim groups in Muslim countries in favor of focusing on the past misdeeds of America and European countries. The Board’s efforts were treated by the politically correct media as little more than wasted effort on a non-problem.⁷²

GROWING POLITICAL INFLUENCE

Of course, one of the most attractive ways to gain influence over American society is to acquire political power. On this front, Islamists have made inroads thanks to a growing population and considerable financial clout. As reporter Daniel Greenfield notes, officials in states with large Muslim populations are starting to form ties with Islamic associations—even those which serve as “front groups for the Muslim Brotherhood or other organizations that are equally antithetical to the United States.” Despite its documented connections with such groups, CAIR has enough influence that former Ohio governor Ted Strickland chose to speak at a banquet hosted by the organization and pander to Muslim causes.⁷³

In early 2013, the Obama administration nominated John Brennan for Director of the CIA. Like the President, Brennan spent time in Indonesia in the 70s, where Islam came to shape his worldview:

Like the president during his childhood years in Jakarta, I came to see Islam not how it is often represented, but for what it is—how it is practiced every day, by well over a billion Muslims worldwide, a faith of peace and tolerance and great diversity.⁷⁴

Brennan has been a leading proponent of eliminating terms Muslims find offensive, such as “jihadists.”

A number of Islamists have found positions at the table in the Obama administration. Their number includes a former Assistant Secretary in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) whose prior claim to fame was “derail[ing] the LAPD’s efforts to monitor the city’s Muslim community—particularly its radical mosques and madrassas where certain 9/11 hijackers were said to have received support.”⁷⁵ Another senior advisor in DHS, Mohammad Elibiary, was a longtime donor to the Holy Land Foundation, five of whose leaders were convicted for financing terrorism, and has argued that the HLF’s imprisoned leader is a victim of political persecution. Elibiary has helped to perpetuate the lie that CAIR is merely a civil rights charity, has called America “a Muslim country,” and has recently claimed that a new caliphate is “inevitable.”⁷⁶ One appointee to the National Commission on Terrorism ended up having his nomination scuttled after it was revealed that he had publicly defended Hezbollah and other Islamic groups.

Columnist Andrew McCarthy has observed several recent changes in U.S. government policy concerning the Muslim Brotherhood. The State Department has reversed a policy limiting formal contacts with members of the Brotherhood. It pushed to continue providing $1.5 billion in funding to Egypt even after the government was taken over by MB. The government dropped investigations into MB organizations in the U.S. despite those groups being previously identified as co-conspirators to provide money to Hamas.⁷⁷

Interestingly enough, these changes took place at a time when then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s top aide was Huma Abedin—a woman with documented family ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. Abedin’s mother, Saleha, is a member of the female division of the MB (the “Muslim Sisterhood”). Abedin herself was a member of the executive board of the Muslim Students Association, a key Muslim Brotherhood foundational organization in the United States.⁷⁸

ISLAMIC SEPARATISM

The growing influence of Islam in America has opened the door to separatism and criminal activity among Islamic populations. One of the best-documented cases of this involves the Somali Muslim population. In a high-profile bust in 2010, federal officials netted around three dozen Somali Muslim gang members operating out of Minnesota, Tennessee, and Ohio. Members were charged with burglary, car theft, and credit-card fraud. But the most heinous crimes involved a sex-trafficking and prostitution ring using runaways and girls “recruited” by gang members by false promises.⁷⁹ According to government officials, Somali immigrant communities in Tennessee and Minneapolis worked together over a ten-year period and exploited girls as young as 12 years old.⁸⁰

The Somali immigrant problem is a self-inflicted injury by the federal government. Motivated by humanitarian concerns, about 70,000 Somalis have been moved to the United States; 13,000 in 2004 alone. Most of these came from a strongly religious and tribal culture and had little exposure to western housing, electricity, flush toilets, telephones, or household appliances. They were essentially dropped off in America en masse with minimal orientation or adjustment.⁸¹

Tennessee journalist Brian Mosely has documented the disastrous results of this policy on the small town of Shelbyville. Charity groups helped relocate a community of several hundred Muslim immigrants to a small Christian town and then effectively left them on their own. Cultural clashes abounded. Immigrants refused to accept women in supervisory roles at the local schools and expected schools to provide free child care. Firefighters discovered the immigrants wouldn’t leave their apartments after a fire alarm—or even during an actual fire—but instead told firefighters they weren’t welcome. Police encountered resistance to their authority, and some officers were hesitant to patrol after dark in Somali areas. In short, the Somalis had little contact with their neighbors or local officials and instead created their own isolated community within a community.⁸²

As a result of this isolation, the American Somali community has been a significant source of terrorism. The largest Somali community in America—located in Minneapolis, Minnesota—has been producing jihadist fighters for years. The Al Shabab group which conducted the deadly Westgate Mall attack in Nairobi, Kenya has been receiving Somali-American fighters for six years. A recent video produced by Al Shabab lauded three “Minnesotan martyrs,” including one American-born convert to Islam.⁸³

Humanitarian considerations are no justification for importing groups with no intention or ability to assimilate. In Mosely’s words, it is “immoral” to do so. While it is possible to help refugees out on a family by family basis, bringing in large masses of them to fill federal quotas and then leaving them on their own without the knowledge or experience of how to support themselves in a modern western society is disgraceful. It should come as no surprise that some members of these communities would turn to extreme forms of their religion or to terrorism.⁸⁴

TERROR ATTACKS IN AMERICA

The growing influence of radical Islam in the United States has opened the door to ideologies more extreme than the Muslim Brotherhood. As a result, a number of terrorist attacks and attempted attacks since 9/11 have been carried out by American Muslims—many of them with little or no connection to organized terror. Most were “self-radicalized” or turned to militant Islam with little guidance or prompting from others.

Foiled attacks include a 2009 plot to blow up a synagogue and a Jewish community center in New York City. Three U.S. citizens and a Haitian were convicted in the case. The main clue as to motivation was reported unhappiness about U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In 2010, Pakistani-American Faisal Shahzad was arrested for a car bombing attempt in Times Square. Later that same year, Somali-American Mohamed Osman Mohamud was arrested for a plot to car bomb a Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Portland, Oregon. Mohamud admitted he was motivated by a desire to carry out violent jihad. In 2011, Rezwan Ferdaus, a U.S. citizen, was arrested for a plot to detonate remote-controlled aircraft loaded with explosives over the Pentagon and the Capitol building. Ferdaus said he was motivated by watching al-Qaeda videos online.

One of the most significant terror attacks since 9/11 came at the hands of a Muslim officer in the U.S. Army. Major Nidal Hasan went on a shooting rampage at Fort Hood on November 5, 2009, killing 13 and injuring more than 30 others. While serving in the Army, Hasan came to believe that he was on the “wrong side” in America’s war on terror. He admitted in his court-martial that he switched sides and opened fire on fellow soldiers to prevent them from going to Afghanistan to kill his fellow Muslims.⁸⁵

The Fort Hood massacre has been problematic for the government and the military to deal with. From the start, there were signs that Army officers with concerns about Hasan’s growing radicalization may have remained silent due to an atmosphere of political correctness that discouraged noticing anything negative about Muslims soldiers. Both the Pentagon and the U.S. government have declined requests to categorize the attack as an act of terrorism or as motivated by Islamic religious convictions. Officially, the Pentagon says it has not done so because it would compromise prosecution efforts, but a spokesman for the families of the victims says this claim is nonsense.⁸⁶ Hasan was found guilty of premeditated murder and sentenced to death in August, 2013.

On April 15, 2013 two brothers, members of a Muslim family which emigrated from Chechnya, carried out a deadly bombing near the finish line at the Boston Marathon. Three people were killed and more than 250 injured in multiple blasts. A fourth person was killed the next day when the brothers attempted to flee from police. By the admission of the surviving brother, the pair was self-taught and self-radicalized. They learned how to make bombs by watching videos online. Although the pair were motivated by extremist Islamic beliefs, they weren’t acting in concert with any known terror groups.⁸⁷

These cases demonstrate that there is no need for central coordination or high-level funding for deadly terror attacks. Each Muslim is capable of acting as a terror entrepreneur, limited only by his own efforts and willingness to sacrifice for the cause. Because of the lack of coordination or money, such individuals can be very difficult—if not impossible—to track. It is of vital importance that the ideology which dominates these individuals be uprooted. Anything less would be to rely upon chance to uncover plots before they become reality.

ISLAM AND THE U.S. CONSTITUTION

Apologists for Islam often make the argument that the increasing Muslim presence in America and other western countries is no cause for concern. Muslims will supposedly adapt to western institutions such as democracy and the rule of law. This argument, however, is superficial at best. The issue is not simply whether the burka may be worn or not, it is much more fundamental—will Muslims be primarily subject to the secular laws of their host countries or to the Islamic law embodied in sharia? Concessions to sharia have already been made in European countries with sizable Muslims populations. It remains to be seen what the case will be in America.

The crucial difference between the idea of law in Islam and the same idea in America will be seen in the beginning of the U.S. Constitution: “We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union.” From the start, it is understood that it is the people who are coming together to create their government and its laws—as Abraham Lincoln put it, “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” This belief is fundamentally at odds with Islamic law, which claims to be derived directly from God through the intermediary of immutable, irrefutable religious texts. An elite group of Islamic scholars, appointed by other Muslim clerics, are responsible for the interpretation of this law. Everyone else is excluded.

The U.S. government is based upon the Constitution. Article VI declares, “This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby.” Sharia, on the other hand, is based upon religious texts: “The source of legal rulings for all acts of those who are morally responsible is Allah … There is only one law which ought to be followed, and that is the sharia.”⁸⁸

Sharia cannot co-exist for long with any other legal system. The reason for this is that Islam is a complete way of life, which includes a legal and moral code obligatory to all Muslims. Since Islamic law does not prescribe any specific form of government, many Muslim countries have parliaments and governmental structures which seem compatible with Western forms of government. On closer examination, however, the fundamental basis for these structures is entirely different.

The difference can be seen most clearly, perhaps, in the concept of separation of powers. The U.S. Constitution describes three separate branches of government (the legislative, the executive, the judicial), each with its own duties and responsibilities and checks and balances designed to prevent one from becoming superior to the others. Contrast this with the Iranian regime, which styles itself as an Islamic Republic. Iran has an elected legislature and an elected president. Yet the president cannot serve without being appointed by the Supreme Leader. The Supreme Leader is appointed by a group of Islamic scholars whose sole responsibility is to the Qur’an. Unlike our Constitution, the Qur’an cannot be changed or amended. The Constitution of Iran is interpreted by a Guardian Council, which consists of 12 members appointed by the Supreme Leader. All laws enacted by the legislature must be approved by the Guardian Council. The purpose of this setup is to ensure that every law is consistent with sharia. The structure of the Iranian regime makes it clear that the government is not “of the people, by the people, for the people.” Rather, the entire thing is under the control of religious scholars, and the will of the people can never prevail against them.

While U.S. judges may have debates about the “intent” of the Founders or the legislatures which frame the laws, it is clear that the American democratic system allows for flexibility. The Constitution can be amended when necessary to take into account the realities of social change and new political needs. The Constitution is not perfect, it is “more perfect” than what went before. In the Islamic system, the Qur’an is immutable and perfect. The purpose of sharia is to get humans to live in a way that conforms to that text—not the other way around.

The real battleground lies in the area of individual rights. Many devout Muslims who are by no means fundamentalists or terrorists nevertheless view sharia as taking precedence over national laws. This view opens up a number of fault lines. Many of the individual rights guaranteed to Americans under the Constitution are flatly incompatible with sharia.

The incompatibility is obvious from the start with the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” As a matter of historic and current political fact, Muslim countries under sharia law enforce second-class citizenship upon non-Muslims (a status discussed in earlier chapters, known as dhimmi). Non-Muslims face everything from limitations to outright bans on public religious observance, building or repairing houses of worship, public prayer, ringing church bells, or proselytizing for the faith. Those who violate these restrictions in sharia states face penalties ranging from fines to execution.

The First Amendment also guarantees that Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech. Under Islam, speech contrary to Islam or Muhammad is unacceptable. This particular fault line has produced unrest and violence in western countries whenever someone dares to criticize Islam or its founder. The First Amendment further guarantees a freedom to dissent, allowing people the right “to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” Islamic states under sharia do not permit criticism of the government. When the Qur’an and other authoritative texts define the law, it cannot be questioned.

Other incompatibilities include the Eight Amendment’s protection against “cruel and unusual punishments.” Sharia law regularly permits punishments which would be considered cruel and unusual on the grounds that they have religious backing. For example: “Cut off (from the wrist joint) the (right) hand of the thief, male or female, as a recompense for that which they committed, a punishment by way of example from Allah.”⁸⁹ For rape victims: “The woman and the man guilty of illegal sexual intercourse, flog each of them with a hundred stripes. Let not pity withhold you in their case, in a punishment prescribed by Allah, if you believe in Allah and the Last Day.”⁹⁰

The Constitution further ensures to every citizen equal protection and due process under the laws. Such protections cannot exist under sharia, which makes an absolute distinction between the believers and the dhimmi (non-believers under Islamic protection). For those outside the believers and the dhimmi, there is virtually no protection whatsoever. Under sharia, females do not enjoy equal protection. Non-Muslims under dhimmi protection are not equal to Muslims before the law.

Of course, Islam is much more varied than Islamic fundamentalists claim. As practiced in Malaysia or Indonesia, Islam is a much different thing than what is practiced in Saudi Arabia or Iran. Certainly many Muslims could assimilate easily into American society, but this is no thanks to Islam, but is often due to their non-Islamic cultural heritage. Should Islam be credited with the ability of a sophisticated, secular Iranian to integrate into Western culture, or should his Persian heritage receive the credit?

Fundamentalist Muslims who come to the U.S. will have to make a choice between obeying U.S. law or obeying what they believe to be their faith. Some, like Major Nidal Hasan, may come to believe they are on the “wrong side” if they choose the former. Others may decide they will only be subject to sharia and recognize no other law. America has faced conflicts with religious groups holding incompatible beliefs before. For example, Mormons formerly practiced polygamy. Despite the separation between church and state, this practice was deemed to be unacceptable when Utah petitioned to become a state. Mormons accepted that to become part of the United States they would have to give up the practice of polygamy. Muslims who demand the right to live under sharia may be asking us to revert to a state we long ago rejected, where one religion held primacy over all things. If America cannot accommodate Islamic law without endangering its most basic principles, it is the practice of Islam which must change—not American laws or values.

As the Muslim Brotherhood’s “Explanatory Memorandum” makes clear, Islam is not interested in being equal to other religions. All other religions must be replaced or else see their adherents become second-class citizens. Free inquiry is impermissible. The role Islam seeks in American life can be compared to that of a strangler fig tree. This tree germinates in the shade of its host and grows up around the body of the host. Once the strangler fig puts down roots and stands on its own, it chokes the host off from all nutrients, killing it. The host tree rots away, leaving only the strangler fig standing in the vague shape of its former host. The Muslim Brotherhood’s strangler fig has not yet taken firm root, but it is already growing into its host. It remains to be seen what the host will do to counteract the civilizational jihad at work in America.

PART SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY - EIGHT

The U.S. and the Ungrateful Arab

Since 1943 I have considered the interests of my country and community to be the same as those of the United States we differ in nothing basic … after Allah we trust in America.

—HRH King Faisal ibn Saud¹

The mistake of the West was to put the Sauds on the throne of Saudi Arabia and give them control of the world’s oil fortune, which they then used to propagate Wahhabi Islam. This very minor extremist cult, Wahhabism, was suddenly propagated across the Muslim world through madrassas and has created generations now who are steeped in this harsher, more paranoid, more confrontational version of Islam.

—Novelist Salman Rushdie²

We must confront this Zionist entity. All ties of all kinds must be severed with this plundering criminal entity, which is supported by America and its weapons, as well as by its own nuclear weapons, the existence of which is well known. It will bring about their own destruction.

—Former President Mohammed Morsi³

The tallest building in the world is now in Dubai, the biggest factory in the world is in China, the largest oil refinery is in India, the largest investment fund in the world is in Abu Dhabi, the largest Ferris wheel in the world is in Singapore.

—Author Fareed Zakaria

The relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia is one of the most contradictory in the annals of foreign policy. The former is a secular democracy, committed to the ideals of freedom of speech, religion, and the press. The latter is a theocratic monarchy which enforces a state religion and severely limits speech and the press. The U.S. champions the equality of women and ideological pluralism, while the Saudis enforce 7th century religious restrictions upon their women and refuse to permit any ideological expression which opposes Wahhabi Islam or their ruling Royal Family. In every respect, the connection between the two countries is a theological, philosophical, moral, and political contradiction. Nevertheless, the pair enjoys a special relationship—the Saudis even have their own Office of Saudi Arabian Affairs at the U.S. Treasury, the only such office for any foreign nation in that department.⁴

The usual explanation for this relationship is oil for security. The United States wants a dependable supply of oil at stable prices on the world market; the Saudis want their territorial integrity protected against all threats foreign or domestic.⁵ In 2013, this arrangement led to the Saudis exporting $51.8 billion worth of resources (mostly hydrocarbons) to the United States while importing $18.9 billion in goods from us.⁶

However, the contradictions in this relationship are immediately obvious as soon as one starts paying attention. The Saudis didn’t outlaw slavery in their territory until put under pressure by President Kennedy. Even today, as this book has documented, it exploits millions of foreign laborers under a work system whose regulations often amount to de facto slavery.⁷ Through both official and private donations, the Saudis also export their Wahhabi brand of Islam around the world—spreading a virulent, radical, literalist understanding of Islam to countries including the United States. Tellingly, 15 of the 19 hijackers on 9/11 were Saudi nationals, as was the leader of the organization which sponsored them. Despite these connections, the United States continues to treat Saudi Arabia as a key ally in its war on terror.

This treatment is coming with an increasingly heavy cost. As was discussed previously in this book, the Saudi regime was profoundly shaken by the occupation of the Grand Mosque in Mecca in 1979.⁸ It was only able to endure the humiliation of this event by conceding greater power to the ulema, the body of clerics who guide the religious policy of the country. “Over the last decade,” scholar Jennifer Delaney has observed, “the rise of Islamic extremism has tipped the balance of power away from the Royal Family towards the radical clerics.”⁹ A relationship that began with a desire to secure oil supplies and counterbalance Soviet influence in the Middle East has led to an absurd situation where American dollars flow almost directly into the coffers of the jihadists who most hate us.¹⁰

The relationship between America and the Saudis is a microcosm of America’s failed approach to the war on terror. Through a combination of short-sighted focus on oil and ideological commitment to anti-Communism, America enriched and emboldened intransigent literal Islamists and nearly destroyed the cause of secular democracy across the entire Middle East. Today, we must face the consequences of those policies. But so far, the American government has tried everything it can to avoid facing the reality of the forces it helped create and what must be done to defeat them.

THE COLD WAR AND THE RISE OF THE JIHADISTS

Before World War II, the United States had comparatively little diplomatic engagement with the Middle East. During the administrations of Presidents Truman and Eisenhower, American engagement was significantly ramped up. Almost at once, American policy was governed by a Cold War calculus: wherever leadership was socialist or sympathetic to the Soviet Union, America opposed it; wherever leadership was staunchly anti-Communist, America provided it with financial and material support.

What happened in Iran illustrates some of the dangers of this policy. President Truman backed the Shah there as a way to counter Soviet influence. When the Iranians elected the popular socialist leader Mohammed Mossadegh Prime Minister, the Eisenhower administration saw that as a potential threat. The CIA aided the coup which deposed Mossadegh by force—an act which has soured the Iranian people on American influence ever since. The Shah used the event to garner more power for himself, which further turned his people against him, eventually paving the way for the Islamic Revolution in 1979.

Saudi Arabia illustrates another pitfall of America’s anti-Communist foreign policy. The Saudis joined the anti-communist bloc during the Cold War because Communism’s atheist and political orientation put it at odds with their core Islamic values. When Gamal Abdel Nasser rose to power in Egypt, America saw his pan-Arab socialism as a threat. But while Nasser was a socialist with Soviet sympathies, he was also a proponent of secularism who opposed the theocratic monarchies of the Gulf. The Saudis saw him and his political philosophy as a threat for religious reasons.¹¹

America backed the theocratic monarchies against the secular democracies of the Arab world. Even though Saudi King Faisal used the spread of Wahhabi Islam as a counter to Nasser’s pan-Arab socialism, the Americans paid it no heed. So long as the Saudis were opposing Communism, whatever religious beliefs they wanted to promote were just fine.¹² For decades, petrodollars from America were turned to the promotion of literal Islam and opposition against secularism. After Nasser’s pan-Arabism met military defeat at the hands of Israel in 1967 and 1973, it eventually gave way to nascent jihadist thought. The countries which had been modernizing and secularizing in the 1950s and 1960s went backward socially.

With Afghanistan, as this book has already shown, the jihadists received the training, funding, and supplies to wage war against a powerful nation state. American and Saudi funding poured in for Islamic radicals from across the region. Again, America thought nothing of it. So long as the mujahideen were opposing Communism, their beliefs were immaterial. Saudi Wahhabism and radical Pakistani madrassas helped develop an army of jihadists to fight the Soviets. Once the Soviets withdrew, the radicals were still there, the weaponry was still there, and the money was still there. Global terrorism as we now know it had a large base of operations.

THE UNGRATEFUL ARAB

Among Arabs it is popular to complain that the United States always supports Israel at their expense. Such complaints reveal surprising ignorance of the enormous amount of financial and military support America has long provided the Arab nations.

Between Israel’s creation in 1948 and 2012, America provided a grand total of $115 billion ($233.7 billion when adjusted for inflation) in financial and military aid.¹³ U.S. exports to Israel have been relatively modest over the years, reaching $13.7 billion in 2013, with imports of $22.8 billion.¹⁴ After Israel’s conflicts with the Arab states in 1967 and 1973, America provided aid which allowed the Israelis to maintain the balance of power with their hostile neighbors. In short, the one thing America has not done is permit the Arab nations to destroy Israel.

The trade between America and Arab nations dwarfs the arrangements with Israel. In any given year, Saudi Arabia alone trades more with the United States. Take 2013 for example, when imports from Saudi Arabia were worth $51.8 billion (versus $22.8 from Israel).¹⁵ Nor is the trade situation likely to change in the foreseeable future, as the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) nations are collectively sitting on another $65 trillion worth of oil and gas wealth, according to one estimate.¹⁶

America has also provided the Arabs with more than their share of military aid. Since the Camp David Accords were signed, Egypt has been a top three recipient of U.S. military funding, to the tune of about $1.3 billion annually.¹⁷ Saudi Arabia is actually the “largest U.S. Foreign Military Sales (FMS) customer, with active and open cases valued at approximately $97 billion.”¹⁸ The United States is currently helping the Saudis with multi-billion dollar infrastructure and border security enhancements. Since the invasion of Iraq, that nation has also been a top recipient of military funding from America. In 2013, the U.S. government allocated $1.7 billion in military aid for Iraq. In all, the volume of all American arms exports to Israel is just 21% of the total U.S. arms exports to the Middle East since 1950.¹⁹ Arab countries who have made war against Israel received far more military aid from America than Israel itself has received (albeit in the cast of Egypt it received this aid essentially for making peace with Israel). The claim that America supports Israel but not the Arabs simply does not hold up to scrutiny.

An honest assessment would find that America and Europe have made the Arabs exceedingly wealthy. Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, is widely considered to be the richest city in the world (though “a million foreign workers don’t share in the wealth,” of course).²⁰ Abu Dhabi is a typical case of Arabs benefiting from the west: 60 years ago it was a tribal village full of hut-dwellers. In 1958, British explorers discovered enormous oil reserves under the ground. When the British left the region in 1971, the benefits of the resources they found fell to the tribesmen.²¹

As a whole, the GCC stands ready to reap a windfall in the coming years from the money it earns from “infidel” nations:

By 2020 the GCC population is forecast to reach 53.3 million, a 30% increase over the level in 2000. Over the same period, the region’s real GDP is expected to grow by 56%. Nominal GDP, which was US$341.6 billio in 2000, is forecast to soar over US$1 trillion in 2010 and US$2 trillion in 2020.²²

This enormous increase in manpower and financial power comes almost entirely at the expense of Western (but also Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Indian) consumers. Ironically, the majority of the GDP productivity in Arab countries comes from infidels—non-Arab foreign workers whose labor is exploited by Arab masters who prefer to manage rather than get their hands dirty themselves.

In one estimate, the entire Persian Gulf is “on the receiving end of a historical transfer of wealth from oil consumers.”²³ In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, uncertainty in the markets proved to be a windfall for the Gulf, in which national economies doubled between 2002 and 2006. Not only that, the transfer of wealth is not coming back to benefit America or Europe as in previous oil booms—this time, “Gulf states like the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia are investing much more of that windfall at home.”²⁴ That means over one trillion in American and European dollars are now hard at work in the Persian Gulf raising playpens for wealthy Arabs to enjoy themselves. Meanwhile, American cities like Detroit slide from industrial powerhouse to ignominious bankruptcy.

What has America received for such enormous amounts of money? Saudi Arabia in particular “has a rather incriminating and duplicitous history of harboring Islamic extremists of the al-Qaeda, jihadist type.”²⁵ The release of the WikiLeaks cables revealed that the U.S. State Department essentially regards Saudi Arabia as a “cash machine” for Islamic terrorists.²⁶ They are a leading source of funds for many Islamic militant groups, including the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Pakistani-directed Lashkar-e-Taiba. Qatar, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates are also known sources of significant terrorist funding. Yet despite its alleged alliance with the United States, the Saudi government has done little to reduce the flow of money. The State Department identifies the annual Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca as a particularly fertile source of militant terrorist funding: militants disguised as pilgrims solicit funds and launder money via front groups posing as charities.²⁷

Worse still, it is entirely possible that the Saudi government had some direct role in the 9/11 attacks. Former Senators Bob Graham and Bob Kerrey have said in sworn affidavits that the Saudi government may have played a part in the atrocity. There certainly seem to be under-explored ties between the hijackers and several key Saudi officials and government representatives who made contact with them while they were preparing for their attacks. These include a Saudi consular official who is believed to have “arranged for an advance team to meet” two of the hijackers when they arrived in Los Angeles in 2000, and then-ambassador Prince Bandar who sent $130,000 to a suspected Saudi agent (who eventually funneled some of the cash to the hijackers).²⁸ And as this book has already shown, the Saudi government funds Wahhabi mosques all around the world—the very places at which many terrorists are radicalized by their particular brand of literal Islam.

For over 75 years, America and the West have supported Arab nations with trillions of dollars in trade and aid. The Arabs have been made rich on the basis of oil and gas resources which were primarily discovered and paid for by Western nations. How has this support been repaid? Terror attacks, more than ten trillion dollars in losses in the United States alone, over ten thousand dead, and more than a hundred thousand injured. The absurd contradiction of the U.S.-Saudi special relationship has been far more to the benefit of the Saudis than it has been to the benefit of the United States. America is now deeply in debt, exporting jobs, with crumbling infrastructure and failing cities. America’s “friendship” with Saudi Arabia and the other oil producing Arab states is going to end up destroying Western civilization.

PART SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY - NINE

How the West Backs
Islamic Fundamentalism

After America won the Cold War, some believed we had come to the “end of history,” and budget-cutters celebrated the so-called “peace dividend.” As a result, we ignored the toxic mixture of militant Islam and terror that ultimately led to 9/11.

—Frank Gaffney¹

During the Cold War, the U.S. instituted a policy of sending money to governments in poor countries to buy their political loyalty. While studies show that sending aid to foreign governments creates allegiance, it does not lead to economic progress.

—Iqbal Quadir²

He who rides a tiger is afraid to dismount.

—Chinese proverb

During two weeks in October, 1962 the Cold War nearly became hot over the issue of missiles in Cuba. The U.S. had just established nuclear missile bases in Turkey and Italy. In April of the previous year an American attempt to provoke regime change in Cuba had ended disastrously in the Bay of Pigs. The Soviets responded by making a secret arrangement to establish missile bases of their own in Cuba. The Americans found out about the arrangement and initiated a naval blockade.

For 13 tense days, the Americans and the Soviets negotiated a way to end the crisis. During this time, American ships had orders to issue warning shots and then board any Soviet vessels trying to run the blockade. An American spy plane was shot down, but rather than issue a military retaliation, President John Kennedy let the negotiations continue. One Soviet submarine, surrounded by American ships and running out of air, came within an inch of arming its nuclear torpedo, but after a heated disagreement among the officers the captain opted instead to surface.³ It was the closest the world had ever come to nuclear war.

In the end, the crisis was resolved by dialogue and compromise rather than guns and bombs. The Americans and the Soviets came to an agreement. The Soviets would dismantle and return any offensive weaponry from Cuba, while the U.S. would publicly declare that it would not attempt another invasion of Cuba. In secret, President Kennedy also agreed to dismantle the U.S.-built nuclear weapons which had been deployed in Turkey and Italy. This part of the deal was not confirmed publicly until decades later.

Imagine if, instead of Nikita Khrushchev, command of the Soviet Union’s arsenal of 20,000 ICBMs had been in the hands of Osama bin Laden. Would such a deal have been struck? Would there even have been a negotiation? Anyone who has lived in the age of global Islamic terrorism knows the answer: bin Laden would have used those weapons.

This story illustrates a basic fact which is too little appreciated by western leaders and politicians. The Soviet Union and Communism was not as significant an existential threat as Islamic fundamentalism. The Communists believed they had a scientific world-view which was dynamic and alterable. But Islam has always claimed that its doctrine is supreme and that not even a single letter of the Qur’an can be changed. Thus, the Communists were ultimately willing to negotiate rather than risk destroying the world. Islam will not negotiate.

RIDING THE TIGER: THE COLD WAR

One of the most curious characteristics of the post-9/11 world is how close the United States remains to the world’s primary seedbeds of terror activity, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. How did the leader of the free world become entangled with these regimes, whose cultures and priorities are so alien and hostile to its own? The answer lies in the Cold War, when America found it to its advantage to nurture Islamic extremism as a counter to the Soviet Union.

The Middle East was left in a state of flux by the First World War. The old Ottoman Empire had collapsed, leaving the British Empire in command of the region. With the end of the war, the British liberated most of the region along the political lines they preferred: monarchies ruled by conservative dynasties. But many of these regimes lacked legitimacy among their own people, and the new national boundaries created issues of divided ethnicities and loyalties among the new countries. The greatest challenge facing the new regimes was left-wing Arab nationalism.

After World War Two, Arab nationalism presented a unique dilemma to the Americans. On the one hand, most Arab nationalists were openly socialist, which raised the possibility that they would align their countries with the Soviet Union. In the case of the oil-rich nations, this was a uniquely distressing option. On the other hand, the nationalists stood for self-determination and social progress, which seemed to place them on the wave of the future.

No regime exemplified both the promise and the threat of Arab nationalism as well as that of General Abdul Nasser, who seized power in Egypt after a military coup in 1952. By this time, the Muslim Brotherhood had already been born—a political organization dedicated to the advancement of fundamentalist Islam. Nasser was not interested in Islamic solutions, and after an assassination attempt against him in 1954 he clamped down hard on the organization. In 1955, though, Nasser’s government made a huge arms deal with the Soviet Bloc.

Alarmed by the prospect of Egypt moving into the Soviet sphere, the Americans tried to push Saudi Arabia as an ideological alternative. The Eisenhower Administration encouraged the Saudi king “to become a political and religious counter to the charismatic Nasser.”⁴ When Nasser invaded Yemen to support the republican revolutionaries against the royalists, he appealed to the Soviets for assistance. After this, the Americans redoubled their focus on the Saudis. In 1965, the Americans and British sold military hardware to the Saudis for $425 million.⁵ Cold War gamesmanship led them both to provide arms to one of the global leaders of Islamic fundamentalism.

Under President Eisenhower, the U.S. also began providing military aid to Pakistan. Viewing the Islamic state as a northern buffer against Soviet expansion, the Americans were untroubled either by Pakistan’s religious extremism or by its tendency to lapse into military dictatorship. By 1957, Pakistan was receiving nearly half a billion dollars in military aid from the U.S. This pushed non-aligned India into the Soviet sphere, as Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru had no choice given the amount of money America was sending to his nation’s mortal foe. Later, Eisenhower would regard this decision as a “terrible error,” as once the U.S. had embarked on its pro-Pakistan strategy he felt it had become “hopelessly involved in it.”⁶

Through bonds of military aid and diplomatic support, the United States aligned itself with two Islamic states (Saudi Arabia and Pakistan) in opposition to secular governments such as Egypt and India. This would become a template for America’s Cold War policy throughout the Middle East.

The pivotal moment for America’s Cold War strategy came in 1979 after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. As detailed elsewhere in this book, this was the event that brought the United States, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and militant Islamic fundamentalism together in an unholy alliance. As then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton admitted to Congress in 2013:

The people we are fighting today [in Afghanistan and Pakistan] we funded 20 years ago. And we did it because we were locked in this struggle with the Soviet Union. They invaded Afghanistan, and we did not want to see them control Central Asia …[so we said] let’s deal with the ISI and the Pakistani military, and let’s go recruit these mujahedeen. That’s great. Let’s get them to come from Saudi Arabia and other places, importing their Wahhabi brand of Islam so that we can go beat the Soviet Union.⁷

For the United States, the invasion ended the policy of détente which it had largely followed since the Nixon Administration. President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski instead laid the foundation for a new strategy: “we should concert with Islamic countries both in a propaganda campaign and in a covert action campaign to help the rebels [in Afghanistan].”⁸ America proceeded to provide enormous amounts of money, and eventually high-tech weaponry, to the Islamic mujahideen. But in doing so, America agreed to work through the intermediary of Pakistan and “defer to Pakistani priorities.” As a result, Pakistan directed American money and materiel toward the advancement of its own political and religious priorities in the region.⁹

For the Saudis, 1979 was a watershed. The Soviet invasion, coupled with the seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca by Islamic fundamentalists, shook the Saudi regime to its core. The Saudis viewed themselves as the stewards of Islam’s holy places and the leaders of its community of believers. After the events of 1979, the kingdom’s response was to redouble its efforts in promoting Wahhabi extremism: “All aspects of Saudi Arabian life after 1979 became infused with the spirit of jihad.”¹⁰ In the following years, the Saudis would go on to spend $75 billion on global promotion of its own particular brand of strict Islamic ideology.

For Pakistan, 1979 was a windfall. Under the military dictatorship of General Zia ul-Haq, the country had already fully embraced Islamic fundamentalism as a national policy. Now, it had the opportunity to wage covert jihad in Afghanistan, bankrolled by the Americans and the Saudis. General Zia and Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence funneled these dollars not only toward Afghan jihadists but also to the building of Islamic madrasas along the border of Afghanistan. Through these madrasas, the Pakistanis nurtured virulent, fundamentalist Islam for its own ends.¹¹

For Islamic fundamentalists, the Afghan war was a funding and recruitment bonanza. Men and money flowed in. The Americans saw no problems with any of this. Passionate anti-Communists like CIA Director Bill Casey actually saw Muslims as natural allies in the fight against the Soviet Union. Their religious motivation was considered a quality which made them reliable and useful allies, and the promotion of Islam was regarded as a wonderful means to undermine Soviet influence across Central Asia.¹² Thanks to America’s anti-Communist efforts, Afghanistan and Central Asia have increasingly embraced violent Islamic fundamentalism. The Soviets may be gone, but the virulent ideology that was used against them remains.

Even after 9/11, which both Pakistan and Saudi Arabia citizens were involved in, the Cold War connections forged between the United States and these two hotbeds of Islamic radicalism have proven hard to dislodge. The socialist orientation of leaders like Nasser helped drive America into the arms of Islamic states, but such states cannot be military or strategic allies. Their fundamental goals and philosophies are an existential threat to democracy and liberty—even more so than Soviet Communism, which is now a dead letter.

In economic and military terms, America has been Islam’s top defender for more than 70 years. Through aid and economic activity the U.S. has enriched Muslim nations. In nearly every conflict between Islam and a non-Islamic force, America has either backed Islam or looked the other way. America did nothing when Turkey invaded Cyprus (an Orthodox Christian nation) in 1974. When the Islamic revolution threatened the Shah of Iran in 1979, America did not defend the Shah. America spearheaded the bombing of Serbia in 1998 in defense of Muslim Kosovo’s survival and autonomy. It backed Afghanistan against the Soviets. It has kept the Saudi regime propped up militarily and flush with enormous amounts of cash. During the Cold War, the American Right was always the stoutest champion of Muslims. Religious faith alone seems to have been the draw, regardless of the content of that faith—as President Eisenhower stated: “our form of government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don’t care what it is.”¹³

ISLAM AND THE LEFT

Since the end of the Cold War, the political Left has taken up the mantle as Islam’s champion in the West. Their support comes in many forms, from armchair liberal apologists to the socialist anti-war movement, to deluded academics. Looking at Islam, they see increasing demographics and imagine a route to political power; they hear anti-imperialist or anti-capitalist rhetoric and imagine a potential ally. They are only deluding themselves. Islam is simply incompatible with the desire for civil liberties and political equality, and it is abhorrent to Marxism (since Islam is founded on metaphysical revelation, which is completely counter to theories of dialectical materialism). Islam does not share power.

Islam is more likely to destroy leftists than to help them. The story of post-colonial Indonesia is illustrative. After the Dutch were driven out, Indonesian rebels split into leftist nationalists who wanted to establish a socialist, secular government and Islamists who wanted to establish an Islamic state. The former were more successful at first and established a left-wing government under their first president, Sukarno. But the Islamists did not go away peacefully. First, one group tried to break away from the government, declaring a separate Islamic state in their strongholds of West Java and South Sulawesi. The main Islamic party, Masyumi, held a convention of Islamic scholars in which it was ruled that Muslims could not be Communists and that the Indonesian Communist Party should be outlawed.¹⁴ Unable to achieve their goals immediately, the Islamists played a role in the military coup that brought General Suharto to power in 1965. Suharto cracked down hard on Communists and left-wing organizations, eventually taking more than a million lives. Throughout, the Islamists were enthusiastic supporters of the Suharto regime since he fulfilled their goal of destroying the Left.¹⁵

The Wahhabi regime of Saudi Arabia placed special emphasis on the defeat of both Communism and the Arab nationalist Left. They established and funded the Muslim World League in 1962 with the explicit aim of countering the nationalism of Nasser and his acolytes. They also supported Egyptian Islamist groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood with the same aim. As journalist David Ottaway explains, “These Muslim Brothers and their followers would become the foot soldiers of the Saudi kingdom’s religious war against the Arab world’s Nasserites, Communists, and socialists.”¹⁶ Saudi funding of the Afghani jihad against the Soviet Union is well known, but few also realize that the Saudis continued to invest heavily after the Soviets withdrew to defeat the left-wing government left behind (an action which eventually created a power vacuum filled by the Taliban).¹⁷

But the greatest example of the implacable hostility between Islam and the Left can be found in revolutionary Iran. In some ways, the regime which seized power in 1979 was in the vanguard of political Islam as we know it today. The Saudis, Pakistanis, and Afghani jihadists at that time were still open to pragmatic alliances with the United States. Khomeini declared the United States to be the “Great Satan.” Anticipating Islamic fundamentalism’s pivot toward anti-Americanism by more than a decade Iran appropriated old anti-colonialist rhetoric to condemn America as the number one threat to world peace and Islam.

Remarkably, Iranian Leftists bought into this rhetoric. They bought in so thoroughly that even while members of Iran’s Communist party, the Tudeh, were being beaten and executed by supporters of the Islamic regime, their party spokesman could still declare, “as long as we believe, based on our own principles, that the Islamic government is anti-imperialist … we will continue to support it.”¹⁸ Tudeh’s reward for helping the Islamists to power was to be destroyed last. All other Leftist parties were crushed by 1983. In that year, Tudeh’s leaders were arrested, tortured, and forced to make humiliating public confessions about the perfidy and bankruptcy of their party and its philosophy. “We tried to solve the problems of Iran with Marxism—an irrelevant ideology,” Tudeh’s leader proclaimed on television. Thousands of party members were arrested and all left-wing parties finally banned.¹⁹

Khomeini’s government demonstrated the full consequences of an Islamic state. They appropriated left-wing tactics and rhetoric and encouraged the support of Leftists to help themselves to power. Once the revolution was accomplished, the Left was no longer useful and was accordingly dispatched. As one scholar observes:

The regime considered Marxism the main ideological rival of Islam. Unlike liberalism, nationalism, and monarchism, it challenged religious metaphysics, held out a utopian future, and offered a comprehensive view of the past and the present.²⁰

In other words, the very preoccupations which lured some on the Left to imagine there could be enduring cooperation between themselves and Islam were in fact the reasons why coexistence was impossible. Islam’s claims to authority and power are absolute and cannot be shared. The leaders of Tudeh discovered too late that if Islam is the answer then all other solutions are nothing but heresy.

In the West, the Left has proven itself all too willing to follow in Tudeh’s footsteps. Since 9/11, they have promoted or defended Islamic fundamentalism on the basis of three principles: multiculturalism, anti-racism, and anti-imperialism. Despite the absurdity or irrelevance of these principles to political Islam as it actually is, the Left has been successful in intimidating and silencing critics.

An example of this can be seen in the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in Britain. The SWP is a virulent anti-establishment Marxist group which launched the Stop the War Coalition ten days after the 9/11 attacks. From the outset, these Leftists rejected any condemnation of terrorism as resolutely as they opposed fighting and dying for freedom and secularism. This soon led them into the arms of the Muslim Brotherhood-inspired Muslim Association of Britain. The SWP has now perfected the art of remaining silent about any evils perpetrated by Islamic states and actors while loudly blaming America and Israel for all the world’s ills.²¹

In the eyes of men such as MP George Galloway, Islamic terrorism is merely a response to western aggression—something the West has brought on itself. Those who reject this view are called racists, even though Islam is not a race. Nevertheless, even the suggestion of such a charge carries enormous social and political penalties in Britain. In 2013, the British government denied entry to anti-jihadist campaigners Pamela Gellar and Robert Spencer. At the same time, the country willingly admits a Saudi preacher who proclaims: “Devotion to jihad for the sake of Allah, and the desire to shed blood, to smash skulls and to sever limbs for the sake of Allah and in defense of His religion, is, undoubtedly, an honor for the believer.”²²

The issue of anti-imperialism creates significant attraction between the Left and Islam. From her experience with the Islamic Revolution, Iranian activist Maryam Namazie describes this as a fatal attraction born of a vision of Islam as “a force of resistance against imperialism.” The vision betrays a Manichean worldview which sees the Americans as the ultimate imperialists and all its enemies therefore as righteous oppressed peoples.²³

The Leftist view of Islam as somehow anti-imperialist is completely ahistorical. Islam’s 1,400 year history is full of almost nothing else but imperialist conquest. Conflating jihad with progressive notions of countering political aggression is a shameful abuse of language. It is sometimes claimed, for example, that Islamists resort to terror in defense of “Muslim lands.” This view is only sustainable if one accepts that whole continents and ancient civilizations with origins in antiquity can be claimed as the eternal possession of a relatively recent world religion. Speaking specifically about the fight against radical Islam in Mali, author Meredith Tax explodes this Leftist talking point:

Like people who see Taliban activity in Pakistan largely as a reaction against drones, leftists who frame the issues in Mali in terms of Western imperialism deny the agency of the people living there, who have been voting with their feet by fleeing jihadi-controlled areas in droves.²⁴

Feminists have even shown themselves willing to sacrifice their stated aim of gender equality on the altar of deference to Islam. When Amnesty International’s Gita Sahgal dared to question her organization’s connections with a group whose leader openly supported the Taliban and defended known terrorists, she was suspended and then forced to resign. Amnesty then doubled down on its depravity by proclaiming that “defensive jihad” was compatible with support for human rights.²⁵ Such alliances, as feminist campaigner Rahil Gupta points out, “reveal the capitulation on the left to the fascists within while organizing against the fascists without.”²⁶

Even in India, which has suffered numerous terror attacks by jihadists and has a long and violent history of confrontations with Islam, it is eminently fashionable for Communists and other leftists to voice their support for fundamentalist Islam. A typical example comes from Mr. Ganapathy, the leader of India’s Maoist Communist Party (CPI-Maoist). In 2007, he proclaimed that his party, “regard[ed] the Islamic upsurge as a progressive anti-imperialist force in the contemporary world.”²⁷ Ganapathy then goes on to deny Samuel Huntington’s theory of a “clash of civilizations,” arguing instead that despite “the role of Islamic fundamentalists” in various struggles around the world, “these are all wars of national liberation” and part of what he considers as “the beginning of the democratic awakening of the Muslim masses.”²⁸ It is a curious case of mental acrobatics to call Islamic fundamentalists like ISIS “an ally of the people in their fight against the fundamentalist of the free market,” as Ganapathy does.²⁹ In fact, Communists think they can use Muslims in their ongoing war against Hindu nationalists.³⁰

The common enemy for CPI and Indian Muslims is the Bharathiya Janata Party (also known as the Indian Peoples Party)—and above all, its leader, Narendra Modi. Leftists complain that Modi wants to divide India along religious lines, neglecting to realize that India was already divided along religious lines when parts of it were carved off to create Pakistan in 1947. Muslims hate Modi and the Indian Peoples Party because they see them as obstacles to the Islamization of India. Although both the Communists and the Muslims each think they are using the other, history suggests the Muslims will turn on the Communists the first chance they get.

There is another reason why Indian Leftists never criticize the Muslim community: simple pragmatism. No harm will come to anyone who criticizes America, capitalism, or the Indian Peoples Party. But if a Communist were to dismiss Islamic metaphysics as mere superstition—which is exactly what a good Marxist believes Islam to be—he runs the risk of being visited by violent extremists. Attacking Modi or what they call “communalism” (which is really just a blanket term used to critique all Hindu nationalist political parties) is a safe ticket to political power and social respectability.

One of the more remarkable instances of Leftist support for Islam is the Jews Against Islamophobia Coalition. This is a group of progressive organizations united against what they call “anti-Muslim bigotry and anti-Arab racism,” formed in the wake of protests against the building of a mosque and Muslim activity center at one of the Ground Zero sites in Manhattan.³¹ Their activities include complaining about New York City police daring to profile Muslims while attempting to protect citizens from terrorist threats.³² They have also played a role in silencing critics of Islam such as Pamela Gellar, calling her criticism “hate speech” and encouraging synagogues and other Jewish institutions either to avoid letting her speak or to break off existing commitments.³³

Leftist support for Islam comes at the expense of people and principles. Islamic regimes around the world are guilty of some of the most egregious human rights abuses in the world today. In Saudi Arabia: “authorities continue to suppress or fail to protect the rights of 9 million Saudi women and girls and 9 million foreign workers,” according to Human Rights Watch.³⁴ Women are still not allowed to drive or to appear in public unless accompanied by a man. Strict clothing requirements for women are publicly enforced. Domestic workers remain unprotected by Saudi labor law, despite complaints from workers about being forced to work 15 to 20 hour days and being denied payments. Public worship by adherents of any faith other than Wahhabi Islam is not tolerated, and Muslim minorities (particularly Shias and Ismailis) are actively discriminated against. Since 2011, 11 Shia protesters have been killed by Saudi security forces.³⁵

In Pakistan, the situation is worse. Terror attacks have led to a breakdown in law enforcement. Police have been accused of torture, unrestrained abuse, kidnapping, and extrajudicial killings.³⁶ In 2012 alone, more than 300 Shia Muslims were killed in sectarian violence. In one horrific case from August, gunman attacked four buses passing through the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, checked the national identity cards of the passengers, and “summarily executed 22 travelers whom they identified as belonging to the Shia community.” The Pakistan Taliban later claimed responsibility for the attack.³⁷ In July 2012, an angry mob attacked a police station holding a mentally disabled man accused of destroying a Qur’an and proceeded to burn him alive.³⁸

The six Gulf states are still routinely guilty of human rights abuses—most notably the mistreatment of their enormous populations of foreign workers. Exploitation of migrant labor includes brutal living and working conditions, failure to pay workers, and confiscation of passports to prevent people from moving around or leaving. Violations of labor law are rarely, if ever, prosecuted. Female migrant workers are particularly vulnerable, since local labor laws often do not cover domestic working situations and exploitation and sexual abuse is known to take place.³⁹ Such abuse and mistreatment would never be tolerated in a Western country, but Leftists remain largely and collectively silent when an Islamic country is accused.

A generation of left-wing thinkers and activists around the world has willingly sacrificed progressive principles for the sake of an ultimately self-defeating alliance with modern political Islam. In doing so, they have been guided by an outsized obsession with Western imperialism and Western faults as well as a simplistic division of the world into oppressor and oppressed. The end result is an alliance between Western progressives and some of the worst misogynists, homophobes, racists, and murderers in the world today.

Such temporary and expedient alliances are part and parcel of Islam’s history. They have been doing it for 1,400 years. Fundamentalist Muslims, one might say, imbibe this kind of treacherous politics like mothers’ milk. As the history of Indonesia and Iran show, however, such alliances will surely end in the destruction of the Left as soon as Islam has no more need of it. Confronted by such a situation, we would do well to heed the advice of the late Christopher Hitchens, spoken in disgust at the flurry of left-wing apologism for 9/11: “The very first step we must take, therefore, is that acquisition of enough self-respect and self-confidence to say that we have met the enemy and that he is not us, but someone else.”⁴⁰

THE ARAB SPRING: GLOBAL SUNNI FUNDAMENTALIST REVOLUTION

The most recent support for Islam has come in the form of the so-called “Arab Spring.” The Western media portrayed this for a time as some sort of liberation movement. It is nothing of the kind. In fact, this movement is part of a global Sunni revolution aimed at installing fundamentalist religious regimes in power.

The danger here lies in the fact that jihad does not rely upon groups or leaders. The idea of jihad is rooted in fundamental Islamic doctrine. It is so ingrained in the consciousness of even moderate Muslims around the world, that what we call “radicalization” is often imperceptible, only recognized once it’s too late. The step to terrorism is often relatively easy and short. We now have countless examples of independent jihadists—such as the Tsarnaev brothers involved in the Boston Marathon Bombing—carrying out devastating attacks with little money and few resources.

Western governments seem to think that the war against jihad can be won by targeting big names like al-Qaeda or Osama bin Laden. The problem is deeper. Al-Qaeda itself is little more than a brand name for jihad, not an organization in the conventional sense. The so-called mastermind of 9/11 Khalid Sheikh Muhammad (KSM) was himself only loosely affiliated with al-Qaeda, and proclaimed his allegiance to bin Laden after the 9/11 attacks. The focus on brand names produces terrible misunderstandings and ineffective policies.

What’s going on in the Sunni Arab world right now could be characterized as a revolution. The revolutionaries want to reclaim what they regard as Islam’s birthright: unification of the former Islamic caliphate and then domination of the world. The first step in reclaiming this birthright is the establishment of genuine Islamic rule in Arab states that have fallen under the sway of what the revolutionaries consider to be apostates.

Wherever the “Arab Spring” appeared—Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Syria—a top priority was always the removal of the government. While many secular men and women participated in the popular protests, their views were eventually subsumed and drowned out by the revolutionaries—that is, by jihadists. The full consequences have yet to be seen, since the situation is still in flux. The Sunni revolution suffered a setback in Egypt, when the Muslim Brotherhood was removed from power and military supremacy reestablished. For the most part, however, the jihadists have been successful in overturning governments. What replaces them is never pluralism or democracy, but religious fundamentalism.

Foreign correspondent and Middle East expert John Bradley has observed:

While most Western reporters considered unrest in the Middle East a step in the direction of democracy, I thought the opposite. It is the Islamists, who wish to create Islamic states and impose Islamic law, who will emerge triumphant from the present chaos.⁴¹

Unable to distinguish between tactics and actual strategic aims, gullible Westerners have assumed that Islamic forces getting involved in elections heralds a new progressive orientation in Muslim politics. The Muslim Brotherhood knows that they can rely on intense motivation and participation from their supporters to give them the edge at the ballot box. For the jihadists, “elections are a necessary evil, but at the same time useful, providing cover for more radical change.”⁴²

Tunisia was ground zero for the chain of events that came to be known as the Arab Spring. Contrary to the media narrative, prior to these events Tunisia was “Ruled by the most secular Arab regime and was the most socially liberal and progressive Muslim country in the Middle East. As such, before its revolution it had been the last bulwark against the Saudi-funded Wahhabi form of Islam.”⁴³ Although the Tunisian government restricted political expression, it was a bastion of liberalism in comparison to the governments favored by the jihadists. The veil was not mandatory, personal freedom was protected, and Islamist ideology was not promoted. The jihadists hated Tunisia and regarded it scornfully as westernized.⁴⁴

Since the regime change, Saudi-funded Sunni ideologues have moved in. Wahhabism has been spread quickly across the country, and “the more radical Islamist groups are becoming visibly aggressive, resorting to violence during demonstrations, and threatening women.”⁴⁵ There has been a sharp increase in violence and intimidation against any who depart from strict Islamic dogma. A Tunisian television station which dared to show an animated movie with a visual representation of God was the center of a firestorm in October 2011. Imams preached against the supposed insult. The home of the station chief was besieged by hundreds of men, some throwing Molotov cocktails, forcing the man and his family to flee for their lives.⁴⁶

There is now an atmosphere of simmering Islamic intimidation unheard of under the previous regime. It sometimes breaks out into spectacular outrages such as the murder of Mohammed Al-Brahmi, the leader of the liberal opposition group. Islamic militants have also killed police officers and soldiers, while terrorists imprisoned by the previous regime have been set free. The leading party is linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, and keeps up a steady campaign of public deception—presenting a sanitized message to the media while telling a different story in the mosques.⁴⁷ Far from being the romantic success story portrayed in the media, Tunisia is losing its secular legacy to Sunni Islamic dogma.⁴⁸

In Egypt, the Arab Spring removed a stable but autocratic leader (Mubarak) in favor of an autocratic and jihadist organization (the Muslim Brotherhood). In the year following the February 2011 regime change, Egypt saw more restrictions placed on religion than any other country in the world saw in the previous five years.⁴⁹ But The Muslim Brotherhood did not retain their grip on Egypt. Everyone knows that the Egyptian military stepped in and removed the Brotherhood and leader Mohamed Morsi from power. Ridiculously blaming the persecuted Christians for this turn of events, Muslims launched a fresh wave of pogroms against the Copts. The Christian Copts, who make up about ten percent of Egypt’s population, endured a wave of brutality not seen in years. In one particularly brazen attack in October 2013, gunmen crashed a Coptic wedding, killing four people, including an eight-year-old girl.⁵⁰

It is little appreciated the role the Saudis played in encouraging this. Despite its sponsorship of jihad and Muslim fundamentalism, the Saudi regime is detested by many Sunni fundamentalists like the Muslim Brotherhood because they are considered impious frauds who are trying to “modernize” Saudi Arabia and undermine the Islamic way of life.⁵¹ For their part, the Saudis are perfectly willing to export Wahhabi Islam around the world, but they have no interest in a fundamentalist regime in power in Egypt. Such a regime could serve as a rallying point for anti-monarchists and prove a serious threat to their grip on power. As an American analyst detected more than a decade ago:

Today the Royal Family does not enjoy total support from the Wahhabis, particularly among the younger religious clerics … This rift between the Wahhabi leaders and the Monarchy is potentially serious.⁵²

The Saudi regime uses fundamentalist Islam to provide a cover for its own decadent activities, but they have no interest in falling victim to fundamentalist Islam themselves.

No situation better exemplifies the connection between what is called the Arab Spring and the reality of Sunni revolution than the Syrian civil war. The Syrian regime and its President, Bashar al-Assad, are certainly no friends of democracy and freedom. Assad’s support of Hezbollah and willingness to massacre his opponents make him an enormously unsympathetic figure. But in this case, the Sunni militants who oppose him are much worse. Areas of Syria which have fallen under rebel control paint a chilling picture of what a Sunni-dominated Syria would look like. Whether or not the radical Islamists are the majority isn’t even the point, since they do not require a majority to impose their will on the political scene.⁵³

Under Assad, Syria’s religious minorities—Christians, Shiites, and other groups—have been free to practice their faith free of repression and intimidation. The governing sect, to which Assad’s family belongs, are Alawites—an Islamic group considered heterodox by most Muslims. Wherever the Sunni rebels have gained the upper hand in Syria, those minority groups have found themselves in mortal danger. Christians in particular “fear extinction if Bashar al-Assad falls,” according to journalist Kirsten Powers.⁵⁴

The incident in Maaloula is instructive. This ancient town has a large Christian community with 17 churches. Some inhabitants still speak Aramaic, the ancient language spoken by Jesus in the first century. In September 2013, members of the Nusra militia entered the town, murdering ten Christians, destroying religious artifacts, and plundering local homes. One man was ordered to convert to Islam, and when he refused his throat was cut. 12 nuns were kidnapped from a nearby monastery by militants in an effort to terrorize the Christian population into leaving the region.⁵⁵ Such efforts have been successful, as more than half of Syria’s Christian population has reportedly fled the country.⁵⁶

A similar fate is befalling Shiites, who are also fleeing Syria by the thousands. Armed and militant Sunnis are keen on “purifying” the country, which means even the “wrong” Islamic sects must go. An elderly mother among the Shia refugees who had lost her son to a rebel sniper recalled to a journalist how the local imam in Damascus had called for jihad against Shiites and Alawites. Her neighborhood in Damascus was subsequently terrorized by Sunni militias who abused and killed the local people. Another of this woman’s sons who worked at a Shia mosque was told to leave town within 72 hours or his head would be cut off and hung on a local Shia shrine.⁵⁷

The war against non-Sunnis in Syria shows no sign of ending. Influential Sunni cleric Yusef al-Qaradawi, a supporter of the Syrian jihad, weighed in to declare that Alawites were “worse infidels than Christians or Jews,” and to encourage Sunnis to go to Syria to fight against Alawite and Shia forces. “There is no common ground between the two sides,” he went on to say, “because the Iranians … want to eat the Sunni people.”⁵⁸ Just a few weeks after al-Qaradawi’s statement, a congress of Sunni clerics in Cairo called for jihad against the Assad government and its allies.⁵⁹

It is clear that Christians, Shiites, and Alawites would have no future in a country governed by Sunni purists. These same purists are seizing control of rebel forces with an eye on enforcing their deadly will on the Syrian population.

In those countries where the Arab Spring has had its greatest effect, freedoms have been lost, security has eroded, and atrocities have accumulated. Bad regimes have been toppled in favor of worse ones. The common element in every country has been the dominance of fundamentalist Sunni forces over the others. As Israeli professor and historian Benny Morris has observed, “the main result of the ‘Arab Spring’ will be—at least in the short and medium terms, and, I fear, in the long term as well—an accelerated Islamization of the Arab world.”⁶⁰

The sequel to the “Arab Spring” has been a Sunni Winter—in the form of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Born out of the removal of one secular dictator (Saddam Hussein in Iraq) and the attempted removal of another (Bashar Assad in Syria), ISIS has quickly emerged as a force on the world stage.⁶¹ And this is not a force for “democracy” or human rights. In addition to documented massacres of civilians, ISIS has “released a guide to the capture, punishment and rape of female non-believers. It outline show to use them as their sex slaves and also justifies child rape.”⁶² Already, the group has kidnapped over 2,500 women, and is suspected in the abduction of another 4,600 more. Of course, the justification for its behavior is all taken from the Qur’an and the Hadith.⁶³ “There have been reports that doctors have performed illegal abortions on pregnant girls as young as nine,” with many of the victims coming from the Yazidis, who are an Iraqi religious minority.⁶⁴ At one time, Western powers believed the groups which formed ISIS could be controlled—and now the people of Iraq and Syria are paying the price for this delusion.

PART SEVEN

PART SEVEN

CHAPTER THIRTY

Europe: The Demographic Conquest

Our country called the foreign workers to come to Germany and now they live in our country … We kidded ourselves a while, we said: “They won’t stay, sometime they will be gone,” but this isn’t reality … And of course, the approach [to build] a multicultural [society] and to live side-by-side and to enjoy each other … has failed, utterly failed.

—Chancellor Angela Merkel¹

Under the doctrine of state multiculturalism, we have encouraged different cultures to live separate lives, apart from each other and apart from the mainstream. We’ve failed to provide a vision of society to which they feel they want to belong. We’ve even tolerated these segregated communities behaving in ways that run completely counter to our values.

—Prime Minister David Cameron²

My answer is clearly yes, [multiculturalism] is a failure. Of course we must all respect differences, but we do not want a society where communities coexist side by side … If you come to France, you accept to melt into a single community, which is the national community, and if you do not want to accept that, you cannot be welcome in France.

—President Nicolas Sarkozy

This is an obvious truth: If you move somewhere, you must adapt to the laws and customs of the land. The multicultural society has undermined this rule of common sense and decency. The multicultural society tells the newcomers who settle in our cities and villages: You are free to behave contrary to our norms and values because your norms and values are just as good—perhaps even better—than ours … This failure to defend our own culture has turned immigration into the most dangerous threat that can be used against the West. Multiculturalism has made us so tolerant that we tolerate the intolerant.

—Geert Wilders³

Europe is no longer Europe, it is Eurabia, a colony of Islam, where the Islamic invasion does not proceed only in a physical sense, but also in a mental and cultural sense.

—Journalist Oriana Fallaci⁴

We do not integrate into Christianity. We will ensure that one day you will integrate into the Sharia Islamic law.

—Anjem Choudary⁵

On July 22, 2011 a car bomb exploded near several government buildings in downtown Oslo, Norway. Eight people were killed. As police and emergency responders arrived on the scene, no one yet realized that the attack was only just beginning. The man responsible for the bombing, a young Norwegian named Anders Behring Breivik, was already on his way to the island of Utøya, where a Workers Youth League camp run by Norway’s Labour Party was in session.

Breivik posed as a police officer on his way to Utøya. When he arrived, he opened fire on the unarmed adolescents. Using a semi-automatic rifle and a handgun, he walked across the island firing at everyone he could see. Once the would-be victims realized what was happening, some fled across the island while others ran into the sea to escape. By the time a SWAT unit arrived from Oslo to secure the island, Breivik had killed 69 more people—most of them teenagers.

When news of the event broke, the fear for many was that here was yet another terror attack by Islamists. After Breivik was captured, it was revealed that he had sent a large 1,500 page manifesto to dozens of people in which his planning of the attacks—and his reasons for carrying them out—were laid out in every detail:

More than 90 percent of the EU and national parliamentarians and more than 95 percent of journalists are supporters of European multiculturalism and therefore supporters of the ongoing Islamic colonization of Europe; yet they DO NOT have the permission of the European peoples to implement these doctrines.⁶

Breivik’s attack was monstrous in every way—no better than the Islamic terrorists we initially feared may have been responsible. But the cause of the attack, the thing that drove him to massacre his fellow citizens, is very real: the fear of Islamic conquest of Europe. Breivik’s attack was remarkable in that he did not target Muslims; he targeted European elites (the youth camp on Utøya was attended by children of Norway’s political elite) whom he blamed for the Muslim presence.

THE DEMOGRAPHIC INVASION OF EUROPE

Invasion and conquest have been part of human life from the beginning. Only the means have changed, as spears and arrows gave way to atomic bombs and bioengineered weaponry. But Europe today is not facing a modern threat involving weapons of mass destruction or complex planning. Instead, it’s the oldest form of invasion and conquest in the world—demographic. The invading army is armed with nothing more than young men and women and their offspring who hope to irritate, then stymie, and then obliterate their enemy. The invading army is Islam.

In Muhammad’s time, Islam’s preferred approach to dominion included military campaigns, forced conversions, and ethnic cleansing. In the 21st century, Islam no longer has the military power necessary to engage the world in such ways. Because of this, many people (particularly in the West) falsely believe the old process of subjugation is no longer taking place or that it is no longer practically feasible. In truth, the process is accelerating. Standing armies have been discarded in favor of the more devious and insidious weapon of demographic conquest. Others may have dreamed of world conquest, but Islam has the power to achieve it.

Public acts of terror are little more than a diversionary tactic in this war. The replacement of European populations by demographic invasion is the more serious and effective weapon. In a speech in 2006, former Libyan revolutionary leader Muhammar Gadhafi said, “There are signs that Allah will grant victory to Islam in Europe without swords, without guns, without conquest. The 50 million Muslims of Europe will turn it into a Muslim continent within a few decades.”⁷

Gadhafi was only exaggerating a little. As of 2010, Europe was inhabited by 44.1 million Muslims, compared to less than 30 million who lived there in 1990.⁸ Over that 20-year period, Muslims grew from under four percent to six percent of the total population of Europe. Millions more are already at the gates, waiting for any chance—legal or illegal—to pour into the continent.

The Islamic demographic invasion is being helped along by dramatically declining birth rates in the Western world. The European Union equivalent of the U.S. Census Bureau reported that live birth rates per woman (a statistic known as the fertility rate) had dropped to an average of 1.58 in the European Union in 2011.⁹ That’s well below the fertility rate of 2.1 commonly understood as necessary for stable population replacement. Today, the European Union relies on immigration for population growth.

The idea of an Islamic demographic threat to Europe has been gaining ground, despite limited media attention to the issue. In 2006, Canadian conservative Mark Steyn made it the theme of his book, America Alone. Steyn argues that selfish preoccupations with pleasure and lives lived without serious consequences have made European countries vulnerable to the raw numbers of Islamic believers. Some of Europe’s most strongly-held beliefs today contribute to its predicament, he says. “In their bizarre prioritization of ‘a woman’s right to choose’, feminists have helped ensure that European women will end their days in a culture that doesn’t accord women the right to choose anything.”¹⁰ Steyn believes demographics will destroy Europe and replace it with “Eurabia,” a term coined by Giselle Littman (also known as Bat Ye’Or) to refer to an Islamized Europe.

THE MULTICULTURAL FAÇADE

Large-scale Muslim immigration to Europe is shielded by an innocuous-sounding ideology called multiculturalism. As the Yale sociologist Jeffrey C. Alexander has explained, “In the early 1970s ‘multicultural’ connoted ‘compromise, interdependence, a relativizing universalism, and an expanding intercultural community.’”¹¹ Instead, as the flow of immigrants from outside the West increased, Western countries were faced with increasing and persistent difficulties in integrating their new populations. These countries experienced a dramatic failure in their multicultural models. Yet mass immigration continues.

Meanwhile, the term ‘multiculturalism’ itself has undergone changes since its first inception. In its more extreme forms, the term now refers to an anti-Western ideology which promotes and protects the customs and perspectives of non-European ethnicities against the customs and perspectives of their hosts. According to Dwight Murphey, a former Professor at Wichita State University:

When expressed less stridently, [multiculturalism] praises “diversity” as a high value and supports the substitution of non-European customs for those that have heretofore prevailed in the West. This is a “diversity” that is advocated for Western nations, but is not at the same time pressed upon other cultures such as those of China, Japan or Latin America.¹²

Multiculturalism today promotes a large-scale societal shift by creating an environment in which non-European immigrants are comfortable without having to assimilate, while at the same time demonizing Europeans who dare to speak out against such an environment.

For years, many European Union countries based their immigration policies on the principle of multiculturalism. More recently, European leaders have begun to back away from these earlier policies, especially in regard to the Muslim immigrants who often compose the largest part of their immigrant populations. German Chancellor Angela Merkel declared: “The notion of multiculturalism has fallen apart … Anyone coming here must respect our constitution and tolerate our Western and Christian roots.”¹³ Her statement is particularly striking given that previous multicultural policies in Germany were aimed at protecting the substantial Turkish immigrant population. German experiences with the Turks, however, have prompted a reevaluation. One well-known German political journalist agreed with Merkel, adding, “If multiculturalism means that it’s okay for 30,000 Turks to live in a certain quarter of Berlin, and never leave, and live like they’re still in deepest Turkey, then the term is now discredited.”¹⁴

MUSLIM IMMIGRATION IN GREECE

The vast majority of illegal immigrants to Europe enter through Greece. Between 1991 and 2001, the immigrant population in Greece increased by well over 400 percent.¹⁵ Since 2001, estimates are more nebulous since many of the immigrants passing through Greece are illegal and therefore unregistered. In 2010 alone, over 130,000 people were arrested for staying in or entering Greece illegally.¹⁶ Whether fleeing war or seeking a land of milk and honey, illegal immigrants come to Greece using the porous Turkish border as a gateway to Europe. As of 2010, Greece accounted for roughly 90 percent of all illegal border crossings into EU territory (up from 75 percent in 2009).¹⁷

One popular method involves a short journey by sea. Immigrants in Turkey are supplied with boats and sharp knives. They’re instructed to use the knives to disable their boats as soon as they enter Greek waters. By doing so, they create a humanitarian disaster, compelling Greek authorities to help. The clandestine agents who support such methods live in Turkey, beyond the reach of Greek law. More brazen agents attempt similar humanitarian disaster cruises across the Mediterranean Sea. In one recent case in April 2015, hundreds of refugees being smuggled from Libya were drowned when their ship was wrecked in the Mediterranean. Experts estimate some 900 people had already died in 2015 in similar incidents prior to this event.¹⁸

The massive, uninvited incursion of immigrants into Greece has sparked an increase in crime. According to one research group, Greek prison populations are now 60.4% foreign, despite foreigners making up only about 10 percent of the total population.¹⁹ Police officials capture and deport thousands of criminal migrants each year, only to see many of them return with new names and passports.

MUSLIM IMMIGRATION IN FRANCE

Apart from Russia, France has Europe’s biggest Muslim population, totaling around five million.²⁰ Illegal immigration of Muslims is also a major problem, and there has been a rapid rise in deportations of illegal immigrations from 9,320 in 2000 to 36,822 in 2012.²¹ Two million Muslims voted overwhelmingly for Socialist candidate Francois Hollande in the 2012 presidential election, support that helped him win victory over Nicolas Sarkozy, whose government had become so active in removing troublemaking Muslims.²² Furthermore, there are now more mosques being built in France than Roman Catholic churches.²³

French society is based upon the concept of political unity, and French citizens are expected to conform to French culture. These expectations were tested in 2010 when a controversial law was passed outlawing the wearing of full-face covering veils in public. The law was supported by 80 percent of French voters and passed by an overwhelming 246 to 1 vote. The French Interior Ministry estimated that only about 2,000 of the five million or so Muslims in France wore veils covered by the law. Yet the law has provoked incidents across the country. In one of the most serious outbreaks, multiple police units had to be called in to subdue hundreds of rioting Muslims in a French suburb after an officer attempted to enforce the law.²⁴

Muslim violence is a growing problem in France. In 2013, a 22-year-old Muslim convert confessed to a failed attempt to murder a French soldier in Paris after being inspired by religious teachers. The French Interior Minister described the case as part of a threat from “increasingly radicalized petty offenders with the potential to commit similar attacks.”²⁵

The case of Mohammed Merah, a French citizen of Algerian origin, is a good example of the severity of the problem. Merah was a troubled teenager with a long record of petty crimes and a spell in prison at 19, where he is believed to have been converted to the cause of jihad. From there, he traveled to Egypt and Pakistan, where his radical journey continued. Upon returning from Afghanistan he prepared intensively for mass murder.²⁶ Then, in March 2012, he went on a killing spree. His first victim was a French soldier who Merah shot in the head at close range, saying, “You kill my brothers, so I am killing you.”²⁷ Four days later, Merah carried out an attack at a shopping center, killing two more soldiers and seriously injuring a third before fleeing.

Eight days after Merah’s initial attack, he assaulted the schoolyard of a Jewish middle school. He grabbed one of his victims, an eight-year-old girl, by the hair and shot her in the head at close range. Merah killed two more children and a Rabbi before escaping again. Police carried out the largest manhunt in French history to find Merah, and eventually killed him in a shootout. During the siege before the shootout, Merah spoke to a French editor by phone, telling her that (in her words), “These deaths were not only necessary … they were to uphold the honor of Islam.”²⁸

MUSLIM IMMIGRATION IN THE UNITED KINGDOM

The United Kingdom is a popular destination for illegal immigrants because asylum and refugee status are easier to obtain there. In the popular imagination, the UK is thought of as a typical country of white Europeans, but demographically this is no longer the case. As of 2011, Asian (a category including Indians and Pakistanis), Black, and mixed populations made up about 15 percent of the total population of England, and five percent of the population identified as Muslim.²⁹ Some towns in the London area have Muslim populations in excess of 50 percent, and large city centers typically are about 14 percent Muslim.³⁰

With this postwar increase in the Muslim population and its increasingly hostile Islamic supremacy, violence has also come to British streets. In June 2013, six men were sentenced to prison for a failed attempt to bomb a political rally in 2012. Police uncovered the plot after one of the two cars planned for use in the bombing was stopped for lack of insurance. They discovered a bomb made from modified fireworks filled with nails and ball bearings and a message declaring, “We love death more than you love life. Where penalty for blasphemy of Allah and his Messenger Muhammad is death.”³¹

In May 2013, two Nigerian British converts to Islam killed a British soldier in the streets of London. They hit him with a car, and then attacked him with knives and a meat cleaver in an attempt to decapitate him before police could arrive. The men told witnesses they had killed the young soldier to avenge Muslims killed by British troops overseas. One of the attackers was filmed by a witness, declaring:

You people will never be safe. Remove your governments, they don’t care about you. You think David Cameron is gonna get caught in the street when we start busting our guns? Do you think politicians are going to die? No, it’s going to be the average guy, like you and your children.³²

For the most part, the British response to such plots and attacks has been to treat them as individual incidents rather than part of a pattern. This attitude is one reason why French officials in the mid-1990s coined the term “Londonistan” to describe Britain’s willingness to allow radical Islamists to stay in Britain so long as their terror activities were kept outside the country. This approach, which can only be called appeasement, clearly is no longer working as the number of terror attacks on British soil attests.³³

One hotbed of Islamic radicalization in the United Kingdom is the prison system. Although Muslims are only 5 percent of the total population, they make up more than 13 percent of the prison population. Inmates are often bullied into conversion or end up converting in exchange for protection. One of Britain’s largest prisons is 42 percent Muslim and, according to the prison officers’ union, “is now effectively run by Muslims, many of whom are jihadis,” and is a prime recruiting ground for terror groups.³⁴

A growing problem in England has been the prevalence of sexual abuse and pedophilia in its Muslim population. Events in the city of Bradford between the end of 2012 and the beginning of 2013 illustrate the problem. In November 2012, a Member of Parliament (MP) representing part of Bradford set off an angry reaction by claiming that gangs of Muslim men were “going around and raping white kids.” But while people were reacting to his claims, the police were also investigating them—and over the next two months made 30 arrests in connection with child sex crimes.³⁵ Then, seven months later, police uncovered what they believe to be the largest child sex ring ever found in the United Kingdom. 45 men, most of them Muslims, were arrested in the Bradford area on charges of abusing four British girls (the youngest only 13 years old). That Bradford MP was not spouting racism; he was describing a horrific reality.³⁶ In Britain today, “the majority of convictions obtained against the child sex grooming gangs have been against men of Pakistani origin who have exploited, repeatedly gang-raped, and sexually tortured vulnerable young girls over long periods.”³⁷

MUSLIM IMMIGRATION IN THE NETHERLANDS

In 2010, the Pew Research Center estimated Muslims in the Netherlands at about 5.5 percent of the total population.³⁸ That percentage is expected to increase to 7.8 by 2030. Worldwide attention on the Netherlands increased when actor, writer, and film producer Theo van Gogh was brutally murdered on the streets of Amsterdam. Van Gogh was a staunch anti-multiculturalist who produced a film called Submission (the literal English translation of the word ‘Islam’) portraying four abused Muslim women. Van Gogh wanted to draw attention to the abuse of women that took place under Islam. He didn’t take the inevitable death threats he received for the film seriously, and was stabbed and shot to death in public for his “insult” to Islam.³⁹

While the overall numbers of Muslims in European countries like the Netherlands may appear small, this appearance is counteracted by their concentration in important cities and the aggressiveness with which they engage their host communities. For example, Muslims make up around 5.5 percent of the population in the Netherlands, but a quarter of the residents of the two largest cities (Amsterdam and Rotterdam) are Muslims.⁴⁰ In addition, in January 2012 “Dutch authorities revealed that 65 percent of youths of Moroccan origin between twelve and twenty-three years old have been detained at least once by the police.”⁴¹ Apologists would respond that these high crime rates in Muslim communities are the result of racism and enforced separation. But as we have seen, this is actually a reversal of the truth. It is the Islamic culture of the Muslim immigrants that teaches them to despise and reject European cultures and turns many into enemies within. As has been noted, the Netherlands opened its arms in tolerant welcome to newcomers and yet, as Bruce Bawer reflects, “many Dutch Muslims kept that society at arm’s length, despising its freedoms and clinging to a range of undemocratic traditions and prejudices.”⁴²

MUSLIMS IN EUROPE

While specific details may vary from country to country, the Muslim incursion into Europe follows a similar pattern. Radical Islam uses all Muslims as weapons in a struggle to impose Islam on completely alien soil. Even so-called moderate Muslims are useful tools in this fight. They do not object to Islam as such becoming dominant, and even the most moderate of them will often see one or more members of their large families who refuse to assimilate to European ways.

A key element in the pattern is the exploitation of the European welfare system. If demography is the preferred weapon of war, use of the host countries’ welfare systems is like heavy artillery directed against the European economy. According to a 2011 article, Muslims were four times more likely than non-Muslims to be on welfare in Germany; in Norway non-Westerners were ten times more likely than native Norwegians to be on welfare.⁴³

France is attempting to stand firm. A series of high-profile cases of welfare fraud prompted legal changes to the country’s benefit system. In one case, a polygamist who had fathered 15 children by multiple wives was using the “extra” wives and children to fraudulently collect some 175,000 Euros worth of benefits. On top of that, he was housing illegal immigrants in his butcher shop, where he paid his workers less than minimum wage.⁴⁴ He wasn’t alone. There are somewhere between 16,000 – 20,000 polygamous families in France as of 2013, despite the practice being forbidden.⁴⁵ After years of this, the French government had enough, and in March 2013 immigrants receiving financial assistance began to see their benefits dramatically reduced. France’s Interior Minister justified the change by saying existing benefits programs were not working:

If this is not done, the costs for the maintenance of migrants now paid by the French Treasury will continue to devastate the economy of France that is already suffering from the crisis caused by international factors.⁴⁶

If even a Socialist government is cutting benefits, the problem must be very grim indeed.

Welfare fraud is an even more acute problem in the United Kingdom. A Pakistani-born member of the House of Lords addressed the problem in 2011 when she went public with the claim that Muslims were abusing the English welfare system. She described how, hypothetically, a Pakistani man could use polygamy in Muslim countries to rack up extra wives and children, then bring them back to England, where they would be counted as “single mothers” with dependents eligible for benefits. He could repeat the process for as many wives as Pakistan would allow him.⁴⁷

This hypothetical situation turned out to be not-so-hypothetical at all. It didn’t take journalists long to turn up a couple of real-life examples. In one case, a Muslim taxi driver in Blackburn had five wives and “so many children that he struggles to remember their names.” The “extra” wives were considered single mothers by the state and received benefits accordingly. Another case involved a 27-year-old pizza delivery driver in Yorkshire with three wives—two of whom he kept in separate residences, collecting single mother benefits from the welfare system.⁴⁸

Consider the case of the radical Islamist Anjem Choudary in the United Kingdom. His “day job” is striving to impose Islamic law on the West. Because he isn’t working, Choudary enjoys the equivalent of $40,000 (£25,000) in tax-free benefits each year. This cleric has been filmed publicly urging other Muslims to do the same thing and live off the state so they have more time to devote to holy war. Mocking the British name for unemployment insurance (the Job Seeker’s Allowance), Choudary calls this state-support a “Jihad Seeker’s Allowance.”⁴⁹ In this way, Choudary pillages his enemy’s treasury while the rest of his Islamic army does the same to the country in slow demographic conquest.

Among Pakistanis, first cousin marriage is not only allowed, it is considered a point of pride; proof that a family has high standing and is very desirable. Pakistani immigrants have brought the same practice with them to the United Kingdom, and as a result, “British Pakistanis accounted for 3.4 percent of all births but have 30 percent of all British children with ‘recessive disorders.’”⁵⁰ The cost of caring for such children falls on the British taxpayers as well.

Muslims also exert a drain on taxpayers through the use of culturally “necessary” operations. For example, between 2005 and 2009, the British National Health Service performed over one hundred virginity operations—that is, operations to restore a woman’s hymen—at a cost to taxpayers of £400,000. Young Muslim women have the operation due to the expectation from their future husbands or male relatives that they will be virgins when they marry.⁵¹

A more grim issue is that of rape. Rape of non-Muslim women is often justified on the grounds that Western women are “immodest” in the eyes of Muslims or “infidels” deserving of no moral treatment. Here again the United Kingdom has been at the center of some of the most terrifying cases. After gang-rape cases involving Pakistani men came to light across the country, a UK House of Commons report into the matter concluded that “evidence presented to us suggests that there is a model of localized grooming of Pakistani-heritage men targeting young white girls.”⁵²

One particularly heinous case involved a group of nine Muslim men called the “Rochdale gang.” This group preyed on young teenage girls from broken homes—the more vulnerable the better. The men took them in and groomed them to be sex slaves. Of course the whole thing was kept private since, as one of the defendants told the trial, the men didn’t want anyone in the Muslim community to see them with young white girls. In pronouncing the guilty verdict upon the group, the British judge declared, “All of you treated [the victims] as though they were worthless and beyond respect.”⁵³

Less than a year later, another case in Britain demonstrated that Rochdale was no outlier. In Oxford, another sex ring run by Muslims prompted an outcry even from Britain’s Muslim community that the child exploitation was too much to bear. One victim of the seven-man gang told reporters after the trial that the members “exclusively wanted white girls to abuse.” The gang targeted underage girls living in care homes and fed them alcohol and drugs to make them more pliable to whatever sick demands the men might make. A Muslim writer who discussed the case with horror described how some Islamic preachers fed an attitude of contempt toward white girls and women:

They encourage their followers to believe that these women are habitually promiscuous, decadent and sleazy—sins which are made all the worse by the fact that they are kaffurs [sic] or non-believers … According to this mentality, these white women deserve to be punished by being exploited and degraded.⁵⁴

The end result, according to the same writer, is a situation where Muslims who would never dare target Muslim girls for sexual abuse out of fear of the consequences feel no shame or concern out of targeting vulnerable British girls for the same treatment. This will not change, he said, unless “we abandon the dangerous blinkers of political correctness and antiquated multiculturalism.”⁵⁵

ISLAMIC TERROR ATTACKS IN EUROPE

The increasing Muslim presence in Europe has already led to a number of well-known terror attacks. One of the most devastating was the London suicide bombings—often referred to by the date of its occurrence, “7/7”—in 2005. This incident involved three separate suicide bombings perpetrated by home-grown Islamic terrorists in the London subway system, with a fourth bomb on a double-decker bus. 52 civilians were killed and more than 700 injured. The group that carried out the attack was not directed by al-Qaeda, but simply Muslims living in Britain.⁵⁶

A similar attack took place in Madrid, Spain in 2004. This attack was planned to occur just a few days before Spain’s general election and intended to shift Spanish policy away from supporting the US-led war on terror. Bombers targeted commuter trains, killing 191 and injuring over 1,800. As with the London bombings, this attack was influenced but not directed by al-Qaeda.⁵⁷

Even the 9/11 terror attacks in the United States had a European connection. The planning for the event was based in Hamburg, Germany. While the target may have been American, Europe provided the center of planning and the staging ground for the plotters.⁵⁸

The reality of Islamic terrorism has provoked counter-responses from various groups in Europe. In Greece, the Golden Dawn political party rocketed from obscurity to gain support from more than 10 percent of voters on the strength of their opposition to immigration. Members of the party were connected with a number of violent anti-immigrant attacks, but many Greeks, fed up with the government’s inability or unwillingness to do anything about the itinerant populations, put up with it. In the Netherlands, Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom is the fourth-largest political group in the country. The group is strongly anti-Islamic, with Wilders himself declaring, “Islam is not a religion, it’s an ideology, the ideology of a retarded culture. I have a problem with Islamic tradition, culture, ideology. Not with Muslim people.”⁵⁹ Backlash attacks and parties indicate the increasing enmity between Islam and the citizens of its host countries in the West.

SOME WHO SEE

Not all in the West are blind to the true nature of the Islamic war against Europe and the rest of the world. Many of those who see the truth are not radical extremists of the left or right, but observant and rational people with a clear view of the issues. They do not advocate campaigns of hate, but they are completely unsatisfied by the head in the sand approach dictated by political correctness or multiculturalism. One of the most outspoken of these was Oriana Fallaci, a distinguished novelist and journalist from Italy.

Fallaci came face-to-face with Islamic intentions toward Europe in 1972 when she interviewed a Palestinian extremist with a gun pointed at her head. The Palestinian explained that Islam was at war with the West:

[The Arabs will] advance step by step. Millimeter by millimeter. Year after year. Decade after decade. Determined, stubborn, patient. This is our strategy. A strategy that we shall expand throughout the entire planet.⁶⁰

Fallaci realized later that the extremist was referring to a broad cultural war that included multiple fronts. As she explained later, the man “also meant the cultural war, the demographic war, the religious war waged by stealing a country from its citizens.”⁶¹

Although Fallaci was an atheist, she came to see the Catholic Church and Pope Benedict XVI as allies in her effort to rouse Europeans to the Islamic threat. For her trouble, she was put on trial in northern Italy on charges of defaming Islam in her 2004 book, The Strength of Reason. Fallaci died of breast cancer before she could defend herself in court, but she told the Wall Street Journal in one of her final interviews that she respected Pope Benedict for his recognition of the problems posed by “Eurabia.” “I am an atheist,” she said, “and if an atheist and a pope think the same things, there must be something true.”⁶²

THE SUPREME IRONY

Muslims never stop demanding that Europeans actively respect their religious, political, and human rights in the West. European governments, on the other hand, hardly whisper a word about the lack of religious, political, and human freedoms in the Muslim world. They do not mention the despicable treatment of women or minorities in countries such as Saudi Arabia. European nations invite Muslims in and do not ask them to learn about or respect the greatness of Western civilization, yet European populations are expected—and even required—to kowtow to the glory of Islamic civilization.

In January 2011, Danish journalist Lars Hedegaard was taken to court for daring to speak out about Islam. Hedegaard was an eminent journalist, president of both the Danish Free Press Society and the International Free Press Society—by no means an extremist nut. His “hate” crime was stating in 2009 that domestic violence and child rape take place in Muslim families at disturbingly high levels. But truth is no defense under Denmark’s hate speech laws; the only relevant issue is whether someone felt offended.⁶³ For pointing out a statistical fact, Hedegaard got himself in legal trouble, and in 2013 an angry Muslim attempted to assassinate him in his own home (he foiled the attempt).

In Austria, a housewife in Vienna named Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff faced up to three years in prison for “hate” activity. Her crime was conducting seminars explaining the perils of radical Islam in which she used direct quotations from the Qur’an. Unable to convict her of hate speech, prosecutors charged her instead with “denigration of religious beliefs of a legally recognized religion.” She was found guilty and had a fine levied against her.⁶⁴

One of the most ironic cases involves Dutch politician Geert Wilders. In 2009, Wilders was arrested for hate speech stemming from comments he had made in previous years about Islam. After a long public trial, Wilders was acquitted in 2011. Then in 2012, Wilders was described in public by a radical Islamist as a “dog of the Romans” who would have to be dealt with once the Netherlands became an Islamic state. The same speaker pointedly referred to “the case of Theo van Gogh” to illustrate what would have to become of men such as Wilders. No arrest was made under the same hate speech law that was applied to Wilders. Instead, when a passerby tried to challenge the man making such threats, he was himself arrested for his trouble.⁶⁵

The best living example of the maddening absurdity of the “hate speech” situation in Europe is probably Anjem Choudary, the proud welfare claimant mentioned earlier. Choudary is a British-born Muslim of Pakistani descent who has made a name for himself in England as an outspoken supporter of the Islamization of the country. He has publicly voiced support for both the 9/11 attacks and the July 7, 2005 suicide bombings in London. Despite being born in England, he has made clear his belief that religion trumps national allegiance, calling his British passport “no more than a travel document.”⁶⁶ Choudary advocates subjecting the UK to sharia law, and has made his rejection of the West clear:

As Muslims, we reject democracy, we reject secularism, and freedom, and human rights. We reject all of the things that you espouse as being ideals … There is nothing called a republic in Islam. When we talk about the shari’a, we are talking about only the shari’a.⁶⁷

For all this, Choudary walks around freely and has experienced little more than mild social disapproval.

European countries seem willing to tolerate almost any level of “hate speech” from their Muslim communities, while any citizen who dares speak on the other side faces a criminal complaint. Further, the idea of criminalizing a description of facts simply because they may be painful for one group of people to hear is antithetical to the very idea of free speech or a free society. If multiculturalism means holding native citizens to a standard which is never applied to guests, it is a very confused ideology indeed.

THE EUROPEAN DEMOGRAPHIC WAR UNVEILED

The Islamic demographic war in Europe is first and foremost a war of numbers. These numbers include populations which have been in Europe long enough to become citizens and establish a political voice as well as waves of new immigrants—legal and illegal—who spread throughout the continent. Social scientists have found that if 10 percent of a given population holds a firm, unshakable belief, that belief will always become accepted by the majority in time.⁶⁸ With six percent of the European population already Muslim, that 10 percent tipping point is frighteningly close.

It is already abundantly clear that the Islamic population has no intention of assimilating to its host countries. Instead, it has already established a separate society within those societies, apart from the native populations. One section of The Hague in the Netherlands is called the “Sharia Triangle,” a territory belonging to orthodox Muslims which is completely ignored by politicians, city officials, and even police. Within this area, Muslims dictate the customs and the laws. For non-Muslims the area is simply “no-go.”⁶⁹

Similar conditions exist in almost every large city in Europe with a significant Muslim population. There are areas in London, Malmo, and the Paris suburbs, for example, where sharia law is already the de facto “law of the land.” European cities used to have quarters where Jewish populations lived apart, more or less according to their own rules. But Jews weren’t aiming to replace the native populations and make Talmudic law the governing law of the country.

The Islamic demographic war is also a war of attrition. By demanding and receiving extensive welfare benefits, creating fear and insecurity in native populations, and filling prisons in disproportionate amounts, Muslim populations exert a steady drain on the financial resources and stability of European countries. Compare this situation with countries with large (but non-Muslim) minority populations, such as Singapore. Minority populations in such countries keep their ethnic identity while still integrating into the economy, military, and society of the host country. But Islam seeks to conquer, not to integrate.

Western countries following a politically correct and multicultural ideology present themselves as playground weaklings with signs on their backs saying “kick me.” Among the general European population, however, growing numbers of people are refusing to go along quietly with demographic replacement. Nothing can justify the brutal killing spree of Anders Behring Breivik, but if European elites continue to ignore what is happening in their countries he will likely be only the tip of the iceberg. Hatred is not and never will be the answer, but if this existential conflict is allowed to continue it will become inevitable.

PART SEVEN

CHAPTER THIRTY - ONE

A Warning to Europe

In each and every case [of rape with violent assault in Oslo], not only in 2008 and 2009 but also in 2007, the offender was a non-Western immigrant. At the same time, in 9 out of 10 cases, the victim was Norwegian, not just by nationality, but also by ethnicity.

—Hanne Kristine Rohde, Oslo Police¹

The confrontations were very, very violent. For months I’ve been asking for the means to alleviate the neighborhood’s problems because tension has been mounting here. You’ve got gangs of youths playing at being gangsters who have turned the area into a no-go zone. You can no longer order a pizza or get a doctor to come to the house.

—Gilles Demailly, Mayor of Amiens, France²

I don’t feel your pain. I don’t have any sympathy for you. I can’t feel for you because I think you’re a non-believer.

—Mohammed Bouyeri, murderer³

Women are not entitled to respect when they walk around without a Hijab. They are to blame for it when they are attacked … All the crimes that occur against women is because they are not covered. When they are not covered, you have no respect for them … She disobeys her master, there are two places in the Qur’an has ordered her to cover themselves … Women make a clean society dirty when they walk around without a Hijab. They are not entitled to respect and are not valuable as those who wear a Hijab.

—Copenhagen Imam Shahid Mehdi⁴

In May 2014, the voters of Europe sent a warning to their political elites. The event was national elections for members of the European Union (EU) parliament. Almost everywhere across Europe the results were stunning—anti-mainstream parties skeptical of mass immigration and loss of national sovereignty to unelected EU bureaucrats surged to victory. In France, it was the National Front, whose leader Marine Le Pen has been outspoken in defense of her country’s traditional separation of church and state. In the United Kingdom, it was the UK Independence Party outstripping both Labour and the Conservatives with its message of retaining Britain’s identity and independence.

On both sides of the Atlantic, the media responded with shock and disgust—yet neither response was warranted. To many observers, the rising tide of revolt against top-down political consensus in Europe has been building steadily for many years. This revolt is based not in racism or ignorance but on the re-assertion of democratic will and cultural dignity. Certainly, the anti-EU and anti-immigration movement which has spread across the continent attracts its share of unpleasant groups. But the fundamental core, the basic principles of this movement lie in love of liberty, love of democracy, and love of nation. It is worthy to rally behind, not to oppose.

The people of Europe have good reason to be angry with their political elites. For decades, the main parties of both Left and Right have presented European integration and multiculturalism as a fait accompli. Abstract ideologies and massive social experiments have been systematically imposed upon the European people as if they were self-evident goods that only bigots or idiots could oppose. Voters have had few genuine opportunities either to give or to withdraw consent for these policies. Taken together, European integration and multiculturalism present an assault against both the democratic will and the cultural heritage of the nations of Europe. As the EU elections of May 2014 showed, however, time is running out on the political elite. The failures of their policies are obvious, and new political parties have emerged to force the mainstream to recognize the will, the history, and the needs of their peoples.

NO MORE—THE REVOLT BEGINS

To find the tipping point which brought Europe to its pass in May 2014 one must look back at the Netherlands a dozen years before. No country better represented the new ideals of cultural relativism and European integration than the Netherlands at that time. Its political parties together formed an echo-chamber of elite opinion in which all dissenting views to its headlong rush into immigration and integration were silenced. Merely to question the course the country had taken was tantamount to racism, idiocy, and madness. But while political correctness could restrain political dialogue, it had no power to suppress reality. The reality was that relativism and multiculturalism were already a disaster.

Across the Netherlands, the famed tolerance and hospitality of the Dutch people was being abused as peaceful neighborhoods fell into crime and disorder. Native men and women became harassed and abused minorities in the streets of their own cities. Ian Buruma, who wrote a well-researched examination of Islam and the limits of European tolerance, has documented the serious increase in crime in the Netherlands. Along with the increase, the doctrine of multiculturalism made it indecent to disclose the ethnicity of the criminals, who were often Arab Muslims. With the increase in criminality came a stunning increase in intolerance and violence, particularly among the Islamic Moroccan population which had come to live in the Netherlands. As Buruma puts it, there was no response from government or media, who watched and even applauded as Dutch cities became “hotbeds of religious bigotry.”⁵ “The most dramatic sociological change of our lifetime was unfolding before our eyes,” Dutch politician Geert Wilders explains, “but neither the Dutch media nor the political class wanted to acknowledge it.”⁶

Then an academic sociologist and political columnist named Pim Fortuyn appeared on the scene. Through the force of his arguments, Fortuyn gave eloquent voice to the opinions of millions of ignored Dutch citizens. Before, it had been common to describe those who opposed mass immigration and multiculturalism as racists and fascists; when those same slurs were heaped upon Fortuyn and his followers, voters saw right through the ad hominem attacks. Fortuyn made the case that Islamic culture and mass Islamic immigration was contrary to the very same liberal democratic values and Dutch tolerance which was inviting them in.

Fortuyn was a political success, but it came at a great personal cost. His local political party made a breakthrough in his home city of Rotterdam in 2002, and this success led to increased support and enthusiasm ahead of national elections in May of that year. Just days before the national election, Fortuyn was shot to death by a left-wing extremist. A country which had not seen a political assassination in 400 years was shocked. But the murderer was unsuccessful at containing the movement: Fortuyn’s party went on to win 17% of the vote and a firm place in the ruling coalition government. It was not an end, but a beginning. After Fortuyn, the terms of the debate over immigration and multiculturalism began to change.

THE PROBLEM

For some readers, it will be necessary to lay out some of the realities behind multiculturalism and Islamic immigration in Europe. Most Europeans know these all too well, and though some deny the extent or the severity of the problem, it is usually acknowledged that there is indeed a problem. The demographic invasion of Europe by Islam has torn apart native communities, eroded ancient liberties, and provoked a spike in violent crime across the continent. While the bonds of political correctness have been slightly loosened, they are still in place and all too readily join together with jihadist intimidation to silence and censor the protesting voices of the majority.

The problem begins with the nature of Islamic immigration. Unlike most other immigrant groups in Europe, Muslims immigrants insist on maintaining a rigid and supremacist separateness from their host cultures. The doctrine of multiculturalism, which holds that all cultures are equal and no cultural values should trump another’s has protected a group that completely rejects it.

Some media outlets prefer to spin Muslim violence in Europe as resulting from imposed isolation, but this argument does not hold water. The national governments of Europe have bent over backwards for decades to accommodate their immigrant groups. Other media figures have honestly acknowledged, as Swedish newspaper editor Ingrid Carlqvist did recently, that:

For the last 20 years or so, we have seen so many immigrants coming to Sweden [that] really don’t like Sweden … They don’t want to integrate, they don’t want to live in this society.⁷

The leader of Sweden’s National Democrats Party Marc Abramsson observed that Sweden,

Tried harder than any other European country to integrate, spending billions on a welfare system that is designed to help jobless immigrants and guarantee them a good quality of life.⁸

Despite these efforts, Sweden now has large areas in its major cities where immigrants regard the police and even the fire department as enemies and attack them.

Muslim separatism in Europe is not the case of a group which just wants to live their lives in quiet and dignity. As author Bruce Bawer has observed in the Netherlands, “many Dutch Muslims kept that society at arm’s length, despising its freedoms and clinging to a range of undemocratic traditions and prejudices.”⁹ Crime statistics bear out Bawer’s observation. In Oslo, Norway, a police report found that in every single violent rape assault in a three-year period where the rapist could be identified, the rapist was a man of foreign origin (in almost every case, the victim was a native Norwegian woman).¹⁰ This was an extreme case, but it is by no means unique. In Britain, where the Muslim proportion is similar:

The majority of convictions obtained against the child sex grooming gangs have been against men of Pakistani origin that have exploited, repeatedly gang-raped and sexually tortured vulnerable young girls over long periods.¹¹

These statistics are not the result of discrimination by police but quite the opposite: Pakistani gangs were in some cases allowed to continue their crimes by police who hesitated to press charges for fear of accusations of racism.¹² Geert Wilders has told of being driven out of his own neighborhood in the city of Utrecht after being personally assaulted and robbed by Moroccan youths. In 2012, “Dutch authorities revealed that 65 percent of youths of Moroccan origin between twelve and twenty-three years old have been detained at least once by the police.”¹³

In her chilling and revealing book Londonistan, author Melanie Phillips describes the response in 1989 of British Muslims to Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. Her description is a microcosm of the systematic threat the community presents to British values:

There was the murderous incitement; the flagrant defiance of both the rule of law and the cardinal value of free speech; the religious fanaticism; the emergence of British Muslims as a distinct and hostile political entity; and the supine response of the British establishment. What was also on conspicuous display was the mind-twisting, back-to-front reasoning that is routinely used by many Muslims to turn their own violent aggression into victimhood.¹⁴

As she goes on to recall, British Muslims burned books and raged against Rushdie on the streets long before Ayatollah Khomeini issued his infamous fatwa. Rather than confront this murderous rage, British culture backed away apologetically—a pattern it has continued to follow ever since.

Knowing that the liberal culture of the West places greater moral dignity on victims and minorities, Muslims were quick to spin this episode not as an example of their own intransigence and hostility to the West but as an example of a thoughtless and intolerant attack on Islam. Unfortunately, the British media mostly bought this lie.¹⁵ Meanwhile, Rushdie (a British citizen) was forced into hiding, a Japanese translator of his book was murdered, and an Italian translator and Norwegian publisher of the book narrowly survived attempts on their lives.¹⁶ This hardly sounds like the case of a religion suffering serious oppression.

Muslims have since expanded this technique throughout Europe. Everywhere they have succeeded in intimidating governments and media outlets into self-censorship and even collaboration in the canard that Muslims are hapless victims. The value of free expression has been buried beneath Islamic intimidation. The intimidation does not come from idle threats, either. Two years after the murder of Pim Fortuyn, Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh was murdered by a Moroccan Muslim on the streets of Amsterdam. His supposed crime was making a film with Dutch MP Ayaan Hirsi Ali about the mistreatment of women in Islam. After the murderer had shot van Gogh and slit his throat, he added a note to the dead victim’s chest threatening Hirsi Ali with death. The note claimed that this woman, who had suffered rape, abuse, and genital mutilation during her Islamic upbringing only to escape and protest against such treatment, was somehow capable of “terroriz[ing] Islam.”¹⁷ It is the height of chutzpah to murder and threaten one’s critics and then complain about victimization and terror.

This is just a sample of the reality that European politicians have been trying their best to ignore. Separatist Muslims benefit from naïve multiculturalist policies and throw it back in Europe’s face. They demand not equality but Islamic monoculture. They back this demand by calling it their “religious freedom.” The aggression and intimidation on display not only erodes free expression and censors critics, it also creates Islamic colonies in the urban areas they have come to dominate. As Bawer describes:

In Britain, imams have pressed the government to designate parts of Bradford as being under Muslim law. In Belgium, Muslims in the Brussels neighborhood of Sint-Jans-Molenbeek consider it to be under Islamic jurisdiction. In Denmark, Muslim leaders have sought similar control over parts of Copenhagen. In France, an official met with an imam at the edge of Roubaix’s Muslims district out of respect for his declaration that it was Islamic territory.¹⁸

Recently in Birmingham an elaborate plot to Islamize the city’s public schools was uncovered. Birmingham is England’s second city, with a 20% Muslim population. What was found is that, with the complicity and acquiescence of the city council, “schools in Birmingham are illegally segregating pupils, discriminating against non-Muslim students and restricting the [national] syllabus to ‘comply with conservative Islamic teaching.’”¹⁹ Reporters found that one school had subsidized trips to Mecca and allowed a teacher to lead the students in anti-Christian chants at assembly. Girls were made to sit at the back of classroom. Christian students were made to study on their own while Muslims were given close attention. Teachers who did not comply with such treatment were hounded out or threatened. A former teacher at one of the Islamized schools testified that “the Islamic ethos is overpowering and it’s dominating everything.”²⁰ This is happening on a large scale at British public schools funded by British taxpayers.

The degree to which Islam is distorting European society and constricting the rights of the people can be clearly shown in the increasing effects of Muslim anti-Semitism. While American media outlets naturally prefer to focus on “far-right” groups when talking about European anti-Semitism, the fact is that the threat against Jews in Europe today is primarily and almost exclusively driven by Muslims. In France a Muslim went to a Jewish school in Toulouse in 2012 and murdered three children and a rabbi.²¹ In May 2014 in Belgium, a jihadist entered the Jewish Museum in Brussels and murdered four people in cold blood, including two Israeli tourists.

This is the legacy of the demographic invasion of Islam in Europe. Aided by European cultural relativism and multiculturalism, European societies today are more divided, less safe, and less free. Native inhabitants are denied their own cultural heritage even as a violent and alien heritage is aggressively enforced with impunity on the streets and in the schools. Voices opposing this transformation are silenced in the name of political correctness. As a result, native populations feel disenfranchised and disempowered in their own countries. A 2008 British government report found:

White people are less likely to feel they can influence decisions at the local level than people from minority ethnic groups (37 percent compared to 45 percent). White people are also less likely to feel they can influence decisions affecting Great Britain (19 percent compared to 31 percent).²²

These numbers are chilling for anyone who believes in democracy as representing the voice of the people.

THE RESPONSE

At first, there may appear to be no connection between anti-immigration positions and opposition to the EU. But on closer examination it can be seen that the two positions are directly related. To begin with, both multiculturalism and European integration are top-down political policies that have been largely imposed upon the European people against their will and interests. Both policies undermine culture and sovereignty of nations while expanding the authority of undemocratic foreign powers. More importantly, immigration and border control policies established by EU bureaucrats are binding upon all of the EU’s member states. This has created an enormous problem for member states with large illegal migrant populations.

One of the main goals of European integration was permitting the free flow of people among the countries of the EU. This goal has been fulfilled quite admirably for native European populations, who are now free to move about and find work across the continent. But the policies in place to permit this free flow of people work against the EU nations when it comes to illegal immigrants. Once immigrants reach any EU nation it becomes incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to prevent them from moving around. Furthermore, because all EU nations are signatory to strict human rights protections, it is not permitted simply to deport even an illegal immigrant back to his or her country of origin.

In practice, this means that illegal immigrants find it extremely easy to game the system. This explains the phenomenon of hundreds of African migrants piling onto boats in the Mediterranean Sea then setting it ablaze in the hope of being rescued by a European nation. Once on shore, migrants will claim asylum and qualify for generous welfare benefits in the country of their choice. As Caldwell puts it, immigration for Europe is effectively set “by whichever member state happen[s] to be the most soft-hearted, lax, corrupt, or sanctimonious.”²³ Even in extreme cases, it is almost impossible to remove immigrants who have become established in Europe: the European Court of Human Rights has repeatedly blocked attempts by the UK government to deport or extradite terrorists to other countries.

It is important to recognize that anti-immigration and anti-EU parties in Europe are not motivated merely by racism or bigotry. There are genuine and reasonable concerns involved which have been ignored or waved aside by the mainstream parties for decades. Rather than deceptively tar groups such as UKIP as neo-fascist, the political and media elite would do well to take their concerns seriously. Unless and until the European cry against Islamization is taken seriously, the problems and frustrations will only get worse.

National sovereignty, border control, and the defense of national culture are not extremist causes. While parties such as France’s Front Nationale (FN) may have origins in unpleasant views (founder Jean Marie Le Pen was often accused of being an anti-Semite), their current leadership is addressing the very real concerns of millions of European citizens. Today’s FN leader Marine Le Pen described her party’s success in the 2014 EU elections with entirely reasonable aplomb:

The French want to regain control of their own country. They want to determine the course of their own economy and their immigration policies. They want their own laws to take precedence over those of the European Union. The French have understood that the EU does not live up to the utopia they were sold. It has distanced itself significantly from a democratic mode of operation.²⁴

In Greece the nationalist Golden Dawn (GD) party emerged to prominence in the wake of harsh austerity measures imposed by their fellow Eurozone countries. When asked to explain their support, 30% of supporters identified it as a protest against the direction of the country while a similar proportion found GD’s anti-immigration policies to be decisive.²⁵ GD and its supporters have been guilty of inciting violence and racism, and as such it does not deserve our support, but the lesson of its success is clear. If mainstream, reasonable parties do not address the seriousness of immigration and integration, voters will turn to truly extremist parties instead.

The immigration issue is particularly bitter in Greece, which is a first port-of-entry into the EU for most illegal immigrants. In 2010, for example, 90% of all detentions for illegal entry into the EU took place in Greece. In that same year more than 132,000 people were arrested for entering or staying in Greece illegally.²⁶ Meanwhile, EU rules about asylum state that asylum-seekers must be accommodated in their country of entry while their application is processed. For a country of ten million where more than half of its young people are unemployed, such requirements are particularly onerous. It is easy to see how a determinedly anti-immigration party such as GD could become successful.

THE WARNING

If European leaders continue to ignore the threats and warning signs, instead demonizing and marginalizing the growing chorus of dissent in their countries, their civilization quite simply will not survive. Multiculturalism and cultural relativism have subjected Europe to the steady degrading of its societies and their cultures. Islam, intrinsically hostile and opposed to European culture, has been allowed to undermine and attack its host cultures with impunity.

To rise from this disaster the European establishment must first stop killing the messengers. The messengers are their own people who see the reality behind the rhetoric. They are the people who know that mass immigration has not worked. Across Europe, people are sick and tired of being told when Muslims riot and murder and rape that it is their fault. Enough is enough.

Second, the laws must be changed so that immigration, particularly Muslim immigration, can be tightly restricted. Those who wish to spread sharia law and jihad must be swiftly and easily deported. If Europe is to endure, it can no longer afford to be tolerant of Islamic intolerance. As we have seen, for these changes to take place there must be change on the level of both the EU and individual nation-states.

Legal and illegal immigration together have filled Europe with violent men intent on destroying its nations from within. These men must be identified as the mortal enemies they are and ruthlessly opposed. Otherwise, the fate of countless noble and fallen civilizations around the world will become the fate of Europe. The Persians, the Copts, the Syrians, the Byzantines, all were established for far longer than Europe, and all succumbed to the onslaught of Islam. Large parts of India today suffer from a similar tragedy. The same tragedy will come to Europe if nothing is done.

PART SEVEN

CHAPTER THIRTY - TWO

Israel and Palestine:
Cousins in Continuous Conflict

We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children. We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children … We will only have peace with the Arabs when they love their children more than they hate us.

—Golda Meir, former Israeli PM¹

I remember how it was in 1948 when Israel was being established and all my Jewish friends were ecstatic, I was not. I said: what are we doing? We are establishing ourselves in a ghetto, in a small corner of a vast Muslim sea. The Muslims will never forget nor forgive, and Israel, as long as it exists, will be embattled … I can’t help but feel that the Jews didn’t really have the right to appropriate a territory only because 2,000 years ago, people they consider their ancestors were living there. History moves on and you can’t really turn it back.

—Isaac Asimov, American writer²

We will not rest and will not abandon the path of Jihad and martyrdom as long as one inch of our land remained in the hands of the Jews.

—Raed Saed, senior Hamas leader³

Neither the liberation of the Gaza Strip nor the liberation of the West Bank or even Jerusalem will suffice us. Hamas will pursue the armed struggle until the liberation of all our lands. We don’t recognize the state of Israel or its right to hold onto one inch of Palestine. Palestine is an Islamic land belonging to all the Muslims.

—Mahmoud al-Zahar, Hamas Foreign Minister⁴

What can New York City and London teach us about sectarian conflict in Israel? Both cities are home to larger and more diverse populations. Compared to about eight million Israelis there are 8.3 million Londoners and 8.5 million New Yorkers. Like Israel, both cities have been built in large part by immigrant populations; but the populations of these two cities have far less in common than the Jews and Arabs who make up the majority in Israel. There are more than 100 different languages spoken across London,⁵ and an astonishing 800 languages spoken in New York City.⁶

And the differences are more than just linguistic. Both New York City and London rank in the top five globally in terms of the size and diversity of their immigrant populations (first and fifth, respectively).⁷ About 37 percent of New Yorkers are foreign born, and only 45 percent of Londoners describe themselves as white British (as of the 2011 census).⁸ Yet for all these differences Londoners and New Yorkers do not have to wall themselves off from one another with military checkpoints to control movement.

Typically, poverty is brought up as a cause of civil conflict. But compare Israel with the city of Mumbai. Around 70 percent of Mumbai’s 22 million people live in slums with limited access to electricity, clean water, food, and education. There are more children under the age of 14 in the slums of Mumbai (about seven million) than there are Jews in Israel (just over six million).⁹ Yet the residents of Mumbai do not require United Nations mediation to settle differences among their ethnic groups.

Even population density cannot explain the conflict. Take the case of Singapore, which crams about 5.3 million people into an island chain about the size of the San Diego metro area (but with less usable land). Like New York and London, it has a large foreign population (about 40 percent of all residents); like Israel, its population consists of just a few large ethnic groups (notably Chinese, Malay, and Indians).¹⁰ Unlike Israel, however, the ethnicities of Singapore have even less in common. The languages and cultures are, despite some cross-pollination over the centuries, much more diverse than those of the Arabs and Jews. Yet Singapore is an extremely peaceful and economically successful nation, one of the original “Asian Tigers.” What allows the Singaporeans to work together while Arabs and Jews in Israel cannot peacefully coexist?

There are two factors at work in the Israeli-Arab conflict which prevent their coexistence. One is already familiar—a toxic theological view which is radically intolerant of a Jewish state in the Middle East. The other is the flow of financial aid which encourages the very violence it is supposed to solve. Put together, these two factors have kept this conflict festering for too long.

THE ORIGINS OF ISRAEL

One of the major forces supporting political Zionism—the 19th century movement which eventually produced the modern state of Israel—was the editor and journalist Theodor Herzl. Herzl’s Der Judenstaat (1896) is an essential early work expressing the Jewish desire for a nation. He noticed that the contemporary movements toward nationalism were making it impossible for Jews to live as they did before in the European diaspora:

In vain are we loyal patriots, sometimes super-loyal; in vain do we make the same sacrifices of life and property as our fellow citizens; in vain do we strive to enhance the fame of our native land in the arts and sciences, or her wealth by trade and commerce.¹¹

Herzl, like many other European Jews, found that increasing nationalist sentiment meant increasing hostility toward Jews, who were seen by many as incompatible with an ethnically-defined national identity.

At first, Herzl and other political Zionists were not particularly fixated on the ancient Jewish homeland as the place to form a political community of their own. But it soon became apparent that Palestine, as it was then known, provided the most viable spot. The First Zionist Congress, which Herzl organized at great personal expense in 1897, would eventually declare its intention to establish a Jewish home in Palestine—a program which would be adopted by the vast majority of political Zionists. When the Ottoman Empire began to collapse in the early 20th century, this program moved quickly from dream to reality.¹²

At the time of the First Zionist Congress, Palestine was under the control of the Ottoman Empire, an Islamic caliphate—an empire of Muslims under a ruler with sovereign political and religious authority. In 1897, the Ottomans were already on the decline, a source of concern to the European powers who worried that an Ottoman collapse would seriously disrupt the existing balance of power. Palestine itself was a sleepy backwater with no political identity of its own. There were about half a million people living in the region, about 5 percent of them Jews (though the number would increase with Jewish immigrants from Russia fleeing there to escape the pogroms).¹³

When World War I broke out, the Ottomans allied with the Central Powers against Russia, France, and the United Kingdom. While the war was raging, British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour issued a declaration of his government’s support for Zionist aims—a statement that became known as the Balfour Declaration:

His Majesty’s government views with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.¹⁴

In 1919, with the Ottoman Empire in collapse at the end of the war, the League of Nations gave Britain a mandate to administer a large tract of Middle East territory—including Palestine. The Balfour Declaration was received in the Middle East with surprising equanimity. There was no storm of protest. As Jews moved to the region, native Arabs found them to be a boon.¹⁵ An analysis of the region by the League of Nations in 1920 found Palestine inhabited by 700,000 people:

Four-fifths of the population are Moslems. A small proportion of these are Bedouin Arabs; the remainder, although they speak Arabic and are termed Arabs, are largely of mixed race. Some 77,000 of the population are Christians, in large majority belonging to the Orthodox Church, and speaking Arabic … The Jewish element of the population numbers 76,000.¹⁶

At the same time as Jews were coming to Palestine, however, the Ottoman collapse also triggered a surge of Islamic revivalism. In Egypt, the newly-formed Muslim Brotherhood was already disseminating a heady cocktail of insurgent populism and militant Islamic supremacy. In Palestine itself, religious leadership passed to a virulent Jew-hater named Hajj Amin Husseini. As Mufti of Jerusalem, Husseini embarked on a long career of genocidal machination that would include negotiations with Adolf Hitler during World War II to eliminate Jewish communities from Palestine once Germany won the war.¹⁷ He first showed his intentions in 1929 by instigating a series of local pogroms in which Arabs murdered 133 Jews.¹⁸ In 1936 he launched a campaign of boycotts and violence against Jews which saw “a growing number of armed gangs roam[ing] the country, attacking Jewish neighborhoods, British forces, and fellow Arabs who dared to defy the anti-Jewish boycott.”¹⁹

In 1937, the British government’s Peel Commission proposed the first two-state solution to the violence between Arabs and Jews. The Commission proposed 85 percent of Palestine to become an Arab state with the remaining 15 percent, consisting of a small coastal strip and Galilee, reserved for a Jewish state. The Jewish community in Palestine accepted the recommendation.²⁰ Arab leaders rejected it, declaring “this country does not belong only to Palestine Arabs, but to the whole Arab and Muslim worlds.”²¹

The issue remained tabled during World War II, during which time the Jewish presence in Palestine increased. After the war, the increased presence, combined with the horrific realities of the Holocaust, inclined world opinion toward the creation of a Jewish state. The newly formed United Nations reflected that opinion and proposed a partition of Palestine in 1947. Every major Arab leader rejected the partition, with one official announcing, “even the tiniest Jewish state will be a rotten apple in a box of other good apples.”²² Despite these complaints, the UN approved the partition, and in 1948 the state of Israel was created. Almost at once, violence between Arabs and Jews went from skirmishes between irregular militias to open warfare.

SEMITIC COUSINS

Before looking further at the conflict in Israel, it’s useful to have in mind just how similar the major players are. By tradition, Arabs and Jews have been regarded (and have seen each other) as Semitic cousins. They trace their lineages back to the Biblical patriarch, Abraham. Jews consider themselves the children of Isaac, Abraham’s son by his wife Sarah. Arabs consider themselves the children of Ishmael, Abraham’s son by Sarah’s handmaiden, Hagar.

In 2000, a genetic study found that these Semitic cousins really were cousins indeed. An examination of the genetic material passed from father to son down through the generations revealed that “Arabs and Jews are essentially a single population, and that Palestinians are slap bang in the middle of the different Jewish populations.”²³ A later study confirmed this, finding that the male lineage between Jews and Palestinians was basically indistinguishable. Studies of female genetic heritage showed more deviation between the two groups, but the basic finding was still the same. Genetically speaking, Jews and Palestinians (and more generally all Arabs) are indeed Semitic cousins.

The similarities between the two groups are cultural as well as genetic. Both Jews and Palestinians are cosmopolitan peoples with a lot of experience living among different populations. Most Israeli Jews descend from European and Middle Eastern Jewish populations (referred to as Ashkenazim and Sephardim, respectively). Both groups spent centuries living among non-Jewish peoples. In the case of many of the Sephardim, those centuries were spent among Arabs and Muslims. Many still speak Arabic or maintain connections with their former homelands. They are certainly familiar with the Arabic and Islamic way of life. The Palestinians themselves are descendants of Jews, Arabs, and other groups who have lived in the region for hundreds if not thousands of years. They have been at the center of trade and human migrations since before Muhammad was even born.

The cultural similarities between Jews and Palestinians extend to religion. Judaism and Islam are in many ways more like one another than either is like Christianity. Both are strictly monotheistic (even the Trinitarian views of most Christian groups are sometimes regarded as vaguely polytheistic) and believe in a strictly transcendent god. Both religions are extremely legalistic, emphasizing correct action in accord with the laws revealed by god rather than rightness of belief. In synagogue and mosque, there are no priests: instead, religious leaders are those who have become very well read in the written traditions of the faith. The religiously observant will set their boys to learning the religious traditions—a learning which begins in both faiths with memorization and recitation. Both religions involve numerous purity rituals and dietary restrictions (such as a ban on eating pork).²⁴ While specific details may differ, Judaism is, in the words of Rabbi David Rosen, “overwhelmingly rooted in its Semitic world view and is extremely similar to Islam in its fundamental religious outlook, structure, jurisprudence and practice.”²⁵

Other cultural similarities include a close affinity between languages. Arabic and Hebrew share a number of family resemblances (both are classified as Semitic languages), including similarities in grammar, pronunciation, and even vocabulary.²⁶ Many of the differences between the two cultures lie in their different responses to modernity. Jews living in Europe during the Enlightenment of the 18th century tended to become more secular and less isolated from mainstream European society. They brought that same attitude with them to Israel, where only about 10 percent of Jews are strictly observant of religious law. Most Israeli Jews today accept modern life, though religiously strict Jews are the fastest-growing demographic group due to their extremely high fertility rate. Among Muslims, every concession to modern life—particularly its secularism and religious freedom—has been bitterly contested.²⁷

The argument is sometimes advanced that the history of Jews living in Arab land shows that the two groups should be able to get along. This historical situation was much as Rabbi Rosen puts it: “as long as they accepted their second class status, [Jews] lived peacefully and cooperatively with their Muslim neighbors.”²⁸ But there is a difference between being allowed to live and being able to flourish. The medieval Jewish scholar Maimonides, who spent his whole life as a second-class citizen in Arab lands, was under no illusions about the Arab attitude towards Jews: “never did a nation molest, degrade, debase, and hate us as much as they.”²⁹ As the conflict in Israel shows, Arabs will not peacefully coexist with Jews if they are not the undisputed rulers.

AN INTOLERANT THEOLOGY

Arab intransigence towards Israel is rooted in theology. Muslims have traditionally divided the human world into Dar al-Salaam (“The House of Peace”) and Dar al-Harb (“The House of War”). Dar al-Salaam, also known as Dar al-Islam, consists of those parts of the world governed by Muslims. Dar al-Harb is everywhere else. It is a religious duty for Muslims to convert Dar al-Harb into Dar al-Salaam. For most of Islam’s history, the pattern has been conquest first, then conversion. The Qur’an also promises Muslims that the whole world will one day be under their control. Therefore, Muslims see it as a religious manifest destiny to take over the world. For any part of the world to revert back to Dar al-Harb after being conquered by Islam is an abomination and a deep shame. Southern Spain, Greece, and India are all territories Muslims believe belong to them by divine right—“once Islamic, always Islamic” is the rule. Israel is another such territory.

The Islamic attitude towards territory that “belongs” to Islam is sometimes expressed by the term waqf. A waqf is an inalienable religious endowment—usually a building, a small plot of land, or even a sum of cash. By figurative extension, the term is also applied to all current and former lands of the Dar al-Salaam, naming them as belonging to the Muslim ummah (i.e., to the community of all Muslim believers, taken as a whole). This is the meaning Hamas gives to the term in its Covenant of 1988:

This is the law governing the land of Palestine in the Islamic Sharia (law) and the same goes for any land the Moslems have conquered by force, because during the times of (Islamic) conquests, the Moslems consecrated these lands to Moslem generations till the Day of Judgement … This Waqf remains as long as earth and heaven remain. Any procedure in contradiction to Islamic Sharia, where Palestine is concerned, is null and void.³⁰

The same theological attitude informs most the political leaders of the Palestinians. A co-founder and Hamas’ so-called foreign minister declared in 2005:

First of all this Palestinian land, and all the Arab nation, is all part of the same area. In the past, there was no independent Palestinian state; there was no independent Jordanian state; and so on. There were regions called Iraq or Egypt, but they were all part of one country … Our main goal is to establish a great Islamic state, be it pan-Arabic or pan-Islamic.³¹

The notion at work here, that all the different regions are part of “one country,” shows that the speaker is thinking of the Islamic ummah. What he has in mind by a “great Islamic state” is nothing less than a caliphate like the late Ottoman Empire which formerly ruled Palestine.

Because of this outlook, the Arabs have been singularly intransigent over Israel and Palestine from the beginning. Prior to the first Arab-Israeli War in 1948, the Secretary of the Arab League told an Israeli official:

The Arab world is not in a compromising mood. It’s likely, Mr. Horowitz, that your plan is rational and logical, but the fate of nations is not decided by rational logic. Nations never concede; they fight. You won’t get anything by peaceful means or compromise. You can, perhaps, get something, but only by force of your arms. We shall try to defeat you. I am not sure we’ll succeed, but we’ll try.³²

It is not often that someone will admit to going to war out of irrational hatred and greed, but here we have it. Of course, the Arab League was unsuccessful and ended up with less than a peaceful compromise would have granted them—Israel ended up expanding its territory beyond the original UN-proposed borders.

Humiliation and anger over the 1948 defeat festered among the Arab nations. In 1964, the Palestine Liberation Organization was founded with the explicit goal of “purg[ing] the Zionist presence from Palestine.”³³ With the PLO conducting militia attacks and Egypt and Jordan massing troops along its borders, Israel launched a preemptive strike in 1967. Now referred to as the Six Day War, this conflict saw the Arab nations again enduring a painful defeat. Israel captured still more territory from Egypt and Jordan, including complete control over the city of Jerusalem.

Since the 1967 defeat, opposition to Israel has largely taken the form of terrorism and rhetoric. Former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been particularly outspoken, with Holocaust denial, prayers for the destruction of Israel, and predictions that Israel will be wiped off the map to his credit. From his comments, it is clear that Ahmadinejad’s attitude toward Israel is informed largely by the theological view described above. In 2008, while playing down any suggestion that Iran was planning a war against Israel, he explained that his objection was “against the Zionists” but that he had no necessary objections “against the Jew[s].”³⁴ However, the implication that Ahmadinejad’s main objection is only to the Jewish state won’t wash when stacked up against his other public statements about the Jews and Israel.

Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of the terror group Hezbollah in Lebanon, is more outspoken—likely because he does not need to answer to world opinion. Nasrallah has launched a number of terror attacks and rocket strikes against Israel since he took over the leadership of Hezbollah in 1992. In an interview on Egyptian television he justified these attacks as part of a fight to “liberate” the Palestinians. The clear implication is that Israel has no legitimacy because it has been “imposed” upon the Palestinian population whom it now oppresses. But Nasrallah is a hypocrite. He has opposed granting Palestinians asylum in Lebanon, and he has made quite clear in other statements that he is motivated by hatred of Jews not just “Zionists.” If the Jews gather in Israel, he has said, “it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide.”³⁵

For hatred of Jews, too, there is religious justification in Islam. Although it is sometimes claimed that the Qur’an only professes scorn for Jews known to Muhammad, it declares, “Verily, the Revelation that has come to you from Allah increases in most of [the Jews] their obstinate rebellion and disbelief. We have put enmity and hatred amongst them till the Day of Resurrection.”³⁶ Such sentiments find even fuller development in the Hadith, most notably in a famous description of the Day of Judgment:

(Muhammad said:) The last hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would say: Muslim, or the servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him.³⁷

This very passage has been invoked by the Palestinian Authority for its ongoing struggles with Israel:

We the Palestinian nation, our fate from Allah is to be the vanguard in the war against the Jews until the resurrection of the dead, as the Prophet Muhammad said: “The resurrection of the dead will not arrive until you will fight the Jews and kill them.” We the Palestinians are the vanguard in this undertaking and in this campaign, whether or not we want this.³⁸

Instead of “the devil made me do it,” we have Palestinians saying “Muhammad made me do it.”

ENDING THE MADNESS

There have been several attempts to defuse the Arab-Israeli conflict and reach an understanding on secular terms. From the very beginning, the Jews have been willing to do so. David Ben-Gurion, one of the founders of the modern Israeli state, said in 1937:

All our aspiration is built on the assumption—proven through all our activity in the Land—that there is enough room in the country for ourselves and the Arabs.³⁹

It took about 40 years for an Arab leader to come to the same conclusion. In 1978, Egyptian President Anwar El Sadat signed the Camp David Accords with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin. With a stroke of the pen, Sadat officially ended a state of war which had existed between his country and Israel since 1948 and recognized in principle the existence of Israel. He was at once perceived by the other Arab nations as a traitor. Egyptian Islamists were outraged. In 1981, a jihadist assassin killed Sadat and 11 other officials during a parade in Cairo. Despite the assassination, however, American cash has helped ensure that the peace between Egypt and Israel has remained intact.⁴⁰

Another opportunity came in 1994 when King Hussein of Jordan signed a peace treaty with Israel. Later, he proclaimed the following hopeful message:

The two Semitic peoples, the Arabs and the Jews, have endured bitter trials and tribulations during their journey through history; let us resolve to end this suffering and to fulfill our responsibilities as leaders of our peoples, and our duty as human beings toward mankind.⁴¹

At the same time, PLO leader Yasser Arafat negotiated with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin to come to a two-state solution to the Palestinian problem. Again, religious extremists were outraged. In February 1994 a Jewish extremist killed 25 Palestinian Arabs in the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron. In response to the Arafat-Rabin deal, Hamas launched a series of suicide bombings targeting civilians across Israel (a practice the group has continued to engage in). A right-wing Jewish radical assassinated Rabin in 1995.

In 2000, the push for a Palestinian state collapsed when Arafat rejected a proposal that would have given him Gaza, most of the West Bank, and a portion of Jerusalem. A new wave of violence known as the Second Intifada soon followed, at Arafat’s instigation. There was a second factor at work behind Arafat’s rejection of Israel’s generous offer—a factor that has to be taken into account when asking why the conflict between Jews and Palestinians continues to persist.

FOREIGN AID AS INCENTIVE TO VIOLENCE

Money is the other element which continues to fuel divisions over Israel. Since the Oslo Accords, the U.S. government has provided about $5 billion in foreign aid to the Palestinian Authority.⁴² Although the money was intended to buy a certain measure of peace, the end result has been the Palestinians doing just enough to keep the aid coming but not so much that foreign donors feel they can shut off the money supply. In the past five years in particular the Palestinian Authority received $500 million annually from the United States, about 40 percent of which was plugged right into the budget.⁴³

One of the worst-kept secrets in the region is that the PA uses its foreign cash to subsidize terror attacks against Israel. About 6 percent of the PA’s operating budget is devoted to a program that provides generous salaries to Palestinians who have been imprisoned for their actions against Israeli civilians and/or property. Although such funding violates laws (particularly in the U.S. and Britain) prohibiting such use of funding, it still occurs.⁴⁴

Any Palestinian convicted of a terror strike on Israel or its citizens is automatically given a salary by the Palestinian Authority which is tied to their time in prison and the nature of the attack. The Ministry of Prisoner Affairs administers the salaries and a private watchdog group called the Prisoners Club ensures that prisoners are paid regardless of any budgetary shortfalls. A three year prison sentence will net a prisoner about $400 a month. Three to five years is worth $560. At the higher end, 10-15 year sentences are worth about $1,690 a month, while a terrorist who attacks civilians and gets a 20 year prison sentence can expect close to $2,000 a month. To put it in perspective, $560 a month is more than most ordinary jobs in the West Bank will pay; $2,000 a month ranks among the best available in the Palestinian territories.⁴⁵

These salaries can even be augmented with bonuses and incentives. In 2009, the PA offered a $150 per prisoner bonus for the religious holiday of Eid al-Adha. Some prisoners receive extra pay if they are married or have children.⁴⁶ Compared to the tribute paid to Egypt, the money spent on the PA is only so much wasted effort. Why would the Palestinians make lasting peace with Israel, knowing that peace would inevitably reduce the flow of foreign aid?

HARD QUESTIONS

With the signing of the Geneva interim agreement on November 24, 2013, the issue of Israel living in peace with itself and its neighbors has become even more acute. If, as seems likely, Iran uses this agreement to acquire nuclear weapons (and the Saudis and other Arab states follow suit, as they have warned), the region will be bristling with weapons far more deadly than rocks and car bombs. And unlike the Cold War standoff, the powers around Israel are not rational actors. Problems between Palestinians and Jews will have to find some resolution other than tragedy.

But there will be no resolution so long as Arabs, including Palestinians, cling to notions of Israel as “Islamic land” or as “sacred waqf.” Much of what passes as Islamic land was originally taken by conquest; is it reasonable for Muslims to object to a New Jersey-sized Jewish state that was established by international agreement amid a massive swath of Arab-controlled land? As recent history has shown, the moments of breakthrough in Arab-Israeli relations have been built on the grounds of secularism and pragmatism. On those same grounds the cities we began this chapter with—New York, London, and Singapore—have achieved economic greatness. Despite the diversity of human life living within those cities, the people live together in relative peace. The scriptural dogma that currently dominates Palestinian political thinking can only produce endless conflict.

PART SEVEN

CHAPTER THIRTY - THREE

Israel and Palestine:
Semites and anti-Semitism

He shall be a wild donkey of a man, his hand against everyone and everyone’s hand against him, and he shall dwell over against all his kinsmen.

—Genesis 16:12

Now go and strike Amalek and utterly destroy all that he has, and do not spare him; but put to death both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.

—1 Samuel 15:3

O you Jews! If you pretend that you are friends of Allah, to the exclusion of (all) other mankind, then long for death if you are truthful.

—Qur’an 62:6

Our plan for this stage is to liberate any inch of Palestinian land, and to establish a state on it. Our ultimate plan is [to have] Palestine in its entirety. I say this loud and clear so that nobody will accuse me of employing political tactics. We will not recognize the Israeli enemy.

—Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Zahhar¹

Our nation was tested by the cancerous lump, that is the Jews, in the heart of the Arab nation … Be certain that America is on its way to utter destruction, America is wallowing [in blood] today in Iraq and Afghanistan, America is defeated and Israel is defeated, and was defeated in Lebanon and Palestine … Allah, take the Jews and their allies, Allah, take the Americans and their allies … Allah, annihilate them completely and do not leave anyone of them

—Sheikh Dr. Ahmad Bahar, PLC²

The problem is not Hamas, the problem is not people. The root of the problem is Islam itself as an idea, as an idea. And about Hamas as an organization, of course, the Hamas leadership, including my father, they’re responsible; they’re responsible for all the violence that happened from the organization.

—Mosab Hasan Yousef³

The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weakness, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still purely primitive, legends which are nevertheless pretty childish … For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstition. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong ... have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are also no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything “chosen” about them.

—Albert Einstein⁴

The 16th chapter of Genesis tells the story of the Jewish patriarch Abraham, his wife Sarah, and her slave-woman Hagar. Because Sarah (at this time still named ‘Sarai’) was past normal child-bearing age, she gave her slave to Abraham (at this time still named ‘Abram’) to bear him a child. But Hagar was a bit too proud of her new status for Sarah’s taste, and Sarah drove her slave-woman away with mistreatment. According to the Bible, Hagar was met in her flight by an angel of the Lord, who told her to return to her mistress and submit to her will. The angel told Hagar to name her child Ishmael, and that through him her descendants would be increased beyond measure.⁵

According to Islamic tradition, Hagar’s son would become the father of the Arab people, while Abraham’s son Isaac by his wife Sarah would become the father of the Jewish people. This tradition describes a theological and cultural kinship between the two Semitic peoples, Arabs and Jews. The relationship, as was shown in an earlier chapter, has been confirmed scientifically as well. Not only theologically and culturally but also racially and linguistically, the Arab and the Jew are Semitic cousins.

The kinship is visible in any number of ways. Both Judaism and Islam are uncompromisingly monotheistic—the Trinitarian theories of Christian theology are too close to polytheism for Judaism and Islam. Both religions worship a singular God, understood as completely transcendent (not immanent or incarnate in any sense). Both reject the divinity of Christ. Male circumcision is a religious practice for both, as is daily mandatory prayer and segregation of men and women (especially in religious buildings). Linguistically, Hebrew and Arabic are closely related. Above all, both Judaism and Islam are supremely legalistic religions, full of detailed requirements for how followers should live their lives—including guidelines on how and when to pray, what to eat and what not to eat, and different behaviors one should show toward nonbelievers. The close relationship between Jews and Arabs has even been demonstrated scientifically. A 2000 study on Middle East genetics revealed that “Jews are the genetic brothers of Palestinians, Syrians, and Lebanese, and they all share a common genetic lineage that stretches back thousands of years.”⁶

This kinship has produced an interesting but profoundly important fact—the most anti-Semitic people in the world today are the Semitic peoples themselves (in their views about each other). This saying from the Qur’an is fairly typical and representative:

Indignity is put over them [the Jews] wherever they may be, except when under a covenant (of protection) from Allah, and from men; they have drawn on themselves the Wrath of Allah, and destruction is put over them. This is because they disbelieved in the Ayat (proofs, evidences, verses, lessons, signs, revelations, etc.) of Allah and killed the Prophets without right. ⁷

This provides a religious justification not only for the abuse of Jewish people but for their insistence on Jewish subservience to Muslims (“under the tutelage of Allah”). Elsewhere, the Qur’anwarns Muslims against befriending Jews or Christians, and that Jews are treacherous and deceitful.⁸

THE TRUE THREAT TO ISRAEL

Today Israel is on the front lines of the conflict between Islam and non-Islamic civilizations. For the people of Israel, it is a conflict between cousins—an intra-Semitic battle, where the two sides share certain theological, cultural, and racial characteristics. At the same time, too many among the Jews fail to recognize the true nature of the threat they face from the Arabs. They fail to recognize it because of a flawed understanding of true anti-Semitism. Because of this failure they waste too much time abusing those who should be their allies, namely, the people of Europe and the United States. The future for Israel lies in embracing its connections with Europe and the West, and realizing that its enemy is no longer Germany or the Europeans but a fellow Semitic group which wants nothing more than to destroy them.

Even before the creation of the modern state of Israel there was enmity between Muslims and Jews. Islamic religious texts make it clear that Jews are to be subjugated: “Fight against … the people of the Scripture (Jews and Christians), until they pay the Jizyah with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.”⁹ Muslims are promised that their God fights against the Jews and regards them as perverse creatures.¹⁰ After the creation of Israel, this enmity became mortal. The Arabs fought several wars against Israel aimed at destroying their nation completely. But despite advantages in numbers and territory, they were never completely successful on the battlefield. After the Yom Kippur War in 1973 ended in Israeli victory, the Arabs began to rely increasingly on terror attacks and heated rhetoric rather than frontal assaults.

The conflict between Jews and Arabs will not be resolved as long as the argument between them is made in theological terms. The ultra-Orthodox Jews, who are influential over the Israeli government, believe that they are “a holy people to the Lord your God; the Lord your God has chosen you for His own possession out of all the peoples who are on the face of the earth.”¹¹ They also believe that if they “pay attention to the commands of the Lord your God … and carefully follow them, you will always be at the top, never at the bottom.”¹² Any who oppose them face certain destruction: “the nation or kingdom that will not serve you will perish; it will be utterly ruined.”¹³ For the ultra-Orthodox, Israel is the Promised Land, and belongs to the Jewish people by divine right.

On the Arab side of the conflict, the theological intransigence is equal and opposite. A co-founder of Hamas expressed the view succinctly in these terms: “We don’t recognize the state of Israel or its right to hold onto one inch of Palestine. Palestine is an Islamic land belonging to all the Muslims.”¹⁴ The terrorist group Hamas refers to Palestine as a Waqf, meaning an inalienable religious grant to the Muslim people, and insists that it “remains as long as earth and heaven remain. Any procedure in contradiction to Islamic sharia, where Palestine is concerned, is null and void.”¹⁵ As long as theological notions are taken seriously in this conflict, there will be no end to it.

Throughout this multi-decade conflict, Israel had no greater benefactor than the Western nations, and the United States in particular. It was American-made weaponry which provided key advantages on the battlefield against the combined Arab armies. And it was American financial aid which resupplied the Israelis after each conflict. In the case of Egypt, the United States has gone so far as to bribe the whole country more than one billion a year to leave its ally alone.

Yet as dependent as Israel is on the West for it survival, some Israelis and Jewish leaders persist in picking at the scars and scabs of the Holocaust and World War II. This includes prosecutions of senile 94-year-olds like Hans Lipschis, a man who was accused of being a prison guard at Auschwitz but later avoided trial when it was determined he was mentally unfit to understand what was happening to him.¹⁶ The scholar Norman Finkelstein has been particularly outspoken in his analysis of why some Jewish leaders continue to do this. His conclusion is simple: it pays. Finkelstein outlines in his book how professor and activist Elie Wiesel turns the Holocaust into a kind of mystery religion:

Thus Wiesel intones that the holocaust “leads to darkness,” “negates all answers,” “lies outside, if not beyond, history,” “defies both knowledge and description,” “cannot be explained nor visualized,” is “never to be comprehended or transmitted,” marks a “destruction of history” and “mutation on a cosmic scale.” Only the survivor-priest (read: only Wiesel) is qualified to divine its mystery. And yet, the Holocaust’s mystery, Wiesel avows, is “noncommunicable”; “we cannot even talk about it.” Thus, for his standard fee of $25,000 (plus chauffeured limousine), Wiesel lectures that the “secret” of Auschwitz’s “truth lies in silence.” Rationally comprehending The Holocaust amounts, in this view, to denying it. For rationality denies The Holocaust’s uniqueness and mystery.¹⁷

Finkelstein objects to such attempts to make the Holocaust into a unique and religiously mysterious event. It prevents rational understanding too see it that way. Furthermore, as the French scholar Jean-Michel Chaumont has shown, “the claim of Holocaust uniqueness originated in, and only makes coherent sense in the context of, the religious dogma of Jewish chosen-ness.”¹⁸

Israel and Jewish leaders go so far in their prosecution of perceived anti-Semitism as to come close to what one might call anti-Europeanism. This was most apparent in the May 2014 elections for the European Union parliament, where anti-EU and pro-nationalist parties won big. The results were immediately denounced in the press as an attack on European Jews (in the absence of any real evidence). One Jewish leader characterized the election as a “rise of anti-democratic forces” and bemoaned the fact that “the European taxpayer has to finance these racist politicians.”¹⁹ President of the European Jewish Congress Moshe Kantor blamed the result of an open, free, and democratic election on the “passivity” of European governments.²⁰

What Jewish groups read as anti-Semitism is really nothing other than ordinary European tribalism. All European groups simply dislike one another. The English are anti-Irish and the Irish are anti-English. Germans mock the French, and vice versa. Russians despise non-Russians. Poles dislike the Germans and the Russians. It is a common part of the European fabric to harbor dislike against the other groups. Jews are not exempt from this tribal mindset.

What makes the complaints so ironic is that these supposedly racist parties were elected on platforms of controlling illegal (and mostly Muslim) immigration to Europe. Muslim immigrants, as this book has already documented, represent the primary source of insecurity and intolerance for European Jews—not the people of Europe. Nevertheless, Jewish leaders insisted that the problem was with the Euro-skeptics:

These radical parties have been able to grow in their respective home countries for quite some time and are now cementing their presence also at the European level. They must be confronted head-on or the danger will only continue to grow.²¹

Thus, European Jews and Muslims joined hands to denounce moves to reduce importing intolerance, calling it unacceptable for Europeans to elect parties which represent their own interests.²²

Instead, Jewish and Muslim leaders in Europe have pledged unity with each other to oppose the nationalist European parties. As reported in one outlet, “Some Jewish leaders see a silver lining in the election results, however, postulating that the rise of the far right may catalyze European Jews and Muslims to work together.”²³ The absurdity of the response is plainly visible in the way leaders pledged unity with one another and in the same breath denounced “anti-Semitic attacks in Belgium and France.”²⁴ The anti-Semitic attacks that Arab and Jewish leaders joined together to denounce were carried out by jihadist attackers, not native Europeans. Yet this same response was picked up in Russia as well, where Jewish and Muslim groups pledged to “work together to combat forces of extremism and hate.”²⁵

What some Jewish leaders in Israel and Europe are missing is that the existential threat to their existence does not come from Europe. Today, the German and the Israeli have a common enemy. It is not Germans or Britons or Swedes who are threatening to destroy Israel. Jews must realize that the real threat—and real anti-Semitism in the world today—comes from their Semitic cousins, the Arabs.

THE TRUE NATURE OF ANTI-SEMITISM

The conflict in Israel between Jews and Arabs needs to be seen in a fundamentally different light. When you put aside the competing theological claims, which have no factual or rational basis, the disagreement will appear quite clear. It is an intra-Semitic conflict, a fight between Semitic cousins. There is no greater anti-Semite in the world than another Semite—or more precisely, than another member of a competing Semitic religion. This is the true cause and nature of anti-Semitism. It is inherent in the exclusivist monotheistic claims of the religions. To be an anti-Semite it is necessary to belong to one of the other Semitic religions: Judaism, Christianity, or Islam.

This is not an uncommon opinion in Christian circles. No less authority than Pope Pius XI declared in 1938, “Through Christ and in Christ we are the spiritual descendants of Abraham … Spiritually, we are Semites.”²⁶ Although the Pope insisted that anti-Semitism was “inadmissible,” he nevertheless expressed the theologically exclusive view that the promise made to Abraham was “realized in Christ.”²⁷ Theologically, the Pope was on solid ground—but his theology directly contradicts Jewish teaching, for which God’s promise to Abraham will never be broken. The Pope’s statement, although it was not intended that way, is fundamentally anti-Semitic.

In a way, Pope Pius could not help himself. As the scholar Jonathan Kirsch points out, it is the committed monotheist who is religiously intolerant. For a pagan or a Buddhist there is no reason to hate someone for his religious commitments, whereas it is inherent in monotheism to regard those who believe in other gods as fundamentally and damnably mistaken:

Precisely because the monotheist regards the polytheist with such fear and loathing, peaceful coexistence between two theologies is possible only from the pagan’s point of view and never for the true believer in the Only True God.²⁸

For all the Abrahamic faiths, there is a Chosen people—the Jews, the believers in Christ, the Muslims—and there is everyone else. Whether called infidel, heathen, gentile, or kafir, the Other is the enemy, and is despised. In the case of Judaism and Islam, the Other does not even deserve the same moral treatment:

When the Lord your God has delivered them over to you and you have defeated them, then you must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them, and show them no mercy.²⁹

In the same book, the Israelites are commanded:

You must certainly put to the sword all who live in that town. You must destroy it completely, both its people and its livestock. You are to gather all the plunder of the town into the middle of the public square and completely burn the town and all its plunder as a whole burnt offering to the Lord your God. That town is to remain a ruin forever, never to be rebuilt.³⁰

They are also instructed as to their supremacy over all peoples:

For the Lord your God will bless you as he has promised, and you will lend to many nations but will borrow from none. You will rule over many nations but none will rule over you.³¹

It is clear that a double morality exists, with one code for fellow Israelites and another for everyone else:

You may charge a foreigner interest, but not a fellow Israelite, so that the Lord your God may bless you in everything you put your hand to in the land you are entering to possess.³²

These beliefs have been well absorbed by the ultra-orthodox Jews for centuries. In 2003 a rabbi named Saadya Grama, who graduated from an American yeshiva in New Jersey, wrote a Jewish supremacist book in which he writes:

The difference between the people of Israel and the nations of the world is an essential one. The Jew by his source and in his essence is entirely god. The goy, by his source and in his very essence is completely evil. This is not simply a matter of religious distinction, but rather of two completely different species.³³

Grama even characterizes the Holocaust as a divine punishment against the Jews for daring to assimilate with Europeans.³⁴ Allen Nadler, the writer who exposed Grama’s book to public scrutiny, later observed that the world of Jewish theological scholarship had become quite extreme, “the Jewish equivalent of the Taliban.”³⁵

Both Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia are often cited for their anti-Semitism. Both societies were steeped in Christian thinking, regardless of their official ideologies, and as such imbibed some of the distrust of Jews as a competing Semitic faith. Professor Robert Wistrich’s masterful study of anti-Semitism has detailed how anti-Semitic stereotypes and preaching were integral to Christianity for a long period.³⁶ What’s more, the famous English writer John Middleton Murry has argued that the savage anti-Semitism of the Nazis was itself caused not by racial hatred but ultimately by the mistreatment of the German people during the Armistice that ended the First World War:

The responsibility for the starvation of Germany after the signing of the Armistice rests primarily upon us … It is primarily our injustice, our betrayal of the principles of morality and humanity which we professed to hold sacred, that has conjured up the spirit of cynical savagery with which we shall in vain seek an understanding today.³⁷

For Muslims or certain kinds of fundamentalist Christians it is possible to be theologically anti-Semitic because their rival theology requires that Judaism be seen as a mistake. For example, Islam has a number of texts explaining how the Jews used to be the Chosen People, but they deliberately tampered with the message God gave to them, necessitating the revelation to Muhammad which could correct all their mistakes and lies. In order to be anti-Semitic, it is necessary to offer a competing narrative. For religions which are not playing the same monotheistic game as Judaism or Islam, it is unnecessary to feel one way or the other about the Jews. Hindus, Buddhists, and Odinists, do not have any theological reason to dislike or despise Judaism.

Some argue that anti-Semitism is a case of racial hatred. But it seems unreasonable for Jews to tell the whole world that they are the Chosen People for centuries and then complain if Germans or Saxons or Hindus or Chinese should make a similar claim. It is of the nature of making exclusivist claims like being Chosen that it will foster resentments. After more than three thousand years of claiming to be the Chosen People the Jews have no reason to be offended if some tribe or nation calls itself special. No one can empirically verify any of the Jewish claims, yet half the world still believes in that sort of nonsense. Furthermore, the example of the Jews in India illustrates that the phenomenon of racial and theological hatred—that is, anti-Semitism—does not really exist outside of Semitic faiths. The Jews of India have not been subject to pogroms or genocide or discriminatory abuse.

On top of this, racial hatred may not even be valid. Recent genetic research on the Ashkenazi Jewish population (i.e., European rather than Middle Eastern Jews) has found that more than 80% of their maternal DNA is pure European, with between 50 to 80% of the paternal DNA also being European.³⁸ While such studies are preliminary, it is entirely possible that Ashkenazi Jews may end up having far more in common genetically with other Europeans than they do with other Jewish groups.

Perhaps this is why Ashkenazi Jews harbor such contempt for the darker-skinned Jewish populations. In 1949, Ashkenazi journalist Aryeh Gelblum wrote the following about Mizrahi Jews who were then immigrating to Israel:

This is the immigration of a race we have not yet known in the country. We are dealing with people whose primitivism is at a peak, whose level of knowledge is one of virtually absolute ignorance and, worse, who have little talent for understanding anything intellectual. Generally, they are only slightly better than the general level of the Arabs, Negroes, and Berbers … these Jews also lack roots in Judiasm, as they are totally subordinated to savage and primitive instincts. As with Africans you will find among them gambling, drunkenness, and prostitution.³⁹

Nor was Gelblum alone in his assessment. Karl Frankenstein, the “father of the Israeli education system,” regarded Mizrahi Jews as endowed with a “primitive mentality.” Israeli author Kalman Katzenelson argued in his book The Ashkenazi Revolution (1964) that Mizrahi Jews suffered from genetic inferiority and called for an apartheid regime which would limit their political rights.⁴⁰

In the end, the claims of anti-Semitism present several irreconcilable contradictions. Jews are one of the richest and most successful ethnic groups in both Europe and the United States. One cannot be both rich and successful and at the same time discriminated against. Economically, nearly every ethnic group in the U.S. would love to be in the situation the Jews enjoy. It is improper and ungrateful to call one’s host an offensive name—and so it is with claims of anti-Semitism raised against the Western countries. On top of this, as was shown above, Ashkenazi Jews often harbor racist attitudes toward fellow Jewish groups—although on the one hand, the Ashkenazis themselves have less claim to Israeli soil, and on the other hand, they still continue to complain about racism and anti-Semitism among European people.Furthermore, Israel and the Jews have no moral right to accuse other countries of being racist. The evidence is overwhelming that if racism and discrimination are alive and well in the world they may be found as easily in Israel as in Europe. Take the results of a survey of Israeli society published in the Jerusalem Post:

According to the survey, 43% of Israelis are unwilling to marry, or have their children marry, Ethiopians. More than 50% refuse to live in the same neighborhood as Arab families. 25% would not want their children to marry religious Jews and more than 10% were averse to their children marrying Sephardim. And these numbers are only the tip of the survey’s iceberg.⁴¹

A later poll found even more striking results, with about half the population of Israel regarding it as “national treason” for a Jewish woman to marry an Arab. A full 75% of the population didn’t think it was right for Arabs and Jews to share the same apartment buildings. Over 37% of respondents felt confident enough to agree with the opinion “Arab culture is inferior.”⁴² Such statistics simply have no parallel in the United States or Europe.

These attitudes are not confined to just opinions. According to the same survey, racist acts against Arabs are also on the rise in Israel, with a 10% increase over the previous year (2006).⁴³ In 2010, demonstrators in Israel took to the streets to protest the mixing of Orthodox Ashkenazi Jews with secular-minded Mizrahi Jews in the public schools. It was the “largest [demonstration] in Jerusalem since ultra-Orthodox protesters gathered in similar numbers in 1999.”⁴⁴ In July 2013 the new Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi sparked outrage with racist comments about basketball players: “Who cares if a bunch of paid Cushim in Tel Aviv beat a bunch of paid Cushim in Greece?”⁴⁵ ‘Cushim’ is a Hebrew slang term for African, that some consider roughly equivalent to the word ‘nigger’ or ‘coon.’

Israel has a common problem with businesses actively engaged in “Jews-only” employment practices. In some cases, religious groups actively boycott businesses which employ Arabs. While Israeli rights groups protest the practice, right-wing political parties actively promote such policies and even award “certificates to firms that restrict hiring to Jews.”⁴⁶

There have been particularly ugly incidents involving dark-skinned Jewish groups from Ethiopia in Israel. In 1996, a protest by thousands of Ethiopian Jews turned into a riot after it was revealed that Israel’s blood bank routinely destroyed donated Ethiopian blood because it was believed they had AIDS. “Although our skin is black,” one demonstrator’s sign read, “our blood is as red as yours and we are just as Jewish.”⁴⁷ Then in 2013 it was revealed that African women immigrating to Israel had been “subjected to mandatory contraceptive injections, effectively amounting to forced (if temporary) sterilization.”⁴⁸ At the same time, Israel’s own Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has openly declared that “illegal [African] infiltrators flooding the country” threaten “our existence as a Jewish and democratic state.”⁴⁹ Such statements pass almost without comment in the mainstream media while European politicians who ask for restrictions on non-European immigration are denounced as racists.

In the end, it is telling that the greatest Jews in history have all been outspoken critics of Judaism. Jesus, Baruch Spinoza, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and Albert Einstein were all critics. All of them ultimately left Judaism after disavowing Jewish theological and racial tribalism. Judaism and Israel, like every other religion, every other philosophy and every other nation in the world is not immune to dialectical analysis, rational criticism, and empirical deconstruction. It is absurd for leaders to cry “anti-Semitism” whenever a critic opens his mouth.

THE WAY FORWARD FOR ISRAEL

Although Israel has its flaws, it is beneficial to the world in the coming conflict with Islam and the West should continue to support it. Israel and the Jews are the eternal enemy of the eternal enemy of non-Islamic civilization. Since its inception, Islam has been in conflict with Hindu, Buddhist, Oriental, and African civilizations. This means that for Westerners, Hindus, Orientals, and Africans, our enemy’s enemy is also our friend. Israel will be in the forefront of the fight to defeat Islam and defend secular western culture.

The West will continue its support for Israel, but this support must come with a price. Israel must give up its Semitic exclusivism and align itself with the Western nations on an equal basis. This means no more support for rabbis who teach that, “Goyim were born only to serve us. Without that, they have no place in the world; only to serve the people of Israel.”⁵⁰ Israel and Jewish leaders must give up their anti-Europeanism. While cries of anti-Semitism and reminders of the Holocaust may work very well as a tactic, it is a very bad strategy in the long run.

This price also means that the ultra-orthodox must be made to pull their weight in Israel. The ultra-orthodox have been the most uncompromising when it comes to dealing with Arabs and Muslims. They believe the metaphysical claims about being Chosen People living in their Promised Land. At the same time, they spend much of their time reading the Torah, producing children, and collecting welfare. Rather than contribute to their society, they refuse to perform military service.

Aligning with the West also means an end to moral grandstanding over World War II. Witch hunts like the Hans Lipschis prosecution should be ended. Nothing is served by such trials from the distant past, particularly when the threat presented by Islam is pressing and immediate. Europe and Israel should unite in their opposition to the spread of Islam by demographic jihad. If Israel wishes to accuse Europeans and Americans of racism, they should look to their own policies concerning African immigrants in Israel.

In the end, Israel must acknowledge that its special relationship with America has brought them $112 billion (nearly $250 billion when adjusted for inflation) worth of direct aid. It has also cost the United States a great deal in terms of Islamic hostility, which would otherwise be directed elsewhere. If Israel wishes this special relationship to continue—and it should continue, because it is in the interests of both Israel and the West—it should do so as a free partner.

The future of Israel and the world Jewish community lies with the West. With the Arabs or Muslims there is only oppression at best and genocide at worst. The example of Muhammad himself teaches the Muslims of every era that it is acceptable and even good to wipe out Jewish tribes. Complaints about European anti-Semitism completely miss the point—the eternal enemy of the Jewish people is their fellow Semite, the Muslim Arab. Attacking Europe out of fear of another Holocaust only fosters resentment. The most likely candidate to re-enact the Holocaust is the Arab. Israelis and European Jews must make common cause with Europe against the Arabs.

PART EIGHT

PART EIGHT

CHAPTER THIRTY - FOUR

What is Religion?

I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.

—Jesus¹

I am the beginning and the middle and the end of all that is. Of all knowledge I am the knowledge of the Soul. Of the many paths of reason I am the one that leads to Truth.

—Krishna²

A man is not a great man because he is a warrior and he kills other men, but because he hurts not any living being he in truth is called a great man.

—The Buddha³

I have been commanded to fight against people till they testify that there is no god but Allah, that Muhammad is the messenger of Allah, and they establish prayer, and pay Zakat; and if they do it, their blood and property are guaranteed protection on my behalf.

—Muhammad⁴

Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness.

—Karl Marx⁵

Just after dawn on November 20, 1979, a small army of about 500 heavily armed religious fanatics took control of the Grand Mosque in Mecca. Hundreds of pilgrims in the process of performing the annual hajj were taken hostage. Insurgent leaders seized control of the loudspeakers and began to broadcast their message. They announced to all of Mecca that the Mahdi—the fabled redeemer of Islam—had returned and was one of their number. They demanded that all oil exports to the United States be cut off and all foreigners on the Arabian Peninsula be expelled. Mecca and all of Saudi Arabia was on the razor’s edge.

Amazingly, the insurgents put together a large number of followers, including members of the Saudi National Guard, on the basis of a handful of religious claims. Mohammed Abdullah al-Qahtani was taken to be the Mahdi because of a similarity between his and his father’s names and the names of the Prophet Muhammad and his father. The date of the attack coincided with the beginning of the year 1400 on the Islamic calendar—according to some Islamic tradition, the Mahdi would reveal himself at this time, prior to the impending apocalypse.⁶ On the Saudi side, the military was reluctant to engage with the insurgents because of religious constraints against violence within the Grand Mosque. The government had to wait for religious leaders to issue fatwas permitting the use of violence to retake the mosque.

Claims that the Mahdi had returned in the end provoked only death and violence. After two weeks of assaults and siege, the insurgents were killed or worn down and Saudi forces moved in. 255 people were killed and 560 injured. When the Ayatollah Khomeini blamed Americans and Jews for the seizure, anti-American sentiment was stirred among Muslims around the world, prompting demonstrations in Saudi Arabia, Bangladesh, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, and Pakistan. In Islamabad, a mob went so far as to overrun the U.S. embassy, killing two Americans.⁷

The insurgents who seized the mosque were motivated by religious imperatives, and in calling for support from the populace in Mecca they appealed to religion. The justification for their claims rested on religion and religious texts. Such a remarkable and deadly act compels us to ask: what is religion, that it could bring both peaceful pilgrims and bloodthirsty insurgents to the same place in 1979? What is religion that both the insurgents and the Saudi government would look to it for justifications that seem, to an outside observer, to border on the absurd?

WHAT IS RELIGION?

Any systematic inquiry into a topic must begin with clear definitions. In the case of religion, however, coming up with such a definition inevitably leads to trouble. Significant problems accompany any attempt to define the word ‘religion’. If we define it too narrowly, not all the world’s religions will be covered and the definition will be useless. But if our definition is too broad, it will be too vague to be of any practical use.

To illustrate the problem with too constricted definitions, consider the question that has often been brought up as one of the central questions of religion—the existence of god. The Encyclopedia of Philosophy includes belief in the existence of a god or gods as part of its enumeration of fundamental religious traits. But already we are on shaky ground.

Buddhism is a major world religion by any measure, yet it is essentially atheistic.⁸ The intent of spiritual practice in Buddhism is to alleviate human suffering through the attainment of nirvana.⁹ The existence of a creator god is specifically rejected, and having faith in a supreme deity is actually considered an impediment to the goal of attaining nirvana.¹⁰ The worldview of Buddhism is also decidedly atheistic. The cosmos is seen…

as regulated by impersonal laws of cause and effect. There is no such thing as divine intervention. Nature is impartial. It cannot be flattered, nor does it grant special favors upon request.¹¹

Jainism is an Indian religion that prescribes self-control and nonviolence toward all living things as the means by which its followers can attain freedom from suffering. The Jains are among the most peaceful of all the world’s religious people, yet they do not believe in a creator god. Instead, they believe that the universe evolves by interactions between matter and energy as governed by the laws of nature. Accordingly, they are very studious of nature and knowledgeable about its workings. Where other religions direct reverence towards a deity, Jains direct their reverence toward all forms of life.

Among the religions native to India, several of the major schools of Hindu thought are either explicitly atheistic or do not require a belief in the existence of gods. Sankara’s Advaita Vedanta school accepts belief in gods as part of the spiritual journey, but ultimately teaches a monistic view that the ultimate reality is that all things are one—an ineffable, formless unity which he calls Brahman. The Hindu Vaisheshika System holds that all that exists is formed as atoms move, combine, and break apart according to an impersonal force or law rather than divine will. The Sankhya System, which is the oldest in Hindu philosophy, takes as its goal the end of human suffering. It also explicitly rejects the existence of a creator god on the grounds that “a thing is not made out of notion” and that “creator and created are one.”¹² Historian Will Durant remarks of India: “in this most religious and philosophical of nations it is nothing unusual to find religions and philosophies without a god.”¹³

Among the religions that do believe in the existence of god, there is not only widespread disagreement but outright contradiction—sometimes even within the same faith tradition. Polytheism is the belief in a plurality of gods, each with its own associated rituals and mythologies. Polytheistic beliefs do not necessarily contradict one another. For example, the ancient Romans were content to assume that what the Greeks meant by “Zeus” was roughly equivalent to what they meant by “Jupiter.” It was understood that different peoples worshipped different pantheons, and this was not typically perceived as problematic. However, there is comparatively little consistency of worship among polytheists—some individuals specialize in worshipping a particular deity, while others worship different gods at different times. As circumstances change, the customs or rites of worship may also change.

Monotheistic religions are even more explicitly contradictory. Whereas two different polytheistic religions could coexist, polytheism is rejected by monotheistic faiths as false or deluded. Since monotheists believe in one god, the different monotheistic faiths also directly contradict one another. It is not possible, for instance, simultaneously to be a Jew who follows Yahweh and to be a Muslim who follows Allah. To a believing Jew, many of a Muslim’s metaphysical views are wrong (and vice versa).

In addition to this, some monotheistic religions embrace different notions of the divine. Trinitarian beliefs in Christian thought are an example. According to most Christian traditions, God is one but has three persona or aspects: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Many denominations further recognize that the person of Jesus essentially has two natures, being both god and man at one and the same time. Other denominations are Unitarian, rejecting the Trinity, while some Trinitarians, such as the Egyptian Copts, hold the monophysite doctrine (i.e., the belief that Christ has a single nature, combining god and man). Therefore, even within this one faith tradition there are radical and even contradictory opinions about god. Both Judaism and Islam regard the Christian Trinity as not even monotheistic at all.

If we choose another trait to be a defining feature of religion, we will inevitably run into the same problem. The Encyclopedia of Philosophy also includes the distinction between sacred and profane as a religious trait. Yet, as Winston King has observed, this distinction itself is informed by the western religious tradition. ‘Sacred’ means something set apart, while ‘profane’ means outside the sacred place. This dichotomy doesn’t apply to Hinduism, where “almost everything can be and is given a religious significance by some sect.”¹⁴ With Taoism, Confucianism, and Shintoism, the religious life is thought of in terms of harmony between the natural and the human order. The dichotomy between sacred and profane has no place in this approach—yet these three (or Taoism and Shintoism at least) are typically considered religions.

Whichever trait we choose we find this problem; not all religions share the trait. Even those that do share it may do so in ways considered completely contradictory. Sometimes the contradictions can be found within the same faith tradition. Yet, if we broaden our definitions so as to be sure to include every religion we end up with something too broad to be useful.

ABRAHAMIC VS. DHARMIC SYSTEMS

Religious studies scholar Arvind Sharma has identified another crucial problem with attempts to define religion. The issue he finds lies in the fact that the approach, and even the word ‘religion’ itself, is decisively shaped by an Abrahamic worldview. In this context, ‘Abrahamic’ refers to the Abrahamic faiths of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. They are so-called because of how each traces its lineage back to the Biblical patriarch Abraham, who according to tradition enjoyed a special covenant with God.

Sharma identifies three concepts that characterize Abrahamic religions. They are conclusive, meaning that followers believe themselves to be in possession of final or ultimate truth. They are exclusionary, meaning that followers belong to a community that shares in possession of the faith and those outside the community do not possess it. And they are separative, meaning that religion is regarded as a distinct and separable component of culture, such that anyone belonging to any culture can, say, choose to become a Christian.¹⁵

The Abrahamic faiths are certainly conclusive in Sharma’s sense. In the book of Exodus the “Children of Israel” (that is, the Jews) are described as possessing the Law of God and the Word of God in the form of the Torah. In the quotation used from the book of John at the beginning of this chapter, Jesus describes himself as “the way and the truth” and insists that “No one comes to the father except through me.” Islam is also conclusive in this sense, and understands itself not as a new religion but as a reestablishment of the only true religion which had been given to the Jews and the Christians but lost. Hence, Allah says to the Muslims: “This day have I perfected your religion for you, completed my favor upon you, and have chosen for you Islam as your religion.”¹⁶ Interestingly, Sharma notes that both Christianity and Judaism have somewhat relaxed their positions when it comes to conclusive claims about possessing the truth, but Islam has not.¹⁷

The Abrahamic faiths are also demonstrably exclusionary in Sharma’s sense. The Hebrew Bible (known to Christians as the Old Testament) describes the Israelites as “treasured people out of all the people on the face of the earth.”¹⁸ The Israelites are also explicitly called god’s chosen people who have a special covenant with him—clearly an ethnocentric and exclusionary claim.¹⁹ In the Christian New Testament, Jesus says:

Do not think that I came to bring peace on the earth; I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I came to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law.²⁰

This passage has typically been interpreted as a warning to Christian communities to expect persecution from others on account of their faith. The expectation is that the community of Christians will be opposed by others who are their enemies. If anything, Islam is even more rabidly exclusionary: “whoever seeks a religion other than Islam, it will never be accepted of him.”²¹

On the issue of being separative, Judaism is somewhat different from Christianity and Islam since it does not actively seek converts as they do. Sharma characterizes this difference as a difference in degree of enthusiasm rather than a difference in kind since Judaism does accept converts and one cannot at the same time be a Jew (meaning in this context a follower of the Jewish religion) and also a Christian or a Muslim.²² For all three religions, Sharma says:

It is not enough for one to say that one is a Jew or a Christian or a Muslim; it also means that one must be part of a mutually exclusive social groupings [sic] associated with the synagogue, the church and the mosque respectively.²³

Sharma distinguishes these characteristics of the Abrahamic faiths from what he calls the “dharmic” position on religion. The word he uses comes from the Sanskrit word ‘dharma’, which is used on two levels in classical Hindu thought. At the level of the individual, dharma refers to one’s station or stage in life and the values and actions appropriate to it. At the level of general humanity, it refers to purely common human values like truth and nonviolence. In this context, the idea of changing one’s dharma makes little sense. You can change your station in life or pass through different stages of life, but these changes do not constitute changing your “religion” in the sense used by the Abrahamic faiths.²⁴

Hinduism represents a prime example of the dharmic religious position. Christianity and Islam teach that man lacks salvation, then offer that salvation to all who join. But the Hindu position offers salvation and does not even require that one become a Hindu.²⁵ It is therefore neither exclusionary nor separative in the Abrahamic sense. The religions of the Far East are also dharmic in this sense. Sharma points to a poll of Japanese religious views in which 95% of the population described themselves as Shinto and 76% of the same population also said they were Buddhist.²⁶ Imagine if 95% of Americans claimed they were Christian but 76% said they were also Muslim!

Interestingly, the word “religion” itself shows the influence of the three characteristics which Sharma identifies with the Abrahamic faiths. It comes from a Latin verb meaning “to tie up” or “to bind,” in the sense of binding together a community of believers. But if Sharma is right, dharmic religions do not “bind up” their believers in this way. In fact, Buddhism and Hinduism in particular have the explicit goal of freeing man from suffering. Could it be that even asking the question “what is religion” we are already stacking the deck against dharmic traditions?

Religious conflicts are the most difficult and unsolvable of the problems facing humanity. Ethnic, linguistic, racial, and territory conflicts all have some objective element to them. That is, they can be measured with some amount of objectivity and resolved accordingly. But religions do not yield themselves to objective scrutiny.

In the case of dharmic faiths such as Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, this lack of objective scrutiny is not practically problematic. They do not claim a monopoly on spiritual or empirical truth. Buddhists, for instance, are not in the habit of blowing people up if they refuse to meditate. But the Abrahamic faiths are unyielding. They claim to be in exclusive possession of the truth, while at the same time they do not provide the means for us to verify their claims.

For practical purposes, Judaism’s exclusivist claims are not significant. For most of their history Jews have not sought political power over others, and they do not actively seek converts among non-Jews. Christianity’s exclusivist claims, meanwhile, have become moderate. Since the age of the European Enlightenment, Christianity has become one of the most inclusive and open-minded religions in the world—theologically, culturally, social, and politically. The Christian peoples of the world are culturally diverse and as a rule quite hospitable to non-Christians living among them.

With regard to Islam, however, the story is quite different. Islam does not permit either Muslims or non-Muslims to test its theological, political, or existential claims. It does not permit its doctrines to be critically examined. Instead, it regards its doctrines as absolute and infallible truths. Although Islam’s claims are metaphysical, the implications of its claims are practical and existential. The rest of the world cannot simply accept what Islam says without question.

When his reasoning led him to this same point, the Scottish philosopher David Hume advocated the abandonment of metaphysics:

Accurate and just reasoning is the only catholic remedy fitted for all persons and dispositions and is alone able to subvert that abstruse philosophy and metaphysical jargon which, being mixed up with popular superstition, renders it in a manner impenetrable to careless reasoners and gives it the air of science and wisdom.²⁷

Hume advocates a scientific and empirical approach as the one best suited to the advancement and improvement of human life. Metaphysical claims, such as the doctrines of the Abrahamic religions, cannot guide any serious intellectual inquiry.

Since the metaphysical claims of the Abrahamic religions are matters of revelation and faith, there is no way to acquire genuine knowledge about them or to choose between them. With Judaism and Christianity we do not need to make such a choice. There are thousands of books published against Christianity in the Christian West, and millions of atheists, agnostics, and non-Christians are free to openly profess their beliefs or non-beliefs. People are not persecuted for their metaphysical values.

Islam, however, is a unique case. As a matter of historical fact, Islam has sought to exterminate non-Islamic religions (Hinduism and Buddhism for example) and has enslaved the people it could not destroy. It has justified invasions by saying it had to convert, dominate, or destroy the infidels. It politically humiliates and subjugates its opponents, calling them dhimmi. Even today, criticism of Islam is not allowed in Islamic countries; in at least 13 Islamic countries, anyone who openly espouses atheism or criticizes Muhammad or the Qur’an can face the death penalty.²⁸ Finally, Islam alone among the major world religions mandates the death penalty for anyone who dares to leave the religion. No other religion makes both criticism and apostasy a capital crime. Therefore, we have no choice but to criticize Islam by the only means available to us: reason and empirical evidence.

PART EIGHT

CHAPTER THIRTY - FIVE

Monotheism and its Discontents

When the Lord [Yahweh] your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drive out before you many nations—the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites, seven nations larger and stronger than you—and when the Lord your God has delivered them over to you and you have defeated them, then you must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them, and show them no mercy. Do not intermarry with them. Do not give your daughters to their sons or take their daughters for your sons, for they will turn your children away from following me to serve other gods, and the Lord’s anger will burn against you and will quickly destroy you. This is what you are to do to them: break down their altars, smash their sacred stones, cut down their Asherah poles and burn their idols in the fire. For you are a people holy to the Lord your God. The Lord your God has chosen you out of all the peoples on the face of the earth to be his people, his treasured possession.

—Deuteronomy 7:1-6

Allah gave the Prophet Muhammad four swords (for fighting the unbelievers): the first against the polytheists, which Muhammad himself fought with; the second against apostates, which Caliph Abu Bakr fought with; the third against the People of the Book, which Caliph Umar fought with; and the fourth against dissenters, which Caliph Ali fought with.

—Islamic jurist Shaybani¹

I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.

—Blogger Stephen Roberts

I regard monotheism as the greatest disaster ever to befall the human race.

—Author Gore Vidal

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

—Voltaire

According to Islamic history, sometime between 628 and 632 the Prophet Muhammad sent out letters to various Arabian and non-Arabian heads of state. The purpose of the letters was to call the leaders and their people to Islam. But the letters also contained a threat with the sense that if the leaders failed to heed the call it would be their doom. The letter to the ruler of Egypt from the self-identified “Apostle of Allah” reads:

Peace be upon him who follows the guidance. Next, I summon thee with the appeal of peace: submit your will to God and you will attain peace. God shall give thee thy reward twofold. But if thou decline then on thee is the guilt of the Copts. O ye people of the Book, come unto an equal arrangement between us and you, that we should serve none save God, associating nothing with Him, and not taking one another for Lords besides God. And if ye decline, then bear witness that we are Moslems.²

Although some of the details of these letters are now regarded by historians as spurious, the critical point is that the Islamic tradition accepts them as genuine. By being accepted, they became an accepted pattern for the Islamic treatment of other religions. There is the offer of a carrot (peace and the reward of God if Islam is submitted to) and the threat of a stick (destruction and woe to those who refuse).

Osama bin Laden knew this pattern quite well. He followed it in 2002 in his letter to the American people. This letter made little sense at the time to Americans, who were not familiar with the history of Islam. But to those who know of Muhammad’s previous “call to Islam” it is quite familiar. In bin Laden’s letter, we find these words:

The first thing that we are calling you to is Islam. The religion of the unification of God; of freedom from associating partners with Him, and rejection of this; of complete love of Him, the Exalted; of complete submission to His Laws; and of the discarding of all the opinions, orders, theories and religions which contradict with the religion He sent down to His Prophet Muhammad … If you fail to respond to all these conditions, then prepare for fight with the Islamic Nation.³

In these two letters we see two things. First, the full range of monotheism and its discontents is on display. The discontents arise from qualities peculiar to the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam). As discussed by Arvind Sharma in the previous chapter, those qualities are a conclusive claim to possess the whole truth, an exclusive claim to be in sole possession of that truth, and a separative demand that all others join—or else.⁴ Second, as bin Laden’s echo of Muhammad’s example shows, Islam continues to bring the world all the discontents of Abrahamic monotheism even into the 21st century.

REVELATION AND THE ABRAHAMIC RELIGIONS

The three Abrahamic religions are so called because they trace their origins to the spiritual father Abraham from the book of Genesis. Abraham illustrates the two essential and defining features of monotheism as it arose among the Semitic peoples. He is absolutely faithful to the revealed word of God and he is absolutely obedient to the commands of God. That obedience supersedes all normal human attachments and relationships, as is clear from the verse: “For not I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.”⁵

Revelation is a very ancient and integral part of Semitic tradition. In the words of Islamic scholar Anwar Shaikh:

Revelation means that the universe has been created by God, who loves to be worshipped. He reveals His will to mankind through his agent, called the prophet, who happens to be the divine interpreter. Salvation is not possible unless people obey the prophet who is God’s messenger … It was God who made laws and revealed [them] to the ruler, and gave him instructions regarding the government and morality.⁶

Among the early Semitic peoples, their rulers were priest-kings who acted as the vicars of god upon earth. It was typical of these rulers to present themselves as unworthy or reluctant voices of God. We see this tradition at work when Moses establishes himself as a prophet for the Hebrew people in bondage to the Egyptian Pharaoh, but is reluctant to be the voice of God on account of his stammer. Muhammad also follows this tradition. There is a story about an angel writing a message and asking Muhammad to read it. Muhammad says he is unable to three times and three times the angel chokes him.⁷

A critical element of Abrahamic revelation is the view of God as wholly other, and both unknowable and unknown without God’s revelation of himself. This aspect of revelation is in a sense quite logical. If God was knowable or approachable by human reason, there would be no need for revelation, or at least it would be of a more limited importance. But if God is completely mysterious and separate, revelation becomes all-important because it is our only source of information or guidance. In turn, the prophet himself becomes all-important as the only source of information about what has been revealed.

Revelation must be accepted as dogmatically true in and of itself without any empirical basis. Christian theologian James Packer acknowledges that “no guarantee can, in fact, be provided except … by a renewed acknowledgement of, and submission to, the Bible as an infallible written revelation from God.”⁸ Theologian Karl Barth also admits that accepting the revealed truth “can only be attested in the realm of humanity by an appeal to proclamation through the Church, to Holy Scripture, to revelation.”⁹ Perhaps the clearest statement, however, comes from Catholic apologist Cardinal Newman:

[Faith] is assenting to a doctrine as true, which we do not see, which we cannot prove because God says it is true, who cannot lie. And further than this, God says it is true, not with His own voice, but by the voice of His messengers; it is assenting to what man says, not simply viewed as a man, but to what he is commissioned to declare, as a messenger, prophet, or ambassador from God.¹⁰

For the Abrahamic religions, faith involves not simply believing God but believing that certain men such as Muhammad or the Apostles have a commission from God. These notions of what faith and religious knowledge are lie at the heart of all the Abrahamic religions.

For the Jews, this basis of religion takes the form of an ethnocentric exclusivism. Hence, God establishes his covenant with Abraham and his legitimate offspring, whereas Ishmael (Abraham’s other son by his slave-girl Hagar) will not be party to the covenant. With Christianity and Islam, however, this ethnic element becomes less important and is even repudiated. But the exclusivism remains in the form of creedal exclusivism. One must believe the correct doctrine as revealed to men. Hence, Jesus says “the only way to the Father is through me,” and Muhammad says, “If you obey me, then you obey Allah, and if you disobey me, you disobey Allah.”¹¹ This is one reason why Christianity and Islam went on to become proselytizing religions.

ABRAHAMIC ABSOLUTISM AND EXCLUSIVISM

As Newman has observed, the Abrahamic approach to faith produces two remarkable results:

Faith has two peculiarities; it is most certain, decided, positive, immovable in its assent, and it gives this assent not because it sees with the eye, or sees with the reason, but because it receives the tidings from one who comes from God.¹²

In other words, faith is at once absolute in its claims (“immovable in its assent”) and immune to rational argument. The moral consequences of this have been nothing short of disastrous for the world. As the history of the Abrahamic religions shows, faith becomes the justification for the worst sort of imperialism.

With Judaism, our primary source of information is not history per se but the religious texts of the Jewish people themselves. Nevertheless, this source is quite clear. Following the commands of Yahweh, the ancient Hebrews travel out of Egypt to the Promised Land. In several places we see that the conquest of this territory involves great slaughter and even genocide. The Hebrews are directed to take vengeance upon the Midianites by killing every adult male, taking the women and children, capturing the property, and burning all their towns and camps.¹³ Moses even becomes angry with his followers for allowing all the Midianite women to survive since some of them had enticed the Israelites to be unfaithful to the Lord. At his order, all the boys and non-virginal women are also killed.¹⁴ Elsewhere, Moses describes how the land of Sihon was given over to the Israelites by the Lord:

When Sihon and all his army came out to meet us in battle at Jahaz, the Lord our God delivered him over to us and we struck him down, together with his sons and his whole army. At that time we took all his towns and completely destroyed them—men, women and children. We left no survivors.¹⁵

After the death of Moses, the conquest of Canaan is left to his successor, Joshua. This campaign begins with the siege and destruction of Jericho, which may stand as a representation of the rest of the conquest of the land. Jericho is several times described as being “devoted to the Lord,” meaning that the Lord of the Israelites has claimed it and it is doomed to destruction:

So everyone charged straight in, and they took the city. They devoted the city to the Lord and destroyed with the sword every living thing in it—men and women, young and old, cattle, sheep and donkeys.¹⁶

This approach is the fulfillment of the Lord’s command to Moses: “you shall destroy all the people that the Lord gives over to you, your eye shall not pity them.”¹⁷ For the followers of the Lord, just about anything is permitted against those who stand in their way. Non-chosen people are legitimate targets for conquest, massacre, and exploitation. This is a remarkably dualistic view that is only matched by Islam.

With Christianity, the discontents of Abrahamic monotheism are somewhat attenuated for several reasons. First, Christianity began as a religion of the powerless—dispossessed Jews, poor gentiles, and slaves. Lacking political power, it could not immediately embark on the wars of conquest seen in Judaism and Islam. In later ages, that would change. Christianity did play a role in the conquest and conversion of the New World, for instance. But Christianity is also not a “pure” Abrahamic monotheism in the same sense as Judaism and Islam. By introducing the concept of an incarnate God, from the viewpoint of the other two religions, an element of the old polytheism is involved.

Furthermore, non-Semitic elements became intertwined with Christian thought from a very early period. We will look at some of these elements in the next chapter, and how they led to a less dualistic ethical system than we find in the other two Abrahamic faiths. For our purposes it is enough to note how Philo of Alexandria brought the concept of logos from Greek philosophy into the Jewish tradition. By Philo’s time, ‘logos’ had come to refer to an amorphous, disembodied principle of order that guided the universe. In the Gospel of John, this notion becomes fused with Jewish thinking from the very opening phrase: “In the beginning was the Word [logos], and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”¹⁸

In Islam, by contrast, the imperial impulse seen in Judaism becomes a universal principle. Whereas the Hebrews had never sought to build a vast empire or to subjugate the entire world, the Muslims see this as their duty. They are provided divine sanction and the promise of rewards by none other than their Prophet, Muhammad:

Allah promises that the Muslim who participates in jihad with no compulsion, other than true faith and to serve Allah, will either be admitted into Paradise or sent home with Allah’s reward or a share of the spoils of war.¹⁹

A new wrinkle has even been added to the promise of reward. The Hebrews had been told their posterity would reign if they should keep their covenant. Muslims are offered the same promise, plus eternal life in Paradise.

Accordingly, the first task undertaken by the followers of Muhammad after his death was a campaign of territorial conquest to expand the sphere of Islam.²⁰ It was motivated by an absolutely dualistic view of the world, as Islamic scholar Efraim Karsh explains:

Islam envisages a global political order in which all humankind will live under Muslim rule as either believers or subject communities. In order to achieve this goal it is incumbent on all free, male adult Muslims to carry out an uncompromising struggle “in the path of Allah,” or jihad. This in turn makes those parts of the world that have not yet been conquered by the House of Islam an abode of permanent conflict (Dar al-Harb, the House of War) which will only end with Islam’s eventual triumph.²¹

The dualistic view of Islam is perfectly on display in the use of the standard word, kafir, to refer to all non-Muslims. Although this word is usually translated as “unbeliever,” as Bill Warner has argued, that translation sounds morally neutral, while ‘kafir’ as used by Islam is never neutral. A kafir is the lowest form of life in the Islamic system. The kafir may be tortured, killed, enslaved, and lied to. Although there are different classifications of kafir—polytheists, idolaters, People of the Book (Christians and Jews), atheists, pagans—the term applies to all of them. None are due the same moral treatment as a Muslim is due.²² Although some believe that People of the Book are a special category, the final word on them is given in the Qur’an: “Make war on those who have received the Scriptures but do not believe in Allah or in the Last day.”²³

Muhammad even created his own equivalent of the Battle of Jericho. After the Muslims besieged a stronghold of the Banu Qurayza, a tribe of Jews living in Arabia, the tribe surrendered. Just as Moses had done with the Midianites, every adult male was killed and the rest of the people and property seized. Somewhere between 600 and 900 people were slaughtered. From Muhammad’s wife Aisha, who witnessed the killing, we know that a woman of the town lost her mind when she saw her family destroyed and was killed along with the rest. Full details of the killing are recorded as a holy act in both the Qur’an and the Hadith.²⁴ The stronghold itself was razed like the walls of Jericho.

Further details of the Islamic scourge can be found in the chapters on Universal jihad and India. Despite the death of their prophet, Muslims were still propelled forward to conquest by his earthly example, particularly his insistence that “I was ordered to fight all men until they say there is no God but Allah.”²⁵ In the case of Judaism, there was great slaughter in Canaan when the Israelites came to claim the Promised Land; with Islam, the entire earth is seen as the Promised Land.

SEMITIC AND INDIC RELIGIOUS TRADITIONS

In contrast to the Abrahamic tradition, what Sharma refers to as the Indic religious tradition makes not revelation but knowledge the primary authority. Epistemological concerns are central in the Indic tradition (in Hinduism and Buddhism, for example). Since experience and human knowledge are accepted sources of information, reason and faith are not seen as opposed as they often are in Abrahamic traditions.

This greater emphasis on knowledge and epistemology means disagreements over doctrinal matters are of considerably less importance. In the Abrahamic tradition, where all depends on revelation, if a group gets its understanding of revelation wrong there is in principle no way to correct them. Either they must be convinced or forced to recant (or destroyed, as often happens to heretics). But in a system that admits experience, proof or evidence can be used. Even if an argument is unconvincing, it isn’t a matter of life and death. If a Buddhist and a Hindu cannot convince one another, they can go their own ways and have done with it. If a Christian and a Muslim disagree, the Abrahamic assumption is that one is mistaken and in danger of going to hell. In the Indic tradition, by contrast:

There is no Hell, for that means there is a place where God is not, and there are sins which exceed his love. If the infinite love of God is not a myth, universal salvation is a certainty.²⁶

In the Indic religions, there is no pressure for doctrinal uniformity. It is not necessary in Hinduism, for example, for all believers to believe the same things about nature or even god. As scholar and statesman S. Radhakrishnan puts it:

There has been no such thing as uniform stationary unalterable Hinduism whether in point of belief or practice. Hinduism is a movement, not a position; a process, not a result; a growing tradition, not a fixed revelation.²⁷

This means Hinduism is open to critical thought and change. In this respect, it is almost the opposite of Islam, where the revelation given to Muhammad cannot be changed or developed, and any development is seen as heresy.

The Indic tradition also does not subscribe to a belief in one god in the Abrahamic sense of something other and independently unknowable. Instead, God is posited as an ideal to be emulated or achieved. As S.N. Dasgupta writes:

The highest reality is no individual person separate from us, or one whom we try to please, or one whose laws and commands we obey, or one to whose will we submit with reverence and devotion. It is, rather, a totality of partless, simple and un-differentiated experience which is the root of all our ordinary knowledge and experience and which is at once the ultimate essence of our self and the highest principle of the universe.²⁸

Since God is perceived so differently, “salvation” is also regarded differently. Hence, in Vedanta philosophy we find the doctrine that “the knower of Brahman [the ultimate reality] becomes Brahman.” The Bhagavad-Gita claims, “With the self unified through yoga, looking on all things with equal vision, he sees the Self in all beings and all beings in the Self everywhere.”²⁹ The issue of salvation is a matter of knowledge of realization—one attains salvation by learning or overcoming ignorance.

The ethical systems of the Indic tradition are also non-dualistic. There is no separate code saying to treat believers one way and non-believers another. Instead, the Mahabharata simply declares, “Non-injury is the highest religious norm.” The expectation is that this norm is to be applied to all things, not just one group of people. In the Dhammapada, the Buddha declares, “All beings fear death, all beings tremble at punishment. Therefore, neither kill nor cause to kill.” In the words of historian Arthur Toynbee, “the spirit of mutual good-will, esteem, and veritable love … is the traditional spirit of the religions of the Indian family.”³⁰

Since the Enlightenment era, philosophy and science have also emerged in the West as a counter to the assumptions of the Abrahamic tradition. Like the Indic religions, philosophers and scientists are focused on experience and knowledge while revelation has no authority. As B.L. Hebblethwaite puts it:

The apparent irrationality of revelation-claims is that they allegedly rest on an unchallengeable and untestable basis. Moreover, as soon as serious attention is paid to the fact of rival revelation-claims in the different religions, it appears that the authority of any one religion’s revelation-claims is undermined, or at least put in question.³¹

THE POLYTHEISTIC ORIGINS OF ABRAHAMIC RELIGIONS

There is a further objection to the claims of the Abrahamic religions. If the assumptions about divine revelation are correct, one would expect these religions to have been delivered as a whole and at once. Instead, what we find at the beginnings of the Abrahamic religions is that they grew out of existing traditions rather than emerged suddenly in a blast of insight—as would be expected if they had been doctrines revealed by God.

In the case of Judaism, “There is … overwhelming testimony to the boundless polytheism of the mass of people even in Jerusalem.”³² Archaeologists have unearthed artifacts and shrines dedicated to divine figures of all sorts. Up until the seventh century BC, it seems that members of Israelite families were living in a polytheistic religious sphere quite separate from the official religion of the state.³³ Down to the reign of Josiah, Yahweh was one of four deities worshipped by the Israelites: El, Asherah, Yahweh, and Baal.³⁴ Engravings have been uncovered in Palestine dedicated to “Yahweh and his Asherah,” indicating the two were worshipped together at some point. Archaeologists have also found carved statues of pregnant women that they believe were used to symbolize Asherah. According to some scholars, the gods Yahweh and El were eventually combined into one, while the worship of Asherah and Baal became officially excluded. Nevertheless, worship of Asherah in particular persisted all the way to the Babylonian captivity.³⁵

It was 19th century historical scholars who first uncovered the evidence that showed a growth from animism to monotheism among the Hebrew people. At first, the God of pre-prophetic Israel was a tribal god whose power was limited in scope to the land of Canaan. It was the work of the Jewish prophets who created the religion of Judaism (later modified by rabbinical traditions), introducing the innovations that culminated in the monotheistic wisdom of the book of Isaiah.³⁶

Christianity evolved out of Jewish tradition, but has also incorporated various elements from outside traditions. The notion of an incarnate deity is one example, as it is generally regarded as foreign and repugnant to the monotheistic traditions of both Judaism and Islam. Other examples include the integration of pagan rituals and festivals such as midwinter becoming Christmas and Spring fertility rites merging with the observation of Easter. The use of Saints as intercessors between worshippers and God, although not present in all Christian denominations, is also an example of polytheistic practices being adopted by a monotheistic religion.

Islam has been even more brazen in its adoption of pagan rites and ceremonies. The holy Kaaba in Mecca was a center of idol-worship long before Muhammad’s time. Muhammad discarded most of the idols but retained the Kaaba itself and its prominence. He justified his actions saying Abraham and Ishmael built the structure.³⁷

Worshipping at the Kaaba and kissing the Black Stone are also holdovers from pre-Islamic times. Even the five times daily prayer facing Mecca was a pagan practice that Muhammad borrowed for Islam. One part of the hajj, where the pilgrim runs between two small mountains at Mecca, was also adapted from a pagan practice. There’s even a Hadith about this one, where a Muslim complains to Muhammad about the practice because it had been used by the ignorant. Muhammad essentially tells the man not to worry about it.³⁸

Another Islamic practice known as tawaf, this one at the heart of the hajj, is also a holdover from pagan times. This practice involves going around the Grand Mosque in circles. The polytheists used to do this in the same place in order to please Hubal the moon god as well as hundreds of other deities of the Kaaba. Religious circumambulations are also practiced by Hindus and Buddhists, though both religions are regarded as the worst sort of pagan idolaters by Islam. Hubal is still present in an even more significant way: his symbol, the crescent moon, has been adopted as the universal symbol of Islam.

Pre-Islamic religion can be seen in Islamic traditions in other senses as well, such as the preservation of animistic beliefs that the power of an individual soul can inhabit certain parts of the body such as the blood, the teeth, or the hair. Accordingly, there are a number of specific Islamic traditions concerning the beard and hair of the Prophet Muhammad. Hadiths record his habit of trimming his moustache but letting his beard grow, and his practice of oiling and perfuming his hair and beard. The holiness of Muhammad’s beard as a symbol of dignity and manhood is now recognized even in common oaths. Arabs will swear by their lives or their beards, and the more solemn oaths will be sworn by the Prophet’s beard.

Although the Abrahamic religions claim to have received wisdom by direct revelation, their histories reveal that many of the practices and rituals had pagan origins or otherwise developed out of pre-monotheistic cultures.

THE MYTH OF RELIGIOUS CONFLICT

If you were to ask a representative of the Indic tradition what a “religious conflict” was, he would probably describe something like a religious debate. Formal debates were a fixture of ancient Indian culture, and often pitted “orthodox Hindu thinkers against their heterodox opponents (materialist, Jain, Ajivika, or Buddhist).”³⁹ These debates had agreed-upon ground rules, and reasonableness was the guide rather than fervency of belief. At worst, the losers of such a debate might be expected to convert to the views of the winner.⁴⁰ There is no danger that someone will be killed because he embraces the wrong kind of metaphysics. The medieval Islamic scholar al-Biruni himself observed this quality in the Indian people:

They totally differ from us in religion, as we believe in nothing in which they believe, and vice versa. On the whole, there is little disputing about theological topics among themselves; at the utmost, they fight with words, but they will never stake their soul or body or their property on religious controversy.⁴¹

For the Abrahamic faiths—above all, for Islam—religious conflict can include genocide. Debate is difficult and ultimately contingent because the basic facts are provided by revelation rather than reason or experience. If the opponent does not accept revelation, there are few ways to impose it other than to use force. The European clashes over dogma and doctrine during the Middle Ages, the Spanish Inquisition, the French Wars of Religion, and the entire 1,400 year history of Islamic jihad stand as historical testimony to the willingness of Abrahamic religion to resort to force in religious disagreements.

The tendency of Abrahamic religious conflict toward violence can be explained by the great psychologist William James. As James has pointed out, belief is highly correlated with action; or, as James himself puts it, “there is a believing tendency whenever there is a willingness to act at all.”⁴² At bottom, our beliefs are matters of passion and will—the same sources from which our actions spring. But there is another side to matters of belief, which we see hinted at in James’s statement that, “As a rule we disbelieve all facts and theories for which we have no use.”⁴³ When we say we have no use for something, we diminish not only its importance but its existence. In other words, we deny or repudiate it. The will to believe is also the will to deny, and this will to deny also has its root in our passion and will. Regina Schwartz has painted a skillful picture of monotheism and its will to deny:

Sometimes monotheism is entangled with particularism, with the assertion that this God and not any other gods must be worshipped, a particularism so virulent that it reduces all other gods to idols and so violent that it reduces all other worshippers to abominations.⁴⁴

This is why ardent Muslim believers like Osama bin Laden are so willing to kill. The same psychological force that guides their belief also informs their will to deny others their own beliefs. Since the content of the Muslim’s belief is provided by revelation, there is no way (other than convincing him he has misunderstood revelation) to reason or argue him out of it. As a rule, the Muslims who believe the most powerfully will be most willing to kill or to destroy.

Herein lies the difference between Judaism and Christianity on one side and Islam on the other. The European Renaissance and Enlightenment (along with modern science) revitalized the old Greek habits of critical thought and introduced new methods of experimentation. For the Christian west, religious belief was no longer the only game in town. As a result, for Jews and Christians the fervent will to believe (and to deny) became less absolute. The old exclusiveness of these religions has given way to more universalism and acceptance in the actual lives of believers.

For Islam, however, there has been no Enlightenment. Two of the longest-running conflicts in the world today are both centered on the Islamic faith. The Arab-Israeli conflict concerns mutually exclusive claims (based in revealed religion) to the land of Israel/Palestine. The Pakistan-India conflict has roots stretching back all the way to the eighth century and is also rooted in an Islamic claim to rule the entire Indian subcontinent. Again, Radhakrishnan underlines the source of wars that continue to be prosecuted by Islam and their foreignness to pre-Islamic India: “Wars of Religion which are the outcome of fanaticism that prompts and justifies the extermination of aliens of different creeds were practically unknown in Hindu India.”⁴⁵

By way of comparison, conflicts between groups in the Indic tradition are not motivated by religious beliefs. The Hindu-Sikh conflict in 1980s India was a conflict over ethnicity and linguistics—in fact, the conflict only emerged after the 1979 Islamic Revolution in neighboring Iran. There were no religious denunciations of Hindu deities or Sikh gurus. The Sikh revolutionary leader Jarnial Singh Bhindarwale was even supported at one time by the leadership of the Indian National Congress. Similarly, the conflict in Sri Lanka between the Tamils and the Singhalese was primarily ethnic. The Tamils had Christians and Muslims among their followers. Neither group denigrated the religion of the other. In both cases, the conflict is now essentially over.

ISLAMIC FUNDMENTALISM IN THE 21ST CENTURY

While Western societies—as well as countries such as India, Korea, and Japan—have embraced pluralism, tolerance, and critical thinking, the Islamic world remains mired in the past. The most significant religious movement in Islam today is a deeply fundamentalist movement with an explicit and often-stated goal of “purifying” Islam and the Islamic world by returning it to the practices established by Muhammad in the seventh century. The core of this doctrine has been defined by a professor of Middle East politics in this way:

The crux of the doctrine is the existence of one single Islamic state, ruling the entire umma [Muslim community]. It is the duty of the umma to expand the territory of this state in order to bring as many people under its rule as possible. The ultimate aim is to expand the territory of this state in order to bring the whole earth under its sway.⁴⁶

What is particularly alarming about fundamentalist Islam is the justification for, and persistence of, anti-egalitarian elements. The trend among other faiths is towards increasing ecumenism and universalism. Islam, however, is enormously resistant to change or growth. The only thing that put an end to Muslim expansion in the first place “was not a change of heart or doctrine, but European military might.”⁴⁷ In the 21st century, fundamentalist Islam has become ever more certain that other faiths are false and worthy of destruction. This is clearly visible in Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to America” cited at the beginning of this chapter.

The Indic religions do not even have a phenomenon equivalent to Islamic fundamentalism. Instead, Jainism represents what could be the exact opposite. Compare the five vows taken by a Jain monk or nun with the practices of Muslims. The first and most essential vow for the Jains is the vow of absolute nonviolence. This includes not only abstaining from harming living beings directly or indirectly but also avoiding thoughts or speech that might injure others or encourage others to deal out harm.⁴⁸ Islam encourages its followers to participate in jihad even if they do not wish to. The second vow is the vow of absolute truthfulness, meaning they will not lie. The Islamic doctrine of taqqiya permits the Muslim to lie if it will save his life or advance the Islamic cause. The third vow is a vow never to take anything that belongs to another. Islam explicitly grants to its followers the right to take the non-believers’ goods as plunder. The fourth vow is a vow of absolute celibacy. Islam permits multiple wives, indulging male sexuality at the expense of women. The fifth vow is a vow of poverty, meaning the Jain monk or nun will keep nothing, even for daily needs. A primary focus of Islamic law involves the distribution of goods.

Similarly, Hindu fundamentalism does not truly exist as such. The Vedas declare that “Truth is One, though the sages know it variously,” which indicates a certain relativism or openness to other traditions. Even among the Hindu philosophies which regard the Vedas as inspired, there is no necessary argument that only the Vedas are inspired texts—other texts may also be holy. As Radhakrishnan says:

The Hindu attitude to religion is interesting. While fixed intellectual beliefs mark off one religion to another, Hinduism sets no such limits. Intellect is subordinated to intuition, dogma to experience, outer expression to inward realization.⁴⁹

In the end, Islam may be the most perfectly realized of the Abrahamic monotheisms. Unlike Judaism, it is universal in scope; unlike Christianity, it does not contain non-Semitic and non-monotheistic elements in its makeup. This makes the monotheistic discontents associated with Islam even more acute. While Western societies are secure in their secular humanism, their military superiority, and their economic prosperity, Islam has recognized its setbacks and identified the weaknesses of modern western culture. It has adopted new and varied tactics in the service of its essentially pre-medieval outlook. These tactics include terrorist violence, cultural infiltration, and demographic warfare.

The nature of Abrahamic monotheism produces a number of problems—what we have called discontents—for the world and all of those who do not subscribe to one of its faiths. These discontents include virulent imperialism, forced conversion, murder, and brutality. Further, because the beliefs that inspired these actions were provided by divine revelation, there was no internal cause for correction or self-criticism.

But the West has more than monotheism to its credit. It also has the philosophical wisdom of Socrates and Aristotle, the Academicians and the Stoics. It has the secular political wisdom of Voltaire and Locke and the active genius of men like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington. It produced men of science such as Bacon and Galileo, who paved the way for empirical investigation of nature. In short, the West has a long and proud tradition of critical thought that has opposed the narrow conceptions of monotheism and won—so far.

Islam has no equivalent to such figures. Instead, in Islam all the old discontents of Abrahamic monotheism remain alive and well and urgently trying to force as many people as possible back to seventh century Arabia. All the intolerance and destruction of the Abrahamic faiths is still alive in Islam, which alone among the world religions has resisted all efforts at reform, or growth, or change. The weapons of the Islamic fundamentalists are terror, deception, and demographic warfare. Their victory would be nothing less than complete and utter disaster for human progress on earth.

PART EIGHT

CHAPTER THIRTY - SIX

The Elimination of Metaphysics

Seven days from now I will send rain on the earth for forty days and forty nights, and I will wipe from the face of the earth every living creature I have made.

—Genesis 7:4

Hear, Israel: You are now about to cross the Jordan to go in and dispossess nations greater and stronger than you, with cities that have walls up to the sky. The people are strong and tall—Anakites! You know about them and have heard it said: “Who can stand up against the Anakites?” But be assured today that the Lord your God is the one who goes across ahead of you like a devouring fire. He will destroy them; he will subdue them before you. And you will drive them out and annihilate them quickly, as the Lord has promised you.

—Deuteronomy 9:1-34

They will pick up snakes with their hands; and when they drink deadly poison, it will not hurt them at all; they will place their hands on sick people, and they will get well.

—Mark 16:18

Shall I inform you of something worse than that … those (Jews) who incurred the Curse of Allah and His Wrath, those of whom (some) He transformed into monkeys and swines, those who worshipped Taghut (false deities); such are worse in rank (on the Day of Resurrection in the Hell-fire), and far more astray from the Right Path (in the life of this world).

—Quran 5:60

Men are the protectors and maintainers of women, because Allah has made one of them to excel the other, and because they spend (to support them) from their means. Therefore the righteous women are devoutly obedient (to Allah and to their husbands), and guard in the husband’s absence what Allah orders them to guard (e.g. their chastity, their husband’s property, etc.). As to those women on whose part you see ill-conduct, admonish them (first), (next), refuse to share their beds, (and last) beat them (lightly, if it is useful), but if they return to obedience, seek not against them means (of annoyance).

—Quran 4:34

The most detestable wickedness, the most horrid cruelties, and the greatest miseries that have afflicted the human race have had their origin in this thing called revelation, or revealed religion. It has been the most dishonorable belief against the character of the divinity … that ever was propagated since man began to exist.

—Thomas Paine¹

The good, say the mystics of spirit, is God, a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man’s power to conceive—a definition that invalidates man’s consciousness and nullifies his concepts of existence … Man’s mind, say the mystics of spirit, must be subordinated to the will of God … Man’s standard of value, say the mystics of spirit, is the pleasure of God, whose standards are beyond man’s power of comprehension and must be accepted on faith … The purpose of man’s life … is to become an abject zombie who serves a purpose he does not know, for reasons he is not to question.

—Ayn Rand²

An enduring feature of religious fanaticism is that when it is unchecked by reason and common sense observation it easily runs into bizarre and dangerous extremes. One of the saddest examples of this is the case of Mother Teresa. While no one would question the piety or religious devotion of the woman, few people understand the extent to which she and the order she founded remained complacent in the face of suffering—out of a religious belief that suffering and misfortune were to be treasured. Christopher Hitchens, a writer and journalist who composed an extensively-researched critique of Mother Teresa, argues that for her, “The point is not the honest relief of suffering but the promulgation of a cult based on death and suffering and subjection.”³

The evidence for Hitchens’ position is considerable. At the top of the list is the intentionally substandard medical care provided by the Calcutta Home for Dying Destitutes, which she founded. Father Paul Chetcuti, a Jesuit priest who worked at the Home, reported that Teresa refused “all sophisticated equipment in her homes, even a simple microscope which could be useful in the rapid diagnosis of certain sicknesses.”⁴ The editor of British medical journal The Lancet reported in 1994 that the sisters who ran the Home did not conduct medical investigations or even bother to separate the curable from the incurable. “Such systematic approaches,” he wrote, “are alien to the ethos of the home.”⁵

Lack of money or ability was not the reason. By the time of the editor’s visit in 1994, Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity had been the recipients of millions of dollars in charitable contributions. They could have done more, but it was “alien to the ethos” of the nuns. When the order opened a home in the Bronx, regulations required an elevator in the building for the sake of the disabled. The city offered to pay for the required elevator. But Mother Teresa would not allow even a free elevator to be installed. In the words of a former volunteer, the nuns and their leader were “obsessed with using only the simplest of means for our work.” In fact, when the sisters were providing medical care in Haiti they went so far as to reuse needles until they became completely blunt and unusable. Even when they saw pain caused by blunted needles and volunteers offered to procure more needles for free, the sisters still refused.⁶

As former volunteer Susan Shields explains, Mother Teresa and her fellow nuns believed that their willingness to endure suffering was pleasing to God. Because of their suffering, they felt, God would dispense more grace to humanity. In other words, the job of Mother Teresa and her order was to sanctify and amplify the suffering of other people. Actually relieving their suffering was not part of their central purpose.⁷ Mother Teresa expressed this very idea in her own words: “There is something beautiful in seeing the poor accept their lot, to suffer it like Christ’s Passion. The world gains much from their suffering.”⁸

It must be pointed out here that Mother Teresa herself never denied that her primary goal was not medical care. She insisted to a would-be biographer, “we are not nurses, we are not doctors, we are not teachers, we are not social workers. We are religious, we are religious, we are religious.”⁹ She is not entirely to blame for the image of her constructed by her fans and the media in the West, many of whom knew next to nothing about the woman or how she and her order operated. In fact, after reading her posthumously released letters, many of them full of details of mental anguish, Hitchens concluded that “all the things that made Mother Teresa famous—the endless hard toil, the bitter austerity, the ostentatious religious orthodoxy—were only part of an effort to still the misery within.”¹⁰

The letters Hitchens refers to reveal Mother Teresa experienced a profound crisis of faith which troubled her throughout her life. In one letter written just after beginning her work in Calcutta, she wrote: “Where is my faith? Even deep down there is nothing but emptiness and darkness. If there be a God—please forgive me.”¹¹ The doubts she felt upon beginning her work for the destitute would haunt her throughout her life. Nevertheless, several priests she confided in encouraged her to continue what she was doing, saying her agonizing was only a demonstration of her true faith.¹² This woman who left her home and family at the age of 18 apparently lived with inner feelings of despair for 50 years until her death because ranking members of the Catholic Church told her to embrace it as a sign of nearness to God. In her work, she was only passing on to others what had been encouraged in her: a primitive glorification of pain.

While Mother Teresa is more of a victim of religious extremism, sometimes the extremists turn out to be profound victimizers of others. This was the case with Swami Bhaktipada, the leader of the American Hare Krishna movement. Born Keith Gordon Ham in Peekskill, New York, Bhaktipada was the son of a conservative Baptist minister who became a Hare Krishna as an adult and founded New Vrindaban, the largest Hare Krishna community in America in 1968. The community was wracked by scandals in the 1980s as police investigated charges of sexual abuse of children by staff members of a school there, the murder of two devotees, and the embezzlement of more than ten million dollars by Bhaktipada himself. He was convicted of racketeering, eventually pleading guilty in 1996 and serving eight years of a 12-year prison sentence.

Warren Jeffs the leader of an offshoot Mormon group called the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), is an even more extreme example. Jeffs was briefly on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List for fleeing prosecution for arranging marriages between his adult male followers and underage girls as young as 12. One of his unfortunate victims was a 14-year-old girl Jeffs forced into marriage with her 19-year-old first cousin. This was accepted by many of his followers, who believed Jeffs to be the prophet of God. In 2011, Jeffs was himself found guilty of sexual assault against two of his “wives,” aged 12 and 15.¹³

Some religious extremes involve outright charlatanism, as is the case with Sathya Sai Baba. This Indian guru claimed to be a miracle worker capable of miraculous healings, resurrection of the dead, and materializing small objects out of thin air. When a physicist challenged him in the 1970s to work his “miracles” under controlled conditions Sai Baba refused. In the 1990s, allegations surfaced that Sai Baba had been guilty of sexually molesting young boys on his religious compound. The allegations were taken seriously enough that a BBC documentary in 2004 followed them in detail. Nothing ever came of the allegations, however, as Sai Baba was extremely well connected politically: his followers included a former Indian Prime Minister.¹⁴

In quite extreme cases a religious charlatan may even believe his own story. This seems to have been the case with Kentucky native and Pentecostal preacher James Coots. Based on his reading of the Bible, Coots thought a true believer couldn’t be harmed by poisonous snakebites since he was protected by God. As part of his faith he regularly handled all manner of dangerous snakes, even losing half a finger to one bite and personally witnessing the deaths of parishioners. In 2014 Coots himself suffered a venomous bite. Yet, based on his previously expressed wishes, his family refused all medical treatment, believing the poison would not harm him. He died shortly after receiving the injury.¹⁵

Religion does not always run to fanaticism. In the words of Dr. Charles Kimball, the Director of Religious Studies at the University of Oklahoma, religion can be perfectly good and useful when it is “an inclusive faith rooted in tradition,” and when it embraces “religious diversity and pluralism.” We have a number of examples of leading religious figures who exemplify these qualities: Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., former President Jimmy Carter and Pope Francis are all religious men who practiced an inclusive faith and embraced religious diversity. However, Professor Kimball also identifies what he calls five warning signs that a religion is becoming evil. The warning signs include: making absolutist truth claims, requiring blind obedience to doctrine, establishing an ideal time (such as the lifetime of Muhammad as an exemplary era for all mankind), believing the ends justify any means, and declaring Holy War.¹⁶ On all five points, Islam exemplifies the warning signs to an extreme degree.

Perhaps the greatest of all self-serving religious leaders was the Prophet Muhammad, who was so absorbed in his own perceived greatness that he saw himself as the final solution to all of mankind’s problems. He seems to have captivated people with the grandiosity of his megalomaniacal claims, despite the fact that none of his claims could be proven. The claims, for example, that Muhammad is the prophet of God or that the Qur’an was revealed to him by an angel cannot be falsified by evidence or logic. The real difference between Muhammad and the others mentioned above is that Muhammad’s followers number in the hundreds of millions and have been following his metaphysical doctrines for centuries. These facts do not make Islam more “true” than Warren Jeffs’ cult; they only make Islam a more serious threat.

With 1,400 years of unrelenting efforts to impose itself upon the world, Islam presents a distinct problem. The problem is rooted in metaphysics—or, as it is usually called when speaking of religion, the problem is theological. The Muslim believes he has a divine right to conquer all non-Muslim lands and annihilate the infidels. He believes this because Muhammad told him so (through the Qur’an or the Hadith), and Muhammad learned it from God. He is even promised eternal life so long as he follows the correct metaphysical doctrine revealed to Muhammad:

They [Muslims] are the people who do not love anyone who opposes God and His Messenger, not even if they were their fathers, or their sons, or their brothers, or their clan … He (Allah) shall admit them into Gardens underneath which rivers flow, therein to dwell forever, God being well-pleased with them, and they well-pleased with Him.¹⁷

The only way to put an end to it all is by rejecting Islam’s metaphysics (or, in religious terms, its theology) as not only absurd but deadly for humanity. The metaphysics of Islam, which is contained in its trilogy of authoritative documents (the Qur’an, the Hadith, and the Sira), must be rejected in its entirety.

METAPHYSICS AND TRUTH

First, let’s take a closer look at this word we’ve been using, “metaphysics.” This word comes from ancient Greek philosophy and combines ‘meta’ (meaning after or beyond) and ‘physics’ (which refers to the natural world). So, metaphysics literally refers to something that is beyond nature. In this chapter, we use the word metaphysics to describe any system of belief or knowledge which proceeds from the assumptions (1) that there is a realm which transcends human experience (i.e. that there are things “beyond nature”) and (2) that we can have knowledge of this realm. As used here, metaphysics is an all-inclusive term that includes both religious or theological beliefs and philosophical systems. Although the focus here will be on Islam, the same arguments apply to other religious systems and metaphysical philosophical systems.

Islam and Judaism are essentially Abrahamic myths. As such, there is no logical reason to prefer them to Hellenic, Roman, or Teutonic myths. There is no reason to believe Abrahamic myths are either better or worse than Oriental, Native American, or African myths. No one is dying for Polynesian mythic beliefs. They are just as valid and meaningful as Abrahamic myths, so why should anyone kill or die for Abrahamic myths but not Polynesian ones?

The fundamental dogma of Islam is clearly metaphysical in our sense: “There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is His Prophet.” The first part of this formula involves the assumption of a realm transcending human experience, namely, the existence of the being “Allah.” The second part of the formula is characteristic of Semitic religions: that our knowledge of this realm is limited to what we’re told by one very special person (the Prophet), who must be believed. Every other person has his knowledge of the metaphysical realm, as it were, as second or third hand information. Another characteristic of Semitic religions on display in this formula is the implication that one must accept the words as true in order to gain access to a highly desirable metaphysical realm (paradise) or else suffer eternal torments in another, highly undesirable, metaphysical realm (hell).

There are two primary objections to be raised with regard to metaphysics in general and Islam in particular. One objection is linguistic and was pioneered by the British philosopher A.J. Ayer in the early 20th century. The other could be called scientific or empirical and dates back to the philosopher David Hume, a pivotal figure in the Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment of the 18th century. The second objection has since been developed and elaborated in detail by other thinkers such as Karl Popper. As will soon become clear, the two objections frequently overlap and reinforce one another.

Ayer’s objection is called linguistic because he challenges the very language and words used by metaphysicians. As he puts it in Language, Truth & Logic:

[O]ne cannot overthrow a system of transcendent metaphysics merely by criticizing the way in which it comes into being. What is required is rather a criticism of the nature of the actual statements which comprise it. And this is the line of argument which we shall, in fact, pursue. For we shall maintain that no statement which refers to a “reality” transcending the limits of all possible sense-experience can possibly have any literal significance: from which it must follow that the labours of those who have striven to describe such a reality have all been devoted to the production of nonsense.¹⁸

Ayer’s objection is not that realms outside the senses exist or do not or that our minds are too limited to understand them. His objection is that the way language works makes all metaphysical statements inherently meaningless.¹⁹ Statements such as “Allah exists” or “Allah does not exist” have no significance because ‘Allah’ names something completely outside of sense experience.

Ayer provides a test, called the “criterion of verifiability,” by which we can determine if a given statement has meaningful significance. A sentence can be meaningful in one of two ways for Ayer. First, a sentence can be analytic, meaning that the truth of it is inherent in the definition of the term or terms being used. Saying that the internal angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees is an analytic statement because it is part of the definition of a triangle that its internal angles will produce such a sum. Second, a sentence can be verifiable. This means that in principle it would be possible through observation and experience to confirm what the sentence says as true or to reject it as false.²⁰

A verifiable statement can be something as simple as “there is a piece of white paper on my desk” or as complex as Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Simpler statements can be verified with one’s own senses, whereas something like the Theory of Relativity was at first only verifiable in principle. After numerous experiments confirmed predictions made by Einstein’s theory it began to take hold among physicists, eventually displacing the theories of classical physics. By contrast, metaphysical systems do not make statements that we can verify either in reality or in principle. There is no way for us to verify that the Archangel Gabriel revealed the word of Allah to Muhammad, nor could there ever be one. The statement is therefore without any factual meaning. It’s not even true or not true, it’s just nonsense words.

What Ayer says about the factual content of questions is a very useful passage to consider in this context. Ayer says:

We inquire in every case what observations would lead us to answer the question, one way or the other; and, if none can be discovered, we must conclude that the sentence under consideration does not, as far as we are concerned, express a genuine question, however strongly its grammatical appearance may suggest that it does.²¹

The end of this passage provides an insightful clue into how to understand metaphysical language. The reader will perhaps recall Lewis Carroll’s poem “Jabberwocky” from his children’s book, Through the Looking Glass. The poem begins with a series of nonsense words presented as if they were normal English terms:

Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:

All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the mome raths outgrabe.

The whole poem is a wonderful example of what Ayer means by “grammatical appearance” implying that a statement makes sense. The pseudo-words ‘brillig’ and ‘slithy’ are in the position of adjectives, ‘gyre and gimble’ look like a couple of verbs, and ‘toves’ and ‘wabe’ act like nouns. Yet none of these words refers to any real quality, action, or object. The whole fun of Carroll’s poem is that it is made up of nonsense words which act real because of grammatical structure even though they have no real content at all. This is what all metaphysical language does and how it works, as Ayer shows in his book. Metaphysical statements are no better than Jabberwocky. Muhammad’s command to “fear the wrath of Allah” is literally no more meaningful than Lewis Carroll saying “beware the Jabberwock, my son.”

Following along Ayer’s lines, the author Stuart Chase identified several examples of how metaphysical claims involve the misuse or abuse of language. Chase refers to a pivotal example of this as “word magic.” Word magic means identifying the words we use with the things we are trying to name, and trying to avoid naming concrete things by using abstract language.²² When Muhammad says his followers must believe him because he is a prophet, he is using word magic. He is trying to get people to identify him, the man, with the word “prophet,” which carries connotations of being a messenger of God. The hearer is not allowed to question whether such a thing as a prophet is possible, or by what right other than bald assertion Muhammad may be called one. Similarly, when Muhammad promises Paradise to his followers he is using word magic. Paradise is a metaphysical entity—one could never have experience of it or prove that it does not exist—but by using seemingly concrete words to talk about it, he makes it seem like something very real and concrete in its own right. The key point is that it is all words and nothing more.

Furthermore, the meaning of words is dependent upon time and context. As Chase explains, changes in culture and conditions lead to changes in meaning. What an American in 2014 means by the word ‘justice’ is different from what one meant in 1700. Even the meaning of ‘American’ has changed radically since that time. Because of such changes, we cannot expect the meaning of written documents to survive over time unless “the words are given new concepts in the light of new conditions.”²³ But Islam insists upon the literal meaning of its own words—an insistence that ensures that the understanding of the world implicit in Islam will inevitably be left behind. As Chase puts it, “The more complicated culture becomes, the less reliable, relatively, is ordinary language.”²⁴ Islam refuses to accept changes even to one word of the Qur’an; it is therefore inevitable that its very language is already unreliable and likely to become more so as the years progress.

As Chase explains, language must change as our knowledge and culture advance. Language cannot be the foundation for eternal laws and principles because the things language is meant to deal with are not eternal or unchanging. Hence:

When men use their hands and minds in the disciplines of science, of art, music, poetry, their knowledge and well-being advance. When they use their minds for establishing eternal laws and principles in philosophy, economics, jurisprudence, theology, politics, then the good life falters, and often turns most evil.²⁵

Establishing eternal laws and principles is something language simply cannot do. Language is tied to real objects, the times in which it is being used, and the people who are using it. When we attempt to establish something “eternal” through language we inevitably run into trouble. Yet this is exactly what literal Islam attempts to do.

The scientific or empirical objection to metaphysics can be said to originate in the empiricism of David Hume. Hume argued that all of our knowledge and ideas originate in sense experience. While metaphysics pretends to offer access to another realm, it is rather simple to observe that all the notions we have of this other realm are composed out of ideas and impressions that came to us through our observations of this one. Even our notion of God, Hume points out, is no more than an augmentation without limit of qualities such as goodness and wisdom. More significantly, it is on the basis of careful empirical observation of this world that major advancements have been made in culture and human existence.

In the early 20th century, the philosopher Karl Popper identified the foundation of modern science as resting on what he called “falsifiable” claims. This means that science works by making claims about the world of experience which could, in principle, turn out to be wrong. Science does not “prove” a theory in the sense of dogmatically accepting it for all time. Rather, it adopts a theory that explains real phenomena in the world and holds onto it until the theory fails or another more successful and useful theory replaces it. The crucial point is that a truly scientific theory is open to being proven wrong.²⁶

Metaphysical claims, by contrast, are completely non-falsifiable. In the case of Islam, even the idea of “falsifying” its claims runs directly counter to the religion itself. Questioning Muhammad or the teachings of Islam in any way is forbidden. This means that one of the most characteristic qualities of modern science, a quality that has enabled it to be so successful in the propagation of self-correcting and non-dogmatic knowledge, is utter anathema to the Islamic religion. Once someone accepts a metaphysical claim, there is almost no way to show them by experience that they have made a mistake. As the satirist Jonathan Swift put it, “It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.”

Popper characterized the advancement of science and human knowledge as a great process of trial and error. Someone proposes a theory, the theory provokes opposition or criticism, and then a solution is found which takes into account both the theory and its criticism. In order to advance, Popper says, we need three things: many theories to be tried out, diversity among the theories offered, and for a sufficiently severe or rigorous testing of the theories to take place.²⁷ To these three, he then adds a fourth which as it were animates the rest: a spirit of critical thought. Mere acceptance of theories will get you nowhere:

It is clear that nothing can damage scientific development more than dogmatism. There can be no scientific development without free competition of thought … And there cannot be free competition of scientific thought without freedom of thought.²⁸

The need for freedom of thought to make scientific and cultural advances is a critical reason why Popper championed what he called the “open society” favored by the modern West.

Metaphysics (and the doctrine of revelation in particular) takes the complete opposite approach from Popper’s process of trial and error. It is all dogma—everything has to be accepted without criticism. Taking a critical stance is suspect. Muhammad was notoriously impatient and hostile towards his critics even when he was just a street preacher in Mecca. Since Islam understands itself as a pure and perfect revelation from God, there is no need for criticism or advancement in Popper’s sense. Indeed, any advance is typically perceived as decay or error, which is why literalist Muslims are so hostile toward the encroachments of American culture in the Middle East. They don’t want a more advanced culture seducing people away from the eternal, unchanging path of Islam. Diversity of theories is nothing other than heresy from the metaphysical standpoint. Revelation commands the hearer not to think or consider or test but to accept and obey.

Empiricism provides a means whereby statements or claims can be determined to be meaningful and externally valid. One such means, mentioned above, is Ayer’s principle of verification. Ayer’s principle ties the meaningfulness of statements to empirical, observable, and thus demonstrable reality. Another means is the scientific demand for repeatability. Singular events are of little use or interest.

By contrast, the “knowledge” one gains through metaphysics gives us no way of making verifiable or demonstrable propositions about reality. For example, what makes Christianity’s picture of heaven more satisfying or believable than Islam’s? On what basis could we decide that Elijah is a more trustworthy prophet than Muhammad? There is also no appreciable means by which a metaphysical system can be improved upon, especially in the case of religions. Instead, as history shows, attempts to improve or correct religions tend to end up in producing new religions—usually involved in new conflicts with the old religions. This was the case with Protestant Christianity and all its various sects, and even Islam understands itself as a “correction” of Judaism and Christianity.

Empiricism is self-correcting. This is what enables modern science to progress. Once Einstein’s theories were proven to be more accurate than classical mechanics, all physicists accepted and adapted to the new system. There are no classical physicists anymore. But despite Islam’s alleged correction of Judaism and Christianity there are still Jews and Christians. Despite Protestantism’s alleged correction of Catholic practices there are still Catholics. Metaphysical systems cannot self-correct in the way that science can because the claims of science are demonstrable. No one argues about whether 2 + 3 = 5 because this fact can be demonstrated. Metaphysics does not have access to demonstrable facts; it has only persuasion through the use of language and appeals to fear or force to win adherents.

The empirical methods favored by science and philosophers like Ayer and Popper also offer us a way to prevent the propagation of false knowledge. In the empirical view, it is crucial to accurately portray reality and the natural world. If the means by which we produce our knowledge of the world is flawed, our knowledge itself will be flawed—that is, it will be incompatible with reality. As Chase puts it, “If a map is going to help us, it has to be accurate in its description of the territory.”²⁹ Scientific knowledge not only provides us with such a map, it provides a means whereby the map can be continually refined to reflect changes or greater accuracy in portraying the underlying reality. When our map of reality is accurate, as it is in the case of modern engineering where mathematics is used as the map of the physical world, we are capable of building great things. Using science’s map of reality we split the atom and sent men to the moon. Using science’s map of reality we have expanded communication from inscribing on stones and writing letters to cellular phones and the Internet.

Metaphysics pretends to provide a map of another reality, but we have no access to it. No one can confirm that heaven or Allah is real. The great cathedrals of Europe may have been inspired by religious devotion, but they were erected by men who understood architecture and stonework—that is, by men with empirical knowledge of the real world. For the things of this world, metaphysics provides no guide at all that experience and common sense cannot provide better.

The author and atheist advocate Sam Harris summed up the two objections to metaphysics that we have been discussing in his 2004 book, The End of Faith:

We have seen that our beliefs are tightly coupled to the structure of language and to the apparent structure of the world. Our “freedom of belief,” if it exists at all, is minimal. Is a person really free to believe a proposition for which he has no evidence? No. Evidence (whether sensory or logical) is the only thing that suggests a given belief is really about the world in the first place.³⁰

The structure of language, as both Ayer and Chase have shown, tells us that metaphysical statements have no real meaning whatsoever. The sensory or logical evidence Harris refers to corresponds directly to Ayer’s verification principle (whereby a statement must be analytic or empirical to be meaningful). A person who allows him or herself to be ruled by ideas for which he or she has no sensory or logical evidence is generally thought of as a madman or at least delusional.³¹

ANSWERING THE METAPHYSICIANS

The claim is put forward by religious persons that faith represents a different type of knowledge, one accessible only by the grace of God. Semitic religions such as Judaism and Islam hold to a version of this belief called the doctrine of revelation. According to this doctrine, the universe was created by a God who reveals his will only through a chosen agent (called a prophet). Everyone who wants salvation must accept the prophet as God’s messenger and obey him as such.³²

This system of belief depends entirely upon people believing that the prophet is God’s messenger. Using the criteria discussed above, it is easy to show that such a claim is utter nonsense. The word is not the thing, so merely calling oneself a prophet does not make it so. Furthermore, the claim is completely beyond the realm of observation or demonstration so its truth value is zero. The prophet demands that people believe the following: that God is real, that the nature of God is whatever the prophet describes, and that the message from God is whatever the prophet says it is. Anyone making such demands would have to be extraordinarily upright to be even minimally credible. Yet Muhammad is a man who married a six year old girl, massacred 600 Jews in one day, and pronounced that “war is deception.”

In the end, the prophet has a very clear and demonstrable goal: to be worshipped as if he were God without being called God directly. The writer Anwar Shaikh demonstrates that this is the case with Muhammad with clarity and precision:

Though the Prophet calls himself Allah’s ABD or slave, Allah allows him to be above His laws … It is a condition of faith that a believer should love Allah, but this stipulation becomes insufficient because a person does not rank as a believer until he loves the prophet “more than his father, his children and all mankind” … Muhammad is as great as Allah because the former like the latter, has ninety-nine attributes … obedience to Muhammad becomes as compulsory as to Allah … Gradually, the Prophet shares authority with Allah: “It is not for any believer, man or woman, when God and His Messenger have decreed a matter, to have a choice in the affair.”³³

Being a prophet is an obviously self-serving position without a shred of evidence.

What is true is what we can empirically and logically demonstrate. Truth is objective, measurable, verifiable, concrete fact. By adopting this view of what truth is, society has made tremendous advances in science, technology, and social life. On the basis of such advances, the philosopher Bertrand Russell rejected the approach of what he called “the classical tradition.” That approach consisted, according to Russell, in the belief that human reasoning—without any aid from information provided by the senses—could discover otherwise hidden secrets of the universe. Instead, Russell advocated the empiricist view that any “secrets” about the universe could be found only by scientific methods. All matters of fact become known to us through the senses, aided by the instruments and techniques of empirical science.³⁴ Once this view is accepted, Russell argues, metaphysical arguments and philosophical problems “all reduce themselves to problems of logic.”³⁵

Religious people may object that inspiration or revelation or some other method provides access to knowledge that is unavailable to the senses. There is nothing wrong with people believing this. But when people make empirical, real-world demands based on what their metaphysics tells them, this is illegitimate. Islam demands that we pay tax to Muslims, that Muslims conquer and rape non-Muslims, and that everyone must believe in its theology or face death. These demands are empirical; they are real. Why should we give in to the demands of this theology rather than another? This is a practical question. As such, it can only be answered the way any practical question involving people with different beliefs should be answered: with reference to the standards of this world. Those standards are provided by empiricism, reason, and the scientific method. Any other approach is doomed to failure and violence because there is no way to decide between competing theologies aside from persuasion or force.

Muslims may object that we should judge other religions by this standard. The objection is irrelevant because the judgment of other religions has already been made. The Enlightenment already raised these issues and both religion and society changed accordingly. Christianity became more universal and pluralist, and society recognized its explicitly secular character. In the United States, this is exemplified in the common practice of separation of church and state and in the enshrinement of individual freedoms such as freedom of speech. The Indian tradition already recognizes non-metaphysical and anti-metaphysical belief systems. Buddhism is a religion without a metaphysical basis. Islamic metaphysics dominates ordinary social and political life in a way that has no parallel in any non-Muslim nation.

The essential point is that if metaphysical claims do not create real-world violence and suffering there is no reason to object to them. If Muslims embrace pluralism and give equal treatment to competing metaphysical systems (Hinduism or Christianity, for example), they can tell whatever stories they wish. But if their claims rise to the level of killing people and invading other nations the rest of the world cannot simply stand by. At that point we must insist that their claims are absurd and wrong. We cannot counter Islam with Christianity or Buddhism or any other metaphysical system. We counter Islam with truth—that is, with logic, empiricism, and the scientific method, which are the means by which we arrive at what knowledge we have of the world.

The claims of metaphysics are completely without merit. Metaphysical propositions are literally nonsensical, unverifiable, and useless with regard to living one’s life or the development of human life in general. Even if we leave aside the sheer number of human conflicts in the world today which arise from metaphysical or religious principles, it would still be true that metaphysics is useless for producing accurate knowledge of either human nature or reality. This is not cause for concern or worry. Rather, as Bertrand Russell points out, this should be perceived as a liberating piece of wisdom:

My Conclusion is that there is no reason to believe any of the dogmas of traditional theology and, further, that there is no reason to wish that they were true. Man, in so far as he is not subject to natural forces, is free to work out his destiny. The responsibility is his, and so is the opportunity.³⁶

In the case of Islam, when we strip away the metaphysical nonsense and delusion we are left with a very different—and more accurate—view of both the religion and its founder. Muhammad was not a prophet; he was only a man. He used stories of another world to acquire all the usual things a man would desire: women, wealth, pleasure, and power over others. He used a fabricated religion to place his own tribe and people above all the others. Even today, all those who call themselves Muslims must adapt themselves to Arab language and Arab customs—in short, they must accept Arab supremacy and second-class citizenship even in their religion.

Once the nonsense of metaphysics is removed, world conflicts involving Muslims can be seen for what they are. The conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is nothing more than a fight between ethnic groups that could be easily settled by a partition of territory. The conflict between Indians (Hindus) and Pakistanis (former Hindus) is an intra-ethnic conflict with no purpose. Truly, once the nonsense of metaphysics is removed Islam itself can be seen as nothing more than Arab imperialism—a drive to enslave the whole world to the Arab people and the Arab way of life. The claim that Islam rules the world by divine right is at bottom a maniacal demand that Arabs should rule the world.

Allah, heaven, and hell are mere words. They do not name real things in the world. The texts of Islam, the Qur’an, the Hadith, and the Sira, which promise to tell us all about these content-free words, are thus little more than fiction. The conflicts engendered by these absurdities are not religious conflicts—there is no such thing. Religions are myths. The real aim of Islam is to subjugate all non-Arab peoples. Theology or metaphysics are only a tool to that end.

Given the length of time and the scope within which Islam operates, it is easy to see that Islamic imperialism is a far greater existential threat than Nazism or Communism ever were. Nazism was finished in less than 20 years; Communism in less than 80. Islam has threatened the world for 1,400 years and is still going, still virulent even in the face of the technological superiority of the West. There is still hope in opposing Islam if European and American intellectuals and political leaders will realize that Islam is the most virulent and potent imperialist adversary the West has faced—not merely a rival religion and metaphysical system. Islam seeks the return of the entire world to the tribal rule of seventh century Arabia. If our leaders fail to understand this grave danger, Western Civilization will meet the same fate of the Hindu, Buddhist, Coptic, Hellenic, and Persian Civilizations—all deformed, devoured, and destroyed by the very same Islamic imperialism.

PART NINE

PART NINE

CHAPTER THIRTY - SEVEN

The Axis of Jihad

The recompense of those who wage war against Allah and His Messenger and do mischief in the land is only that they shall be killed or crucified or their hands and their feet be cut off on the opposite sides, or be exiled from the land. That is their disgrace in this world, and a great torment is theirs in the Hereafter.

—Qur’an 5:33

They wish that you reject Faith, as they have rejected (Faith), and thus that you all become equal (like one another). So take not Auliya’ (protectors or friends) from them, till they emigrate in the Way of Allah (to Muhammad ). But if they turn back (from Islam), take (hold) of them and kill them wherever you find them, and take neither Auliya’ (protectors or friends) nor helpers from them.

—Qur’an 4:89

And don’t be weak in the pursuit of the enemy; if you are suffering (hardships) then surely, they (too) are suffering (hardships) as you are suffering, but you have a hope from Allah (for the reward, i.e. Paradise) that for which they hope not, and Allah is Ever All-Knowing, All-Wise.

—Qur’an 4:104

And fight them until there is no more Fitnah (disbelief and polytheism: i.e. worshipping others besides Allah) and the religion (worship) will all be for Allah Alone [in the whole of the world].

—Qur’an 8:39

On June 10, 2014 a previously little-known insurgent group calling itself the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) exploded onto international headlines by seizing control of the Iraqi city of Mosul. Although the group had already captured territories across Iraq, including the city of Fallujah, Mosul was “a bigger and more important prize, located at a strategically vital intersection on routes linking Iraq to Turkey and Syria.”¹ With the capture of Mosul, the power and importance of ISIS could no longer be ignored by the international community—particularly given the embarrassing way in which Iraqi security forces abandoned their weapons and fled from the advancing insurgents. Flush from its victory, ISIS soon after declared that it had created a new Islamic state—a caliphate—in the regions under its control in Iraq and Syria.²

Two months later, the bloody cruelty of ISIS was demonstrated in terrible and dramatic fashion with the on-camera beheading of American journalist James Foley. The videotape shows Foley kneeling in a desert with a masked ISIS fighter behind him, armed with a knife. The fighter announces in a London accent that Foley will be executed in retaliation for recent U.S. airstrikes against his group in Iraq. After a brief confession, Foley is butchered and beheaded. The video ends with a promise of more murders to come.³

The murder of James Foley is in keeping with ISIS’s promise to attack Americans “in any place” if the U.S. went through with its plan to use air strikes to stall the group’s bloody advance through Iraq.⁴ But Foley’s murder pales in comparison to the scope of the violence surrounding Iraq’s religious and ethnic minority groups.

One of ISIS’s victims has been the Christian community of Mosul. For 2,000 years, Mosul was home to a Christian community. Although used to mistreatment and persecution from the Islamic majority, the community nevertheless survived. All that has been wiped away. When the ISIS jihadists seized control of the city they announced it would be run according to strict sharia law. The homes of Christians were marked and the inhabitants told they must convert to Islam or die. Although the total loss of life is not yet known, almost the entire community of Christians from Mosul are reported to have been driven out by threats and murders carried out by ISIS fighters.⁵

Even less fortunate have been the Yazidis, an ethnic minority group who also practice a faith that predates Islam. The United Nations observed early on that the ISIS approach to this group involved “hunting down and killing large numbers of minority Yazidis, acts which amount to genocide.”⁶ Whereas some Christians under ISIS control were given, according to literal Islamic law, the choice of paying a religious tax, converting to Islam, or suffering death, the Yazidis “are considered by Sunni militants to be infidels who deserve extermination.”⁷ Accordingly, ISIS killed hundreds of Yazidis and captured hundreds more (mostly women) to serve as slaves. By the tens of thousands, Yazidi tribe members in Iraq were forced to flee their villages and seek refuge in the mountains or face certain destruction.

Other Muslim groups are subject to similar treatment. In August, heavy fighting between ISIS and Shiite militiamen in Iraq’s Diyala province produced considerable casualties. The fighting culminated in the August 22 suicide bombing of a mosque during Friday prayers, which killed at least 68 people.⁸ As of this writing, sectarian violence between ISIS and other Sunni groups and the Shia majority in Iraq had the potential to draw the country into another bloody sectarian conflict.

Also in June 2014, Hamas, the Palestinian Sunni Muslim organization that governs the Gaza Strip, reignited the simmering Israeli-Palestinian conflict by arranging the kidnap and murder of three Israeli teenagers.⁹ The Israeli Defense Forces sprang into action, with a series of ground attacks and targeted air strikes aimed at Hamas cells. Hamas launched numerous rocket attacks at Israel. After U.S. efforts to broker a peace agreement collapsed, the IDF conducted a series of raids aimed at destroying tunnels used by Hamas and other militants to launch their attacks in the Gaza Strip. Only after many tunnels were destroyed and Israeli troops withdrew from Gaza did a 72-hour ceasefire begin on August 7.

The Gaza Strip is a heavily populated area, of course, so civilians were inevitably caught up in this conflict. As of August 2014 there were around 2,000 people dead and 10,000 more injured from the fighting. Estimates vary as of this writing, but as many as 80% of the dead and injured were probably civilians. Such loss of life plays into the goal of Hamas, which seeks to delegitimize and destroy Israel. Every civilian killed in their conflict only serves to stoke the fires of jihad.

In that same month of August, the U.S. lost its highest-ranking officer in the Afghanistan conflict. Major General Harold Greene was shot to death while on a visit to the national military academy in Kabul. A German brigadier general and two Afghan generals were also injured in the attack. According to Afghan officials, the assailant was a trainee who had served in the academy for more than two years.¹⁰ Greene had been spearheading efforts to train Afghan troops for the fight against insurgent groups such as the Taliban. He had two children.

THE UNSPOKEN WORLDWIDE SUNNI ISLAMIC REVOLUTION

All of these incidents are part of a worldwide revolution taking place today almost completely unacknowledged. No one seems to truly notice what is happening, or else they seriously underestimate the significance of what they’re seeing. Part of the difficulty lies in the fact that in every country the Muslim revolutionary group operates under different names. In Iraq and Syria its name is ISIS; in Israel, it is Hamas; in Afghanistan, it is the Taliban and al-Qaeda; in Nigeria, it is Boko Haram; in Egypt, it is the Muslim Brotherhood; in Indonesia, it is Jemaah Islamiyah; in India, it is the Indian Mujahideen and Students Islamic Movement of India; in Russia, it is Riyad-us-Saliheen; and in Pakistan, it is the Pakistani Taliban, al-Qaeda, and another 30 Muslim terrorist and extremist groups which all exist autonomously.

Unfortunately, too much attention is focused on these particular organizations and certain charismatic leaders like Osama bin Laden. While it is understandable for governments look to specific groups of people who constitute a direct threat to peace, when this institutional response is combined with misconceptions about the true threat from Islam it becomes difficult to effectively combat that threat. The danger of Islamic conquest is only made manifest by prominent groups and their leaders—it is not defined by them. Individuals come and go, groups may disband or reform or change their name. What is important is to focus on what the groups and the individuals have in common. Above all, we must consider the common ideology that unites them.

The ideology that unites these groups is nothing other than Islam itself. That is, every one of these groups is doing its best to follow the literal words of Islamic doctrine as laid out in the Qur’an, and in the sayings and biographies of the Prophet Muhammad. When applied to the current world situation, Islam is virulently anti-Western and anti-modern. In essence, all of these groups—whether one calls them jihadists, terrorists, literal Islamists, or Islamic fundamentalists—want the same thing. They want to return to the Islam of the seventh century. They want to restore the caliphate, the Islamic theocracy that ruled the entirety of the Muslim world during the first centuries after Muhammad’s death (then survived in a decayed form until it was finally abolished by Kemal Ataturk in the 1920s when he created modern Turkey out of the ruins of the old Ottoman Empire).

Every one of these groups is waging jihad in order to establish literal Islam and make it dominant, both in their own nations and around the world. The importance of jihad in this sense can be seen in Osama bin Laden’s 2002 letter to America. In this letter, bin Laden explains the reasons for al-Qaeda’s enmity with the U.S. and calls on Americans to embrace Islam:

It is the religion of Jihad in the way of Allah so that Allah’s Word and religion reign Supreme. And it is the religion of unity and agreement on the obedience to Allah, and total equality between all people.¹¹

These words express the desire that animates all the Sunni revolutionary groups operating today: the desire to fight so that their brand of Islam will “reign Supreme” not only in Islamic lands but everywhere. They also express the idea that only one brand of Islam is acceptable.

The Hamas Charter explains why all so-called Islamic lands—and Israel in particular—must remain part of the Islamic world for all time. The reason is simply that such lands are “Islamic Waqf,” meaning something that is religiously given and cannot be abrogated. In the words of the Charter:

The Islamic Resistance Movement believes that the land of Palestine has been an Islamic Waqf throughout the generations and until the Day of Resurrection, no one can renounce it or part of it, or abandon it or part of it … This is the status [of the land] in Islamic Shari’a, and it is similar to all lands conquered by Islam by force, and made thereby Waqf lands upon their conquest, for all generations of Muslims until the Day of Resurrection.¹²

So long as such metaphysical claims are accepted without question, Muslims will continue to cause trouble over Israel. It is impossible to form rational agreements with people who believe that some land belongs to them in perpetuity because their ancestors conquered it once.

In Syria and Iraq, ISIS has been trying to rally fighters from the worldwide Sunni revolution to its own banner. Declaring the area under his current military control to be a new caliphate, so-called Caliph Ibrahim issued a call to Muslims to join his state:

Know that we fight over a religion that Allah has promised to support. We fight for an ummah to which Allah has given honor, esteem, and leadership, promising it with empowerment and strength on the earth. Come, O Muslims … By Allah, if you disbelieve in democracy, secularism, nationalism, as well as all the other garbage and ideas from the west, and rush to your religion and creed, then by Allah, you will own the earth, and the east and west will submit to you.¹³

From such statements it is clear that al-Qaeda is just one of many groups aimed at establishing Islamic supremacy.

It is important to realize that these terror groups and their spectacular attacks are not aberrations. There has been a worldwide Sunni revolution steadily building since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. This revolution itself is merely the continuation of a 1,400 year jihad against the non-Islamic world. Terrorism is only a means to an end in this jihad. The end is Islamic conquest of the entire world. To that end, “apostate” regimes such as Bashar Assad’s secular tyranny in Syria must be abolished in favor of “genuine” Islamic rule. The Arab Spring itself was not a democratic movement, it was an effort to replace secular rulers with religious ones.

While there were certainly many secular-minded men and women and even outright anti-jihadists involved in the popular protests which toppled governments in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya, in every case their voices were subsumed and drowned out by the jihadists—who were more ferocious if not always more numerous. When governments fell, it was the jihadists who were best organized and most determined to establish a post-revolutionary order. The sudden rise of the Muslim Brotherhood to political control of Egypt perfectly illustrated the case. The Egyptian military’s subsequent removal of the Brotherhood from power shows that the situation is still in flux.

One of the clearest analyses of the situation comes from foreign correspondent and Middle East expert John Bradley, who remarked:

While most Western reporters considered unrest in the Middle East a step in the direction of democracy, I thought the opposite. It is the Islamists, who wish to create Islamic states and impose Islamic law, who will emerge triumphant from the present chaos.¹⁴

Bradley goes on to caution readers that the revolutions should be judged by their outcomes rather than by intentions. And as Middle East historian Benny Morris has shown, “the ‘Arab Spring’ has brought both Islamization and chaos.”¹⁵

What the media tried to call an Arab Spring was only an illusion. In reality, it would be more accurate to call it a Sunni Winter. It is nothing less than a global Sunni fundamentalist revolution, and the consequences of a loss in this conflict are nothing less than catastrophic.

THE AXIS OF JIHAD: DRIVERS OF THE REVOLUTION

What are the forces that drive and sustain this revolution? Here the answer is twofold. The first part of the answer is simply: Islam itself. The revolutionaries are under the sway of Arab imperialist thinking. This way of thinking says simply that Islam is a complete way of life—it tells followers how to behave in almost every situation in their lives. The way of life was supposedly revealed by God to the prophet Muhammad and human beings should accept it completely and live accordingly without change or deviation. Not only that, the whole world must be converted to the same view and must adopt the same customs and habits. Accepting anything less than this is to shirk one’s duty as a Muslim.

In behavior, Islam acts like the strangler fig tree. It attaches itself to a host culture like the strangler fig does to another tree. Then it grows along with the host culture, slowly drawing nutrients from it until it becomes strong enough to stand on its own. At that time, the host dies and rots away, leaving the strangler fig free growing by itself. Examples of this are common throughout Islamic history—the Hellenic culture of Asia Minor, the Coptic culture of Egypt, the Christian culture of Syria, the Assyrian culture of Mesopotamia, the Indian culture of what is now Pakistan and Afghanistan, the Zoroastrian culture of Iran all were clung to, sapped of energy, and destroyed. This is the future of any nation that hosts Islam, and is the chief danger facing Western nations today.

The second part of the answer is this: the revolution is being driven by the Axis of Jihad. Behind the Sunni fundamentalist groups two nations stand head and shoulders above the rest in terms of their support. Saudi Arabia supplies money and Wahhabi ideology; Pakistan supplies logistics and muscle. The involvement of these two nations in the global Sunni fundamentalist revolution goes back to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. At that time, the U.S. conspired with both Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to train, indoctrinate, arm, and supply jihadi warriors to oppose the Soviet army. The Saudis provided more than $10 billion worth of funds through charitable front groups alone.¹⁶ Meanwhile, Pakistan was a logistics base for the mujahideen, and used Saudi money to set up radical madrasas on its northwest border to spread literalist Islam throughout the region. Today, the people indoctrinated by those madrasas are everywhere and include some of the most prominent leaders of the Taliban and other radical groups.¹⁷

In the words of journalist Patrick Cockburn, “The price of the triple alliance between the US, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan was the jihadi movement.”¹⁸ The Wikileaks release of U.S. diplomatic cables exposed the extent to which the American government was aware of Saudi duplicity in the war on terror. “Private individuals in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states friendly to the United States are the chief source of funding for al-Qaeda, the Taliban and other terrorist groups” those cables revealed.¹⁹ Qatar was singled out as the worst in the Middle East when it came to restraining private funds from going to fund terror. Kuwait was identified as a “key transit point” for the movement of funds from individuals to terror groups.²⁰

The Saudis remain out in front when it comes to funding terrorist groups worldwide, however. A leaked memo written by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2009 asserts that “donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide.”²¹ In mid-2014, the Iraqi government accused Saudi Arabia of supporting “genocide” efforts within its borders; the Shia government of Iraq believes the Sunni rulers of Saudi Arabia were supporting ISIS in its efforts to murder Shias and destabilize the government.²² The Iraqi government has a point—it is known that the Saudis funded insurgent groups in Syria with America’s blessing, only to have ISIS emerge as one of the chief recipients of those funds. The situation is not unlike the funding provided to the mujahideen in Afghanistan, which benefitted from Western dollars only to blossom into al-Qaeda later.²³

Meanwhile, in Pakistan demonstrators gathered by the hundreds to show solidarity with Bin Laden after he was killed by American Navy SEALs. Particularly since the military dictatorship of Gen. Mohammad Zia ul-Haq (1977-1988), Pakistan has especially cultivated the identification of nationalism with Islamic fervor. As journalist and former diplomat Husain Haqqani puts it, “A whole generation of Pakistanis has grown up with textbooks that conflate Pakistani nationalism with Islamist exclusivism.”²⁴ During the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, militant Islamic groups were given free rein—with American support—to resist the invasion however they saw fit. Pakistan hoped in turn to make these groups instruments of Pakistani regional influence. Although it succeeded in this aim, the groups have become almost impossible for the Pakistani government to pacify, even if it wanted to. But it does not really want to, as then-Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta observed in 2012 when he warned that “it is difficult to achieve a secure Afghanistan as long as there is a safe haven for terrorists in Pakistan from which they can conduct attacks on our forces.”²⁵

Even more galling to Americans should be the fact that alleged ally Pakistan seems to have sheltered Osama bin Laden for years. It has become increasingly clear since bin Laden’s discovery and death that Pakistan only makes “a show of cooperation with the American fight against terrorism while covertly abetting and even coordinating Taliban, Kashmiri and foreign Qaeda-linked militants.”²⁶ Pakistan’s feared Inter-Services Intelligence agency is the key to this double game. It is only through observing how ISI operates to supply and coordinate terror groups in Pakistan and Afghanistan that the country’s “true relationship to militant extremism can be discerned”—a fact the U.S. has refused to face directly “for fear of setting off a greater confrontation with a powerful Muslim nation.”²⁷

A list of the most significant state sponsors of terrorism would not be complete without mention of Iran. As a Shia state, Iran is not truly part of the global Sunni fundamentalist revolution. In fact, the Shia had their own revolution in 1979, and it brought them to political power in Iran. And part of the Sunni revolution actually involves killing Shiites over petty doctrinal differences as a way of acquiring and consolidating power. Nevertheless, when it comes to sponsoring radical Islam, Iran has been a major player since the foundation of the Islamic Republic. In fact, “At least eight of the fourteen Saudi ‘muscle’ operatives selected for the 9/11 operations traveled through Iran in the months before the attacks.”²⁸

Iran’s most visible radical proxy group is Hezbollah, which it helped to create in the 1980s. Support provided to Hezbollah is estimated at around $100 million to $200 million annually. Iran is also suspected of provided arms and training to Taliban fighters.²⁹ In recent years, according to expert testimony provided to the U.S. Senate in 2012, Iran has become even more aggressive in its use of terror groups for its own nationalist ends. It is motivated partly by fear of its equally aggressive Sunni neighbors and partly by a desire to take advantage of new opportunities presented by the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.³⁰

Together, these three countries—Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Iran—make up what should be called the Axis of Jihad. Between them, they provide the lion’s share of the funding and training used by radical Muslims on each side of the Sunni/Shia split. It is not just the money, either. All three nations also use their money and influence to inculcate a literalist brand of Islam throughout the Muslim world (and even into the West, where Saudi-funded mosques and teachings are common). Thanks to the efforts of the Axis of Jihad, the Muslim world is more “Islamized” than it has been in a century. Instead of modernizing and secularizing, Muslim nations are going backward—back to the seventh century if the jihadists have their way.

THE SCOPE OF THE PROBLEM

Few people living in the world today appreciate the full scope of the problem presented by Islamic imperialism. The 20th century was dominated by the struggles between Western liberal democracies and two totalitarian forces, Nazism and Communism. In the 21st century the West faces a far more potent threat in Islam.

Nazism was an intense nationalistic force, but in the end it lasted less than 15 years and died with its founder. Adolf Hitler was a soldier not a philosopher and had no time to develop a coherent system. Furthermore, there was no metaphysics promising eternal life or heavenly rewards for its followers. Its racist and ultra-nationalistic policies were inherently self-destructive and non-viable.

In some ways, Hitler himself left little lasting mark on the world. During World War II his National Socialism was defeated and ultimately destroyed. He had no children. His closest surviving relatives are three great-nephews descended from his half-brother who live together on Long Island. Not one of the three men ever married or had children.³¹ Many relatives gave up the family name entirely, unwilling to live in infamy for their whole lives.

Unlike Islam, Communism is a dynamic system that allows for change and growth. Marxist thought claims to be scientific and reasonable and sees the world in a state of perpetual flux. The Soviets put the first man in space. Soviet Russians and Communist Chinese were fully trained in the physical sciences. Like Nazism, Communism has no place for metaphysics (Marxism is a strictly materialist doctrine).

The leading Communists likewise left comparatively little lasting mark on the world. In 2013 Lenin’s last surviving relative, his niece Olga Ulyanova, died in Moscow in 2011 at age 89.³² Stalin’s last descendent, daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva (known by her married name of Lana Peters), died in a Wisconsin nursing home, also in 2011³³ Mao Zedong’s only surviving male heir is a general in the Chinese Army, but something of a joke because of his poor school performance and obesity.³⁴ Karl Marx himself was survived by only two of his children, and both of them committed suicide.³⁵

By comparison, Muhammad’s descendants number in the tens of millions. In South Asia alone (India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh) there are an estimated 15 million Sayyids (people claiming descent from Muhammad).³⁶ The title ‘Sayyid’, which roughly translates as “lord” or “master” indicates the honor in which such persons are held in the Islamic world. Some of his descendants are among the more virulent terrorists in the world. Abul A’la Maududi is an example. This Islamic scholar founded the terror group Jamaat-e-Islami and wrote several books articulating a literalist Islamic worldview.³⁷ The self-proclaimed new caliph of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi (also known as Caliph Ibrahim) also reportedly claims to be a descendent of the prophet.³⁸ Ayatollah Khomeini, rose to political power in Iran’s Islamic revolution, was himself a purported descendent of the prophet. Almost all Muslim leaders claim some form of descent from the prophet as a way of seeking legitimacy in the eyes of other Muslims.

Islam is an infinitely more totalitarian system than either German National Socialism or Soviet Communism. Nazism died in its infancy without time to grow, mature, or reform. Communism lasted far longer, and was elaborated and developed by thousands of people, from Karl Marx and Frederick Engels to Mao Zedong and Michael Suslov. Nevertheless, it too lasted less than 80 years in practice. In the end, it could not reconcile the internal contradictions within its static economic system and a moribund Marxist ideology that lost the ability to be self-critical and self-examining. Today, Nazism has been completely uprooted and has no presence in the political world. Former Communists have reevaluated their worldviews and embraced free market reforms to varying degrees.

In Islam, by contrast, such reform or change is impossible. Reform is heresy. Islam combines metaphysics with its political doctrines, and the metaphysics of Islam do not allow for any diminution of its political demands. This encourages totalitarianism far broader than either Nazism or Communism could dream of—one which completely governs the thought and behavior of the people who adopt it. It is also far more intolerant of dissent, because to dissent from Islam means to disagree with Allah’s holy design for human life, which is unacceptable.Through its metaphysics Islam has exerted a far stronger hold on people than Nazism or Communism could manage. It has lasted for 1,400 years and remains today the same as it was when Muhammad first articulated it. It is an eternally static doctrine, and necessarily so because it purports to be the final and true revelation of God. Because of this claim, it completely despises critical or scientific thought as enemies of faith. It is impossible in Islam to advance beyond the ethical world of seventh century Arabia because that is the world within which Muhammad declared his prophecy. To add to or change anything he said is complete anathema to Islam.

The literal words of Islamic doctrine command followers to kill or convert all unbelievers and take over the world. Muslims are told how to live, how to think, how to eat, how to dress, how to defecate, how to wash themselves, how to have sex, how to beat their wives, and so on. It is not permitted to question these directives or to change them or to fail to live up to them. For those who refuse to adopt the Muslim life there are two choices: pay an exorbitant fine (i.e., protection money) or die.

For those who choose to convert, Islam presents still another problem. It becomes necessary to learn Arabic (reading the Qur’an in translation is regarded as inauthentic), to adopt Arab customs, and inevitably to think of oneself as inferior to Arab people. There is a definite hierarchy, as this book as shown in several chapters, in the Islamic world whereby Arabs are higher than all others, and Quraysh (members of Muhammad’s tribe) higher than all other Arabs.

Many Western observers will concede these points only to claim that Islam presents no threat because of its lesser power compared with the West. This is an extremely short-sighted view. In fact, Islam is already undermining and destroying Western society from within by means of a long-range demographic conquest. It is not necessary to fire a single shot if Muslims can become a significant portion of the population simply by outbreeding and steadily replacing the native population. Westerners are having children at below replacement levels. In short, they are dying out while the Muslims they permit to immigrate to their countries have extremely high fertility levels (helped in part by generous welfare funding from European host nations).

If the global jihadists achieve their goal it will be the end not only of Western culture, but of all human progress. Hsuman progress and Islam are simply incompatible. Islam is an inherently regressive theological and political force. Only static seventh century Arabian living will be permitted, as was the case under the rule of the Taliban in Afghanistan, and as is the case now with the Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia, ISIS in Iraq, and other assorted fundamentalist groups in Sudan and Nigeria.

What we need today is a global secular revolution to counter the Sunni fundamentalist revolution and defeat Islam. We need a united front of the victims of jihad. Whether Jew or Gentile, Asian or European, White or Black, Atheist or Religious, all have a common interest in resisting the totalitarian threat posed by Islam. It is up to the citizens of the free world to force their leaders to develop a cohesive, systematic, lasting, and comprehensive solution to the problem of Islamic imperialism.

The question of how will be addressed in the final chapter.

PART NINE

CHAPTER THIRTY - EIGHT

The Faces of Jihad

Tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies

(Tell me lies, tell me, tell me lies)

Oh no, no, you can’t disguise

(You can’t disguise, no, you can’t disguise)

Tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies.

—Fleetwood Mac, “Tell Me Lies”

The tendency toward conflict is the essence of the Arab. He is an enemy by essence. His personality won’t allow him any compromise or agreement. It doesn’t matter what kind of resistance he will meet. His existence is one of perpetual war.

—Historian Benzion Netanyahu

Fight against those who (1) believe not in Allah, (2) nor in the Last Day, (3) nor forbid that which has been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger (4) and those who acknowledge not the religion of truth (i.e. Islam) among the people of the Scripture (Jews and Christians), until they pay the Jizyah with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.

—Qur’an 9:29

The world today is haunted by a specter out of seventh century Arabia. It is the specter of Islamic imperialism, born and bred in violence. Even today, with very few exceptions the deadliest and longest-running conflicts in the world involve Islam. More often than not, Islam and violence have been synonymous.

Since the seventh century Muslims have been ready to take advantage of internal conflicts and contradictions within non-Muslim societies. Early on, the idolatrous Arabs and the Jews of Arabia were isolated and then killed, exiled, or converted. The Sassanid Empire of Persia, weakened by warfare with the Byzantines, was completely overrun. The peoples of India and the Middle East were divided among themselves and all were, to varying degrees, conquered and their histories erased.

Today, the greatest flaw of non-Islamic societies is their disinterestedness, apathy, and indifference to Islamic history and conquest. This book has made the case that Islam is not a religion at all, and should not be regarded as such. It is Arab imperialism through and through, with a metaphysical justification supporting it. The metaphysics of Islam prevents believers from looking too critically at the belief system and promises great rewards to them if they follow the program to the letter. When Islam fails to subjugate and enslave a non-Islamic society it offers Muslim soldiers or jihadists some form of pie in the sky—rewards for the believers that always come after the believer’s death (72 virgins and all the rest).

To defeat Islamic imperialism it is necessary both to know the enemy and to recognize the threat. At first, the problem may seem enormous—even insurmountable. The most fundamental claim of this book is that it is Islam itself, not Islamic radicalism or fundamentalism, which represents the problem. Islam as a religion, philosophy, and imperialist ideology is an existential threat to the entire free world. It threatens all non-Islamic civilizations. In other words, Islam is the greatest regressive, oppressive, and counter-revolutionary movement the world has ever seen. The threat comes primarily from demographics, which involves the replacement of native populations by Muslims. Demographic conquest is the most permanent form of conquest; it is irreversible.

THE EXAMPLE OF MUHAMMAD

The problem of Islam begins with its creator, founder, and supreme model for human existence—Muhammad. The differences between Islam and other religions can be seen quite clearly by comparing Muhammad as a religious leader with the leaders of other faiths and belief systems. Take four remarkable men such as Buddha, Confucius, Jesus, and Socrates. Certainly most people can agree that these are distinguished religious or humanitarian leaders. If these four are not religious or humanitarian figures, no one is.

Not one of these four led armies into battle or killed people. Muhammad’s biographers record at least 27 battles in which Muhammad personally took part. In Ibn Ishaq’s account (which has great religious authority as an official biography of the Prophet), Muhammad personally enjoyed the results of these engagements. After the infamous Battle of Badr, we even read of Muhammad ordering the bodies of his fallen enemies to be dumped into a well.¹

Jesus, Buddha, Socrates, and Confucius have all been remarked upon for their pity for humanity. Of Muhammad, we read the following treatment of some camel thieves:

He then ordered to cut [off] their hands and feet (and it was done), and their eyes were branded with heated pieces of iron. They were put in Al-harra and when they asked for water, no water was given to them.²

Such behavior is unthinkable for someone like Jesus or Buddha, but for the highest example of human life in Islam—the Prophet Muhammad—it is not only acceptable, it is something for his followers to emulate. Lest anyone think this treatment was a one-time thing, the Qur’anexplicitly allows this kind of treatment:

The punishment of those who wage war against Allah and His Messenger, and strive with might and main for mischief through the land is: execution, or crucifixion, or the cutting off of hands and feet from opposite sides, or exile from the land.³

In the Christian Bible, the Savior of mankind endures crucifixion; for Muhammad, it is just another punishment to be used against one’s opponents.

Imagine a religious leader like Jesus or Buddha arranging for an opponent to be assassinated. This happened dozens of times on Muhammad’s orders. The Prophet had a Jewish man and an Arab woman killed for writing poetry that mocked him.⁴ Examples like this are why Muslims have no qualms about killing or rioting whenever someone offends Muhammad’s honor today. The rioting in 2006 over cartoons of the Prophet run in Danish and Norwegian newspapers is a typical case in point.⁵

Not one of the other four was ever involved in the execution of a human being—let alone an entire tribe of them. One of Muhammad’s bloodiest accomplishments was exactly this. They were known as the Banu Qurayza, a tribe of Jews who lived in Arabia and were allied for a time with the Muslims. When the alliance had run its course, the Muslims besieged the tribe in their stronghold, forcing an unconditional surrender. When the Prophet asked one of his followers what should be done with the prisoners, he received the answer that the adult males should be killed and the rest taken as slaves. Muhammad called this judgment divine. Accordingly, all the males of the tribe were examined and those with pubic hair were judged to be adults and summarily executed. A poor woman who lost her mind upon seeing her entire family butchered began to laugh at the sight of the executions. She went so out of control she was executed along with the rest. Far from being an event of embarrassment to Muslims, it is considered a holy act with details of the slaughter recorded in the Qur’an—where Allah is very pleased by the “terror” this action put into the hearts of the Jews—and in the Sunna.⁶

None of the other four religious leaders were sexually licentious. Jesus was a celibate, and Buddha became one after his enlightenment. Socrates was (unhappily) married, and Confucius was a firm family man who still has descendants living today. Muhammad, of course, is notorious for his many sexual escapades. These include not only juggling multiple wives (sometimes unsuccessfully, as the wives were often jealous of one another, to the Prophet’s constant vexation) but numerous sex slaves. He married the wife who would become his favorite when she was six years old, consummating the relationship when she was nine (he was 52 at the time). Because the Prophet sets the example for his followers, it is no stretch to say that the marriage to Aisha has been the cause of more pedophilic relationships than anything else in history.

Jesus on the cross implored God to pardon his enemies and espoused the virtue of meekness (controlling one’s own use of force). Muhammad freely and openly hated his enemies and there are numerous records of him condemning people and even whole tribes of Jews to death. Confucius emphasized the importance of social bonds, the maintenance of tradition, and worship of ancestors. Muhammad completely overturned Arab society, eradicating almost every trace of tradition or regard for ancestors which he did not approve of. Buddha taught that the purpose of human life was to relieve the suffering of others. The primary means by which Muhammad spread his religion was through violence and robbery. There are numerous records of his enjoyment at the suffering of his political enemies (or their potential suffering in Hell). Socrates famously said that the unexamined life was not worth living. For Muhammad’s followers, the only need for examination is to determine whether or not one has been living up to the example set by Muhammad himself. If Muhammad is a religious man, what are we to make of the humanity of these other four men?

THE HISTORY OF ISLAM

The history of Islam is a history of jihad against humanity (that is, against all non-Muslims). The first jihad was fought against the non-believing Arabs from 622 – 634 AD. It was followed by jihad against the Zoroastrian Persians, Byzantine Christians, Coptic Christians, North African Berbers, and the Hindus of India. By the eighth century, the jihad had also gone against the Spanish, the French, the Sicilians, and the Turks (even the Chinese suffered assault, as the westernmost provinces of the T’ang Empire in Central Asia were taken by Muslim armies after 100 years of warfare in 751). In each case, the civilization was destroyed or completely transformed.

Just in the past ten years the jihad against the Christians of the Middle East is coming near to completion. For centuries Christians have lived as an oppressed minority group in the areas now containing Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. These were some of the earliest Christian communities in the world, but also some of the first regions to fall under Islamic hegemony during the first century of jihad. Today, Christians are fleeing these countries in droves due to sectarian conflicts and terror.

There is no end to the conflict against infidels. India has been subjected to jihad since the first Muslim conquest in 712. Today, despite the partition which divided India into Hindu and Muslim nations there are still terror attacks by Muslims eager to claim all of India for Islam. Since the creation of Israel in 1948 Muslims have been attempting to destroy the Jews there. Since the 1960s Muslims in Nigeria have been engaged in constant conflict with the Christian population. Since the 1990s, Muslim separatists in Chechnya have waged a bloody conflict with the Russian people. More recently, Muslims in Thailand have stepped up jihadist attacks in the hope of creating an independent state in the south where they have a sizable population advantage (the country is majority Buddhist).

Yet even if the whole world should convert to Islam the jihad would not end. Sectarian conflicts between Sunnis and Shias illustrate this point quite clearly. In Iraq the ISIS jihadist group (which is Sunni) is asking Shia suspects questions such as how many times a day they pray, what type of music they listen to, and how they wear their turbans. If the suspects answer these questions “incorrectly” they are executed. In Pakistan, members of different ethnic groups will kill each other over grievances only they can understand. Even two Sunni Islamic states, Pakistan and Bangladesh (formerly known as West Pakistan and East Pakistan) could not remain at peace with one another.

This is the history of how Islam was spread. It advanced through violence and destruction of existing civilizations. The list of civilizations destroyed or completely uprooted by Islam is long. It includes the Coptic Christians of Egypt, most of the Orthodox Christian world, Hindu civilization, Buddhist civilization across Asia, the Zoroastrians of Persia, and even southern Europe (Spain, Sicily, and the Balkans all spent time under the Islamic yoke).

The crucial point is that this is not just ancient history. Today, Muslims still look to bring jihad to non-Islamic countries. In July 2014 journalist Abhishekh Bhalla reported on Al-Qaeda’s latest plans for India—a plan which involved “mobilization of its resources” for an apocalyptic final battle in India called Ghazwa-e-Hind.⁷ According to Islamic belief, this war will feature the final conquest of India by a jihadi army; all soldiers of this army will be guaranteed a place in heaven. That same month, British newspaper The Guardian reported on the wave of British-born Muslims going to fight with jihadists in Syria. One volunteer told the paper:

If and when I come back to Britain it will be when this khilafah—this Islamic state—comes to conquer Britain and I come to raise the black flag of Islam over Downing Street, over Buckingham Palace, over Tower Bridge and over Big Ben.⁸

ISLAMIC CIVILIZATION

Sometimes the argument is put forward that Islamic conquest may not have been a good thing, but the Caliphate provided many benefits of civilization to conquered peoples. These arguments are overstated and inaccurate. As this book has shown, many of the cultural advances Muslims are given credit for are really borrowed glories. The much-heralded Islamic architecture was itself a combination of styles taken from conquered people—most notably from the Persians and the Byzantines. Many of the alleged advances in mathematics were made not by Muslims, but by non-Islamic Assyrians. So-called Arabic Numerals are not Arabic in origin at all; they were developed by Hindu mathematicians and only became known as “Arabic” because they arrived in Europe through Arab intermediaries. The centers of learning during the Caliphate were never Mecca or Medina but cities such as Baghdad and Cordoba—centers captured from the infidels. Until the 20th century, Mecca and Medina were little more than small towns. The most magnificent of Muslim cities were places captured from infidels like Istanbul or Cairo.

When Muslims took over a territory they often found early “success” in ruling it for three reasons: looting, slavery, and taxation of infidels. Slaves formed the backbone of their Caliphates, and the brand of slavery practiced was on a scale and level of brutality far beyond anything practiced in the United States. Africans were brought into Islamic lands by the millions. The men were often castrated to keep them docile and worked to death in brutal conditions. The women were brought in to serve as sexual playthings for the wealthy. Although it is seldom discussed today, white Europeans were also captured and sold into slavery in Islamic lands by the hundreds of thousands (the infamous Barbary Coast Pirates were responsible for much of the white slavery).

In captured countries that had been the homelands for centuries of Christians, Jews, and other infidels, Muslim rulers had another means of extracting wealth. This was the protection racket known as the jizya tax. Essentially, infidels who paid jizya accepted second-class citizenship in their own countries in order to avoid death or exile. Payment of the tax was sometimes accompanied with various ritual humiliations so the infidels would know their place in Islamic society.

Plunder from looting usually did not last very long. Once it was drained, only jizya and slavery kept Muslim leaders living in their accustomed luxury. The vast majority, both Muslim and non-Muslim, lived in relative poverty—even in lands which could richly support human populations. Mesopotamia is an excellent illustration of this. For 2,000 years before the coming of Islam it was the cradle of civilizations and a major center of trade. Since the coming of Islam it has never amounted to much. Even today, countries in the region such as Iraq and Syria are basket cases only held together by tyranny and force. India is another example. Prior to the Islamic invasions the subcontinent was wealthy and culturally advanced; today, after 1,300 years of jihad and misrule it is poverty-stricken.

The pattern of an extremely wealthy few lording over a vast majority of citizens living in relatively poverty is still in place in Islamic countries today. In the 21st century, the presence of massive oil reserves marks the difference between those countries where the majority enjoy various comforts from the state in exchange for their docility and those countries where the majority lives as poorly as they always have. According to one estimate, “Despite possessing 70 per cent of world energy resources and 40 per cent natural resources, the gross domestic product (GDP) of all member states of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) is less than that of Japan.”⁹ OIC member states are generally unable to leverage their resource wealth into high productivity: the same source shows that OIC countries contribute only 8 percent to world GDP and 40 percent of their populations live in poverty.¹⁰ The six countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council are the wealthiest Arab nations on earth, but most of their combined economic output of $1.39 trillion per annum (2010 to 2012 figures) comes solely from resource wealth (mostly oil and natural gas).¹¹ Outside of oil, Arab countries offer little in terms of economic productivity.

On top of this, Muslim countries contribute little to the global store of knowledge. OIC countries on average spend less than one percent of their GDP on research and development. Despite being close to 1/4 of the global population, Muslims have so far produced only two Nobel laureates in the sciences. The first of these was a Pakistani theoretical physicist named Mohammad Abdus Salam. Ironically, Salam doesn’t really count because he was a member of the Ahmadiya sect, which has been deemed non-Islamic by the Pakistani government. The second Muslim laureate was Ahmed Hassa Zewail, a chemist. Zewail is an Egyptian-American who lives and works in California.¹² So, out of 1.6 billion Muslims there have only been two who have made significant contributions to the sciences. Rather than advancing knowledge, most Islamic states actively repress it. Pakistan is a prime example, with some of the most brutal and repressive “blasphemy” laws in the world.

THE SHARIA THREAT

One of the poorest understood dangers coming from the Islamic world today is sharia. This situation is in part the creation of “stealth” jihadist groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood and the religious leaders of Saudi Arabia—both of which have spent enormous amounts of money and effort to spread misinformation and deceit about the true nature of sharia. It is sometimes claimed, for example, that only a handful of jihadists want to impose sharia law. In fact, many Muslims tacitly agree with the jihadists about their ends; the primary disagreement concerns their means. Others may disagree with both the ends and the means, but anyone who opposes the imposition of sharia law runs the very real danger of being denounced as an apostate, which is a crime in most Muslim countries punishable by death.¹³

Adherents to sharia are not isolated or extremist figures. On the contrary, “shariah adherents who comprise the supremacist camp constitute a mainstream and dynamic movement in Islam.” No one can deny that sharia law is derived from Islam’s most authoritative texts and is explicitly favored by many very influential Muslim leaders. It has been financed and propagated by Islamic regimes (most notably Saudi Arabia and Iran) for more than 50 years. In fact, it is very difficult for any would-be reformers in Islam to make sharia appear illegitimate to other Muslims.¹⁴

Actually, sharia is not really a religious code or even “law” as most people in the west think of it. It covers law, morality, customs, politics, the military; it is a doctrine presenting a complete way of life that is binding upon all Muslims. Although there are disagreements on some of the particulars between Muslims sects and between different schools of thought, there is broad agreement on about 70 percent of the major details.¹⁵

Sharia is based on four sources. One is the Qur’an, which is regarded as the revealed word of God. As such, it is beyond question. A second source is the Sunna, which is all the sayings and doings of Muhammad. This, too, is more or less beyond question. A third source, which is only slightly less in dignity than the other two, is called ijma. This is the consensus opinion of the greatest Islamic interpreters of the past. Over a period of time, Muslim sages came to agree on a number of issues; this consensus has become a permanent part of Islamic sharia. Finally, there is something called qiyas, which is reasoning by analogy—a way of applying accepted principles to new situations to arrive at sound rulings.

What makes sharia so treacherous from an American perspective is that it is completely at odds with America’s most basic principles. The U.S. Constitution declares that the power to create government and make law comes from the people; in sharia, only Allah can truly make law. The law given by Allah is perfect and cannot be changed. It is only necessary for all human beings to adopt sharia and follow it.¹⁶ The U.S. government and society have means to foster changes and improvements in society and technology. As the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood has explained, “The shariah cannot be amended to conform to changing human values and standards. Rather, it is the absolute norm to which all human values and conduct must conform.”¹⁷

Sharia also introduces an important principle that many non-Muslims do not fully appreciate: the principle of abrogation. This principle is crucial for reading the Qur’an correctly. Since the Qur’an was revealed over a long period of time, it contains passages that contradict other passages. Even Muhammad admits this is so. Following a rule laid down by Muhammad, sharia uses abrogation to resolve the contradictions. What happens is, chronologically later verses replace or abrogate earlier verses. Sharia tradition is very clear on which verses are chronologically later.

The principle of abrogation explains why Muslims are either ignorant or dishonest when they quote from the “moderate” verses of the Qur’an to imply that Islam has a live-and-let-live attitude toward other religions. In fact, the chronologically last Sura (chapter) dealing with jihad is in Sura 9, “Sura of the Sword.” It reads:

Then kill the Mushrikun [unbelievers] wherever you find them, and capture them and besiege them, and prepare for them each and every ambush. But if they repent and establish [regular prayers] and give Zakat [Islamic charity] then leave their way free.¹⁸

And a little later in the chapter:

Fight against those who (1) believe not in Allah, (2) nor in the Last Day, (3) nor forbid that which has been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger (4) and those who acknowledge not the religion of truth (i.e. Islam) among the people of the Scripture (Jews and Christians), until they pay the Jizyah with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.¹⁹

This verse is the final and definitive word on jihad.

Apologists for Islam will often quote the verse, “There is no compulsion in religion.”²⁰ Non-Muslims should be aware there is another verse, which comes later and is therefore more authoritative: “Whoever seeks a religion other than Islam, it will never be accepted of him.”²¹ Another asserts that those who do not believe in Islam are “the worst of creatures.”²² This sort of passage forms the basis for sharia as a system of Islamic supremacy.

By now, the reader is better informed than President Obama’s own counterterrorism expert John Brennan when it comes to sharia. Brennan fatuously claimed that the U.S. government would no longer describe its enemy as ‘jihadists’ because “jihad is a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam” while there was “nothing holy or legitimate about murdering innocent men, women and children.”²³ Following the Sura of the Sword, sharia does not classify non-Muslims as innocent. While millions of Muslims may not follow sharia, and may indeed think poorly of jihadists killing innocent people, it should be clear that those who do adhere to sharia have very solid grounds for arguing that their version of Islam is the most authoritative.²⁴

Groups like the Muslim Brotherhood are engaged in a different version of jihad in the United States. They are not engaging in direct violent acts because they believe slow and silent subversion is a better technique for achieving the same end (global Islamic rule). In 2008, the Holy Land Foundation trial in Dallas, Texas “provided evidence that the majority of Islamic organizations in America are affiliates of or associated with the Muslim Brotherhood in some way and many of them are raising funds for jihad.”²⁵

The Muslim Brotherhood’s goal for the United States has been made clear in an “Explanatory Memorandum” produced by the organization for some of its key followers. This document describes the aim of the Ikhwan (that is, the Muslim Brotherhood in America) as a “Civilization-Jihadist Process” whereby western civilization is infiltrated and destroyed from within. To this end, the organization prioritizes making coalitions with other Islamic groups, taking them over, and directing them to its own ends.²⁶ This Memorandum also listed its many front groups operating in the United States. This included prominent allegedly respectable organizations like the ISNA and the ICNA, among many others.²⁷

Groups like the Muslim Brotherhood are particularly dangerous because they operate by stealth rather than open violence. They are harder to denounce than open terrorists like Osama bin Laden because the means by which they operate are not so obviously abhorrent. Yet it must be stressed that their aims and goals are exactly the same. The Explanatory Memorandum makes clear that the Brotherhood seeks to destroy non-Islamic civilization in America, replace it with Islam, and support the efforts of the “global Islamic state” wherever it may be. “It is a Muslim’s destiny,” the document says, “to perform Jihad and work wherever he is and wherever he lands until the final hour comes.”²⁸ By maintaining a low profile, the Muslim Brotherhood has been fairly successful in its goals of co-opting American leadership, influencing public policy, and propagandizing Americans to think that sharia law is simply a case of freedom of religion.²⁹

Wherever Islam comes into power it imposes sharia in one way or another. In the United States, this would mean an end to civil rights, an end to the U.S. Constitution, and an end to the Statue of Liberty. Civil rights are an absurdity in Islam, which sees the Qur’an and the words of Muhammad as the true source of law and wisdom. The Constitution is the antithesis of sharia because its source of authority is not in Allah but in the people. The Statue of Liberty is nothing more than an idol, one of the most abhorrent things to Islam. Like all idols, it must be destroyed.

The same situation holds across the Western world. Each of the nations of Europe is completely unacceptable from an Islamic viewpoint. They are based in secular and non-Islamic principles. They do not ban things that Islam says should be banned (such as alcohol). Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square will have to come down, just like the Bamiyan Buddhas were brought down. St. Paul’s Cathedral must be turned into a mosque, just like the Hagia Sophia. Islam made inroads into Europe before, taking parts of Spain, Sicily, the Balkans, Greece. It is important to recognize that it still wants to conquer Europe. If it does, Western civilization will be destroyed just as the Byzantines were destroyed.

THE FACES OF JIHAD

The jihadist threat today comes in three forms. Two of these, terrorism and the use of weapons of mass destruction, are already familiar to most of us. With terrorism, it must be kept in mind that it is only a technique—it is not the problem itself. Other groups, like the Tamils in Sri Lanka, have used this technique. The problem is Islam itself. No other religion today makes the killing of innocent people into an acceptable means of spreading and defending the faith.

As for the use of weapons of mass destruction, again it must be recognized that Islam itself poses the serious threat here. The United States and the Soviet Union both backed away from nuclear conflict; would Osama bin Laden have done the same? The regime in Pakistan which sheltered bin Laden is in possession of a nuclear weapons stockpile. The ISIS organization in Iraq recently obtained about 90 pounds worth of uranium from a university lab.³⁰ While they are unlikely to have the know-how to make a working nuclear device, they could certainly build a so-called dirty bomb—an explosive that scatters dangerous radioactive material around an area rather than creating a fission reaction.

But the most insidious and significant jihadist threat comes from the third source: demographics. The demographic jihad is both the most effective weapon in Islam’s arsenal and the least understood or appreciated of all. For the full picture of demographic jihad in motion, consider the four charts added to the end of this chapter. The following data is taken from those charts.

To illustrate the dramatic demographic shift that has taken place, consider that in the year 1900 there were more Hindus in the world than there were Muslims. In South Asia, there were 86 million Muslims in 1900, representing 28 percent of the population. Today, they number 500 million in South Asia and represent 34 percent of the population. By 2050, there are expected to be 867 million Muslims in South Asia.³¹ Not coincidentally, this dramatic shift in demographics has come with increased hostility between Muslims and Hindus and increased jihadist efforts to “reclaim” India as a Muslim country. This is how demographic jihad works.

Consider that in 1900 Muslims were almost nonexistent in Western Europe and jihad was almost entirely unknown there. Only 50,000 or so Muslims lived in Western Europe at that time, less than a fraction of a percent of the total population. Today, there are more than 11 million living in Western Europe, and they are 6 percent of the population and growing. By 2050, it is projected that Muslims in Western Europe will number around 18.7 million and be just under 10 percent of the total population.³² That is a massive demographic shift toward a completely alien religion. The shift has been accompanied by increased hostility, calls for sharia law, and terror attacks.

The United States is not nearly as beset as Europe, but the trajectory of Muslims there is almost identical. In 1900, there were only about 10,000 in all of North America, a statistically insignificant number. Today, there are more than five million and their presence is already being felt in many ways (9/11 being only one example). By 2050, there are projected to be about 11 million.³³ America will soon be close to where Europe is now in terms of having a ticking demographic time bomb on its hands.

In global terms, Muslims are expected to make a major jump from 1.6 billion to 2.2 billion people over the next 20 years. At that time, a little more than a quarter of the world population will be Muslim. “If current trends continue, however, 79 countries will have a million or more Muslim inhabitants in 2030.”³⁴ By that time, Pakistan will likely pass Indonesia in having the largest single Muslim population of any country. The United States will have a larger Muslim population than any European country other than Russia or France. Most tellingly, the increases in Western Europe are driven not just by fertility but “primarily by continued migration.”³⁵ This means that the Western countries are openly and actively courting demographic disaster by continuing to import large numbers of Muslims whom it already admits openly to being unable to assimilate or accommodate properly.

The intimidation and silence in the face of Islamic intolerance and violence will only increase as this demographic situation grows more ominous. The consequences of the demographic pressure are already visible. When the Muslim population has grown in the major European cities, they begin to establish their own legal fiefdoms independent from, and often contradictory to, existing European norms. Journalist Joachim Wagner documented this phenomenon in Germany for nine months and found that the shadow sharia system was directly undermining the German legal process. It has gotten to the point where witness testimony is now being withdrawn from German courts and existing legal cases there completely derailed by the shadow sharia system. The justice system is “powerless” to stop it, “partly because it hasn’t tackled the problem vigorously enough.”³⁶

Contrary to what Islamic apologists may say, Islam does not bring peace. The name does not mean peace; it means “submission.” The Muslim submits to Allah, the Muslim’s wife submits to her husband, and all non-Muslims submit to Muslims. In fact, it is not even a religion at all. It is an Arab imperialist philosophy dressed up in metaphysical robes. Muhammad is no religious teacher in any ordinary sense of the word. He is a political leader—perhaps posthumously the most successful the world has ever seen, but essentially a worldly leader who defended the interests of his race, his family, his nation, and his culture.

The Arab imperialism Muhammad founded is unlike any other form we have seen. It is infinitely more dangerous than British, French, Spanish, or American imperialism. It is infinitely more dangerous than any totalitarian regime founded by Nazis or Communists. The difference lies in its effects, which are radical and completely transformative. No culture “colonized” by Islam has ever recovered.

Islamic imperialism is established in two ways. One is already familiar to most people; it is violent jihad performed by terrorists. The other, and more insidious way is to infiltrate and subvert. Whichever way it is carried out, however, the final goal is the same. In the words of student of Islam James Arlandson, “Ultimately, violent and non-violent radicals want religious world domination.”³⁷ Looking at the words of actual Islamic writers, and their origin in the Qur’an and other religious texts, Arlandson shows the truth which most Western leaders are reluctant to admit:

Accommodating Islam is impossible in the long run. Muslims believe that it best expresses the will of Allah, so it must prevail … Since Christianity is declining in Europe, the threat of an Islamic takeover is real, in the next five or more decades.³⁸

Most importantly, Islam is always literal. Referring to adherents of the literal words of Islam as “Islamists” or “jihadists” is not strictly accurate. In fact, they are good Muslims. Whatever name we may choose to use—literal Islam, radical Islam, jihadist, Salafist, followers of Mehdi—the end result is the same. All these names refer to the same sort of person. It is probably best to think of Islamic “radical” groups as something like Delaware corporations: on paper they seem to exist in different forms, but once you shut down one group it simply metamorphoses into a new group with a new name.

In the end, Islam is not a religion but an imperialist system that threatens the world. It follows Muhammad, who is not a religious man, and the Qur’an, which is not a holy book. It provides no real benefit to 95 percent of its adherents around the world. From its history, its belief system, and the actions of its present followers it is clear that Islam presents a clear and present danger to the non-Islamic civilizations of the world. Therefore, Islam in its present form must be defeated. The only question is how.

PART NINE

CHAPTER THIRTY - NINE

Islam and the Clash of Civilizations

I am a United States Army General, and I lost the Global War on Terrorism. It’s like Alcoholics Anonymous; step one is admitting you have a problem. Well, I have a problem. So do my peers. And thanks to our problem, now all of America has a problem, to wit: two lost campaigns and a war gone awry.

—General Daniel P. Bolger¹

We may be fighting the wrong enemy in the wrong country.

—Richard C. Holbrooke, U.S. Special Rep.²

The (Afghanistan) war has been a tragedy costing untold thousands of lives and lasting far too long. The Afghans were never advocates of terrorism yet they bore the brunt of the punishment for 9/11. Pakistan, supposedly an ally, has proved to be perfidious, driving the violence in Afghanistan for its own cynical, hegemonic reasons. Pakistan’s generals and mullahs have done great harm to their own people as well as their Afghan neighbours and NATO allies. Pakistan, not Afghanistan, has been the true enemy.

—Journalist Carlotta Gall³

Islam will return to Europe as a conqueror and victor, after being expelled from it twice—once from the South, from Andalusia, and a second time from the East, when it knocked several times on the door of Athens.

—Sheikh Yousef Al-Qaradhawi⁴

The meat of horses, mules, or donkeys is not recommended. It is strictly forbidden if the animal was sodomized while alive by a man. In that case, the animal must be taken outside the city and sold.

—Ayatollah Khomeini⁵

The future must not belong to those who slander the Prophet of Islam.

—President Barack Obama⁶

ISLAM AND THE CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS

When Arab Muslims turned planes full of innocent people into weapons of mass destruction on September 11, 2001, the question on nearly everyone’s mind was why. To find the answer, some pundits and scholars took a fresh look at the work of Harvard academic Samuel Huntington. Just five years earlier, in his seminal 1996 book The Clash of Civilizations, he had suggested that a conflict between Islam and the West was coming. One of the key arguments in his book was that international conflict in the future would increasingly take place along the lines of religious and cultural divides. In the wake of the Cold War, Huntington said, religious and cultural identity would reemerge as “the most important distinctions among peoples.”⁷ Speaking of this situation as a clash of civilizations, Huntington believed that “the relations between states and groups from different civilizations will not be close and will often be antagonistic.”⁸

When Huntington was writing his book the West was reacting with horror at the ethnic cleansing taking place in the former Yugoslavia. Westerners, secure in their belief that liberal democracy had triumphed over its last serious opponent in the form of Soviet Socialism, were unable to explain what they were seeing. Yugoslavs who had lived together for centuries and spoke a common language were suddenly turning upon each other in murderous rage. Huntington’s thesis supplied an answer: it was the Islamic, Catholic, and Orthodox identities which truly defined and inspired the Yugoslav conflict. The nation was a flash point where the fault lines between civilizations came together.

One of the chief threats to global peace identified in Huntington’s work is Islam. Looking at the state of the world in the 1990s, Huntington observed that “whenever one looks along the perimeter of Islam, Muslims have problems living peaceably with their neighbors.”⁹ He brought in historical and contemporary evidence to demonstrate that Muslims “have been far more involved in intergroup violence than the people of other civilizations.”¹⁰ Predictably, Huntington is still chastised today by the politically correct thought police for daring to single out Islam in this fashion. But the hard truth is not that he was wrong, it is that hedid not go far enough.

Despite his acknowledgement of Islam’s “bloody borders,” Huntington still identified the primary global fault line as the one between what he called as “the West and the rest.”¹¹ But since 9/11 it has become increasingly clear that the real fault line is between Islam and the rest. Furthermore, this division is not one of the rest’s choosing; Islam chose it and has chosen it for over 1,400 years.

The cause of this division is not hard to find. Muhammad created Islam upon the idea of a fundamental split between believers and non-believers. Throughout Islam’s trilogy of sacred texts it is made clear that non-believers are the worst of people and to be treated accordingly. Furthermore, Islam demands conflict between believers and non-believers. In one oft-cited passage in the Hadith, Muhammad declares that he was commanded by Allah to fight everyone until they submit to Allah’s will.¹² Contrary to what Islam’s apologists claim, this is not a spiritual or metaphorical battle; in his life, Muhammad demonstrated that the battle against the non-believers was quite physical, real, and permanent.

Following in their founder’s footsteps, the keepers of Islamic tradition have expanded upon and refined the basic opposition. Lands outside the rule of Islam are known collectively in this tradition as Dar al-Harb, the House of War. In keeping with Muhammad’s message and practice, the war against these lands is expected to be very real indeed. All Muslims are called upon to fight in this war—even those who would prefer not to involve themselves in slaughter.¹³ This is why the Islamic world cannot seriously oppose the actions of terrorists; the literal words of their religion sanction acts of terror and condemn those who do not kill infidels as shirking their duty.

The opposition between Islam and the rest of the world is of a different character than mere enmity. All civilizations may confront opponents from time to time—wars of opportunity, fought because one side thought it had an advantage over the other. Islam, however, sees itself as opposed in principle to non-Islamic civilizations. Hindus and Buddhists can agree in principle to live-and-let-live. Islam can only make peace in order to gain breathing room. Individual Muslims are even commanded not to be friendly with infidels.¹⁴

Islamic hostility toward other cultures is by no means something limited to fringe elements. Nor is it something that arose in response to historical suffering such as the Crusades. Instead, this hostility is commanded by the literal words of Islam’s most sacred documents. The full extent of the hostility is rarely mentioned in public, but this excerpt from a planning document prepared by the Muslim Brotherhood in America provides a taste:

The process of settlement is a “Civilization-Jihadist Process” with all the word means. The Ikhwan [Brothers] must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and “sabotaging” its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions. Without this level of understanding, we are not up to this challenge and have not prepared ourselves for Jihad yet. It is a Muslim’s destiny to perform Jihad and work wherever he is and wherever he lands until the final hour comes, and there is no escape from that destiny except for those who choose to slack.¹⁵

Furthermore, the hostility inherent in Islam is so strong that without external enemies Islam will simply turn upon itself. This can be seen all across the Muslim world, where Sunnis and Shiites are regularly at war with each other or with other smaller Islamic sects. These internal divisions suggest that even if the whole world should become Islamic there would still be no end to Islam-inspired violence. Three of the four “righteously guided caliphs” (in the first century of Islam’s existence) were murdered. Islam was born in war and has been at war with the world from day one.

Faced with such threats, the Left in the West turns out to be little more than a band of useful idiots and apologists for jihad. “Islam means peace,” they say, but fail to acknowledge that Islam promises peace only to Muslims—and even there, it has proven unable to deliver for 1,400 years. By defending Islam and attacking those who dare to criticize it, the Left provides cover that groups like the Muslim Brotherhood use to advance their plans. Ironically, those plans involve undermining and destroying the very freedom Western leftists and liberals believe they are defending.

Leftists in America today style themselves as “Progressives” and believe they are part of a gradual improvement of human society from injustice toward justice, peace, and equality. This makes it all the more absurd that they would support Islam, which is a regressive and reactionary ideology that insists on bringing the world back to the morality of seventh century Arabia. Cultures progress when they embrace critical thought and self-examination, but Islam rejects such progress as unnecessary and unacceptable. If Muhammad was the perfect man and the perfect model for human life, what need do we have of progress, the literal Islamist asks. And if anyone dares to ask whether something better than what Muhammad imagined could be, that person is in mortal danger. This situation is the very opposite of what Progressives claim they want.

Still, with the help of the Left, criticism of Islam is often stifled by labeling such criticism as bigoted or racist. Acts of shocking violence are also employed to spread fear. Comedians and artists feel free to mock Christianity, but few dare to do the same with Islam out of fear for their lives and livelihoods. The French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo dared to treat Islam with the same irreverence it uses for other religions, and on January 7, 2015 Muslims broke into the magazine’s offices and slaughtered its top journalists and artists and their bodyguards. While most ordinary people were aghast and instinctively rose up to defend freedom of speech, some on the Left darkly hinted that Charlie Hebdo got what it had coming for insulting Islam. This response is even more telling given that the magazine itself is a leftist magazine that regularly criticizes religion, racism, and right-wing politics. Fortunately, surviving staff and contributors expressed resolve in the face of Islam’s attempt to curtail their freedom of speech through violence.

Western leaders held a march presumably to show defiance in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo massacre. But in the end they only demonstrated their own folly by refusing to acknowledge the role of Islam in the whole affair. The Muslims who murdered the staff of the magazine were only emulating Muhammad in word and deed. After all, Muhammad had poets in Mecca murdered for writing slanders against him when he was a street preacher. The Qur’an and sharia law both sanction such treatment for anyone who insults the Prophet. If Western leaders had marched not against terrorism but against Muhammad, the Qur’an, sharia, and Muslim immigration, the problem of global Islam would be at the beginning of its end.

If anyone doubts that there is a unique and implacable fault line between Islam and the rest of humanity, consider the example of immigrant experiences in Western Europe and America. Multiple waves of immigrants from every civilization in the world have found ways to coexist and integrate respectably and productively within Western cultures. Only Muslims have maintained a sullen hatred for Western Civilization that continually explodes in violence and barbarities such as the Rotherham sexual abuse scandal in 2014. Islam is a unique and principled enemy of all the world’s non-Islam civilizations. The rest of the world must defend itself and unite to oppose this implacable enemy.

THE WARS IN AFGHANISTAN AND IRAQ HAVE FAILED

Opposition to Islam must begin by facing facts. The most critical fact to begin with is that the approach taken to Islam since the 9/11 atrocity has failed. This approach was dubbed a “War on Terror” by the United States, and the primary theaters of this war have been the countries of Afghanistan and Iraq. Using nearly every diplomatic, economic, and military resource at its command, the U.S. led two wars against these countries, dismantled their existing regimes and helped to establish new ones.

After 13 years, even the most optimistic of politicians and military experts in America will likely admit that the U.S. and its coalition allies have failed. The attempts to defeat the enemy and reform the political structures of Afghanistan and Iraq have been unsuccessful. The American people agree. As of January 2014, some 52 percent (according to a Pew Poll) of U.S. citizens agreed that America had failed to achieve its goals in either war.¹⁶ This failure has been enormously costly. More than $4.4 trillion has been spent and more than 10,000 American lives have been lost so far.¹⁷ More than a million veterans have registered disability claims with the Veterans Administration due to injuries sustained in this conflict. The final costs have yet to be tallied.

In Afghanistan, efforts to suppress the Taliban have been frustrated at every turn. These frustrations are due thanks in large part to interference from America’s supposed ally, Pakistan, on behalf of the Taliban. In Iraq, America oversaw the replacement of Saddam Hussein’s dictatorial regime with one we believed to be more democratic. But the removal of the secular strongman has predictably reopened deep sectarian divides that pit Sunni Muslims against Shiite Muslims while exposing other religious and ethnic minorities such as Christians and Kurds to new dangers. In 2014, despite billions of US dollars spent on equipment and training, Iraq’s military forces proved spectacularly unable to deal with a new Islamic threat within its borders.

This new threat, known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), represents a force that has not been seen in the world since the end of the First World War. Declaring itself to be a new caliphate, ISIS now aims at forcibly unifying the Sunni populace while unleashing genocide against non-Sunni groups. They have issued a call to arms that has resonated around the world, drawing Islamic fighters from as far afield as the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Russia, Indonesia, Nigeria, and Indian Kashmir. As ISIS seizes huge swathes of territory in Iraq and Syria, secular regimes have been replaced or weakened by the so-called “Arab Spring” in countries such as Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Syria. The world is more threatened by literal Islam than ever.

These developments show that while the 9/11 attacks may have seemed to be a wakeup call at first—a tragic warning of the deadly threat posed by resurgent Islam—Western leaders have failed to learn the lesson. Instead of dealing with the primary instigators of Islamic violence around the world, the U.S. responded to 9/11 by launching two interminable wars which stand out in American history for the confusion about one very important question: Who is our enemy?

This confusion was inevitable given the mode of thinking that has come to dominate American and Western politics. This mode of thinking could be accurately described as resolutely politically correct, self-hating, liberal, relativistic, and multicultural. It has undermined and poisoned all attempts to understand the threat posed by Islam. A perfect example came in the wake of the 2009 massacre at Fort Hood. An Islamic Army psychiatrist went on a rampage, killing 13 fellow soldiers in the name of Islam. It was a stunning blow, and it happened on a military base in America—a place where American soldiers had every reason to believe they were safe from jihadist attack. The response by then-Chief of Staff General George Casey was simply baffling. His first thought was for the Muslims rather than the victims:

I’m concerned that this increased speculation [about Islam] could cause a backlash against some of our Muslim soldiers … our diversity, not only in our Army, but in our country is a strength. And as horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that’s worse.¹⁸

Instead of asking why Islam could provoke a soldier to turn on his fellow soldiers and his fellow Americans, Casey chose to worry about a buzzword like diversity. This is typical of the failed approach to Islam; instead of directing our brave soldiers to engage the enemy, we expose them to a quagmire within which the enemy is shrouded in bureaucratic euphemisms.

In his straight-talking new book, three-star Lt. General Daniel P. Bolger notes that all of our various euphemisms for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (e.g. Operation Enduring Freedom) tip-toe around the truth. “Not one title for this war identified the enemy,” he writes, “anti-Western Islamists and the ramshackle, quasi-fascist Middle East states that enabled them.”¹⁹ Afghanistan was Osama bin Laden’s latest hideout in 2001, and the Taliban regime was a typically odious manifestation of literalist Islam, but who educated, enabled, and propped up the Taliban? It was Pakistan, an alleged ally in the War on Terror, and their support continues to this day. As most Americans know, it was Pakistan where bin Laden was eventually discovered, living in relative comfort next to Pakistan’s West Point. Where did the funding and personnel that fueled the Taliban come from? The Arabian Peninsula, and above all from another alleged ally: Saudi Arabia.

When America was attacked on 9/11, we had an opportunity to confront two virulent enemies in the Islamic world. Whatever the official regimes of Pakistan or Saudi Arabia may say or promise the fact remains that these countries are two of the primary sources of fighters, funding, logistical support, and ideological inspiration for Islamic terror. Responding to the 9/11 attacks by making war on the Taliban and al-Qaeda while tightening alliances with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia was like hiring a drug cartel to clear the streets of heroin dealers. Even if the mission is a complete success, the cartel itself will only supply new dealers in short order. It is always a mistake to deal with weaker manifestations of a threat than to deal with the source of the threat itself.

The invasion of Afghanistan was a misapplication of force, but the invasion of Iraq can only be called pure folly. There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein was a dictator and a brutal human being, but even in his own neighborhood he was a long way down the list of dangers to the United States. By 2003 Iraq had long been contained by no-fly zones patrolled by Anglo-American jet fighters. While loathsome, Iraq’s regime was at least secular and therefore capable of responding to rational arguments and force. Hussein had no interest in jihadists or theology. His regime was bad but containable. Saddam Hussein and his Baathist party were the secular enemies of Islamic fundamentalists.

The failure to correctly identify and oppose the real enemies of America was not the mistake of any one party or ideology. In March 2009, the newly elected President Barack Obama told the American people that our goal was now “to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al-Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future.”²⁰ The problem with this approach is that al-Qaeda exists primarily as a brand name today. Jihadists affiliate with it for the same reason that others affiliate with ISIS: because they identify with the pure Islamic supremacism that combines jihad and imperialism. No one group has a monopoly on that ideology. And that ideology would not die even if every al-Qaeda fighter were to be killed tomorrow. ISIS and al-Qaeda are only manifestations of the ultimate enemy.

When Vice President Joe Biden visited Afghanistan in 2009 and asked junior soldiers to define their mission, he got a broad range of responses. Despite the variety, as Bolger reports, “the most common answer rang true: ‘I don’t know.’”²¹ As was clear to Bolger and others, “the mission remained obscure because the enemy remained ill-defined.”²² When American troops pulled out of Afghanistan in 2014 the question still remained in their minds: Who was the enemy? The inability to provide a coherent answer to this simple question is the hallmark of America’s failure in the War on Terror.

In fact it is Islam itself that was and is the greatest threat to the United States and the non-Muslim world. For decades, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia have been two lynchpins of Islam-inspired imperialism and jihad. Any attempt at defining who our enemy is should begin with these two nations. But the threat is bigger than any particular nation, no matter how wealthy or influential. Even before our national enemies are identified we need to be clear about Islam itself—as a religion, as a political ideology, and as a metaphysical system. In the words of philosopher Shabbir Akhtar, “Islam is explicitly public, communal, and politicized, that is, coercive if and whenever empowered.”²³ This means that the claims Islam makes must be taken seriously by non-Muslims because whenever Muslims get the upper hand they will attempt to force their views on the non-Muslims. It is not in Islam’s DNA to leave other systems alone. Islam makes enormous claims for its own dignity and respect as a spiritual and ethical creed. Are these justified? Is Islam a religion at all? What does it even mean to call something a religion?

WHAT IS RELIGION? MONOTHEISM AND ITS DISCONTENTS, REVISITED

The word ‘religion’ is so commonly used that it is easy to assume that everyone agrees upon its definition. Yet there is no objective definition and no common core of ethical and ritual practices that could justify one. Attempts to produce an acceptable definition of religion are typically heated and inconclusive affairs. During one such attempt by the American Academy of Religion (an organization consisting of professors of religion at American colleges and universities), half the audience walked out in protest.²⁴

Even the supposedly unifying concept of “world religions” is, as scholar Tomoko Masuzawa has described, a “slipshod, weirdly composite term” that conveys little meaning beyond the desire to impose a scientific façade on a distinctly un-scientific field of study.²⁵ It is an attempt to combine together under one name practices and beliefs which share very little in common. Instead, there is such diversity of practices and beliefs among human beings that much of what one culture might call a religion another culture might call philosophy, science, magic, or mythology—and vice versa. What one religion considers holy can be deeply offensive to another religion.

For example, consider the belief in God. Followers of the three major Abrahamic faiths (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) commonly assume that religion must include faith in a supernatural deity. According to these faiths, God created the world, regulates the world, and will bring the world to an end at some unspecified future time. But this core dogma of Abrahamic religion is not necessary for other religions. Buddhism, Jainism, and Confucianism are agnostic or atheist regarding the existence of a god or gods. Jainism in particular is a humanistic and naturalistic system that sees the world as composed of matter operating according to natural laws. Human beings, in Jainism, have the power to achieve their aims and ethical goals using reason alone, without supernatural aid or revelation.²⁶

For the Abrahamic religions, God is transcendent and one, meaning he does not exist as part of the natural world we know by experience. In Islam, this means God is “separate from the world of his creation … not subject to its laws, moral or arguably logical.”²⁷ Given such an idea of God as completely other and separate from the world, the question arises of how he can make himself known to mortal creatures. The answer in the Abrahamic tradition is that God communicates through direct revelation to certain extraordinary individuals called prophets. A core component of these religions, therefore, is faith in the authenticity and divinity of the exclusive revelations God makes to specific people. This faith does not require accountability, reason, or empirical verification of its claims. Islam actually goes so far as to believe that anyone demanding rationality is an unbeliever. As Akhtar puts it, Islamic scholars say that “whoever engages in (Greek) logic commits infidelity.”²⁸

Other religions do not retain such a view of truth. For religions in the Indic tradition such as Hinduism and Buddhism, truth is open to anyone capable of learning it.²⁹ It makes no sense to say, as Islam does, that any one person holds the “final” revelation of God to man. Furthermore, it is possible in the Indic tradition for truth to cross over many disciplines or systems. A Hindu, for instance, may choose to believe many of the tenets of Christianity without ceasing to be a Hindu. But a Christian who comes to think of Hinduism as true has ceased being a Christian—and this is even truer for Muslims. Abrahamic religions are exclusivist, meaning that the most important truths are exclusively held and taught by the religion itself and cannot be found elsewhere. It is not possible for a believer of an exclusivist religion to say “we have the truth and you do, too.” Instead, the exclusivist religion says, “we have the truth, and you have shadows and lies.”

For religions without god or with different conceptions of god, divine revelation is either unnecessary or subject to debate. In the Yoga philosophy of Patanjali, for example, God is merely the ideal of enlightenment toward which the practitioner of Yoga aspires. In Advaita Vedanta, a school of Hindu thought, the validity of divine revelation must be tested by independent, logical means. Listeners are persuaded to accept the validity of Advaita teaching by pseudo-Socratic dialogue rather than by memorization of dogma. Through self-inquiry and reasoning ignorance can be reduced and eventually eliminated. In Advaita, divine revelation is something subject to independent investigation, and it is only by independent investigation that one can obtain the correct view.

Our first step in combating Islam must be this: We must not defer to Islam’s pretensions of being above question or criticism. No system is beyond objective and empirical investigations. Why should we bow to Islam’s statements or even its idea of what truth is? If Islam contains the truth it must prove it, explain it, and demonstrate it. Above all we should remember that we are not fighting individuals here, we are fighting against an ideology. We cannot stop all uses of weapons of mass destruction, but we can eradicate the ideology that leads to someone wanting to use those weapons.

This is the great weakness of Islam, because criticism—and especially self-criticism—is almost entirely absent in Islamic tradition. One of the common refrains of the Qur’an and the Hadith is the phrase “Allah knows and you do not know.” The believer is repeatedly taught that he does not know for himself what is best. In practice, this has made Arabic culture more fatalistic than causal in its thinking. There is a tendency among Arabs (and Muslims generally) to believe that Allah will provide whatever he wishes to provide. There is little impetus within Islam to search out the secondary causes by which the universe operates.

But a religion does not have the right to exclusivist claims any more than its adherents have exclusive access to truth. Thought, persuasion, self-criticism and debate are far more characteristic of the truly great religious thinkers. And in the same way, real religious conflict takes place in the form of debate and discussion. For centuries in India this was the only form of religious conflict that was experienced. It was not murder but debate. The Islamic approach, where one group attempts to impose its exclusive claims to truth on another group, is not a religious contest but a bloodthirsty quest for power.

The exclusivist position of Abrahamic monotheism is the basis for conflict between its creeds. The pagan Greeks did not fight each other or with the pagan Persians because of different religious beliefs. They fought for the age-old reasons of land, wealth, glory, and empire. Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism have not provoked wars to spread religious truth; these faiths were spread by monks and scholars, with the pen rather than the sword. Those who wish to cite the Hindu-Sikh conflict in the Punjab in the 1980s or the Tamil and Sinhala conflict in Sri Lanka, which ended five years ago, should consider that these were ethnic rather than religious (theological or metaphysical) conflicts. Hindus and Sikhs did not attack each other over metaphysical disagreements.

Based on the idea of divine revelation, Islam encourages its followers in the belief that their vision of the theological truth is correct and all other spiritual and secular systems are false and evil. The Islamic dogma must be accepted by all human beings, with their eternal lives or souls at stake. The unbeliever must accept the truth, and he must accept all of it. One who rejects the truth is in danger; according to the literal words of Islam, it is acceptable and even mandatory to put such a person to death.

Christianity and Judaism share the Abrahamic characteristics of Islam, but while they officially reject pluralist ideas, in practice they subscribe to pluralism. It is acceptable in Christian countries to practice other religions or to reject Christianity and religion altogether. While in theory such persons are supposed to be condemned by God for this, in practice few people really believe that agnostics are doomed to eternal hell. After long periods of self-criticism, both Christianity and Judaism have been reformed.

Islam, however, is unreformed. It rejects pluralism both in theory and in practice. It remains undiminished in its violent insistence upon the acceptance of its arbitrary dogmas. Its dogmas themselves are beyond question, critical inquiry, or reform. In short, it is characterized by an ignorant exclusivism that should not be dignified or excused under the banner of religion or philosophy. It belongs in a separate category from the great religions and philosophies of the world.

There is no better way of demonstrating this than to compare Islam’s founder and perfect model of behavior, Muhammad, to the world’s other great men. Next to men such as Buddha, Confucius, Jesus, and Socrates, Muhammad seems a distinctly unspiritual, violent, and hedonistic despot.

BUDDHA, CONFUCIUS, JESUS, SOCRATES, AND MUHAMMAD: A COMPARISON

The great German philosopher Karl Jaspers wrote a seminal work examining a group of men he called “the great philosophers.” Jaspers identified Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, and Jesus as “paradigmatic” men who “by being what they were did more than other men to determine the history of man. Their influence extends through two millennia down to our own day.”³⁰ From Jaspers’ analysis of these men it is easy to see how the religion Muhammad founded differs absolutely from the religious and philosophical traditions they founded.

Consider first the equanimity with which the four paradigmatic men approached life. In Plato’s Republic, Socrates spends hours of argument trying to convince some young men in Athens that justice is a virtue which should be practiced for its own sake, not just to get a good reputation. “Doing evil in retaliation for evil is not just,” Socrates said, and “neither injury nor retaliation nor warding off evil by evil is ever right.” Meanwhile, Buddha taught “the universal love which offers no resistance to the evildoer, suffers with infinite patience, and does good to all living things.” Confucius believed that one should face evil and suffering with quiet dignity. Jesus famously commanded his followers to love their enemies, to pray for them, and to turn the other cheek.³¹ Even while Jesus was being crucified, he prayed for his murderers: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”³²

In comparison with such men, Muhammad seems petty and merciless. According to biographer Ibn Ishaq, when Muhammad found the mutilated body of his uncle on the battlefield of Uhud, he furiously responded, “If God gives me victory … I will mutilate thirty of their men.”³³ When Mecca fell to Muhammad’s forces, he hunted down certain enemies from the past so that he could have them executed, leading early Islamic jurists to conclude that insulting Muhammad “was a crime so heinous that repentance was disallowed and summary execution was required.”³⁴ It is this kind of behavior in Muhammad that is used to justify the rage modern Muslims exhibit, for example, over cartoons of Muhammad.

The four paradigmatic men devoted their lives to spiritual and intellectual development. Confucius, Socrates, Buddha, and Jesus “knew that they were speaking to the profound inwardness that precedes all action.”³⁵ As a result, “where the influence of Socrates is felt, men convince themselves in freedom.”³⁶ Meanwhile, as Jaspers observes, “an aura of gentleness lies over the peoples that have been touched by Buddhism.”³⁷

By contrast, Muhammad’s focus was on the attainment of military and political power. He was a man of coercion rather than persuasion. When confronted with men who turned from Islam and murdered a shepherd, Muhammad’s response was to butcher and torture them:

He then ordered to cut their hands and feet [off] (and it was done), and their eyes were branded with heated pieces of iron. They were put in ‘Al-Harra’ and when they asked for water, no water was given to them.³⁸

It is hard to imagine any one of the four paradigmatic men commanding such torture. Yet Muhammad’s actions established a pattern later Muslims regard as holy to follow. Where the four others reasoned peacefully, Muhammad demanded obedience and punished those who resisted or refused.

The Islamic calendar begins with Muhammad’s attainment of earthly power in Medina. Islam glories above all in its earthly conquests and judges its success and honor as a religion in terms of the territory it dominates. By contrast, the four paradigmatic men regarded material and political success with suspicion. Buddha exemplified “a life of indifference toward the world and its tasks.”³⁹ Socrates humbly accepted the death sentence of his fellow Athenians and drank his hemlock without recrimination or protest. Jesus told Pontius Pilate while his life hung in the balance that “my kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting.”⁴⁰

The wisdom of the paradigmatic four is conveyed also by their humility toward the past. Confucius “was cautious and reserved, yet not from fear, but from a sense of responsibility … he had an insatiable thirst for knowledge of antiquity.”⁴¹ Jesus’ teaching did not rest on his rejection and replacement of the Jewish scriptures, but on his mission to carry out and consummate them: “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law of the Prophets,” he assured his hearers, “I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.”⁴² In contrast, Muhammad declared that his revelations from God would replace all previous revelations. Retroactively, all the great men of Judaism and Christianity were interpreted as “good Muslims.” Wherever Islam takes over, the cultural heritage is in danger as it was in Afghanistan, where all traces of the Buddhism and Hinduism that were part of the culture for centuries have been almost completely eradicated.

To this day, accepting the teaching of Muhammad is a matter of compulsion and submission. One must accept what Muhammad said; little or no thought is required. In stark contrast, Confucius, Socrates, Jesus, and Buddha all demand something more from their followers than mere obedience. Their example crosses cultural boundaries and commands respect from wise men of many cultures. During their lifetimes, not one of these men was engaged in violent compulsion, rape, and murder. Muhammad was guilty of them all.

The teachings of Jaspers’ four paradigmatic men are almost polar opposites of what Muhammad and the Qur’an teach. One cannot accept both, it is necessary to choose between them. Our universities have succumbed to a moral and cultural relativism (and to Arab oil wealth), allowing them to place Islam in a position equal to those of the four paradigmatic men. They should be subjecting Islam to critical examination, not excusing it for its failings. A simple comparison of the four men above with Muhammad and the Qur’an is sufficient to demonstrate the vast gulf separating Islam from the intellectual traditions of the non-Islamic world. The best and most moral men the world has produced are clearly superior to Muhammad, and the systems they inaugurated are superior to his system.

ISLAM IS NOT A RELIGION; MUHAMMAD WAS NOT A RELIGIOUS MAN

It should be clear thatthe creed Muhammad created, promulgated, and exemplified is violent, militaristic, and political. It is morally distinct from the paths taught by other great men of the past 2,000 years. Muhammad and his early followers behaved as his terrorist acolytes do today, using massacres and brutality as tactics to defeat the enemy and gain political power. The challenge Islam poses, therefore, is unique in its nature and its dangers.

One of the most noteworthy features of Islamic ethics is its dualistic nature. There is one set of standards and rules that applies to fellow believers and another set which applies when dealing with “infidels.” Notably, the infidel may be treated quite poorly—raped, killed, and robbed if necessary. Islam explicitly forbids its followers from making friends outside the faith. Even simply wishing a Christian “Merry Christmas” is not allowed. The literal words of Islam enforce an absolute separation between believer and infidel, and in both doctrine and practice Islam acts more like a political ideology than a religion.

Military historian Richard Gabriel, though deferential and keen to avoid offending Muslims, nevertheless concludes from Islam’s own records that Muhammad’s primary impact was as a general rather than a thinker or teacher. Muhammad’s military innovations were many and remarkable—and also evil. “It was Muhammad,” Gabriel explains, “who changed the traditional moral basis of Arab warfare, removing the traditional restraints on killing.”⁴³ He did this by making the infrequent and temporary rules of the traditional Arab blood feud into a permanent state of conflict. This is essentially what the concept of jihad is: a traditional blood feud imposed on the division between Islamic believers and the mass of humanity that does not accept Islam. The rules of jihad allow killing and destroying the enemy without the inconvenience of social or moral disapproval. “Any rules of ethical behavior,” as Gabriel puts it, “applied only to the community of believers; those outside the ummah were held to possess no moral standing and could be killed or enslaved without consequences.”⁴⁴

The result of this conceptual shift at the beginning of Islam was both horrifying and sadly familiar to the student of subsequent history and current events:

The idea of exterminating an entire town or a tribe was beyond the imagination of those engaged in a blood feud. Under Muhammad it became a common practice. Even murder became acceptable under the new rules.⁴⁵

In the wars initiated and carried out by Muhammad there were more participants, more deaths, and more terror than before. What respect ought we feel for a man and a religion that represents “the elimination of the practical and ethical limits to warfare and violence undertaken against believers in the service of the faith”?⁴⁶

In a 2014 speech, President Obama spoke out against ISIS for its massacre of civilians, saying the group’s actions were un-Islamic. Apparently the president or his speechwriters were unaware of the methods Muhammad used to gain momentum for his insurgency. Following his victory over the Quraysh tribe of Mecca at the Battle of Badr in 624, Muhammad “killed without mercy all the Meccan leaders that fell into his hands.”⁴⁷ Ibn Ishaq records that one Muslim chopped off the foot of his son who had fought with the Quraysh in the battle, while other Muslims cut their prisoners “to pieces with their swords until they were dead.”⁴⁸ It should be noted that the above information is known from Muslim accounts, and that the surviving version of these matters was purged by a Muslim editor who was reluctant to preserve “things which it is disgraceful to discuss” and “matters which would distress certain people.”⁴⁹

The behavior after Badr was a model, not a singular event. In 627, Muhammad massacred the last surviving Jewish tribe in Medina, the Banu Qurayza. He ordered all the men to be beheaded in public (some 600 to 900 people) and their wives and children enslaved. Muhammad himself took one of the newly orphaned girls as a sex slave.⁵⁰ If Muhammad did this, how can we call ISIS massacring civilians and enslaving girls un-Islamic?

Muhammad and his followers were able to go so far beyond the pale of normal respectability by hiding behind a metaphysical veneer. As other tyrants have done on a smaller scale, Muhammad tried to make his immorality into a new morality. What I do is right, he told the Muslims, because it is commanded by and in the service of Allah. For Muslims, what Muhammad did was right and remains right. ISIS and al-Qaeda and Boko Haram can be called cruel, barbaric, inhuman, but they cannot accurately be called un-Islamic.

Another characteristic non-religious innovation of Muhammad was the cultivation of a death fetish. In the early years of Islam, Muhammad and his forces were often outnumbered and surrounded by hostile peoples. They found success by taking a reckless approach, spurred on by the metaphysical promises Muhammad gave them of rewards in the afterlife. As Gabriel puts it, “Muhammad’s pronouncement that those killed in battle would be welcomed immediately into a paradise of pleasure and eternal life because they died fulfilling the command of God was a powerful inducement to perform well on the field of battle.”⁵¹ The Muslims were characterized not only by vicious contempt for the lives and families of their victims but also by a careless disregard of their own. This dynamic combination gave Islamic forces an advantage in battle that others in Arabia at the time could not match. This is Islam’s inhumane legacy.

Jihad, terrorism, and demographic conquest are Islam’s most significant contributions to the world. None of its supposed religious beliefs are spiritually significant, while some of its texts are even cribbed directly or indirectly from Judaic and Christian sources. As Christopher Hitchens wrote, “Islam when examined is not much more than a rather obvious and ill-arranged set of plagiarisms, helping itself from earlier books and traditions as occasion appeared to require.”⁵²

It is not a religion because it compels murder in its name. It is not a religion because it dismisses reflection and responds to criticism with intolerance and murder. It is not a religion because it threatens apostates with death. It is not a religion because it was founded by an illiterate whose primary contributions lay in the field of military brutality. Islam is not a religion, it is an evil empire. Islam, Hitchens aptly concludes, “makes immense claims for itself, invokes prostrate submission or ‘surrender’ as a maxim to its adherents, and demands deference and respect from nonbelievers into the bargain. There is nothing—absolutely nothing—in its teachings that can even begin to justify such arrogance and presumption.”⁵³

Terror is not the enemy. Terror is a technique used by the enemy. It is a technique used by those who want to enforce literal Islam. The people who want to do this are called by various names—jihadists, Islamists, Salafists, terrorists. But the people are not the problem. Muhammad is the one who divided the world into two eternally warring groups, believers and non-believers. Islam is the ideology of Muhammad, and Islamic imperialism is the source that spawns the terrorists who plague the world. Islamic imperialism itself is the problem. Islam is the enemy.

THE SIX STEPS OF ISLAMIC CONQUEST

Following the example and the dictates of Muhammad, Islam and its leaders have throughout its 1,400 years of existence sought to conquer and convert the world. They have not stopped short at anything, including slavery, rape, and genocide. Over the centuries, the methods of Islamic conquest have evolved into a predictable pattern of stages. Each step represents greater power for the Islamic overlords and a diminishing of the native culture, religions, and beliefs down to nothing or next to nothing. There are six steps to this imperialist conquest.

In the first step, Muslims appear in a targeted nation as immigrants or seemingly innocent practitioners of a separate but equal religion. At this stage their numbers are too few to make many demands other than to be left alone to practice their religion in peace and quiet. If such immigrants are accepted the door is open for development to stage two.

In the second step, the population of Muslims in the targeted nation has grown so that fewer and fewer feel the need to assimilate to the host culture to survive. Instead, they begin to form separate communities or enclaves and issue demands to be allowed to follow their own traditions, particularly sharia law, within those enclaves. Several European countries have now reached this stage. Their governments have failed to insist upon assimilation and as a result numerous independent Muslim areas have arisen in their cities where native citizens fear to go and sharia law is the de facto law of the land. This opens the door in turn to step three.

In the third step, the established and unassimilated enclaves of Muslims have grown in size to where they have political leverage. Muslims now make more and more demands of the surrounding society. They demand censure of all criticism of their religion and their way of life. The freer the host society the easier it is for the newcomers to use that society’s own laws to force compliance with these demands in the name of fairness and equal treatment. The Charlie Hebdo murders mentioned above demonstrate that France has reached this stage in Islamic conquest. As this stage gains momentum, lawsuits will be filed against any person or entity who opposes increased Islamization. This is already happening with members of France’s Front Nationale political party, which opposes Islamic immigration.

In the fourth step, Muslims will stage protests against individuals and organizations that resist the process of surrendering their cultural heritage. These protests may seem to be spontaneous and peaceful, but there will certainly be an undercurrent of threats. Over time, the demonstrations can easily become angry and violent, especially if the authorities attempt to control or restrict the protesters. Anyone arrested or detained during such events becomes a heroic victim in the eyes of the protesters.

In the fifth step, violence will be used. Opponents will be assassinated, often brutally. Resistance to Islamization is increasingly suppressed by creating a climate of fear. Weak political leaders will foolishly try to appease Muslims much as Neville Chamberlain did with Hitler in the years leading up to World War II.

In the sixth step, Muslims have become a significant part of the population of the host country. High birth rate plus mass immigration produces a displacement or replacement of the native population. Eventually, the native population becomes a minority in its own country, lacking the political or social power to resist. This is the point which most of the Middle East and much of Southern Asia and India have reached.

Once the demographic conquest of a nation has been achieved, its former political system is toppled and replaced by sharia law. The former culture of the nation is denigrated, destroyed, forgotten, and lost. Prior freedoms are gone. Remaining non-Muslims are killed, expelled, or enslaved. This may happen with greater or less rapidity but it is inevitable all the same. These six steps of Islamic conquest are a matter of historical record. Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, and Turkey were once Buddhist, Hindu, Zoroastrian, and Orthodox Christian nations, respectively. Today, few remember their pre-Islamic past. The United States and Europe are being heated in the same frying pan; the sooner we jump out, the less likely we are to be cooked.

ISLAM: A GREATER THREAT THAN COMMUNISM AND NAZISM

As the example of Muhammad shows, and as this book has repeatedly argued, Islam is not a religion but an ideology of Arab supremacy. It is an imperialist ideology that commands its followers not only to obey but to expand and force others also to obey. This is particularly obvious when one considers how extensively Islam seeks to regulate and direct the lives of individuals under its control. As an imperialist ideology, Islam is infinitely more extensive, more dangerous, and more enduring than both Nazism and Communism combined.

Communism and Nazism both professed to reject Abrahamic monotheism, but both actually succumbed to the same mindset of monotheistic exclusivism. Following a convoluted notion of Aryans as the “master race” destined to rule and subjugate others, the Nazis engaged in wars of conquest and genocide. Communists thought that coercion and state tyranny could produce a classless society. Such utopian and infantile assumptions proved a disastrous failure in practice, destroying millions of lives.

Communism and Nazism today are obsolete. Hitler’s regime lasted only 15 years and did not outlive him. He left behind no children, no followers, and has no serious or influential heir. Nazism was simply a one-man show; it lacked a systematic metaphysics or a potent epistemology. The Communist Soviet Union lasted 70 years and was already moribund and failing at the time of its collapse. Neither Lenin nor Stalin produced an heir of significance, and their utopia is long dead. The Chinese have attained rapid economic growth through a gradual but steady rejection of Maoist ideology, embracing both technology and investments from the West as well as free market reforms.

If you compare the rational restraint that characterized the Soviet Union’s calculations even at the height of its power and antagonism toward the U.S. with America’s jihadist enemies, it is clear that Islam is far more dangerous than Communism. The Cold War was a contest between two Western political ideals. Despite many stark differences, certain mutually held fundamental moral imperatives could still be relied upon. The decades-long policy of deterrence followed by the Cold War superpowers worked because each side knew that the other sought to preserve human life and limit casualties. With Islamic imperialism, there is no such similarity of belief, and it never wearies of claiming that death is preferable to life.

Islam also offers a striking contrast to the Communist system, which at least allowed sufficient freedom of thought to foster scientific and technological advancements such as the launching of Sputnik in 1957. Nominally Communist nations like China and Vietnam and former Communist countries such as Russia are today formidable economic entities who have to varying degrees embraced market reforms. Islam does not allow such reform. It is the ultimate totalitarian system, demanding complete submission of mind, body, and soul without question.

Unlike the Nazi or Communist threat, Islam adds the dimension of demographic conquest. Osama bin Laden has 24 children; King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia has 45 children with some 30 or so wives. Even simple laboring folk like one Gulzar Khan of Pakistan get in on the act—Khan has 36 children despite having been displaced by sectarian violence.⁵⁴ On a wider scale, Islam itself went from about 175 million followers in the 1880s to around 1.75 billion followers in 2015. This is a ten-fold increase in 135 years:

It is true that Islam has fewer professors than the others; according to one of the latest estimates, a hundred and seventy-five millions (of Muslims) against Christendom’s four hundred and Buddhism’s four hundred and fifty million or more.⁵⁵

This report from 1881 shows that at one point Islam numbered fewer adherents than even Buddhism. The rapidity of its increase is a testimony to the reality of demographic conquest.

By contrast, Hitler had no children and three childless brothers on Long Island represent the last surviving remnants of his extended family. Stalin’s last surviving child, known as Lana Peters, died poor and nearly unknown. Neither Nazi Germany nor the Soviet Union ever presented a demographic threat to the survival of the West. Islam does. By having children in such massive numbers, Islam threatens to displace the cultures of the West, which have all fallen to replacement-level or sub-replacement-level fertility rates. This level of demographic replacement represents a threat from which recovery is impossible. Economic bankruptcy can be overcome; cultural bankruptcy means destruction.

All sense of humanity and decency is swept aside by Islamic imperialists, who for 1,400 years have maintained that either destruction or submission is the destiny of all non-Muslims. It is clear that if Nazism and Communism were accepted as threats to the free world, Islam must necessarily be seen as an infinitely more potent enemy. The West, led by the United States, was able to reason with the Soviet Union and its allies on the basis of shared Western values for peaceful co-existence. With Islam, discussions, debates, and agreements are impossible because Islam explicitly rejects reason and empiricism. In Islam, theology (the Qur’an and sharia) are the only true guides and all else must be rejected. This means that we are now faced with implacable mass-murderers who cannot be deterred from their agenda of genocide and total supremacy. Rather than opponents who at least valued the lives of their family and compatriots, we have those who voraciously sacrifice their own wives and children for their bloody cause.

Western leaders today want to suggest that Russian leader Vladimir Putin somehow represents a threat that must be addressed. Some publications go so far as to compare his actions in Crimea and the Ukraine with those of Adolph Hitler in the years leading up to World War II. The absurdity of such comparisons may be demonstrated by the fact that, in order to oppose Putin, the West is now supporting actual Neo-Nazis in the Ukraine who oppose Russia.⁵⁶ Putin’s Russia is no threat to the West—they have no claims on Western nations, they do not fund or direct terrorists to attach Western targets, and they are not engaged in an ongoing process of demographic replacement. Islam has announced its hostility to the West; it kills Westerners routinely through terror attacks; it is engaged in steady demographic conquest of Western nations (as this book, and others, have amply documented). Far from being an opponent of the West, Putin is a potential ally: Russia has the same problem with Islam and Islamic terror within its borders. It is time for the world to recognize a true threat and get serious about its opposition to Islam.

IDENTIFYING PROBLEMS AND 21ST CENTURY SOLUTIONS

What would it look like if the non-Islamic world got serious about taking on, containing, and defeating the threat of Islam and its imperialistic and genocidal hatred? If the world realized that Islam was not another religion but a threat to all religions and to freedom of thought everywhere, what would the response be? This book has suggested many policy changes that must be part of a comprehensive solution, but let us consider here a range of actions that could be taken across economic, military, political, demographic, geopolitical, and philosophical spheres.

The principles of Islamic imperialism and bigotry would not have spread so widely over the past 70 years if not for Saudi oil money. The Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia have used their petrodollars to grease the mechanism of hatred for a long time, and the oil-thirsty West has largely looked the other way as they did so. The West’s addiction to oil may well be leading it to commit suicide.

What makes this situation particularly galling is that the price of oil has been largely controlled by an Arab Muslim-dominated cartel to the detriment of the rest of the world, despite the fact that it was European and American explorations which first discovered and tapped the Middle East oil reserves. On top of that, the oil was of no use to the Muslims until the West required it to fund the machinery of its modern technology. Left to their own devices, the Muslims of Arabia would scarcely have needed or even found the oil beneath them and would have remained in the poverty to which they had been subject for centuries. How long will the West permit its own advances and its own funds to be directed against its own interests?

It is time to press home the obvious fact that Arab oil exporters are as dependent on the oil-importing nations of the world as we are on them. The oil-importing countries can and should form an alliance to offset and overwhelm the collective power of OPEC. Such an alliance could force oil exporters to sell their product at a fair market rate. Although at the time of writing oil prices are falling around the world, this is only happening with the Saudis’ acquiescence. If the Saudis wish to reduce oil production in order to push prices back up, they are more than able to do so to the world’s detriment.

Getting serious about confronting this unacceptable dependence means we must take drastic measures. The non-Muslim world should continue to move forward with policies of energy conservation, alternative fuel sources, and the exploitation of new sources of oil. Imports of oil from countries ruled by Islamic fundamentalists should be cut off. Let the Saudis feel what it is like to be put over an economic barrel; they need water and food from the rest of the world more than the rest of the world needs their oil. This need can and should be used as a weapon in the economic war against Islamic imperialism.

If the United States can lead the nations of the world in ending the Arab dominance of the world oil market, it can also end its own long history of supporting Islamic supremacists who have used American protection and American money to kill Americans. Once America’s poisonous pseudo-alliances with the likes of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are repudiated, those countries can be seen as what they are: part of an Axis of Jihad. These countries are not to be appeased; they should be demilitarized, democratized, and secularized. Together with Iran, which represents the Shia sect of Islam, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are part of this Axis, which perpetuates and expands Islam in its most intolerant and virulent form.

The opposition to Islam must also be carried out with thought as well as force of arms. The ideology of Islamic imperialism must be opposed. The absurdities of Muhammad’s teaching must be exposed. During the European Enlightenment, the logical absurdities and historical inaccuracies of the Bible were exposed by critical thought and scientific examination. Christianity and Judaism underwent a period of reform in the light of these examinations. The same process can and must be applied to Islam. To that end, the forces of secular humanism, critical thought, and scientific inquiry must be exported to and supported within the Islamic nations of the world. Literal Islam cannot withstand such scrutiny because it rests upon fairy tales like Muhammad’s midnight horse ride to heaven and Jerusalem and disguises cruelty and genocide (such as the extermination of the Banu Qurayza tribe) beneath a veneer of “religious” justification.

PRESIDENT OBAMA AND THE FAILURE TO NAME THE ENEMY

In mid-February of 2015, the White House hosted a three-day summit on “Countering Violent Extremism.” People representing more than 60 different countries attended, including Muslim leaders based in the United States, the Mayor of Paris, the Director of the Russian Federal Security Service (their equivalent of the FBI), and other foreign officials. Oddly, despite the presence of his Russian counterpart, Director of the FBI James Come was not invited. The conference opened with an Islamic prayer by Imam Sheikh Sa’ad Musse Robel from Minneapolis, Minnesota. No other faith was represented.

In connection with this summit, President Barack Obama penned an op-ed on the topic. The op-ed correctly notes that “military force alone cannot solve this problem.” Unfortunately, it betrays a shallow and confused notion of what the nature of “this problem” is. President Obama continues to peddle the line that the issue is one of “violent extremism,” that “Groups like al Qaeda and ISIL promote a twisted interpretation of religion,” and that Islamic terrorists “betray Islam.”⁵⁷

This is a common line in Muslim apologist rhetoric—when Muslims do something horrible in the name of Islam, simply declare that they do not represent Islam. Unfortunately for the President, it is profoundly misleading to do this. Global jihadists are dutifully following the teaching and examples of Muhammad, the founding Prophet of Islam. His words and deeds are well enshrined in the Qur’an and the Hadith texts. During his lifetime, Muhammad had his critics assassinated, beheaded opponents, and committed genocide against tribes who refused to surrender to Islam. He was personally involved in nearly 100 military campaigns that resulted in the deaths of thousands. He and his forces took women and children as slaves, and Islamic holy texts record the proper distribution of such booty. What groups like ISIS do may be called evil, cruel, barbarous, and savage—but it cannot be called un-Islamic. Their actions are part of the fabric of what Islam has been since its beginning. Our fight is not against some vague extremism—it is against extremism of a very particular Islamic kind.

Despite the culture of denial and apology for Islam, there are credible counter-voices raised in the media. In a thorough and nuanced article in the Atlantic, journalist Graeme Wood points out that contrary to persistent denials by Muslim scholars and academic apologists in the West, ISIS sees itself as “the agents of the … apocalypse” as described in the Qur’an. All the activities ISIS has engaged in are sanctioned and encouraged by the sacred writings of Islam, and this has been agreed upon by Muslim clerics through the ages.⁵⁸ Meanwhile, feminist journalists Asra Q. Noumani and Hala Arafa point out in The Daily Beast that “the Islamic State, al Qaeda and the alphabet soup of Islamic groups … rely very much on the scholarship of ‘religious leaders’ from Ibn Tamiyyah in the 14th century to Sayyid Qutb in the 20th century, who have credibility and authority among too many Muslims.”⁵⁹ While President Obama may wish to avoid saying so, Noumani and Arafa honestly declare “we are at war with an ideology and theology of Islam.”⁶⁰

President Obama goes on to say that “al Qaeda and ISIL peddl[e] the lie that the United States is at war with Islam.”⁶¹ He is correct; the United States is not at war with Islam. But what he fails to admit is that Islam is most certainly at war with the United States—and with all non-Islamic civilizations. This war is one of Islam’s founding principles. It has been in perpetual conflict with non-Islamic civilizations for 1,400 years, and its current goals are to destroy Western Civilization as it destroyed the Hindu, Buddhist, Persian, Coptic, and Hellenic civilizations.

The United States is founded in and promotes freedom. This can be seen in the Preamble to our Constitution, which declares that the people of the United States “do ordain and establish this Constitution.” The assumption is that the people are sovereign and may decide for themselves what form of government to establish. This founding document makes clear that certain rights belong to human beings inalienably and outlines limits to the federal government’s power over its citizens. Not only are the people free to form a government suitable for them, they are free also to change how that government operates. The Constitution contains provisions for amendment and alteration as may become necessary.

These assumptions are completely anathema to Islam, which holds that Allah, not the people, is sovereign: “Allah knows and you do not know,” as the Qur’an repeatedly states. Islam wants to destroy the Constitution and replace it with the Qur’an and sharia law. The Qur’an in Islam is not like the Bible in Christianity—it is a political document which declares Islam to be the supreme law and guidance for life. Saudi Arabia and other Muslim countries declare that it is their Constitution. Islam has no Bill of Rights, but it has rules for the enslavement of non-Islamic peoples and the treatment of non-Islamic religions. It mandates unequal treatment for both. Unlike the Constitution, the Qur’an is uncontestable and inalterable. It is divine law, perfect and valid for all people and all times. Far from accepting that people may govern themselves, Islam declares that they must follow its rules and anyone who refuses to surrender and convert must be taxed, demeaned, imprisoned, or killed.

In the light of these facts, what are we to make of President Obama’s claim that “I consider it part of my responsibility as President of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.” How can it be part of the President’s responsibility to defend a religion that seeks to destroy the Constitution he is sworn to uphold? President Obama has a long track record of praising Islam, the dominant religion where he spent his early years in Indonesia. “The sweetest sound I know is the Muslim call to prayer,” he told a receptive crowd in Cairo. He has also on several occasions praised what he calls Islam’s “proud tradition of tolerance” and announced that, “Islam has always been part of America.” Such comments suggest that the President is ill informed as to the nature both of Islam and of America. Barack Hussein Obama, the 44th President of the United States of America is the most eloquent apologist for Islamic supremacy in the world today.

In order to win a permanent and lasting war against Islamic imperialism we must not view our enemy as an abstraction, and we cannot act as apologists for their ideology. After $4.4 trillion dollars and 10,000 lives in Afghanistan and Iraq, we cannot afford any longer to offer praise and support to the very people who want to destroy us. We must openly and clearly name our enemies. President Obama, the Muslim apologist, will not do it. That enemy is global Islamic jihad, and its leaders are Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and non-state actors such as ISIS, the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and Boko Haram. Naming our enemy is the first step toward solving the problem.

AN ENEMY OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION: THE ISLAMIC REPUBLIC OF IRAN

Iran is one of the principal states seeking to establish a global Islamic empire. Unlike Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, Iran is quite public about its ambitions. This publicity is necessary because as a Shia state Iran is regarded with suspicion by most of the Muslim world. Therefore, Iran preens itself before the Muslim community for its open defiance of Israel and the United States and for its support for terrorism.

This support has been increasing in recent years. As expert Dr. Matthew Levitt told the U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs, “Iran’s state sponsorship of terrorism has increased dramatically to levels not seen since the late 1980s and early 1990s.”⁶² Iran is well known as a crucial supporter of both Hamas and Hezbollah, who between them have ensured the ongoing failure of the Middle East peace process. The Iranian regime also has its own terror force operating under the aegis of its Revolutionary Guard. They are sent to sow chaos from Afghanistan to Yemen.⁶³

At the same time, Iran is a special case in the Axis of Jihad because it is not an Arab country. The people of Iran are Persians and still retain pride in and respect for their own cultural past. Despite being conquered by Arabs centuries ago, the Persian people do not respect Arab culture or civilization. Their version of Islam has a decidedly different flavor.

More importantly, it is only the regime of Iran that is part of the Axis of Jihad. The people of Iran themselves are not interested in theocratic Islam. Most Iranians alive today were born after the 1979 revolution. While they have no memory of the excesses of the Shah, they are very familiar with the failed promises of the Islamic Revolution and its ignorant clerical tyrants who repress the people. The world should continue to isolate this regime while supporting the forces of reform and secularism within Iran. There is no need for invasion or attack.

The U.S. also shouldn’t fall into the trap of making the Iranian regime an ally against ISIS. This would only ensure the clerics’ survival for another generation. Iranian human rights leader Maryam Rajavi has called it “naïve and dangerous” to imagine that collaborating with Iran could bring peace. “Tehran and the Islamic state group,” she explains, “complement and strengthen each other—ideologically as well as tactically on the field of battle.”⁶⁴ Elsewhere, she called Iran’s participation in the fight against ISIS “a hundred times more dangerous than any form of Islamic fundamentalism,” since such participation would give the regime cover to go on the offensive against other countries in the region.⁶⁵ Rajavi is precisely the sort of person the U.S. and its allies should be supporting in Iran. She is a secularist and a nationalist who leads a major political resistance movement that opposes the theocratic regime. Rajavi’s movement has a ten-point plan for Iran that emphasizes free elections, political pluralism, separation of church and state, and equality for women. While still a Muslim, Rajavi is careful to distance herself from those she calls “Islamic fundamentalists” and advocates a region-wide approach that emphasizes Iranian regime change in concert with the fight against ISIS.⁶⁶

The provisional agreement that western nations naively signed with Iran has not changed either the Irania regime’s apocalyptic view of its Islamic role or its determination to gain nuclear weapons. Speaking recently to the Iranian parliament in defense of Iran’s pursuit of such weapons, Ayatollah Khamenei asserted that “battle and jihad are endless because evil and its front continue to exist.” Rambling on, Khamenei also insisted that “this battle will only end when the society can get rid of the oppressors’ front with America at the head of it, which has expanded its claws on human mind, body, and thought.”⁶⁷

Therefore, the solution for Iran is regime change. The popular opposition to heavy-handed theocratic rule should be encouraged. The youth of Iran are showing profound interest in their pre-Islamic heritage and Zoroastrian religion. If Iran could be restored as a secular nation it would become a beacon of light to the whole region.

NUCLEAR PAKISTAN: AN EXISTENTIAL THREAT TO THE WEST AND INDIA

In mid-December 2014 Pakistan suffered the deadliest terror attack in its history. Seven Islamists attacked an Army Public School in Peshawar, killing 145 people, 132 of them children between eight and 18 years of age. Sadly, this is not unsurprising from a country at war with itself, its heritage, and its own nature. The Pakistani people retain a Hindu soul but follow a foreign Arabic creed that produces a reaction one can only call schizophrenia. Since India’s independence and the partition that created the Pakistani state the country has repeatedly gone down the road toward greater and greater Islamism—with predictably tragic results. The ideology of the Peshawar attackers is not an aberration it is the direct result of the Pakistani state’s very own jihadist modus operandi, now spun out of control.

Pakistan’s Islamization had deadly consequences for its neighbors and for the world long before the country itself came to reap the whirlwind. The Pakistani Army has long inculcated its soldiers in the jihadist ethos, most visibly in the famous book The Quranic Concept of War which former Pakistani leader General Zia ul-Haq made mandatory reading for army officers. Pakistan’s powerful Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) has for decades trained, developed, taught, and made use of jihadist fighters to further the country’s political aims. Kashmir, India, Bengal, and Afghanistan all bear witness to the ISI’s jihadist meddling.

Revealingly, Pakistan has continued its support for jihad despite ostensibly joining America’s War on Terror after 9/11. New York Times reporter Carlotta Gall offers the most recent exposé of this continued policy in her aptly titled book, The Wrong Enemy. In this book, Gall details how Afghan Taliban leaders were sheltered by Pakistan after 9/11 and even reformed, reorganized, and sent back into battle at the instigation of the ISI—sometimes even against their will. The Taliban resurgence in Afghanistan, which was a source of grave sorrow to the U.S. and its allies, was essentially a creation of Pakistani policy. Pakistan pulled off this duplicitous act while continuing to collect taxpayer dollars from the United States as a purported ally.⁶⁸

For example, in 2006 when a wave of suicide attacks spread carnage across Afghanistan, “Afghan investigators soon discovered that the suicide bombings and the networks supplying them were emanating from Pakistan.”⁶⁹ In 2008, a suicide bombing at India’s Kabul embassy killed 50 people. As Gall reveals, “American and Afghan surveillance intercepted phone calls from ISI officials in Pakistan and heard them planning the attack with the militants in Kabul in the days leading up to the bombing.”⁷⁰ In short, the atrocity was sanctioned and monitored by the most senior officials in Pakistani intelligence.

Pakistani officials claim they are good allies in the War on Terror, pointing to arrests of Afghan Taliban leaders. What they do not advertise is how often they arrested these Taliban leaders to prevent them from making peace deals with the Americans. At times, they have gone so far as to kill people in detention they feared were likely to make peace, as they did with Taliban Defense Minister Mullah Obaidullah. They did the same in 2009, preventing Afghani President Mohammed Karzai from speaking with several dozen Taliban leaders they held in custody.⁷¹

Compared to the flimsy rationale used to justify the invasion of Iraq, the accumulation of Pakistan’s crimes against America is overwhelming. America has been fighting the Taliban tail in Afghanistan while petting and feeding the dog in Pakistan. Yet despite the evidence American support for Pakistan continues. Between 2001 and 2013, the U.S. provided some 26 billion USD in assistance to Pakistan.⁷² As an exasperated former Pakistani legislator told Gall, the U.S. is “standing by a military that protects, aids, and abets people who are going against the U.S. and the Western mission in Afghanistan, in Syria, everywhere.”⁷³

PAKISTAN AS A CASE OF MENTAL ILLNESS

The problem of Pakistan demands a deeper explanation because its behavior exhibits nothing less than the symptoms of collective psychosis. In its jihadist crusade against its ancestral culture and race, the Muslims of Pakistan have sought to Arabize themselves to such a degree that they have induced a virtual dissociation psychosis. With this misguided zeal to become truly Muslim and eradicate their Hindu roots, they have developed a schizophrenic self-loathing from their failure to do so. In rational terms, Pakistan’s attempt at self-Arabization is nothing less than a fantasy sustained by a perverse will to believe. In more general terms this is the generic mental illness of Islam, a religion likewise sustained on pure irrational will to believe.

The failure of attaining the utopian ideal envisioned by Pakistan’s ideological founders, especially Mohammed Iqbal, can be seen in the complete betrayal of Pakistan’s founding belief of becoming a state that unites all Muslims in amity and concord. Even among Muslim nations, Pakistan is notably riven with divisions and internecine violence. It stands out for its extreme examples of intra-faith conflict and genocide. It is a state in which all but the most fanatical Sunni Muslims are targeted as non-Muslims, apostates, and infidels and subjected to oppression and murder.

In every sense of the term Pakistan today is a failed state that only continues to exist because it is propped up by more powerful governments who fail to recognize the pathology at work. Pakistan’s problem, despite its leaders’ rhetoric, is not extremism or the Hindus of India, or even terrorism per se. Its problem is Islam. The only nation in the world founded explicitly as a Muslim nation is completely unable to function without outside financial assistance—and even then it could not control the jihadists who use its territory even if it wanted to.

As Pakistan is a failed state, it must be invaded and subsequently demilitarized, democratized, and secularized. Its military should not be allowed to threaten its neighbors, its nuclear weapons cannot be allowed to fall into the hands of jihadists, and its ISI cannot be allowed to continue to develop terrorists as a matter of national policy. However, Pakistan’s failure also offers a unique problem. What could or would replace Islam in Pakistan if this ideology were abandoned?

There seem to be two viable alternatives for Pakistan. One would be a return to its ancient Buddhist heritage. A nontheistic religious system that champions reason and rejects theological dogma, Buddhism was actually the dominant religion for centuries in most of the area which today comprises Pakistan. The other alternative is modernization, meaning the embrace of secularism, science, and critical thought. This alternative would require a revolution in consciousness, but the end result would bring the greatest benefit. In a nation informed by the choice of reason and science over theology, Islam would be unable to survive as a significant force.

SAUDI ARABIA: RELIGIOUS SUPERPOWER AND ENEMY OF THE WEST

Like Pakistan, Saudi Arabia has long been playing a double game with the West. With one hand it offers mostly token gestures of opposition to jihadism while with the other it offers global jihadists the financial backing they need to carry out their campaign of destruction. Using their enormous oil wealth, the Saudis promote the spread of their own literal and conservative brand of Islam called Wahhabism. Without Saudi money, a large proportion of the mosques, madrasas, Islamic charities, media outlets, and terror groups around the world that promote literalist Islam would not even exist. Whatever its government may officially do or not do, Saudi Arabia is at the epicenter of the spread of Islamic imperialism and therefore constitutes a major threat to the world.

The Saudis hide their support for terrorism behind the façade of charitable donations. This is not speculation; it is a fact. In 2002, a report from the Council on Foreign Relations concluded that “for years, individuals and charities based in Saudi Arabia have been the most important source of funds for al Qaeda. And for years, Saudi officials have turned a blind eye to this problem.”⁷⁴ One of the lawyers engaged in a suit against the Saudi government for complicity in 9/11 asserts that these purported charities “served as the primary sources of funding and logistical support for Al Qaeda for more than a decade leading up to the 9/11 attacks.”⁷⁵

Recently, al-Qaeda member and 9/11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui has accused Saudi Arabia and members of its royal family of being patrons of al-Qaeda. Moussaoui says there was a connection between the Kingdom and the 9/11 attacks, and that funding for his organization came from several Saudi princes.⁷⁶ Saudi Arabia has dismissed these claims on the grounds that Moussaoui is insane, but this is belied by the facts, given that Moussaoui was accepted as mentally competent to stand trial and even to represent himself in court. Former U.S. Senator and 9/11 Commission Report member Bob Kerrey has suggested that Moussaoui’s claims have not been fully investigated perhaps because the U.S. is unwilling to antagonize its alleged ally. “But that is no excuse,” he says, “to sweep these charges under the rug.”⁷⁷

The problem is that the United States has become something of a “Saudi Occupied Government” over the years. Nothing illustrates this quite so well as the American response to the death of Saudi King Abdullah in January 2015. The death of former U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was greeted with only a minor delegation of retired politicians and former officials. President Obama did not attend her funeral, nor did any other serving politician. Yet Thatcher was a long-time leader of one of America’s closest allies.⁷⁸ When King Abdullah died, President Obama himself, who “rarely travels overseas to mark the death of a foreign leader,” attended the funeral along with several top current officials.⁷⁹ It is a mark of Saudi Arabia’s outsized influence that the death of its dictator should be treated with respect and accusations of its being involved in a conspiracy to conduct an unprecedented attack on the United States should be received in silence. This is an odd situation, to say the least, for the world’s premiere jihad nation to be in.

Saudi Arabia’s prominence as a jihad nation rests on two things: oil money and the guardianship of the two holiest sites in Islam. Therefore, the solution to the problem of Saudi Arabia consists first in removing these two supports. As discussed above, a boycott of Saudi oil combined with increased moves toward energy independence would go a long way to removing the first. Countries such as Russia, Venezuela, and the United States have significant oil reserves and well developed industries for accessing them, while dependence on Saudi oil is not as great as it used to be. Another potential approach is to move forward with pending lawsuits against Saudi Arabia for its role in promoting jihad. Victims of terrorist attacks in America are already seeking what could be billions or even trillions of dollars in compensation. If successful, such suits could go a long way toward bankrupting this jihadist regime forever. Regarding the second support, control of Mecca and Medina should be given to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (which represents 57 Muslim states). This solution would be welcomed by the majority of the world’s Muslims, many of whom are resentful of high-handed dealing at the hands of Saudi managers of these sites. If Islam is truly a universal religion as it claims to be, let a multinational organization of Islamic countries handle the affairs of the holy sites in Mecca and Medina.

In addition, as a sponsor of jihad Saudi Arabia should be ostracized and isolated from the community of civilized nations. Immigration from Saudi Arabia should be severely restricted, and many Saudis currently living abroad should be repatriated. Jihadist preachers in the West should likewise be deported to Saudi Arabia. The reason for this is quite simple: since all jihadists subscribe to a Saudi supremacist ideology, it makes sense to deport them to the country they operate on behalf of, regardless of current or original nationality. As much as possible, Saudi Arabia should be demilitarized, democratized, and secularized. Its military forces cannot be permitted any offensive capability but should be downgraded to the status of police forces with the downgrade enforced by treaties and a regime of inspections and sanctions. This policy worked against Hussein’s Iraq and could work even better against Saudi Arabia, whose military is even more radically dependent upon the U.S. for training and materiel.

Furthermore, Saudi Arabia should no longer be permitted to take advantage of its migrant worker population. No other country on earth is allowed to treat foreign workers as poorly as the Saudis have done. This book has already documented the many abuses and as a matter of record Indonesia has gone so far as to issue a ban on its citizens going to work there due to the large number of human rights complaints and abuses. Existing migrant workers within Saudi borders could be given permanent residency or citizenship, which they are currently denied. Since they are the ones who built modern Saudi Arabia, this is a just demand. If Islam can have mosques in Rome, Paris, London, and New York, why can the world have no houses of non-Islamic worship in Saudi Arabia? The world holds enormous leverage over Saudi Arabia, which is completely dependent upon foreign workers and imports of food and water and medicine. The world can use food, water, and medicine—as well as threats to national security—as bargaining tools in negotiating with Saudi Arabia.

Fortunately, there are forces within Saudi Arabia that oppose the harsh theocratic regime which oppresses its people. One of the most touching examples comes within the royal family itself, in the persons of four daughters of the recently departed King Abdullah. The four princesses (Sahar, Maha, Hala, and Jawaher Al Saud) have all been outspoken proponents of women’s rights in the Kingdom. As a reward, for 13 years they “have been confined in pairs, isolated from outside contact—beaten, drugged, deprived of food and water for periods of time, slowly starved, and [sic] subjected to heat without air-conditioning in the desert clime.”⁸⁰ Another example is blogger Raif Badawi, who was charged with apostasy (a crime punishable by death) for “Liking” a Facebook page for Arab Christians and sentenced to 1,000 lashes for criticizing the religious leaders of Saudi Arabia on his blog. As of this writing, Badawi is in danger of being executed on the charge of apostasy.⁸¹ Badawi and the Saudi princesses represent forces of hope in the country—they dare to speak out against the harsh Islamic regime, despite the threat to their freedoms, their persons, and their lives.

NAMING THE ENEMY: NON-STATE ACTORS ISIS, BOKO HARAM, THE TALIBAN

Nothing illustrates the failed approach of Western leaders to Islam as well as President Barack Obama’s response to this latest manifestation of jihad and Islamic imperialism. Speaking a day before the 13th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the President announced a new round of military actions aimed at defeating the new threat from ISIS. Referring to the group as ISIL (with an ‘L’ for the Levant), Obama ludicrously claimed that “ISIL is not Islamic. No religion condones the killing of innocents, and the vast majority of ISIL’s victims have been Muslim.”⁸² The problem with this claim is that in the eyes of ISIS and its supporters and well-wishers the victims of this group are not innocent or even Muslims at all. It also ignores the basic facts of Islam’s history, which have been well documented in this book. The killing of non-believers is not only condoned by Islam, it is encouraged repeatedly in its holiest texts as a righteous act.

In truth, ISIS is unimpeachably Islamic. Its declarations and actions are all fully justifiable using the literal words of the Islamic triad of scriptures. This group is consciously and directly imitating the example provided by the Prophet Muhammad, who likewise struggled to establish his religion—the true religion, in their eyes—despite being surrounded by pagans and nonbelievers. Whole tribes were killed as part of the Prophet’s struggle, while Muhammad’s successors expanded that example into large-scale genocide. Whatever ISIS may be, it cannot factually be called “un-Islamic.”

We cannot understand or defeat ISIS if we insist on regarding it as something separate from Islam, as an aberration or an extreme. It is in fact an integral part of the worldwide Sunni revolution of which the events in the so-called Arab Spring are one prominent facet. With ISIS it is clear that the world is witnessing not an Arab Spring but a Sunni Winter.

In the late 2000s, Syria became only the latest battleground in this global Sunni revolution. The Syrian conflict pits majority-Sunni rebel groups against government forces led by the Alawites (a Muslim minority sect to which Syrian president Bashar al Assad and his family belong; the Sunni fundamentalists regard them as non-Muslims). As of 2014, the deaths in this civil war topped 200,000 with more than six million people displaced by the violence. ISIS began as one of several Sunni terror groups that fought with Assad, then gained power and influence by spilling over the porous border with Iraq to oppose the shaky Shia government there.

As mentioned above, ISIS has declared itself a new caliphate. This is truly the aim of many of the major radical players in the Islamic world—the claim to be the political and religious leader of the worldwide Islamic community. With nothing to lose, ISIS can afford to be bold and public in its declarations. The spectacle of beheadings and ethnic cleansing which ISIS has presented to the world are actually part of its jihadist bona fides. Muhammad and his successors who formed the first caliphate did the same thing, cleansing the Arabian Peninsula of all non-Muslims then turning their sights on the expansion of the Islamic empire. Today, ISIS is trying to wipe out the wrong kinds of Muslims from lands it controls. Tomorrow, it hopes to expand just as the first caliphs did. This is the jihadist dream, and it comes from the example of Muhammad and the caliphs who built the first Islamic empire.

ISIS cannot be opposed simply by bombs from above. The ideology which produced it must be discredited and discarded. The flimsy protection of “religious freedom” used to defend it in Western countries must be exposed. The values of critical thought and scientific method must be championed vigorously in opposition. In short, ISIS must be defeated on the battlefield of ideas as well as on the battlefield of armies.

But even as ISIS captures the headlines, similar groups with identical Islamic inspiration also wreak havoc around the world. One of the most despicable examples is Boko Haram in northern Nigeria. In 2014, this group followed Muhammad’s example when it kidnapped and enslaved 276 Nigerian schoolgirls in Chibok. People in the West thought hashtags and token gestures were an appropriate response. And even as the world’s attention was riveted on the awful Paris massacres and their aftermath in January 2015, Boko Haram reportedly massacred 2,000 people in the northeastern Nigerian town of Baga and burned down the town.⁸³

All these non-state actors have one thing in common: their Islamic ideology. While they may not always cooperate due to being rivals for prestige, money, and power, their goals are always the same. They want the universal conquest of the world by Islam and the imposition of sharia law. ISIS, Boko Haram, the Taliban and others are all unimpeachably Islamic. They follow the example of Muhammad, the laws of sharia, and the dictates of the Qur’an quite literally. The fact that they are carrying out mass murder and sexual slavery does not make them un-Islamic; instead, it demonstrates the evils of the Islamic ideology that guides them. These true followers of Muhammad, sharia, and the Qur’an represent yet another front in the war between world civilization and Islam—a war that Islam itself started and continues to perpetuate. All such entities must be militarily destroyed.

NAMING THE ENEMY: THE GULF COOPERATION COUNCIL (GCC)

Everything said about Saudi Arabia can be extended to the GCC as a whole. This wealthy consortium of petty kingdoms and emirates is almost completely reliant on non-Arab migrant labor. In the United Arab Emirates, some 95 percent of the working population is foreign. Yet these workers are often treated like slaves—abused, degraded, detained, endangered, and even raped. Domestic workers are in a precarious position since they are often not even covered by labor laws, leaving them completely at the whim of their employers. Few in the West realize how dependent these Arab states are on a system that is slavery in all but name.

In Qatar, 1.38 million foreign laborers make up 94 percent of the workforce. Yet a recent Amnesty International report uncovered routine abuse and mistreatment of these workers on a wide scale. The abuse includes:

[Workers] having their pay withheld for months, or not being paid at all … having their passports confiscated and being prevented from leaving the country by their employers … being made to work excessive (sometimes extreme) hours … [and] being housed in squalid accommodation.⁸⁴

Investigations by Britain’s Guardian newspaper found nearly 500 Indian workers had died in Qatar in 2012 and 2013 with 24 more deaths reported as of January 2014. Nearly 400 Nepalese workers died over the same period, with a large number of these attributed to heart failure or workplace accidents. “Workers described forced labour in 50C heat, [and] employers who retain salaries for several months,” the paper revealed.⁸⁵

At the heart of the Islamic world, GCC states are controlled by decadent oligarchs who degrade and exploit workers from poorer countries, including their fellow Muslims. This hypocrisy goes mostly unmentioned. It is time for these states to be held to the same standard as the rest of the world. Systemic mistreatment should not be tolerated, especially from countries that are among the richest in the world. As with Saudi Arabia, the GCC should be pressured into reforming its labor system and forced to provide permanent resident and citizenship to some of those whom it has exploited.

Given the parasitical nature of the economies of the GCC nations there is great potential here. Their utter dependence on petrodollars gives importing countries leverage. The U.S. and its allies should decide whether they will continue to prop up these barbaric regimes or use some of their leverage to advocate for significant change. Citizenship for migrant workers would go a long way to denuding the GCC of its Arab tyranny. Enforcing secular democracy in the GCC should be the price the world charges for allowing them continued access to the global oil market and American military protection.

THE HOAX OF THE UMMAH

As the systematic degradation perpetrated by Arabs on their fellow Muslims illustrates, the ummah, or worldwide community of Muslims, is a crucial hoax used to shield Islam from criticism. Apologists for Islam will point to places like Indonesia and say, “See, this is a relatively normal Islamic country. Islam cannot be so bad after all.” This is a foolish line of reasoning. The relative stability and functionality of such parts of the “Muslim world” have nothing to do with Islam; it is due to the pre-Islamic culture of these (Hindu and Buddhist, in the case of Indonesia) lands. Furthermore, the Indonesian and other non-Arab Muslims are typically treated as second-class citizens in the Arab world. There is a clear hierarchy in Islam with Arab Muslims at the top.

The non-Arab Muslim world is composed almost entirely of coerced converts to Islam and their descendants. Muslims in the Balkans, for example, were converted by the conquests of the Ottoman Empire. Sunni Arabs do not regard them as Muslims with the same status as themselves. Saudi Arabia and the wealthy Arabs of the Gulf Cooperation Council are having it both ways here. On the one hand they call Indonesia or Bangladesh part of the ummah and count their Muslims as part of the world total, yet at the same time they treat them as slaves and abuse them when they come to work in their countries. Muslims in Bangladesh, Indonesia, the Philippines, and all of South Asia are in quasi-slavery. Arab employers usually confiscate the passports of their foreign workers upon arrival.

In recent years, thanks to the increasing influence of Saudi-financed Islamic teaching, non-Arab Muslim countries have been increasingly Arabized. Islam in these countries has become stricter and more literal in its application. Consequently, the Muslims in these countries have grown to be increasingly at odds with their native civilizational heritage and more hostile to non-Muslims and other Muslims regarded as insufficiently pious. Muslims in countries such as Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Burma are expected to reject their Hindu-Buddhist heritage in favor of a fanatical jihadist mindset. The Buddhist majority has resisted these efforts so far, leading to civil conflict.

The solution for non-Arab Muslim countries is the same as for the rest of the “Muslim world.” It is a return to pre-Islamic roots and an embrace of ancestral civilizational values. The leaders of these countries should shake off the spell of Islamic indoctrination and realize that their future should not be a regression to a primitive, reactionary, and unscientific worldview. Indonesia is starting to turn away from Saudi influence due to the mistreatment of their citizens in Saudi Arabia. Such turnings should be encouraged and hastened wherever possible.

In the end, the hoax of the ummah is that the vast majority of Muslims receive no benefits from their adherence to Islamic ideology. Perhaps 5 percent of Muslims, the so-called Syeds who are members of Muhammad’s bloodline, receive tangible and significant benefits from it. They constitute a de facto noble class within a system that is supposedly egalitarian. For centuries, Syeds have received financial and social benefits from their birth because, being descended from Muhammad, they are allegedly more perfect or holy than other Muslims. For the 95 percent of non-Arab Muslims who cannot boast of such ancestry there is no comparable benefit.

On the contrary, Islam breeds and makes use of poverty in its effort to expand its influence through demographic conquest and terror. Ordinary Muslims like Gulzar Khan (mentioned above) breed foot soldiers for Islam. From the poorer ranks of Muslims, terrorists are often recruited to carry out attacks in the name of religion. Ajmal Kasab, a Pakistani terrorist, is an example of this trend. Kasab, the only militant taken alive by the police during the 2008 Mumbai Terror Attacks, was from a simple Pakistani laboring family. This is standard practice for Islam. Illiterate, failed, unemployable criminals are routinely recruited to become terrorists with promises of wealth and immortality. Kasab was told that his sacrifice would clear all family debts and lead to a promising marriage for his sister. For around 150,000 Pakistani Rupees (about $1,500 USD) Kasab and the nine other Mumbai terrorists were recruited to kill. This is how cheap life becomes under Islam: $1,500 is enough to get a terrorist to kill innocent people.

The teachings of Muhammad do not benefit anyone outside of the elites of the Muslim world. The 95 percent of the Muslim masses become little more than tools like Kasab who are manipulated and bought by the elite for their own purposes. In short, the teachings of Muhammad do not lead to progress for humanity, they lead to exploitation. The myth of the ummah is only a tool used in this exploitation.

TURKEY

The last Islamic caliphate in the world was the old Ottoman Empire. Today, the homeland of the Ottomans is the erstwhile secular republic of Turkey. In recent years, however, the secular nation of Turkey has been returning to its former orientation under the iron fist of Recep Erdogan and his explicitly Islamic AKP Party. While many apologists claim this government is a “moderate” Muslim regime, there is nothing moderate about its philosophy or its ambitions.

The danger posed by Turkey is illustrated by its unwillingness to engage ISIS even as it conducts massacres on Turkey’s doorstep. Newsweek recently revealed “the extent to which the cooperation of the Turkish military” has been allowing ISIS forces “to travel through Turkish territory to reinforce fighters battling Kurdish forces.”⁸⁶ This aid comes at the same time as the rest of NATO is seeking to disable and destroy ISIS.

Turkey is justifiably suspected of complicity with the jihadists of ISIS in their quest to establish an Islamic caliphate. Should Turkey become a pro-jihadist state, it would be a formidable enemy in Europe itself, capable of striking directly or facilitating the funneling of jihadists into Europe. Even now, as a NATO member, Turkey could facilitate such an infiltration. The West and even the entire non-Islamic world should do everything to encourage Turkey to return to the policies of founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and to disempower the Islamic imperialists now driving the nation toward a confrontation.

THE FAILURE OF THE UNITED STATES TO DEFEAT ISLAMIC IMPERIALISM

It is time for the United States and its allies to unambiguously and directly oppose the Islamization of the world and to vigorously defend and promote secularism and secular values. The absurdity of defending jihad nations like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia while isolating secular regimes in Syria and Egypt must end. If the non-Islamic world is to avoid the fate of the destroyed civilizations that have been swallowed up by Islamic imperialism, we must consider how we have failed to contain and defeat the threat of Islam. Only then can we correct the course.

The roots of America’s failed response to the threat of Islam lie in the Cold War. As part of its strategy to contain and frustrate the Soviet Union, America spent decades supporting some of the most extreme jihadists in the world. Scholar John Cooley’s book Unholy Wars has documented this approach, which he calls “a strange love affair which went disastrously wrong.” His summary of his findings deserves to be quoted in full:

In the 1950s and 1960s, the administrations of four US presidents—Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon—all faced the task of defending American interests in the Middle East and south Asia. Like President Harry S. Truman before them in 1945-53, they perceived those interests as interconnected. Protection of strategic geography and defending sea and air access routes were linked to defending the vast reservoirs of oil and natural gas in and around the Arabian Peninsula and the Persian Gulf, which the industrial world had begun exploiting and depended upon. In addition to these concerns, though often incompatible with them, was defending the security of the new State of Israel.

These interests emerged as consequences of the Second World War of 1939-45. At the onset of the American-Soviet Cold War in 1946, President Truman perceived the Soviet Union as the principal threat to American interests, in the Middle East as elsewhere. This perception was to persist for the next half-century. US administrations of the 1960s, to be sure, so regarded “world communism,” embodied in dictator Joseph Stalin’s system of Soviet hegemony. Western Europe’s leaders, under the American-forged shield of the NATO alliance since 1949, in general thought the same way. In France, Greece and Italy, the new CIA gave massive financial aid to Rightist parties to enable them to defeat the Communists.

Western analysts in the think tanks and intelligence services in Washington, London, Paris, Rome and elsewhere asked themselves, who or what is the principal enemy of our enemy, communism? How can that chief enemy help us? At the same time, how can we oppose Third World leaders and doctrines perceived as handmaidens of communism, such as President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt (1954-1970) and his dubious doctrine of “Arab socialism?” There were consultations with planners and politicians in conservative Muslim and Arab states, such as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Many of them opposed both Soviet communism, its home-grown sub-species, and Nasserism (even though they also bitterly opposed Nasser’s main adversary, Israel). The tacit consensus was that the Muslim religion, fundamentally anti-Communist, if translated into politics, could be harnessed as a mighty force to oppose Moscow in the Cold Wars, in a world growingly polarized by that war.

Thus began what was, at first, merely a flirtation between America and Islam. Its expression was at first only modest and cautious support, usually covert, for Islam’s political activists—I choose to call them Islamist, rather than the worn out and inappropriate term “fundamentalists.” Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and its branches and affiliates throughout the Muslim world, from Syria and Jordan to Indonesia, received encouragement and sometimes money, when they became engaged against local or Soviet Communists. Later, by the mid-1960’s, came talk of an anti-Nasser and anti-Soviet “Islamic Pact,” led by the ultra-conservative and hyper-religious Saudi Arabian monarch—talk which, echoed from Pakistan, alarmed the mixed Hindu-Muslim, but secularly-ruled state of India, as well as the less conservative Arab states. The American flirtation with Islamism became a serious affair. Britain and France, in particular, helped the United States to conduct this affair. Often their governments or information media sought to represent their colonial or post-colonial wars, aimed at preserving their contested and crumbling rule in North Africa, southern Arabia or the Persian Gulf, as part of the struggle against “communism;” therefore worthy of US support.

…[President] Carter’s team, spearheaded by (Zbigniew) Brzezinski, perceived the foolhardy Soviet invasion not only as a major international threat, but also as an opportunity to undermine the already tottering Soviet empire by lying north of Afghanistan, in Central Asia. So the American love affair with Islamism was now raised another notch in intensity. It became a marriage of convenience. It was consummated in an alliance with Islamist military dictator of Pakistan, desirous for his own reasons to cleanse Afghanistan of the Soviets and their Afghan satellite regime and, if possible, advance Pakistan’s strategic and commercial influence northward into South Asia.

…Even in the training of more than 50,000 Muslim mercenaries to fight the Russians, the CIA chose the proxy method. Pakistani ISI officers and a few key Afghan guerrilla leaders were first secretly schooled in the service training centers of the CIA and the US Army and Navy Special Forces in the United States. Main training took place under the watchful eyes of the Pakistanis and sometimes a very few CIA officers—in Pakistan and, eventually, in areas of Afghanistan free of Soviet troops and the Communist Afghan government. Various open and hidden channels and stratagems were used to send arms supplies. Early in the war, the Americans gave Pakistan full control of training and allocation of the cash resources, weapons and logistical support for the holy warriors. A variety of sources financed the war, and the post-war conversion of the fighters into international terrorists. First came US taxpayers’ funds during President Ronald Reagan’s two administrations (1981-89). Saudi Arabia’s public and private contributors, like bin Laden, matched American funds dollar for dollar. The fraudulent BCCI bank and the drug trade provided more billions.⁸⁷

As Cooley shows in his book, America’s short-sighted policy greatly hampered the Islamic world’s incipient moves toward secularism and modernism. The Muslims were ready to join the 20th century, but to keep them out of the Soviet sphere of influence, America left them in the hands of seventh century Islamists.

Afghanistan is the prime example of America’s approach. After the Soviet invasion in the late 70s, America joined with the Saudis and the Pakistanis to fund the training and recruitment of virulent jihadists. Osama bin Laden, as this book has described, got his start in jihad by providing funding and material for these fighters. But once the Soviet threat was removed, the jihadists remained. Afghanistan went from a modernizing and comparatively open society, as it had been in the 1960s, to a backward, war-torn, and religiously strict society in the 1990s. With all non-jihadist forces having been opposed by Pakistan and its American allies, the Taliban seized control and allowed its territory to become a training ground for global terrorists.

In recent years America has seemingly doubled down on its catastrophic Cold War policies. The disastrous alliances with treacherous enemies Saudi Arabia and Pakistan continue, while the U.S. seeks to overthrow secular dictators like Syria’s Bashar Al Assad with little thought for the jihadists who will most likely take his place. From the Cold War era to today America has consistently and continually failed to acknowledge that Islam itself presents a threat to its interests. As historian Robert E. Kaplan has observed, since the 1990s, the United States has staged military interventions repeatedly in areas that had once been part of the old Ottoman Empire:

In each, a secular regime was ultimately replaced by an Islamist one favoring sharia law and the creation of a world-wide Caliphate. The countries that experienced the “Arab Spring” of the 2010s without the help of American military intervention, Tunisia and Egypt, had also been part of the Ottoman Empire, and also ended up with Islamist regimes.

Each U.S. military action in Europe and the Middle East since 1990, however, with the exception of Iraq, has followed an overt pattern: First there is an armed conflict within the country where the intervention will take place. American news media heavily report this conflict. The “good guys” in the story are the rebels. The “bad guys,” to be attacked by American military force, are brutally anti-democratic, and committers of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. Prestigious public figures, NGOs, judicial and quasi-judicial bodies and international organizations call for supporting the rebels and attacking the regime. Next, the American president orders American logistical support and arms supplies for the rebels. Finally the American president orders military attack under the auspices of NATO in support of the rebels. The attack usually consists of aerial bombing, today’s equivalent of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’ gunboat which could attack coastal cities of militarily weak countries without fear of retaliation. The ultimate outcome of each American intervention is the replacement of a secular government with an Islamist regime in an area that had been part of the Ottoman Empire.⁸⁸

In short, Jihadi terrorism is the illegitimate child of America’s promiscuous post-war, anti-Communist, anti-Soviet, and anti-Russian foreign policy. And we are still siding with those who hate us the most.

Today, this failure has left America open to infiltration by hostile forces who seek to undermine and destroy it from within. The example of the Muslim Brotherhood’s plan for America was cited earlier in this chapter and has been discussed previously in this book. In addition to the MB, there are also pressure groups and alleged charities such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which spread disinformation about Islam and oppose attempts to look critically at Islam or America’s relations with Islamic regimes.

Shaukri Abu-Baker, the cofounder of another of the MB’s American affiliates, described the double game Muslim apologists in the United States like to play. In a recorded conversation Baker explained that he couldn’t go to Americans and explain “I demand the ’48 borders [of Israel]” because it would never be accepted. Instead, “I approach it through humanitarian suffering, refugees’ rights and issues which the Americans will agree with you on.”⁸⁹ Omar Ahmed, the founder and first president of CAIR, concurred with Baker’s approach, commenting that “the media person among us will recognize that you send two messages; one to the Americans and one to the Muslims.”⁹⁰

Thanks to successful playing of this double game, a fifth column such as CAIR is able to operate successfully on the American public. CAIR poses as an advocate for Muslim civil liberties in public, but in private they support terrorism. According to court testimony by U.S. Attorney Gordon Kromberg, “from its founding by Muslim Brotherhood leaders, CAIR conspired with other affiliates of the Muslim Brotherhood to support terrorists.”⁹¹ CAIR has so far managed to avoid legal indictment over its connections, but many of its individual officers have not been so lucky. One officer, Randall Royer, was sentenced to 20 years in prison for his connections with terrorists in 2003. He had been the head of a cell of Virginia-based jihadists who were plotting attacks against D.C.-area targets.⁹²

This is how Islamists in the U.S. operate. First, they cast themselves in the role of victims. Here they are aided by Americans on the political Left who are dedicated to supporting the rights of those they perceive as oppressed minority groups. Then they try to obfuscate any charges brought against them by deferring to claims of free speech. This approach, too, gains Leftist and Liberal cover and support. Third, they toss accusations of bigotry and prejudice freely against their opponents in an attempt to undermine and delegitimize any efforts to reveal the truth. This last tactic has proven particularly resilient and impervious to the facts.

The facts, however, are not on the side of the MB or CAIR. Omar Ahmad summed up CAIR’s intentions thus: “Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant … The Qur’an should be the highest authority in America.” As Daniel Pipes has accurately observed, “CAIR forwards its program by focusing on one topic: silencing those who have anything negative to say about militant Islam.”⁹³

CAIR likes to draw attention to purported hate crimes against Muslims, but the numbers do not support their allegations. In 2011, there were 157 incidents targeting Muslims and 771 targeting Jews in the United States (Muslims and Jews are roughly equal as a percentage of the total population).⁹⁴ In short, there is no factual basis for any claims that America has an “Islamophobia” problem. In fact, as the late Christopher Hitchens rightly observed, “Islamophobia” itself is “a stupid neologism” which mostly serves “to promote criticism of Islam to the gallery of special offenses associated with racism.”⁹⁵

Liberal American culture and its worship of multiculturalism have become one of jihad’s greatest weapons against the United States. Instead of recognizing and fighting the enemy, America spends its resources defending, protecting, and flattering a viper in its bosom. To fix this problem, America must recognize that this path is one of national suicide. Promotion of Islam goes hand in hand with cultural relativism and non-stop efforts in the media and in the educational system to denigrate, apologize for, and despise America’s Anglo-Saxon heritage.

In order to fight Islamization, nations must find the courage to value their own culture and heritage. America owes a great deal to its immigrants, true, but the establishment of freedom, rule of law, and commerce that have made it a beacon of hope is thanks in large part to its Anglo-Saxon foundation. Those who follow the doctrine of multiculturalism and spit on America’s legal, ideological, and cultural antecedents are foolish, deceptive, and dangerous. As we have seen around the world, parasitical Islam flourishes on the ruin of great civilizations. There is no future for the West if it abandons its distinctive heritage to embrace a platitudinous and vacuous relativism that gives succor to that which must be fought.

We must treat our enemies as enemies. This means deporting Islamic supremacists, separatists, and jihadist ideologues and imams, while enacting strict restrictions on Muslim immigration. Membership in Nazi and Communist groups has long prevented immigration to America, and there is no reason why the same standard should not be applied to Islam as well.

Defeating Islam’s evil empire also means supporting groups at home and abroad that the U.S. has traditionally shied away from. This includes secularists, socialists, atheists, and others. It also means making common cause with countries such as Russia and India, who have suffered greatly at the hands of jihadists. These are the countries we should be embracing as friends rather than Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. America’s foreign policy should be based on a clear perception of its own national interests, not on the influence of wealthy foreign lobbies, on the considerations of political correctness, or on the blackmail of false friends.

America also can still reach out to those on the Left who have been misled by cultural relativism and political correctness. If the Left can grasp the truth of Islam and the danger that it poses to the liberties and minorities Leftists wish to champion, it can be a valuable ally in the fight. When the true racism and imperialism at the heart of Islam is understood, the Left’s support for Islam should wane. A similar effort could be made to reach those Muslims who fled to escape the oppression of sharia law. This can be done by re-emphasizing America’s secular and empirical tradition, and above all its constitutionally enforced neutrality on religion.

Similarly, America can gain new allies and friends while also strengthening its own society by emphasizing and implementing economic policies favoring the interests of the American people rather than those of international corporations. This is the America that people around the world yearn to believe in again. It is an America that recognizes evil and fights it, an America that promotes justice for the individual and freedom from religious and ideological tyranny.

THE FAILURE OF INDIA

Having been exposed to Islamic conquest for over 1,300 years, India and the Hindus have some of the longest experience with Islamic imperialism. Yet they have also committed serious errors in their response to the Islamic threat. As such, India stands today as a warning of what not to do. The chief cause of the Hindu failure has been a false epistemology and worldview. They mistakenly believe that Islam is a rival metaphysical system, another competing religion like Buddhism. In fact, Islam is a civilizational enemy. The conflict in India is between Hindu civilization and Arab imperialism.

The Islamic conquest of India began 1,300 years ago and is still ongoing, despite independence in 1947. Today, 75 percent of what was originally Hindu India no longer exists as such. Similarly, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan were Hindu and Buddhist countries before Islamic conquest. One should be forgiven for thinking that the –stan suffix was of Arab origin, but instead it points to the former origin of these colonized countries. It come from the Persian word for ‘land’. Those who think Islam is a peaceful or benevolent force should compare former Buddhist lands in the “stans” with Buddhist-influenced countries such as China, Korea, or Japan. As a rule, the former are backward third world nations; the latter are rapidly developing or first world countries. The most salient difference between the two groups is the dominance of Islam in the former.

Islamic conquest happened as a result of more than military victories and massacres. Military victory is only one kind of victory, and it is far from the only weapon in Islam’s jihadist arsenal. The other weapons Islam has employed to bring down some of the world’s most impressive civilizations are deception (taqiyya) and demographic conquest.

The symbol of Hindu failure with regard to Islam is Kashmir. Islam was first introduced to this Hindu land by warfare, but it was spread by deception and demographics. The true nature of Islam was concealed. Instead, Sufis came to the country to spread an Islam that was presented as a variation on Indic religion. Once the new converts embraced Islam in its Sufi disguise, the orthodox Muslims behind the scheme promptly introduced sharia and undertook campaigns of strict submission to the fundamentalist tenets of Islam. Those who resisted were killed and their property and women taken. The Hindus were then depopulated or simply outbred to solidify Islam’s hold.

Today in the Kashmir Valley, the true natives (the Hindu Pundit community) have been forced to flee their homeland as refugees, ceding land and homes to usurpers. Successive Indian governments have remained too apathetic or impotent to stem this tide. And so the tragedy is compounded until Kashmir is entirely lost. Kashmir is a microcosm of how Islam operates everywhere. It plays soft and weak when its numbers are small, then when it gets the upper hand the conquest is completed through battle or demographic replacement. The end result is always the same—the eradication of the previously existing culture and its replacement with Arab supremacist ideology.

Hindus were hampered by their failure to understand Islam’s binary view of the world. Islam sees the world in terms of believers and unbelievers; believers are the privileged and chosen people of God, while unbelievers are those who must be conquered, massacred, exploited, taxed, and enslaved. Another weakness lay in the Hindu tendency toward accommodation. “Truth is one; the wise express it in different ways,” the old saying goes. But Islam does not believe this. Instead, Islam believes that the literal doctrine of the Qur’an and the rest of the Islamic trilogy is the truth while all else is lies, imperfection, and ignorance.

Hindus have preferred to try to integrate Islam into the fabric of India. This is also a mistake. Sufism and other varieties of allegedly moderate Islamic sects—even Shia Islam—are seen by orthodox Muslims as unacceptable compromises. They are being subjected to an escalating campaign of persecution and annihilation. Furthermore, after 1,300 years, the Semitic worldview has proven incompatible with the Hindu-Buddhist worldview. The former is exclusive and rejectionist; the latter inclusive and integrating. Any hopes entertained by non-Muslim Indians that Islam will ‘one day’ become an integral part of overall Hindu civilization is nothing but a delusion and a pipe dream. The history of Islam in India says otherwise.

It should now be candidly acknowledged that the leaders of modern India have likewise failed to understand the true character of Islam. Mohandas Gandhi’s commitment to nonviolence, so successful with the British in his struggle for Indian independence, proved unrealistic with regard to Muslims. The Islamic ethos of violence and conquest meant that his nonviolence simply carried no weight with them. When India was partitioned, despite Gandhi’s best hopes, it happened in a horrific and bloody manner. The legacy of this deadly division still hobbles the Indian subcontinent, and Hindus and Muslims now threaten each other not with knives but with nuclear weapons. Gandhi failed to grasp the true character of Islam, and this led him into a fantasy of Hindu-Muslim solidarity. If allowed to persist, this fantasy will inaugurate the complete erosion of territory until Hindu India becomes a mythological idea of the past.

The independence of India itself has been a failure. Consider three simple facts. First, when the British were in India there was no constant military threat to its people. Pakistan now has more than one hundred nuclear weapons, an arsenal it has developed for use within the subcontinent, putting India in perpetual and mortal danger.⁹⁶ (India has fewer weapons and has made a commitment not to launch a first strike.) Second, when the British were in India there was no border dispute with China. After independence, under Jawaharlal Nehru, India fought a border war with China in which India was humiliated. Finally, when the British were in India there was a Hindu community in what is now Pakistan, comprising about 25 percent of its population. After independence, these Hindus almost all had to migrate to India, but a commensurate forced removal of Muslims to Pakistan did not take place. Therefore, Muslims in India got to have their cake and eat it too. They got Pakistan and remained a formidable force in India.

What India needs is an internal cultural revolution. This begins with a rejection of all arguments of equivalence between Islamic imperialism and Hinduism. There is no equivalence; Islamic imperialism has no parallel in Hinduism. For example, how can there be a comparison between Hindu gurus and Muslim religious leaders? Shankara was a celibate and an intellectual who spent his life in contemplation and peaceful debate. Maulana Maududi was an advocate of jihad and a sensualist. Hinduism recognizes that Islam is a religion but Islam does not reciprocate. It does not accept any Indic religion—Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, or Sikhism—as valid.

This internal revolution must also include the rejection of caste identity. No non-Hindu can possibly understand the mind-boggling issues connected with caste in India. It must be accepted that either everyone is an Untouchable or no one is. Caste should be a matter of character, not birth. One should be honored as a Brahmin not by birthright but by the quality of one’s character. Historically, many great Hindu reformers have rejected the caste divisions. If Hindu civilization is to survive, the caste culture must perish.

Furthermore, the primary divisions in Indian identity must be overcome in the face of a mutual enemy. Islam is the nemesis not only of Hindus but also of Marxists, secularists, Sikhs, Christians, Dalits—everyone. Islam plays one group against the other at present. Instead, within the nation of India, all Indians, regardless of their ideologies, should form a United Front of opposition against Islamic hegemony. Indians should actively appeal to the Muslim masses to embrace secularism and humanism. More often than not, critical examination of the Qur’an, Muhammad, and sharia will lead to the rejection of Islam. It is for this very reason that Muslim leaders disallow critical study of the life of their prophet.

However, among the nearly 200 million Muslims in India, there are also many secular-minded individuals with Hindu roots. Furthermore, the ruling Muslim classes of India consider themselves as being of foreign origin (typically Arab, Persian, Turkish, or central Asian) and inherently superior to native Indian converts. Therefore, there is an opening and an opportunity. Indian Hindus can reach out to these secular Muslims, with the examples of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Wafa Sultan, Ali Sina, and Ibn Warraq in mind. Apostate intellectuals can be our greatest allies. These apostates from Islam are the greatest refutation of the fearful idea that Islam’s hold on a large minority of Indians is a permanent reality. Secular-minded Muslim leaders can bring changes within their society, and non-Muslim Indians can and should support this. The Muslim masses on the Indian subcontinent should be liberated from the Arab imperialism that is Islam. These masses have never benefited from it, they have received only misery, ignorance, and a fatal theory of predestination which all keep them enslaved.

HINDU-BUDDHIST UNITY, OR, LOOK-EAST WORLDVIEW

As an integral part of its unity strategy against Islam, India should embrace the ideal of Hindu-Buddhist unity as a civilizational paradigm and the guiding principle of its foreign policy. In a globalized world where economic, technological, ideological, and military competition is the overwhelming reality, there are advantages in stressing civilizational unity. One such principle for South Asia lies in promoting the unifying idea of Dharma. A unity based on dharma would be extremely and invincibly potent in economic, military, and sociological terms.

As the progenitor of Dharmic civilization, India must take the lead. Indeed, the Buddhist countries of Asia still look to India for ideological inspiration, though India, deeply wounded by Islamic imperialism and partition, has not been up to the task of leadership for many years. Moreover, the internal divisions within Indian society, rooted in regionalism, the Hindu-Muslim divide, and the caste mindset are continuing to impede progress in all areas of Indian life. The dysfunction evident in these seemingly intractable internal problems inspires little confidence that India will soon be able to assume the mantle of leadership.

Islam is the deadliest and most potent nemesis of the Dharmic civilizational paradigm which unified Asian civilization for millennia, and in fact threatens to annihilate Dharmic civilization in its entirety. As the center of Dharmic civilization, India has been the focus of Islamic imperialism’s fury for over 1,300 years. The nations of South and East Asia, which represent the reach of Indian Dharmic civilization, are also under threat by jihadist Islam, which seeks to extirpate all Buddhist cultures. These cultures in many ways represent the survival of pre-Islamic Indian civilization at its apex.

The rage of Islam fell disproportionately heavily on Buddhism, which had highly developed and visible institutions. Such was the fury of the Islamic onslaught in India that Buddhism’s centers of learning and monasteries were decimated and the institutional support for Buddhism in India destroyed. The jihad against Buddhism now faces only one last Indian enclave in Bangladesh. It has otherwise been reduced to near extinction on the subcontinent.

That Buddhism has been driven from India is a great tragedy, as the great 19th century Hindu revivalist Swami Vivekananda acknowledged. The reintegration of Buddhism into Indian civilization would serve to restore the integrity of Hindu civilization and also enable India to be the ideological, philosophical, and cultural unifier of Asia. Buddhism is quintessentially Asian in outlook and represents the best of Hindu civilization. It is rational, compassionate, and egalitarian in its principles. It offers a truly universal outlook and is capable of embracing both science and ethical thought. It is the rational and scientific outlook of Buddhism that has enabled it to both foster dialogue with Western science and refute theological fanaticism. This approach guarantees its contemporary relevance.

Hindus today should embrace Buddhism as a great asset rather than marginalize its role in Hindu civilization. Islam cannot withstand Buddhist dialectics, a skill that has been largely lost in contemporary Hinduism. A Hinduism intellectually empowered by the rediscovery of Buddhist dialectics would have the confidence and the ability to resist the onslaughts of Islam with rational arguments unencumbered by theistic obfuscations.

Among the theistic dogmas that have come to smother Hindu society, the most egregious is caste—the belief in a divinely ordained social order valid in perpetuity. This belief is a complex borne of Hindu psychology and acts like a poison on Hindu civilization. Clinging to irrational belief in divinely ordained social divisions precludes the rational explanation offered by the Buddha: human beings themselves evolved their social and occupational divisions. Although Hindu caste divisions have parallels in other societies, the ideas have been largely discredited and repudiated around the world as incompatible with science and humanism. India would do well to follow this example. Here, too, embracing Buddhism could provide a measurable and tangible benefit.

Another benefit to embracing Buddhism would be resistance to the Semitization of Hinduism which has grown in recent years. Hindu nationalists have sought to oppose Islam by turning Hinduism into a theological opponent. In doing so, they and their allies have unwittingly bought into the theistic mindset of Abrahamic religion. Atheism, non-theism, and expedient theism have always been part of Hinduism; Hindu nationalists who want to turn Hinduism into just another pantheon of deities with its own counter-theology are completely misguided. Here, Buddhism offers a better counter to Islam because it contains an atheist or non-theistic dialectics which can be employed against the claims of Islam. If Hindu nationalists want to bring home those Hindus who converted to Islam they should regard Buddhism as a potent ally.

Only a united front of Dharmic nations can effectively counter the Islamic threat. The resources of the Dharmic block of nations far exceed those of the Islamic imperialists who want to make Asia the nucleus of their new caliphate. But consider that the 57 members of the Organization of Islamic Conference represent 1.6 billion people with a collective GDP of $4.7 trillion USD. By contrast, the GDP of Japan alone, with only 127 million people, is $4.92 trillion USD. When China, Korea, India, Thailand, Vietnam, and Taiwan are added to the mix, the Dharmic block commands nearly $18 trillion USD in GDP and close to three billion people. The combined wealth, technology, and military resources of the Dharmic block must be applied with a unified will against its most significant existential threat: Islamic imperialism and jihad. Only by making common cause with the rest of the Dharmic cultural sphere can India survive in its struggle with Islam. This means India must embrace its Buddhist heritage and forge new ties with the Buddhist nations of Asia—nations such as Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Japan, and China.

It is not enough merely to fight against Islamic imperialism. All the non-Arab Muslims of the world, from Bosnia to Nigeria, from Iran to Indonesia, must be liberated from it as well. All the greatest modern Islamic nations—Turkey, Egypt, Iran, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Pakistan—are non-Arab in their origins. Turkey had Hellenic and Byzantine culture, Iran had Zoroastrianism, and Egypt was heir to the Coptic civilization. Indonesia, Malaysia, and Pakistan were all former Hindus and Buddhists. If human beings need religion to survive, let them embrace any of these other religions that are part of their legitimate historical heritage. Let them be Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, Buddhist, Hindu, Zoroastrian, or even Deist like the great Founding Fathers of the United States. Anything but Islam, and this will be a positive step for all of humanity.

COMPATIBILITY OF NON-DUALISTIC INDIAN TRADITIONS AND MARXISM

This book has criticized Marxism, and especially the shortcomings and delusions of many Indian Marxists. However, for the sake of fighting a common enemy, Islam, the non-dualist traditions of Dharmic thought such as Mahayana Buddhism and Vedanta can be reconciled with Marxism. Although at first it might appear that there is little common ground between a salvific system and an explicitly materialist doctrine, there are many areas of compatibility that could become the basis for cooperation.⁹⁷

It might be objected that Marxism has a materialist view of reality and focuses exclusively on the improvement of conditions in this life, while Indic systems appear to be spiritual or metaphysical in their emphasis. But this is only partially true. Both Mahayana Buddhism and Vedanta recognize two levels of truth or reality. There is a conventional level, which pertains to the material world, and a metaphysical level which pertains to the state of enlightenment. There is, however, no substantial division in reality. In other words, there really is no hard distinction between the material and the metaphysical. Furthermore, in all three systems (Mahayana Buddhism, Advaita Vedanta, Marxism) a rigorous dialectical process is necessary in order to understand reality and reform the self and the world accordingly.

By contrast, there are no points of compatibility between Marxism and Islam. A Muslim by definition cannot be an atheist and cannot subscribe to a wholly materialistic worldview. To a Muslim, Marxism is an absurdity, and any Muslim who subscribes to the philosophy of Marxism is marked for death. Communists have indeed been the targets of massacres in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Muslim world. No one opposed the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan as strongly as the most fervent Muslims in the country. India allows for criticism of Marxism but it does not decree the death penalty for Communists; by contrast, a recent Saudi law made it a capital offense to be an atheist. In 1965-1966, over 500,000 Communists and their sympathizers were killed by the Islamic government in Indonesia; 5,000 political prisoners in Iran were killed in 1988 by the Khomeini regime.

Indian Marxists are often the harshest critics of Hinduism and typically sympathize much more with Muslims than they do with Hindus. They should realize, however, that they enjoy the freedom and safety to take these positions only because of the tolerance of the Hindu ethos. Were they to live under Islamic masters, tolerance of their views would be nonexistent and they would have to flee the country, recant, or face execution. That this is so is proven by the simple fact that while there are many well-organized Community groups and political parties in India, there are none in neighboring Islamic Pakistan. Marxists should realize that they have a common enemy with Buddhists and Hindus. Islam does not seek coexistence, it seeks their complete subjugation and destruction. Islam is the enemy of Marxist and Hindu alike.

THE FAILURE OF ISRAEL

While Hindus and Buddhists can rightly claim to be among Islam’s most consistent victims, the hatred that the Qur’an preaches toward Jews finds new manifestations daily in the rhetoric and terror attacks of jihadists. There is no surprise that the Islamic campaign of genocide focuses so much of its attention on Israel, which was formed explicitly for the preservation of the Jews as an ethno-religious group. Israel was established in a region where the Jewish people and religion have historical and cultural roots. Unfortunately, Christianity and Islam also have roots there, and because of these contested territorial claims Israel has been dogged by conflict since its inception. Since both Jews and Arabs base their territorial claims on theology, the nature of their dispute is essentially unresolvable as it currently stands. Thanks to ongoing support from Europe and the United States, Israel has so far managed to fend off its hostile Arab neighbors. Nevertheless, those neighbors would like nothing more than to destroy Israel and re-establish total Arab-Islamic hegemony over the Middle East.

It is sometimes claimed by Islamic apologists that the Jews who lived under Islam enjoyed greater tolerance than did those who lived in Europe. Bat Ye’or and Andrew Bostom, MD, have both published extensively refuting this claim. It is also belied by the historical record. Legendary medieval theologian Moses Maimonides said of his Arab overlords “never did a nation molest, degrade, debase, and hate us as much as they.”⁹⁸ Historian Raphael Israeli describes that the enforced second-class citizenship (dhimmi status) which Jews suffered in the Islamic world “generated … a deep hatred and hostility towards the Jewish minorities throughout Islamdom.”⁹⁹ Essentially, Islamic “tolerance” of Jews has always consisted in offering them a choice between subjugation and annihilation.

The relationship between Jews and Muslims (Arab Muslims in particular) illustrates a crucial point that deserves wider recognition: anti-Semitism is itself a necessary outgrowth of the exclusivity of the Semitic faiths.¹⁰⁰ How else could one explain the anti-Semitic hatred expressed by Arabs for Jews, who are a fellow Semitic people sharing various cultural, linguistic, and even religious similarities?

It is not possible to be anti-Semitic unless one belongs to a Semitic religion. The claims of exclusivity made by the Semitic faiths have no meaning in a different religious context. If Jews claim to be the “chosen people” this is of no interest to a Hindu or Buddhist. In fact, there have been Jewish populations in India and China for many years without any concomitant history of anti-Semitic conflict. But to some Christians and to all Muslims the Jewish claim of being “chosen” is a repudiation of their own belief systems. They cannot accept it. Christian and Islamic theologies have propounded various explanations for why the Jews are not chosen (or are chosen no longer). The important thing to note is that non-Semitic religions have no interest in such theological exclusivism. Anti-Semitism, in short, is entirely a product of Semitic theology itself.

The absurdity at the heart of claims of anti-Semitism can be exposed by one simple question. Why is it right for Jews to claim to be the Chosen People but wrong for Hitler to claim that Germans were the Master Race? According to Jewish scripture, the Israelites fought their own wars of genocide to create the original land of Israel. As Jewish and Islamic history shows, the Semitic approach to religion ensures genocide and theft of land. Islam simply carries forward the same impulse which led the early Jews to conquer Palestine and applies it to the whole world. And unlike the Jews of the 21st century, Islam has not reformed its attitude or approach.

Jewish concerns over anti-Semitism at times today border on absurdity fueled by error. A crucial example of this came in 2015 with a Wall Street Journal article by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks (the chief rabbi of the United Synagogue in London, the largest Jewish temple in Britain). In this article, Sacks goes so far as to claim that anti-Semitism has no Islamic basis but that when it is found in Islam it originated from Europe. A simple perusal of the Qur’an should be enough to refute this suggestion. In that work we find Jews regarded as minions of Satan and consigned to Hell.¹⁰¹ Jews are given a curse for killing Prophets of Allah worthy of permanent humiliation and debasement.¹⁰² They are presented as subhuman creatures comparable to swine and apes and are cursed by the tongues of David and Jesus.¹⁰³

Later Islamic scholarship has merely confirmed the anti-Semitic sentiments to be found in the Qur’an. The influential cleric Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi wrote in the 1960s that the Qur’an describes Jews accurately with “their own particular degenerate characteristics” and claims that good Jews become Muslims while bad ones go to hell. In a 2009 speech, Egyptian cleric Muhammad Hussein Yaqub insisted that “we will fight, defeat and humiliate them until not a single Jew remains on the face of the Earth.” By insisting on anti-Semitism as a peculiarly European phenomenon, Sacks commits a factual, historical, and strategic error. Muslims have their own brand of anti-Semitism that owes nothing to Europe, and it is merely antagonistic to a potential ally for Sacks to claim otherwise. It would be more accurate to describe the sentiments people like Sacks are fearful of as “anti-Jewish” rather than “anti-Semitic.” And there is no more anti-Jewish ideology in the world today than Islam, which is a rival Semitic religion.

Modern Israel, however, has one important point in its favor. The Jewish State was founded and built not by religious nuts but by secular Zionists who felt that it provided the best political solution to Jewish dislocation and their persecution in Europe. These secular Jewish leaders thought Jewish-Arab coexistence was not only desirable, but even essential and mutually beneficial. “We do not wish and we do not need to expel Arabs and take their place,” said David Ben-Gurion in 1937, “all our aspiration is built on the assumption—proven through all our activity in the Land—that there is enough room in the country for ourselves and the Arabs.”¹⁰⁴ This is a noble sentiment, and it is entirely correct.

The spirit of Ben-Gurion should be recovered in modern Israeli politics, and the international community must stop giving succor and diplomatic victories to those in the Arab world who wish to delegitimize and reject the state of Israel. King Hussein of Jordan showed the way forward in Oslo in 1994 when he signed a peace treaty with Israel. Secular leaders such as Hussein can rise above the emotional populism that is so often exploited by rabid anti-Jewish jihadists. Hussein made his decision out of secularist, rational calculation of interests; creedal dogmas such as Islam do not allow for such compromises.

Compare King Hussein’s actions with the Hamas charter, which asserts that “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it.” It further insists that “the land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf consecrated for future Muslim generations until Judgment Day. No one can renounce it or any part, or abandon it or any part of it.”¹⁰⁵ This theologically informed intolerance cannot permit peace.

Islam and Judaism are so antagonistic toward each other because they are so similar. Both are religions of divine law; both are Semitic and uncompromisingly monotheistic. One key difference between them is that Judaism is ethnocentric while Islam is a missionary religion. A second important difference is that modern Judaism has been reformed in that it now recognizes and actually promotes theological and epistemological pluralism. Islam, however, has refused to reform itself and continues to show uncompromising hostility toward all non-Islamic religions. Professor Ivan Kalmar at the University of Toronto explains:

When the Jewish spirit rose again in the form of Islam, it did so in a historical context different from that of ancient Israel … Moreover, like Christianity, Islam threw off Jewish particularism, the insistence that God has chosen one nation over the rest … [but] universalism in its Muslim form was not something better, but something much worse … Islam is not the opponent of Judaism, but merely Judaism gone mad.¹⁰⁶

Make no mistake. The state of Israel and Jews worldwide must recognize that it is white European and North American that are their greatest allies and their Semitic cousins, the Arabs, and Muslims worldwide are their greatest enemies. It is not the other way around, and outside of a few despicable attempts through European history to punish (or kill) the Jews, they have been able to live in relative peace and security for the vast majority of that history. Jews must refrain from the eternal charges of anti-Semitism for two very simple reasons. One, there cannot be anti-Semitism in the absence of Semitic monotheism; and two, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will exist for the next thousand years. This conflict is racial, theological, and a case of “sibling rivalry” between Arabs and Jews. Being numerically insignificant, the Jews need allies if they wish to survive in Israel. Their natural allies are the Europeans. It is therefore improper and discourteous to humiliate and denigrate those who give and support life. For the sake of their own prosperity, Jews should end the accusations of European anti-Semitism.

THE FAILURE OF EUROPE

Europe today is in the process of making the same mistakes as India. Instead of facing a military invasion, however, the Europeans are inviting mass immigration of Muslims into their countries. Under the false logic of multiculturalism, these immigrant populations are allowed to remain isolated and independent and establish de facto states within states. In many of the cities of Britain, France, and the Netherlands there are now places where native people cannot go. The Muslim inhabitants live under sharia law, ironically protected by the shadow of the traditional freedoms of Europe that these Muslims despise.

According to the reigning doctrine of multiculturalism, these Muslim populations are regarded as no threat. Europeans are told that if the Muslims in their countries behave badly it is because they were mistreated. Any problems with immigrant populations are blamed on white racism rather than on Islam. Europeans are taught to be tolerant of Muslims and are accused of prejudice if they dare to criticize them or their religion.

In such an atmosphere, Islam is permitted to grow freely and poison the well of European life. This, combined with the low birth-rate of the native European populations, has led to a looming demographic shift. In Russia today more than 10 percent of the population is Muslim, and the numbers in France may well reach that level in another decade. The most common name for a new baby in Britain today is “Muhammad.” Europe is being Islamized from within. The example of India shows the folly of acquiescing to such a change. Within a generation, the nations of Europe will be in the same condition if nothing is done to reverse the demographic trend. Doing so requires a proper assessment of the threat posed by Islam.

Fortunately, ordinary Europeans are slowly awakening to the threat. Perceptive and critical thinkers, mostly outside of official government or academic channels, are acutely aware of the situation and are beginning to vote accordingly. They are opposed by deluded leaders of the Left and Right who, imprisoned by political-correctness and multiculturalism, prefer to spout the disingenuous claim that Islam is a religion of peace. Of course, the loudest proclaimers are often recipients of Saudi funding or else are wealthy enough to live far away from the Muslim crowds to feel no threat from them.

So far, politicians in Europe have only managed to produce belated half-measures. Banning headscarves and other items of Islamic dress is superficial. Stronger measures are required to disarm Islam in Europe and to discourage its spread worldwide. The suicide of allowing large-scale Muslim immigration must be immediately halted. But, since so much of this damage has already been done, the culture of jihad and Islamic imperialism needs to be uprooted from where it has been growing within European society, choking and endangering native European culture.

Strict no-tolerance deportation policies are necessary for all jihadist imams and propagandists. If they want a jihadist society, these places exist and they should go there. But there is no moral obligation on any community to shelter and aid those who are trying to destroy it. On the contrary, there is a moral obligation to remove this threat. Similarly, madrasa-style Islamic indoctrination must be ruthlessly removed from all European schools. Should Europeans have to pay for the brainwashing of children with an ideology that holds European culture in contempt?

All of these moves require Europeans to shed the self-hating doctrines of multiculturalism, boldly and unashamedly reasserting Europe’s native cultural values and their superiority to the values of Islam. Europe is already a largely secular continent and, in this framework, rational conclusions about the true nature of Islam should not be hard to arrive at. And just as many European countries treasure their own secular ethos, they need to advocate for the same in the so-called Muslim world. At the moment, the European Left is all too eager to flatter Islam and collaborate in the lie that Islam is an anti-imperialist victim. Recognizing the imperialism and aggression of Islam will foster solidarity with its victims across the world.

Too often pan-Europeanism has been advocated by the same multiculturalist left-wingers who seek to erase European identities. But this inclination to unite across Europe should instead be utilized to present a united European front against the Islamization of its society and culture. Russia, which has suffered greatly at the hands of jihadist mass-murderers, can and should be included in this movement. Russia is not America’s enemy, they are potentially a great ally.

When Islam is seen for what it is, then it is easy to argue for the cessation of all support for Islamic regimes that oppress non-Muslims and all non-Arabs. There is a great amount of oil-production outside of Islamic countries and, therefore, no excuse for not systematically minimizing oil imports from Muslim countries that sponsor jihad, Islamic indoctrination, and madrasa-style education such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Qatar. Europe and America have

demonstrated the desire and summoned the moral will to defeat two totalitarian threats in the twentieth century. In Islam, Western Civilization faces a perennial enemy that is infinitely more potent than these past totalitarian threats. Today, Europeans are facing death by a thousand cuts at the hands of multiculturalism, jihadist terrorism, and demographic conquest (through both legal and illegal immigration from Islamic countries). The majority of Muslim immigrants in Europe refuse to assimilate and have a far greater fertility rate than native populations. They have become a de facto state within a state.

THE ETHICAL BASIS FOR TOTAL WAR AGAINST ISLAMIC IMPERIALISM

Islam says that truth comes from Allah and was revealed directly to the Prophet Muhammad. Such claims are purely metaphysical, meaning they assume the existence of a separate world outside of or beyond nature. Further, they assume that one very special person can have knowledge of this realm, and this person must be believed completely under the threat of punishment in another metaphysical realm that lies outside nature (namely, hell).

As this book has argued, such metaphysical claims fail on two points, one linguistic and one scientific. On the linguistic point, the philosopher A.J. Ayer has argued that the nature of language is such that any metaphysical statement is inherently meaningless. For a linguistic statement to make sense, it must be possible to verify its truth through sense experience. But statements such as “Allah exists” can never be verified one way or the other through the senses. Therefore they are, strictly speaking, meaningless.¹⁰⁷ The scientific objection to metaphysics is that although someone like Muhammad may claim to have access to another realm of reality, any notions he can give us of this realm must necessarily be composed of ideas and impressions which we already have. Those ideas and impressions come to us from our observation of the physical world as we know it. Therefore, any knowledge we may be supposed to have of a metaphysical reality is actually based on our knowledge of physical reality.

It is only on the basis of careful empirical observation of the physical world that human culture has been able to advance and develop. Through a process of trial and error human beings learn about what works and what does not. Metaphysical revelations have never helped a man to build a house, streamline a process, or invent a device. Science and empirical investigations are advanced versions of this same process of trial and error that humans have always used. The proper development of science requires freedom of inquiry, which metaphysical systems such as Islam deny their followers. It also requires what philosopher Karl Popper calls falsifiability, meaning that it investigates claims that can be proven to be false or not false.

Islam puts forward claims that by definition cannot develop or advance. At the same time, they hinder all other progress by denying freedom of inquiry or the utility of studying the natural world. Islam’s claims are rooted in the seventh century teachings of a man who claimed to offer the final revelation of God to man. As such, these claims cannot be questioned, cannot be improved, and cannot be reformed. This is why Islamic movements such as al-Qaeda or ISIS are essentially nostalgia exercises. Their adherents look back to an idealized past of Muhammad’s lifetime and seek to reacquire it through brutal and literalist application of Islam’s laws.

When Islamic texts are considered from this literal perspective, one can only laugh at how childishly absurd it is. According to Islam, the Christian trinity is the father, mother, and the son.¹⁰⁸ This is factually wrong, as any Christian could tell you, but literal Islamists must believe it. According to Islam, Allah once sent a raven to scratch up the ground to show a man how to bury his brother.¹⁰⁹ According to Islam, genies (or jinn) are real spiritual creatures made by Allah out of fire to be adversaries to men.¹¹⁰ According to Islam, Muhammad once split the moon in two.¹¹¹

One of the great examples of Islamic absurdity is the case of Muhammad’s “Night Journey.” Described briefly in Sura 17, this is known in great detail from the Hadith. The story itself has problems on its face because in it Muhammad claims to visit the “furthest mosque” in the world in one night and this is supposed to be in Jerusalem. However, the furthest mosque at the time when the story is alleged to have taken place was nowhere near Jerusalem. In the story, Muhammad says his body was cut open from throat to stomach and filled with special water as well as wisdom and belief. Then he was taken physically up to heaven on a white animal (something between a mule and a donkey in size, he says) and allowed to meet with Adam and Jesus and other prophets. He also met with Moses and managed to talk Allah down from requiring 50 prayers a day for his followers to only five. The whole thing reads like one of Rudyard Kipling’s “Just So Stories.”

When the metaphysical claims of Muhammad are rejected we can see his actions in their proper light. What Muhammad was doing was an attempt to secure power and the superiority of his own people over that of others. His elimination of the Banu Qurayza tribe in Medina was not a divine act mandated by Allah as an example of what should happen to those who betrayed the Prophet. It was nothing more than genocide to clear the city of a competing tribe and acquire that tribe’s possessions for his own people. His marriage to the six-year-old Aisha was not some complicated holy marriage; it was a disturbing and pedophilic relationship from a man who seems to have been inordinately fond of a wide variety of sexual conquests. The example Muhammad set for his followers is clearly not a spiritual example but the example of a warlord. It is no accident that his most ardent and vocal followers today all seem to be low-level warlords dreaming of greater power and glory. Once the metaphysical justifications of Muhammad’s actions are removed we can see that he was not a religious hero at all; he was Genghis Khan with a theology.

We can expand this claim more broadly to include any metaphysical justification used for war. There is no such thing as religious conflict, in a sense. Wars are always fought over territory and property. A religious justification is nothing more than a myth or a story to disguise unjust desires for someone else’s things. One of the earliest examples of this religious hoax comes in the Old Testament with Joshua’s siege of Jericho. According to the account in Exodus, Yahweh gifted the land of Canaan and all its property to the Israelites and commanded them to destroy the people of Jericho. Following these divine commands, therefore, the Israelites destroyed the city, killed all the adult males, and even slaughtered the animals. The virgins of the city were taken by their Hebrew captors. The present atrocities of ISIS and Boko Haram are essentially reenactments of this same pattern. It is not a righteous war these groups are carrying on, it is slaughter with mythical justification.

The opposition to Islam must proceed from an epistemological rather than a metaphysical basis. It is not God who commands us to hate or fear the Muslims, it is history, Muslim threats, and hateful and murderous Muslim actions. Simple human prudence tells us to act on behalf of our own self-preservation. On a global level our opposition begins with a United Front of the Victims of Jihad. The Hindus, Buddhists, Middle Eastern Christians, African Christians, Jews, and Russians are all on the firing line when it comes to suffering violence directly at the hands of Islam.

A United Front could easily include as many as 90 percent of Muslims as well since Islam offers them little more than oppression and uses them as pawns against the infidel. Today’s Muslims are mostly descendants of Islam’s earlier victims. The world should therefore bring them education into rationalist and empirical ways of thinking and free them from mental slavery and superstition. If human beings can develop empirical sciences such as physics, chemistry, and biology, they can also deconstruct absurd metaphysics and theologies that harm them. Women in particular deserve to be liberated from the yoke of Islamic oppression that renders them third-class citizens. Generally, the governments of Islamic countries should be reformed along the model established by Turkey’s founding father Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. This model emphasizes secularism, democracy, and critical thought. Ataturk established a vigilant state to monitor Turkish society, encourage its modernization, and keep Islamic fundamentalism at bay.

A United Front against Islam should promote secular revolution, particularly in the Islamic world. In the 1950s such a revolution was already underway when it was halted and reversed thanks in part to the social and economic failures of Arab socialism but also to the misguided Cold War policy of the United States. Such a revolution should be encouraged again to promote the values of secularism and empiricism around the Islamic world. The advantages of such an approach are obvious: increased wealth, increased freedom, and increased enjoyment of life.

WHAT THE WORLD CAN DO

The entire Middle East must be demilitarized, democratized, and secularized if the ideology of Islamic imperialism is to be defeated. This will not be solely a matter of military struggle. The aim should be accomplished by logical persuasion when possible, by propaganda when useful, and by force when necessary. It is an ideological battle as well as a physical one. As such, the universities will be a key battleground. Just as the jihadists have used madrasas and Islamic universities to spread their hateful dogmas, the spirit of free inquiry can be kept alive and spread through Western-style universities. If these bulwarks of knowledge fall prey to political correctness and multicultural weak-mindedness it diminishes and disables our ability to combat Islam.

Above all, the non-Muslim world must promote the ideals of free minds and free markets. One of the earliest methods for promoting free inquiry was the development and encouragement of the art of disputation known as dialectics. This method was used by such luminaries as Buddha, Socrates, Aristotle, and the great Hindu philosopher Sankara. Islam, which is based on faith and submission, makes little use of dialectical thinking. Dialectical thinking is crucial for the dissemination of a rational worldview and allows for development and progress for humanity. In short, Muslims should emulate Socrates, not Muhammad.

One of the best examples of the free minds and free markets approach can be found on the Korean Peninsula. The North concentrated on obedience to a dictatorial leader and the development of military might. The South embraced American-style free minds and free markets. Less than 60 years later, the different results of the two approaches are stark. South Korea has been transformed from a mostly uncultured nation of illiterate farmers into a global economic powerhouse. Their cousins in the North are mired in cultural and economic stagnation, kept afloat by China.

Muslim countries such as Saudi Arabia enjoy enormous wealth due to their surplus of valuable hydrocarbons. Yet what have such countries accomplished for all their wealth? Compare the scientific and cultural achievements of Saudi Arabia with those of South Korea and the results are stark. The Saudis have wealth, yes, but they use it to acquire luxury goods designed and made elsewhere. They have comparatively few scientific contributions of note. They have made little mark on the world outside of luxury good purchases and terrorism. The best-known Saudi Arabian of the last 60 years is Osama bin Laden.

Islam plunders rather than adds to the wealth of non-Islamic civilizations. Consider the case of Mes Aynek in Afghanistan. This region is home to what could be more than $100 billion worth of copper deposits. The copper is sitting beneath the ruins of a flourishing Buddhist civilization from centuries ago. Located along the fabled Silk Road, this area held temples, a copper smelter, and signs of the merging of multiple cultures over a period spanning multiple generations. The whole region was seized forcibly by Muslims and subjected to demographic conquest. Today, the country is finding it difficult to take advantage of either the cultural or the mineral wealth lying under the soil. Ask a simple question: does Islam make the Afghans more or less likely to access and utilize this wealth? Has there been any improvement in the material and spiritual comfort of the Afghan people since they were forced to leave Hinduism and Buddhism in the 8th century? For centuries, Afghanistan was the home of Buddhist universities and monasteries for celibate monks. Today, it is home to nearly 1.6 million heroin addicts.¹¹² Many children, girls and boys, are sexually abused by grown men.¹¹³ In what way has Afghanistan benefited from its forcible conversion to Islam?

The Western countries achieved unprecedented wealth through an embrace of free speech, critical thought, the scientific method, and religious tolerance. One of the hallmarks of this embrace is the Constitution of the United States of America. The Constitution takes as a bedrock assumption that the free people of a country may come together to decide for themselves how they wish to be governed:

The American Constitution … lays out its bold theme – that all power derives from the people – with force and grace … The Constitution’s root principle, deeply embedded in its overall structure in countless clauses, is popular sovereignty: rule by the People.¹¹⁴

Unlike Islam, the Constitution also acts to protect the interests of minority groups from being completely overrun, as Thomas Jefferson so eloquently stated:

Bear in mind that this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will, to be rightful, must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal laws must protect, and to violate would be oppression.¹¹⁵

It has endured for more than two centuries because it offers flexibility, allowing for the people to change their minds over time as new discoveries or new ways of living become common.

Islam is eternally hostile to the West in its guiding principles. Its metaphysical ideology demands submission to the revealed word of Allah. Any speech or thought which runs counter to that word is not permitted; therefore, there can be no freedom of speech or critical thought in Islam. According to Islam, the way of life it presents is perfect and complete. Therefore there can be no growth, no flexibility, no change. The U.S. Constitution allows amendments, but there are no amendments in Islam. Furthermore, Muslims are taught that they must destroy all non-believers in order to usher in an age of eternal peace. The only intelligent response from non-believers of the world must be to oppose Islam—beginning by countering its most pressing current threat, which is demographic overrun.

For all Western nations, the demographic threat from Islam must be countered immediately and decisively. Mass immigration from Islamic countries must end. The practice of importing labor from Muslim countries must stop. In combating terrorism worldwide, we must all accept the logic and necessity of profiling. There is no reason to pretend that disabled elderly white women are a legitimate terror threat on par with young men from Islamic countries. The demographic profile of typical terrorists is well known and it should be utilized prudently and effectively. Further, it is both impossible and suicidal to completely shut down any nation due to terror threats. You can’t close malls, roadways, airports, schools, stadiums, hospitals, or other public places simply out of fear. Instead, the best way to handle the threat is to profile or perish. When the predominant terrorist threat comes from immigrant Arab men, there is no reason to pretend that elderly white women are an equal danger.

There is ample proof that the nations of the East should make common cause with the West to combat Islam. In January 2015, ISIS kidnapped two Japanese men and filmed a video demanding $200 million for the release of the hostages or else they would be killed. “Although you are more than 8,500 kilometers away from the Islamic State, you willingly volunteered to take part in this crusade,” a masked representative of ISIS told the Japanese on the video.¹¹⁶ The Japanese men were beheaded. China, too, has been subject to attacks. In 2014, nearly 100 people (59 of them terrorists) were killed in a terror attack in China’s Xinjiang province. In what was described as a “premeditated” act, a gang armed with knives and similar weapons attacked both civilians and police and vandalized multiple vehicles. According to the Chinese news agency, the attack was masterminded by someone connected to a terror organization known as the “East Turkestan Islamic Movement.”¹¹⁷ Clearly, both China and Japan have a common cause in opposing Islam.

The battle against Islam should also be local. Individuals must take the initiative. In the early stages, it may well be individuals alone who do so, as many of the leaders of the world remain mired in muddled multiculturalist thinking which prevents them from seeing the threat posed by Islam. What individuals can do varies a great deal according to their country of origin and walk of life, but bear in mind that individuals in democratic societies are far less restricted than the courageous people in Muslim societies under sharia.

First, Americans who enjoy the best freedom of speech protections in the world should take full advantage of those protections. We are permitted to speak out against virtually anything and to express our views without fear of censure. The Internet provides an excellent platform; it is the death of Islam. Use it to create blogs or study groups and to educate others about the threat. Make your voice heard. Above all, do not forget that the constitution of Islam lies in the Qur’an; the Qur’anis the complete antithesis of the U.S. Constitution. The two cannot co-exist.

Next, Americans should get organized. We need citizen revolutionaries in the fight against Islam. Whoever reads this book can become a leader in the fight, whether at a grassroots level or above. Work with mayors, town councils, and representatives at all levels. Those with the time and resources can organize and influence political pressure groups such as AARP, which already enjoy considerable leverage with politicians. Voting blocks and pressure groups can have an impressive effect over American political policy. If enough people get organized to resist the influence of Islam, they can carry significant weight. Retired persons in the United States are potentially one of the most powerful forces imaginable in the fight against Islam. They have the time, the resources, and the willpower to make a difference. All that is needed is full awareness of the nature of the threat.

Individuals in Europe may have many similar rights to Americans, but their situation offers certain unique opportunities and limitations. Direct criticism of Islam is somewhat limited in many European countries (compared to what is possible in the U.S.) due to restrictions on speech which officials deem “hateful” toward a religion. At the same time, however, Europeans already have existing political parties that have the restriction of Islamic immigration and Islamic influence in their platforms. Europeans should support such parties, and encourage other political parties to work with them and grant their demands. Individuals in Europe should make their fellow citizens aware of the danger of Islam and the necessity of making a stand against it; they should also encourage the assertion of local and national identity against Islamic encroachment on the one hand and bland “multiculturalism” on the other.

In the Middle East and Africa, in countries with Muslim majorities or large Muslim minorities, a systematic campaign of education is necessary to deter the development of Islamic literalism. Such education should focus not on theology but on secular ethics, critical thought, and scientific inquiry. Islam has no defense against the penetrating inquiry of reason and empiricism because its claims cannot be rationally justified. This strategy would be effective in these regions because it does not by itself provoke open confrontation with Islamic ideologues. Instead of opposing Islam directly, individuals will simply work toward developing a reasonable alternative to Islam. Once the benefits of that alternative become clear, it will become easier for members of society to join in.

Islam has been far more damaging to Africa than Europeans ever were. Muslims ran the slave trade in much of Africa for centuries, working its own African slaves to death in the Middle East long before Western nations, save the Romans, took up the practice. Muslims were also the last to give up slavery, with some nations (notably Saudi Arabia) not even outlawing slavery until the 1960s. The Muslim nation of Mauritania was the last nation to do so in 2003. Just a few years ago, Saudi Arabia had a Facebook advertisement for the sale of a “black castrated slave.”¹¹⁸ Today, de facto slavery still exists in the GCC in the form of migrant workers (as this book has amply documented). Only free minds and free markets will save Africa from the threat of Islamic imperialism.

Individuals in India, Pakistan, and Iran should consider themselves heirs to a non-Islamic civilization whose greatness should be rediscovered. Muslims in Pakistan are Hindus who have abandoned their superior cultural heritage for a fanatical medieval outlook that offers them nothing but self-destruction. In Iran, the Aryan civilization of Persia is already remembered with pride by most young Iranians.

SECULAR HUMANISM AS A SUPERIOR ALTERNATIVE

The alternative to Islam is not a rival theology—not Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, or Buddhism—it is secularism. In the words of Oxford philosopher Shabbir Akhtar, secular humanism is the “most astute and energetic contemporary antagonist of Islam.”¹¹⁹ Secular humanism is the necessary antidote to Muslim ideologues trapped in a medieval mentality. Islam has infinite energy to combat rival theologies with assertions based on faith, but it has no grounds to answer empirical observations and scientific reasoning.

The theology of Islam has been the driving force behind Islamic imperialism since Muhammad first created it. Most of the Muslim world follows a literalist interpretation of Islam which is intransigent to reason and scientific thinking and is responsible for the stagnation of traditional Muslim societies. As the world progresses through its embrace of secular humanist principles, literalist Islam remains unable to accommodate or compromise with secularism. This is because Islam demands unthinking allegiance to theological dogmas and to the cult of Muhammad. For Islamic scholars, any deviation from literal Islam is blasphemy, and any refutation is considered apostasy punishable by death.

The premise of secular humanism, by contrast, is that reason and experience, scientific method, and openness to change and adaptability should be the driving forces of civilization. Dogmas based in revelation are to be left alone or cast aside. In the words of Scottish philosopher David Hume:

If we take in our hand any volume of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance, let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of face and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames, for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.¹²⁰

Since the Enlightenment, the West has embraced these principles and left behind the era of religious wars. It has developed science and technology to a high degree and made rapid advancement. By comparison, the Islamic nations have stagnated and declined.

Literal Islam, based in the seventh century conditions of Muhammad, is unable to accommodate new facts uncovered by science and the exercise of reason. It is unable to deal with the developments of technologies and devices unimagined by Muhammad. The only option literal Islam has in the face of the modern world is to return to the seventh century. This is neither acceptable nor desirable.

Secular humanism is premised on the free use of reason and choice. Literal Islam insists that Quranic injunctions guide and micromanage every aspect of a Muslim’s life, leaving no room for privacy or conscience. Islam forbids free thinking and moral choice. All thought and conscience is predetermined by Quranic dictates.

Given the fundamental incompatibility of the ideologies of Islam and secular humanism, it is easy to see why the latter is seen as a mortal threat to Islam. Muslims who hesitate to embrace secular humanist values show that Islam is really very brittle and unable to survive the tests of free thought and rational inquiry. Islam therefore reacts defensively and with hostility to the advances of secular humanism. The violence of Islam’s reaction reveals its weakness. Muslim ideologues sense that the fantasy of a return to the seventh century Arabian utopia would be abandoned as a relic if the Muslim masses embraced rational thought and modern science.

Fortunately, there are precedents in the nations that make up the Islamic world for establishing secular regimes. Iran in the 1950s and 60s was governed by a secular modern government under Reza Shah Pahlavi. Modern Turkey was established after the First World War by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk as a defiantly secularist nation. In Syria, the Assad family has implemented a variety of secular and social reforms, including women’s suffrage. Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan in Central Asia are all secular nations. Kosovo’s constitution declares it is a secular state that will remain neutral in matters of religious beliefs. Secularism is not foreign to Islamic countries. Rather, these are examples to build upon.

Secular humanism is the most potent antidote to the poison of Islamic claims. The absurdities of theology cannot stand in the face of the relentless pursuit of reason and empiricism. Islam will not be defeated by rival religions and certainly not by foolish political correctness. We must have the courage of our convictions; reason is our guide.

INFIDELS OF THE WORLD, UNITE!

Uniting a grand coalition of infidels from around the world against Islam will save us from the existential threat and free Muslims themselves from Islam. Creating such a coalition requires us to learn from past mistakes. In the wake of 9/11, America and the West awoke to the threat of Islam, but the focus and strategy were all wrong. Convincing themselves that jihadists were just aberrations, Western governments embarked on a strategy of targeted campaigns against individuals and specific groups. Afghanistan and Iraq became key battlegrounds. But by ignoring and denying the fundamentally Islamic ideology behind the groups they wanted to target, Western governments ensured their approach would fail. The enemy is the ideology of Islamic imperialism. Individual terrorists and groups are a secondary set of enemies. Terrorists kill and die to defend their worldview, their metaphysics, and their epistemology (or lack thereof).

For the world to correctly identify the threat and unite against it we must put aside less urgent antagonisms and grievances. For example, the days of opposing or withholding support from Leftist secularists in the Middle East must be left in the past. Such people are our greatest potential allies in the region. There may be real causes of disagreement between Western governments and Middle East Leftists, but these pale in comparison to our common foe. Similarly, it is important for Israel to focus on Israel’s and Europe’s mutual enemy, rather than European anti-Semitism. Most of the anti-Semitism currently visible in Europe comes from its Muslim minorities. By focusing on their common enemy, Israel and its European allies can enhance their mutual security while establishing a more stable and long-term partnership.

The non-Muslim world must promote and defend secularism because secularism is the greatest adversary of Islamic imperialism. Reason is infinitely more potent than Allah’s revelation. Secular humanism is an existential threat to the fairy tales of Islam because it is based on reason, logic, and experience. Our greatest weapon against Islam is the relentless pursuit of reason. It is reason that liberates all human beings—the millions of Muslim masses included. Islam cannot withstand anything like critical thought or empirical deconstruction. A critical examination of the doctrine of Islam and the life and teachings of Muhammad is the necessary prelude to the victory of the free world over the tyranny of Islam.

Infidels of the world can help launch the secular revolution that the Middle East so clearly and so desperately needs. In many cases, this revolution is exactly what the people most desire, even if they may not know it yet. It is clear that non-Muslims around the world share a vital common interest in the fight against Islam. But perhaps it is not so well appreciated just how many of those we regard as Muslims are actually prisoners in the Islamic world, gaining no benefits from Islam. Hundreds of millions of Muslims around the world are born with two stark options: either agree to follow the faith of their parents or face the death penalty for apostasy. The former choice, one can easily imagine, is not always accepted with enthusiasm so much as resignation. Many of these Muslims, and particularly the non-Arabs, are only second-class citizens of an illusory ummah; they are Islam’s greatest and most pitiful victims.

A key lesser antagonism that must be overcome to assemble this grand coalition is the one between Russia and the West. Russia is a rational geopolitical power that poses no serious demographic threat. They are part of Western Civilization and well aware of the threat posed by Islam because they and much of the Orthodox Christian world have been living at Islam’s doorstep for centuries. Instead of sanctioning Russia over a quibble about the Ukraine, we should be embracing them as an ally in the struggle against our common Islamic enemy.

Across Europe, great historical heritages are being abandoned by the politically correct as they are being attacked by genocidal Muslims. It is time for all nations to choose sides in this clash of civilizations. There is no multicultural middle ground. Do we want to preserve Teutonic, Nordic, Slavic, Anglo-Saxon, Hellenic, and other native cultures? Does the inheritance of classical civilization merit preservation? If so there is no alternative but to fight Arab imperialism or Islam will obliterate all of it. It is a mistake to combat Islam with religion. Culture, race, and language are much stronger bonds. To call Western civilization “Judeo-Christian” is inaccurate and self-defeating. It ignores the contributions of Hellenic, Germanic, Roman, Anglo-Saxon, and other cultures to the whole. People must be willing to stand up for these cultural traditions and preserve them.

The threat is not what Western governments and the media would have you believe. The root problem is not bin Laden. It is not al-Qaeda. It is not the Palestinians. It is not Iran, or ISIS, or Boko Haram. The problem is Muhammad, sharia law, and the Qur’an. It is a so-called religion that stands in sharp contrast to the true religions of the world. The problem is Muhammad’s teachings, Muhammad’s example, and Muhammad’s creation. It is the creation of a man who shares little in common with the truly religious leaders of the world like Jesus, Buddha, or Confucius. The problem is Islam.

To fight Islam we must launch a global movement of counter-jihad. This movement can and should be started by regular people just like you and me. Infidels of the world unite!

PART NINE

CHAPTER FORTY

Postscript

Islamic Sharia Law says all men are not created equal, but the American Declaration of Independence says otherwise. Islamic Sharia Law, which defines Islamic Government power, does not derive through the consent of the governed; and such law is therefore a feature of unjust and tyrannical government power—so says the American Declaration of Independence. Islamic Sharia Law sanctions murder of non-Muslims and apostate Muslims; and so it violates the God-given human right to life which our forefathers spelled out in the Declaration of Independence. Islamic Sharia Law suppresses human liberty which our forefathers declared to be a God-given human right; and our sacred liberty, such as freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom to defend human life, and the other freedoms were then enumerated in, and secured by our Constitution and Bill of Rights. Our right to the pursuit of happiness, declared in the American Declaration of Independence is nullified by Sharia Law because there can be no happiness if our right to life and liberty are destroyed.

— Author Unknown

The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.

— Camus

Man is quite insane. He wouldn’t know how to create a maggot, and he creates Gods by the dozen.

— Montaigne

When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion, it is called a Religion.

— Robert Pirsig

Avoid novelties, for every novelty is an innovation, and every innovation is an error.

— Saying attributed to Muhammad¹

British historian Arnold Toynbee famously declared that “Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.” Today, Western Civilization is in the process of committing suicide through multiculturalism, mass immigration, and demographic conquest at the hands of Islam. The future of that civilization is in danger, and its fate can be read in the fates of others—Hindu civilization in Pakistan, Buddhist civilization in Afghanistan, Coptic civilization in Egypt, Zoroastrian civilization in Iran, Hellenic civilization in Turkey, Christian civilization in North Africa and the Middle East.

At the end of this book, the reader must ask himself whether Islam truly is a peaceful religion as its apologists claim. Or is it rather an imperial force that destroys everything in its path? Are those nations that were forcibly converted to Islam better off for it? Pakistan, Afghanistan, Egypt, Iran, Turkey, North Africa, and the Middle East—has Islam made them great, or has it borrowed their pre-Islamic glories for a time and then destroyed them? Today, the only wealthy parts of the Islamic world are so mainly because of large deposits of oil and natural gas. Prior to the extraction of those resources in the mid-20th century, Mecca and Medina were largely unpopulated backwaters for centuries.

Wherever one looks in the Muslim world, one sees volatility rather than wealth and stability. In Yemen, this volatility has led to a near-complete collapse of the government as Muslims kill Muslims for being the wrong kind of Muslim. A league of Sunni Arabs, led by Saudi Arabia, was forced to intervene against Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthis to prevent a full-scale revolution. The volatility has also spread beyond national boundaries, as it did in February 2015 when Muslim attackers murdered staff members of the Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris over articles they considered offensive to Islam.

In a recent article for Britain’s Daily Mail newspaper, Nobel Prize-winning author V.S. Naipaul remarked that ISIS

is dedicated to a contemporary holocaust. It has pledged itself to the murder of Shias, Jews, Christians, Copts, Yazidis, and anyone it can, however fancifully, accuse of being a spy. It has wiped out the civilian populations of whole regions and towns. Isis [sic] could very credibly abandon the label of Caliphate and call itself the Fourth Reich.²

The allusion to the Nazis is not far-fetched. Rather, the threat to world civilization presented by ISIS is far greater than what the Nazis offered—they at least preserved art (albeit by stealing it for their own use) and valued innovation. Islamic fundamentalists, by contrast, have been destroying all vestiges of the civilizations they conquer for fourteen centuries. They seek to freeze the world in a 7th century poverty of mind and spirit. Whatever they cannot do by the sword they will seek to accomplish by simply outbreeding their enemies.

Such volatility calls for decisive political action, yet at every turn Western leaders have failed to understand or to respond correctly. As of this writing, American politicians are gearing up for the 2016 presidential campaign. Top candidates such as Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush, along with others of both parties, now freely admit that the Iraq War was a mistake. This admission is both too little and too late. How can one explain to the families of the hundreds of thousands of dead and injured that your policies have failed? “I guess I got it wrong,” which were Clinton’s words, are far too inadequate for such a catastrophe. Even the attempt to put an end to Afghanistan’s drug trade has ended in a miserable and expensive ($7.6 billion) failure.³

In fact, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were failures before they even began. They were failures because the politicians and the generals failed to understand who their enemy was. The enemy was not the Afghanis or the Iraqis, of course, yet they have suffered disproportionately. Our enemy was not “terrorism,” which is only a concept and a technique used by the enemy. Our enemy was not even the Taliban or al-Qaeda, though these may have been particular manifestations of the true enemy. No, as this book has argued repeatedly and clearly, our enemy was real, literal Islam. The enemy of Western Civilization is Muhammad, the Qur’an, and sharia.

As a result of this failure, American intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan has made the situation worse. A secular and stable government in Iraq has been replaced with a government based on Islam and a country fractured along religious lines. ISIS now controls a large part of the territory of Iraq. America followed up the Iraq and Afghanistan debacles by compounding the mistake—helping to overthrow (or trying to overthrow) secular dictators in Libya and Syria or watching helplessly while Mubarak was overthrown in Egypt and briefly replaced by the literal Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood. Only the intervention of the Egyptian military prevented this latter disaster from becoming worse than it was.

The Western powers have failed to understand that by promoting democracy without also promoting secularism, their mad rush to overthrow Middle East dictators has only opened the door for Islamic extremists to fill the void. They do not realize that Islamic “democracy” is not democracy at all; it is only the replacement of secular dictators with a far more brutal and uncompromising religious authority. In short, supporting democracy without secularism is playing right into the hands of our enemy—literal Islam.

Only now, after more than a decade of failure in Iraq and Afghanistan, and across the Islamic world, is the nature of the enemy becoming clear to some in the West. While Western leaders continue to deny it, thoughtful observers have begun to recognize that the various terror organizations, armies, and militias—the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, ISIS in Iraq and Syria, Boko Haram in Nigeria, the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and so on—are only different aspects of the same global Sunni fundamentalist movement. The goal of every one of these groups is essentially the same: to establish a global Islamic caliphate and impose the medieval sharia law code upon all humanity. Given the chance, each one of these groups would overthrow a local secular government and replace it with a theocratic dictatorship in the mold of the first caliphs of Islam.

The most recent example as of this writing comes with the negotiations between Iran and the U.S. over Iran’s covert pursuit of nuclear weapons. Fearing the result of these negotiations would endanger his country, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu flew to the U.S. for an almost unprecedented speech before Congress asking them not to make a deal. Given Iran’s known sponsorship of global terrorism, Netanyahu’s concerns are well founded and largely shared by the international community (and the majority of the American public). For more than two decades Netanyahu has opposed Iran’s nuclear and imperial ambitions in the Middle East.

Yet neither Netanyahu nor President Obama has offered a viable solution to the problem of Iran. President Obama, out of folly or secret sympathy with Iran’s religious leaders, believes that Iran can be appeased and talked out of its pursuit of nuclear weapons. While such a deal might be agreed to and signed, it would mean nothing. Religious deception (the Arabic term for which is taqiyya) has been part of Islam from the beginning. Muhammad explicitly directed his followers to make deals with non-Muslims when they had to, but they only had to honor them until they had recovered their power. It is perfectly acceptable to lie to non-Muslims and to make deals with non-Muslims that they have every intention of breaking at the first opportunity. Since Iran has repeatedly broken agreements concerning the inspection of its nuclear development facilities, there is no reason to believe it will not do so again.

Netanyahu, on the other hand, would be satisfied by a forced scrapping of Iran’s nuclear program. Even if this were to happen, Israel would still be threatened by demographic overrun. Nuclear weapons would be unnecessary if in 50 years Israel is surrounded by increasingly hostile Muslim nations, or overwhelmed from within by the breeding of Palestinian Arabs. The real threat to Israel’s security comes not from possible nuclear weapons but from the force that would direct those weapons—that is, the real threat comes from Islam.

Maryam Rajavi, an Iranian opposition leader in exile whom this book has discussed and praised for her efforts, is on record expressing considerable doubts for the deal President Obama has proposed with Iran. Calling the pursuit of nuclear weapons “one of three pillars that will ensure the continuity of the control [the regime] established over Iran with the 1979 revolution,” Rajavi characterized the proposed deal as a capitulation.⁴ Congress has not yet ratified Obama’s deal, but the crucial point is the same whatever the congressional outcome: our leaders simply do not know how to deal with the threat of Islam. The idea that Iran’s mullahs can be pacified or that their promises are anything more than empty words and gestures is absurd to anyone with an understanding of Islam or taqiyya (religious deception). They are jihadists, just like ISIS and the Muslim Brotherhood—the key difference being who they want to be in charge of Muslims.

This book has argued that we must recognize that jihadist organizations are not separate entities, but separate expressions of the same single ideology of Islam. This ideology is not an extremist or inaccurate interpretation, either: it is founded on the literal meaning of the words in Islam’s holiest and most authoritative texts, the Qur’an, the Hadith, and the Sira. The enemy is Muhammad and his work in this trilogy of texts. In this war, we must target not just the jihadi groups but the ideology which inspires and creates them. Battling such an ideology may seem like an enormous task, but there is good cause for hope.

First, the monumental attacks of 9/11 were a serious overreach for the forces of global jihad. These attacks, plus subsequent spectacular attacks in such countries as Britain, Spain, and India, exposed the nature and agenda of jihad as never before. Prior to 9/11, only a select few academics and researchers knew much about the psychology, history, and agenda of Islam. After 9/11, many ordinary citizens have become familiar with the aims and terminology of jihad, while the protests of Islamic apologists have worn increasingly thin. Repeated acts of barbarity and violence make it difficult to sustain the proposition that Islam is a peaceful religion willing to coexist with others.

Second, with the development of the Internet there is now ample information about Islam available instantly at one’s fingertips. Islam thrives on ignorance—ignorance of its true aims, ignorance of its true beliefs, and ignorance of its true actions. With the Internet, such ignorance becomes far more difficult to accept. Of course, the Internet can be a double-edged sword, as virulent jihadist groups can use it to spread their propaganda and recruit members. However, I believe that what the jihadists offer is far less appealing. In the end, anti-jihadists will likely find greater success in undermining Islamic propaganda, but we must be effective and aggressive. As a rule, the Internet and freedom of speech are our two most potent weapons against Islam.

Third, the development of sectarian violence is turning some people in the Muslim world away from Islam entirely. Perhaps the most interesting example of this comes from Iraqi Kurdistan, which borders ISIS-controlled territory. Fed up with ISIS and sectarian violence, some Kurds in this country are returning to the ancient and native religion of Zoroastrianism (founded by a man born in Kurdish Iran 3,500 years ago). Although it is difficult to determine how many Kurds have converted, the topic has become enormously popular on social media in the autonomous region.⁵ When offered a choice, people like the Kurds may well choose simply to leave the brutality of Islam.

Building on these causes for hope, this book offers a long-term solution to the problem of Islam. That solution begins with understanding our true enemy, then proceeds to opposing the most powerful and dangerous avatars of that enemy. In other words, we must oppose the Axis of Jihad, which is Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan. These three nations are the wealthiest and most powerful (militarily and ideologically) of all exporters of jihad and literal Islam.

With Iran, the solution must come from within the country itself. It is the fundamentalist religious regime, not the Iranian people, which is our enemy here. Fortunately, there are already representatives of the forces of democracy and secularism in Iran; these should be encouraged and supported. One example is Iran’s National Council of Resistance (NCRI). Led by human rights activist Maryam Rajavi, NCRI is a powerful advocate for democratization and secularization of the Iranian state. Rajavi and her organization offer a better future for Iran and its people.

The youth of Iran also offer abundant cause for hope. The majority of Iranians are under 35 years old. They have no memory of the 1979 Islamic Revolution or the government of the Shah that preceded it. Their experience with politics is limited to the failures and broken promises of the mullahs who currently oppress them. Thanks to the Internet and mass media this generation is more western-oriented and democratic in its temperament and aspirations than the older generations. They naturally loathe Iran’s theocratic regime and would be glad to be rid of it.

Iran, however, represents only a small fraction of the global problem presented by Islam. As a Shia state, Iran represents scarcely 15% of the total world Muslim population. An even bigger threat to Israel, the United States, and the world comes from the Sunni majority. Sunni Islamic fundamentalism is at present the single largest source of terror in the world. The threat posed by Sunni fundamentalism comes in multiple forms. Terrorism is only one form—others include the potential use of weapons of mass destruction and demographic conquest. By killing, terrorizing, and outbreeding non-Muslims, Sunni fundamentalists hope to impose their ideology on the world. If Iran acquired nuclear weapons, all the Sunni nations in the region would feel compelled to do likewise. (Saudi Arabia has already been in talks with Pakistan to purchase some of its weapons if Iran goes nuclear.) This result would be disastrous for the entire world.

With the Saudis, the solution begins with admitting what many already know—that Saudi Arabia is our enemy. Bin Laden and the majority of 9/11 hijackers were Saudis. There is strong reason to believe that Saudi Arabia directly financed the attacks. The U.S. Senate inquiry into 9/11 contains 28 classified pages which, in the words of former Senator Bob Graham, “go to the question of who financed 9/11 and they point a strong finger at Saudi Arabia.”⁶ Senator Rand Paul and others have fought with the Obama administration over declassifying these pages, so far to no avail. Whatever those pages may reveal, it has been documented (see Part 2, Chapter 1 of this book) that Saudi money finances a large portion of terror around the world and their government does little to nothing to stop it. Meanwhile, the Saudis have spent tens of billions of dollars over the past decades to export Wahhabism, which is their own particular brand of literal Islam. The fruits of this export may be seen in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where members of the Taliban are typically grown-up trainees of Wahhabi madrassas.

Fortunately, Saudi Arabia is enormously dependent on others for its very survival. Outside of petroleum exports, the country has very little to offer. Its military depends entirely on U.S. equipment, training, and supplies. This dependence makes the Saudis vulnerable to a determined effort to restrain their worldwide efforts to proselytize others in the ways of literal Islam. The Saudis should be demilitarized, democratized, and secularized. The immigrants they exploit for cheap labor should be made citizens. For years, the Saudis have willingly used oil as a foreign policy tool. Why should the world not return the favor and use food, water, and medicine as foreign policy tools against the Wahhabis?

Finally, Pakistani support for global terror must be stopped by any and all means necessary. Together with Saudi Arabia, Pakistan is the epicenter of Islamic fundamentalism worldwide. Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, the architect of the 9/11 attacks, is a Pakistani and was found in Pakistan. Bin Laden was found in Pakistan, where ranking government officials had been hiding him for years. The Taliban receives money, training, and logistical support from Pakistan—and even shelters within its borders. Pakistan, along with Saudi Arabia, is one of the true enemies of the United States and the West. Afghan president Hamid Karzai has been outspoken in his denunciation of Pakistan’s involvement in his country’s ongoing problems:

Pakistan has created enough mischief! And when I say Pakistan, I mean the Pakistani military and intelligence … The Pakistani military and intelligence must stop creating excuses for the promotion of terrorism. … [Their] work in creating radicalism, in promoting radicalism, in using radicalism as a tool of terrorism, as a tool of foreign policy vis-à-vis Afghanistan and also vis-à-vis India and other countries. It should stop it.⁷

The advantage with regard to Pakistan’s military and intelligence forces is, as journalist Mustafa Qadri remarks, that these people are “as inept as [they are] corrupt.”⁸ The Pakistani military holds over $15 billion (USD) worth of private assets and a large portion of the country’s territory. Military members enjoy relative freedom from criticism in Pakistan’s press, despite their repeated failures to deal with internal problems such as the Taliban insurgency. Furthermore, since the 1950s both the United States and China have provided large sums of cash to the Pakistan military in order to secure alliances with the country.⁹ Former general and dictator of Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf rose from humble beginnings to become a multi-millionaire (in USD) thanks to his military connections. As a general, Musharraf was the chief instigator of the Kargil War, which brought the Indian subcontinent to the brink of nuclear war. After taking power in a military coup, he was embroiled in scandal over his role in encouraging nuclear proliferation.¹⁰ Once his dictatorship was put to an end, he promptly skipped the country for Great Britain, where he lived for several years in lavish comfort.¹¹

As with Musharraf, so with other generals in Pakistan. Their truest allegiance is not to Islam but to cash. Their support and even their nuclear weapons stockpile are accessible for the right amount. A study by a research fellow with the International Security Program in the U.S. goes so far as to recommend this very approach in securing U.S. interests in Pakistan.¹² The only issue is identifying those interests more precisely. It must be recognized that the paramount interest for Pakistan should be in removing Islamic influence from its government and putting it firmly on a secularist or at least non-Islamic path. Instead of promoting religiously motivated wars with India, Pakistan’s military should be turned into an internal police force to monitor the enemies of secularism—namely, the Islamic fundamentalists. As this book has argued (see Part 2, Chapters 3 and 4), Pakistan’s real enemy is not India but the supremacist ideology of Islam, which has produced in their psyche a split like a mental illness.

As of this writing, the effects of Sunni fundamentalism have been constantly in the news. The summer of 2015 has brought still more terror attacks. In June, 38 tourists (30 of them British citizens) at a beach hotel in Tunisia were massacred by a jihadi gunman. Earlier, in Yemen, 150 Shiites were murdered at a mosque, and in Kenya 150 Christian students were murdered at a university—both mass murders carried out by Sunnis. Then in July a terrorist conducted yet another shooting spree on a U.S. military base, killing five soldiers in Chattanooga. These acts all had one thing in common: they were all inspired by the virulent Sunni/Wahhabi ideology that the Saudis have been exporting for more than five decades.

In addition, Islam and the entire Muslim world have exhibited a pattern of deception and hypocritical behavior that are sanctioned and even directed by Islamic scripture. This strategy has been fully documented in this book, but a few crucial examples should be kept in mind. In Saudi Arabia, atheism is punishable by death. Pakistan persecutes atheists while at the same time maintaining close relations with officially atheist and Communist China. At the same time, Muslims in the West routinely collaborate with leftists, liberals, secular humanists, and atheists to combat Christian conservatives and conservative politics.

In the United States, Pakistanis seek to develop relations with Indian immigrants. When it suits them, they appeal to the commonality of so-called “desi” (meaning common culture, common ethnicity) connections. After 9/11, many Pakistanis pretended to be Indians or even Hindus to protect themselves from any possible backlash against Muslims. Pakistani and Bangladeshi restaurants across Britain and America referred to themselves as “Indian” to mislead the public. At the same time, the same Pakistanis rabidly denounce and vilify India and Hindu culture whenever they want to assert their true Muslim identity. Some of them continue to fully support Pakistani terrorism against India as well.

Whenever it is convenient, Muslims around the Western world make common cause with Jews to fight against alleged White Christian racism. These same Muslims are just as likely to turn around and advocate Arab violence against Jews and the destruction of Israel whenever it suits them. To that end, they love to align themselves with Palestinians or any other cause where they can express anti-Semitic attitudes under the guise of opposing “Zionism.”

In similar fashion, Muslims will align themselves with Christian groups to oppose homosexuals or other marginalized groups, then turn around and support homosexuals and others against “Christian homophobia” whenever they wish. In general, when Muslims want to attack predominantly Christian cultures in the West they will be at the forefront singing the praises of multiculturalism. In Islamic countries, however, they suppress and oppose multiculturalism at every turn. In many of these countries, no culture other than Islam is accepted or permitted. In others, even if non-Islamic cultures are permitted they are forced into second-class status below Islam.

In America and the West, Islam loves to advocate unity between black Africans and Muslims using slogans referring to white oppression and racism. In many Islamic countries, blacks were enslaved until John F. Kennedy’s term of office—and in some cases, even after. And even after the official abolishment of slavery, de facto slavery remains firmly in place in the nations of the Gulf Cooperation Council in the form of migrant worker programs where non-Arab workers from such nations as India, Bangladesh, the Philippines, and Indonesia are abused, treated like slaves, and deprived of many basic human rights. In Sudan and Mauritania, Africans can still be found enslaved to Arabs. In short, Islam sanctions the practice of hypocritical double standards on almost every imaginable issue.

The fight against Islamic imperialism is also a war of liberation. The non-Arab masses in the Muslim world should be freed. Ultimately, they have nothing to lose and everything to gain from repudiating and abandoning this ideology. This book has argued that some 90% of Muslims worldwide are not beneficiaries but rather victims of this Arab imperialist ideology. Muslim women and the Muslim masses of the world must be liberated from this tyranny.

With the appearance of ISIS and the spread of sectarian violence across the Islamic world, this war of liberation has become a moral imperative. This violence illustrates the crucial fact that even if the entire world converted to Islam there would still be no peace. There would still be, as there is now, intra-religious conflict among the different sects of Islam. Already there is growing fear among foreign policy experts that a massive conflict between Shia and Sunni could be looming in the near future.

The state of perpetual violence in the Islamic world demonstrates that the teachings of Muhammad are harmful. His teachings are diametrically opposed to those of Buddha, Confucius, Jesus, and Socrates. The most crucial point of difference here being that Muhammad’s ethics are dualistic, with one set of rules applied to fellow Muslims and another set—where all manner of violence and duplicity is acceptable—applied to non-Muslims. Not only that, the teachings of Muhammad are also utterly incompatible with the ideals of a free and democratic society. Enlightenment thinkers such as Voltaire and John Locke assumed that what humanity needed above all was critical thought and freedom of inquiry, both of which are impossible in Islam. The Founding Fathers of the United States based their new government on the findings of the Enlightenment, and the government they created is therefore opposed in its bedrock principles to the teachings of Islam. They are mutually exclusive: one cannot simultaneously believe in the teaching of Muhammad and in the Constitution of the United States. It is logically impossible. It was recognition of this impossibility which led Major Nidal Hassan to unleash his terror attack on fellow American soldiers at Fort Hood.

President Obama announced in June 2015 that he has no strategy to fight ISIS.¹³ I have one. It is total ideological war against the teachings of Muhammad, the Qur’an, and sharia law. It is building a united front of non-Islamic nations to invade the nations infested by Islamic radicals. It is to demilitarize, democratize, and secularize the Axis of Jihad—Iran, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia. These steps would put an end to the threat of Islam.

Fortunately, there is a historical precedent for what I have in mind, albeit on a smaller scale. That precedent is the foundation of the secular, modern state of Turkey by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (1881-1938). Ataturk is a far better political role model for the Muslim nations than Muhammad. At the foundation of his new nation, Ataturk announced his dedication to democracy, freedom, and secularism:

My people are going to learn the principles of democracy, the dictates of truth, and the teachings of science. Superstition must go. Let them worship as they will, every man can follow his own conscience provided it does not interfere with sane reason or bid him act against the liberty of his fellow men.¹⁴

At the same time, he also warned against the dangers of allowing religion to influence the secular policies of the state:

Those who use religion for their own benefit are detestable. We are against such a situation and will not allow it. Those who use religion in such a manner have fooled our people; it is against just such people that we have fought and will continue to fight.¹⁵

The Middle East needs more great leaders like Ataturk, not more Ayatollahs, dictators, and royal families full of hedonistic princes.

In the end, the message of Islam is simple: it seeks universal conquest, not universal brotherhood. The entire world must surrender to Islam, and nothing else is acceptable. The “evidence” supporting the claims of Islam are metaphysical and false. There is no more reason to believe the words of Muhammad than to believe the words in a Saturday morning cartoon. They are based on faith in a claimed divine revelation and as such cannot be proven, cannot be argued, cannot be sustained. Theological and metaphysical claims cannot be used as justification for enslavement and mass murder.

The entire world is under direct or implicit threat from Islam. This threat is not simply a threat of a terror attack or military invasion—there is also a demographic threat, where Muslims outbreed the native population and become dominant. This happened in India and is already underway in Europe. The native cultures of the world will be destroyed if Islam persists in its demographic conquests. Islam’s great strength is its ability to change from acting weak and oppressed when it is at a disadvantage to becoming tyrannical and high-handed once it has the power to do so, and then to change back again when necessary. This adaptability to changing political fortunes has allowed Islam to persist through various historical setbacks.

The failures of world leaders to recognize and address the problem of Islam cannot be accepted. In America, our Anglo-Saxon civilization is under threat because our leaders have embraced multiculturalism and Islamophilia at home, permitted rampant legal and illegal immigration, embarked on enormously expensive wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and steadily eroded our freedoms in the name of greater security from “terrorism.” We are watching the death of the soul of America and Western civilization before our eyes. Since the fall of the Soviet Union we have seen Western Europe, the U.S., and Canada move further away from defending the values of Western civilization. There is every possibility that in the coming decades Russia will emerge as the epicenter of White European civilization and become the torchbearer of Western ideals as the West itself degenerates into amoral “multicultural” societies.

This failure of leadership comes at a poor time. The strategy I have described for defeating Islam requires leadership. That strategy requires a united front of the non-Islamic civilizations of the world—Russians, Chinese, British, French, Germans, Scandinavians, Italians, Greeks, Japanese, Americans and more. The whole of Indic civilization, which includes India, Sri Lanka, Burma, and Thailand, is also under direct and immediate threat and should unite to oppose Islam. All these nations and cultures have a common enemy in Islam. It is an existential, military, and demographic threat to all. When our leaders point out Russia, or China, or North Korea as a threat they are ignoring the scimitar pointed right at their throats.

Because the threat from Islam is demographic as well as military, it is fundamental. Russia, China, and North Korea have no missionary zeal to transform the West. Islam does. India today bears witness to the results of Islamic military and demographic conquest. Ancient India has been split into squabbling countries perpetually in conflict with their former parent. This feeling is particularly rampant in Pakistan, where Muslims seek the death of their mother Hindu civilization—matricide on the grandest scale. In Pakistan Islam has produced a societal mental illness, where Pakistanis wish they were Arabs and despise the racial, cultural, and linguistic heritage of their Hindu and Buddhist ancestors. Yet these latter ties are far stronger and more meaningful than a religious creed.

One final word is necessary. If Islam is allowed to achieve its aims, it would be an end to human progress. Progress is impossible without innovation or change—yet Islam regards both of these as positive evils, since all truth is held to have been revealed by Muhammad. The quotation used at the head of this chapter illustrates the traditional Islamic attitude toward progress: suspicion and hatred. Instead of seeking progress, Islam hates change and glorifies enslavement and parasitism. Islam tries to freeze the dynamic progress of human existence in the position it occupied in 7th century Arabia. The world has developed far beyond that time and anything Muhammad envisioned. It is time to leave his fantasies in the past where they belong. Everyone who believes in progress, change, and the dynamism of the human spirit must oppose Muhammad’s evil and reactionary force or our descendants will be destroyed by it.

PART NINE

CHAPTER FORTY - ONE

Postscript Two

The Syrian Migrant Crisis of 2015

Having established a foothold in Iraq and Syria, the Islamic State has begun actively expanding to other regions. It is seeking dominance in the Islamic world. And not only there, and it plans to go further than that. The situation is more than dangerous … This may result in the global terrorist threat increasing dramatically and engulfing new regions, especially given that Islamic State camps train militants from many countries, including the European countries.

—Vladimir Putin, President of Russian Federation¹

It is an issue of demography. I would say that before accepting immigrants or refugees, we need to have more activities by women, elderly people, and we must raise our birth rate. There are many things that we should do before accepting immigrants.

—Shinzo Abe, Prime Minister of Japan²

Masses of young men in their twenties with beards singing Allahu Akbar across Europe. It’s an invasion that threatens our prosperity, our security, our culture and identity … Turkey, Greece, Macedonia, Serbia are safe countries. If you flee them then you are doing it for benefits and a house.

—Geert Wilders, Dutch politician³

During the course of writing this book, one of the greatest difficulties was incorporating new events as they arose. Islamic fanaticism is on the move, and with the emergence of ISIS as a state player it seems every month brings fresh atrocities. In April of 2015 a long-simmering crisis surged into the consciousness of the Europeans and Americans, bringing home the reality of one of the fundamental arguments and warnings of this book. This crisis is known popularly as the Syrian Migrant Crisis.

Press coverage has tended to focus on emotionally gripping images. One of the most famous is the photo of the body of a young boy washed up on shore after his migrant boat sank in the Mediterranean Sea. Other images have shown people living in camps, running over barren terrain, and fighting with border police. People’s hearts quite naturally go out to scenes of human suffering. Everyone wants to help. Such feelings likely prompted German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s initial declaration that there was no legal limit to the number of refugees the EU might take, if they were qualified.

But once the full scope of the migration became clear, feelings of concern gave way to practical considerations. Hungary has seen some 200,000 migrants, mostly Muslim, streaming over its border at a rate of as many as 5,000 a day. They gather at train stations and demand transportation to the destination of their choice (often Germany). To put this in perspective, imagine if over six million people entered the United States between January and September and requested asylum. The EU had the most asylum requests it has had in 20 years in 2014 with 625,000 and may be on track to reach up to 800,000 in 2015.⁴ Faced with large, unruly groups of migrants passing through Hungary quickly put up a border fence and began policing it fiercely.

The reason why Hungary and other former Eastern European nations are so critical for migrants is that they are on the outer border of the “Schengen Zone.” European nations bound by the Schengen Agreement allow for hassle-free transportation across countries (similar to traveling from state to state in the United States) within the area. Once migrants reach a country within the Schengen Zone they have only to go to the country where they want to end up to request asylum. None of the refugees want to stay in Hungary, as it is not particularly wealthy or generous in its social subsidies. They just want to get there because it is one of the easiest nations in the Schengen Zone to get to; then, they will transition through. This plan was disrupted when Hungary decided it had neither the interest nor the infrastructure needed to handle what amounts to mass immigration of Muslims from the Middle East.

Why are such large numbers of Muslims trying to get to Europe? Some are indeed Syrian refugees fleeing their war-torn country. At present, Syria is de facto split into separate sections ruled by President Bashar Assad, by anti-government coalition forces, by Kurdish separatists, and by the Islamic State. American policy has been to provide covert support (and some direct financial aid and military supplies) to the anti-government coalition, even though many of these groups are al-Qaeda affiliates or other religious fanatics much like ISIS itself.⁵ American money and weapons have already ended up in the hands of ISIS and al-Qaeda, and there is an ever-present danger that more will follow suit.

However, EU figures suggest that as few as 1 in 5 migrants are actually Syrian (although as many as 90% of those who enter will claim they are Syrian hoping to obtain asylum).⁶ For the most part, migrants are (70% of them) adult males, Muslim, from Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq. They are coming because the ongoing war in Syria shows no signs of stopping. Afghanistan and Iraq remain failed states which cannot consistently provide basic services for their citizens. In fact, the Taliban has recently retaken Kunduz, one of their last strongholds to fall during the U.S.-led invasion in 2001.⁷ Not all of the migrants are fleeing war, by any means. Some simply want to improve their lot in life. Not a bad aspiration, but when it is shared by millions of others the practical reality is that few will be able to accomplish it. Thanks to unscrupulous human traffickers it has never been easier for those hoping to trade their unpleasant situations for the wealth and security of Europe. The end result has been the largest migration of people to Europe since World War II.⁸

EUROPE’S RESPONSE

The response of European governments has been twofold. There has been a perfectly reasonable, skeptical attitude from some—notably from poorer former Soviet Bloc countries on the periphery who have to deal with migrants transitioning through their lands for greener pastures. Then there is a contrasting suicidal and politically correct attitude which high-handedly condemns the former attitude without due consideration for its merits.

The former attitude is perfectly encapsulated by Hungary’s Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán. Orbán astutely noted the “explosive consequences for the whole of Europe” which would follow from allowing hundreds of thousands of Muslims to enter. In a German newspaper he rightly noted that “We shouldn’t forget that the people who are coming here grew up in a different religion and represent a completely different culture. Most are not Christian, but Muslim. That is an important question, because Europe and European culture have Christian roots.”⁹

By contrast, European Commission Vice President Frans Timmermans accused Orbán of playing on irrational fears. “Any society, anywhere in the world, will be diverse in the future,” he declared, “that’s the future of the world. So [Central European countries] will have to get used to that.”¹⁰ This statement is almost too sick to believe. Since every place must be “diverse” (whatever that means) the reality must be imposed on the people? Is resistance to mass Muslim immigration really irrational? Later events seem to call Timmermans’ view into question. While at first Hungary was struggling to stop Muslim migrants and Germany was encouraging them, within a couple of weeks Germany closed its Schengen border with Austria and began enacting migration controls as its facilities were being overwhelmed.

The irrationality and foolishness are all on the side of those who encourage mass Muslim immigration and then damn those who try to stop it. It is not merely a case of logistical problems or lack of capacity. It is, as Viktor Orbán stated, a matter of life and death for the survival of Europe as a civilization and as a culture. It is not mere speculation or paranoia to say so. History and current reality both suggest that Orbán has a point.

THE DISASTER OF MUSLIM IMMIGRATION IN WESTERN EUROPE

Muslims first immigrated to Europe in substantial numbers in the 1950s and 1960s. After nearly three generations, what has been the result? Across Western Europe Muslims have distinguished themselves among immigrant groups by their self-segregation, by their incompatibility with host cultures, and by their hostility and aggression. This is not a matter of race and ethnicity—Hindus of essentially similar racial and ethnic backgrounds to Pakistanis have successfully integrated with British culture, for example. The issue lies with the fundamental ideas and doctrines of Islam, which insist upon separatism for its followers. Islam is the problem.

Consider the Charlie Hebdo massacre at the beginning of 2015. The two brothers responsible for the killing grew up in France as the children of immigrants. Yet they still slaughtered innocent journalists—nearly a sacred profession to the secular French state—in the name of Islam. Pundit Rich Lowry observed that the Muslim-heavy suburbs of Paris “are not just alienated from the French state, they are actively hostile to it.”¹¹ But this was not an isolated case, even within France which has had several cases of home-grown Islamic terrorism.

Across the channel in the UK, whole cities and neighborhoods have been taken over by the children of Muslim immigrants. The 7/7 suicide bombers of 2005, who murdered dozens of Londoners on their way to work, were (with one exception) born and raised in Britain. They spurned the opportunities their parents and their country gave them and chose jihad instead. A year after this mass murder, 25% of British Muslims said it was justified. In the same survey, 28% said they wanted Britain to become a fundamentalist Islamic state, and 68% said they wanted British people who insulted Islam to be arrested and prosecuted.¹² Liberal day-dreamers would like us to see these numbers as a turning away from violence. But as readers of this book will notice, they show they opposite—the support among British-born Muslims for murder and intolerance is a sign that they still embrace Islam as it always is and has been: as a supremacist, imperialist, and genocidal ideology.

Such a creed and its adherents are fundamentally incompatible with Western society. How many more gang-rape sex rings are needed before Western media will admit there is a problem with Islam? How many mass-murders of civilians must take place? Such atrocities are not perpetrated by Hindu immigrants, Christian immigrants, or atheist immigrants.

This is not a coincidence. A Muslim murders Jews in Brussels—it is Islam which told him killing Jews is a righteous act. Muslim boys repeatedly rape an 11-year-old English girl—it is Islam which told them how female war captives may be treated. European neighborhoods become Islamic fiefdoms where native authorities fear to tread—it is Islam which commands them to live according to its dictates and no others. British schools are taken over by Muslims and begin to impose Islamic doctrine—it is Islam which told them Muslims are destined to rule and dominate the rest. Everywhere in Europe you see the fruit of Islamic teaching: everywhere Europeans are pushed out of their own neighborhoods by incompatible Muslim communities. There is no “diversity” in the sense of living together with different people; there are only pockets of Islam which exist separately in their own world. Those pockets are getting larger.

This is recent history, but as an Indian I can add that past history tells the same story. This book has documented some small parts of that story. When I look at India, I see vast swathes of Hindu and Buddhist civilization which have been transformed utterly under the iron grip of Islam. I have read past Hindu calls for tolerance and understanding of the conquering Islamic armies. The end result is a fractured country, a land of a million mutinies. India’s history will become Europe’s future if nothing is changed.

Any realistic appraisal of past history and current experience with Muslim immigration should tell us that Viktor Orbán’s warning deserves serious consideration. As in the past, the politically correct elite today wish to bully the common people with talk of compassion and integration. But this is all a lie. We have seen how this plays out, and it is always a disaster. When today’s leaders are gone tomorrow’s society will be left with the consequences. Those consequences will be Islamization, cultural genocide, and complete disintegration of European society.

WHY CAN’T MUSLIM COUNTRIES TAKE MUSLIM MIGRANTS?

The Prophet Muhammad encouraged Muslims to immigrate to infidel lands as preparatory to Islamizing them. Indeed, the Islamic calendar begins with Muhamad’s own immigration to Medina, leaving Mecca (where he was no longer welcome) to become a power broker among competing tribes of Arabs and Jews. From the very beginning, then, Islam has used demographic conquest as a potent weapon. The same weapon is now being used to conquer Europe without firing a shot.

Consider the following: if this were truly a humanitarian crisis, why does Saudi Arabia, with a population under 30 million, refuse to take any refugees? Saudi Arabia is their natural home. They are Arabic-speaking Muslims who share the Sunni religion and a similar culture. Saudi Arabia is enormously wealthy. Why should the refugees be sent to Europe, which has a radically different religion and culture from their own? Why are the Saudis being outspent on aid efforts by distant Japan, which recently increased its aid package to over one billion euros?¹³

The Saudis have over two million square miles of territory, inhabited by fewer than 30 million people. Their per capita GDP is $53,149. By contrast, India has over three million square miles, but is inhabited by well over one billion (with a per capita GDP of $6,266). In short, there is plenty of room for a few million refugees. The Saudis have the space and the money to support all those streaming to Europe ten times over. Yet they have offered to take in no one.

Instead of offering to take in refugees, the Saudis offered to build 200 mosques in Germany. So rather than accept refugees, they offered to create new centers to radicalize the ones Germany was generous enough to accept. Saudi-funded mosques are well-known, as this book has demonstrated, as centers for indoctrination into literalist and fundamentalist Islam. Should Germany accept such an offer, it would be like letting foxes into the hen house.

Nor are other Sunni nations willing to accept migrants. Turkey will not give asylum to its Sunni brethren. The other wealthy Gulf Arab nations have also declined. As Dr. Abbas Kadhim, a teacher in California, noted on Twitter: “the only Syrian refugees that got attention in the Gulf States are the vulnerable underage girls they bought in the name of marriage.”¹⁴

THE DANGERS POSED BY MASS MUSLIM IMMIGRATION

Bulgarian Defense Minister Nikolay Nenchev caused a bit of a controversy when he divided the so-called refugees coming to Europe into three camps. One camp he called real refugees, “people fleeing the horrors of war.” A second camp were those he called “economic migrants,” meaning people who simply wanted the advantages of living in Europe rather than in a poorer country. A third camp were those “likely to be affiliated to terrorist organizations.”¹⁵ Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee has criticized Europe’s open-door policy to “alleged Syrian refugees” for the same reason. Europeans were allowing people to stream across their borders and denouncing those who questioned their policy as intolerant, he stated, “Even as some of the newcomers were attacking and cursing policy, throwing bottles, and shouting ‘Allahu akbar’.”¹⁶

Certainly there is a danger that some number of those entering Europe will be committed terrorists. In any mass movement of people there will be some percentage that are undesirable. Given the high percentage of single adult males coming (70 or more by most estimates), the chance is even higher that some will at least have some terrorist sympathies. This does present certain short-term and medium-term dangers to Europe, where some of those admitted for asylum turn around and plot against their hosts almost immediately.

Some of the dangers have been spotted already, though the media is slow to report. Migrants in shelters are being targeted for sectarian violence, with Christians, Kurds, and Yazidis being hit particularly hard. The head of German intelligence has reported that his agents observed “Salafists are appearing at the shelters disguised as volunteers and helpers, deliberately seeking contact with refugees to invite them to their mosques to recruit them to their cause.”¹⁷ German police have noted that Muslim asylum seekers are enforcing Sharia law in their refugee shelters, with some Muslim groups “from different sects, clans, ethnicities, and nationalities” attacking each other.¹⁸

Far from being anomalies, these issues point to the long-term dangers posed by Islam itself. Fundamentalists of any religion have one thing in common: a vision of global conformity to their worldview and practices. What makes Islamic fundamentalism unique is its methods for dominating the world. These are many, varied, and advanced. It ranges from direct warfare to infiltration, subversion of governments, and gradual imposition of Sharia law. The position of Islam with regard to non-Islamic states is clearly stated by theologian Syed Abdul A’ala Maududi: “Islam wishes to destroy all states and government anywhere on the face of the earth which are opposed to the ideology and program of Islam … The purpose of Islam is to set up a state on the basis of its own ideology and program.”¹⁹

This is the real reason the Saudis would prefer to push all the migrants off on Europe and fund their mosques. If the long-term goal is Islamization Saudi Arabia sees Europe as ripe for the plucking. Sure, many of the migrants—perhaps even most of them—may be “moderate” Islamic. They may not be very interested in religion themselves. But it’s a numbers game. Once Islam builds itself into a large enough minority, it can begin to agitate on behalf of its long-term religious interests. “Moderate Muslims” will not be in charge for the simple reason that “moderate” in this sense really means “a Muslim in name only.” Such people do not rule in the Muslim community.

Migration and Saudi-funded mosques is how Europe will be conquered. It is how the US would be conquered, given the chance. One cannot be at one time both a good Muslim and a good citizen of a non-Islamic nation. This is because a good Muslim must regard the Qur’an and Sharia as infallible and true and all institutions of men as fallible, defective, and irrelevant. Migration is the tip of the iceberg. The immutable force under the water line is Islam.

WHAT EUROPE MUST DO TO AVOID CIVILIZATIONAL SUICIDE

There are four central truths the nations of Europe must grasp now and act on immediately in order to avoid civilizational suicide. First of all: Ignoring real differences causes real disaster. It is a sad irony that the first thing Western societies must to defend themselves from extinction is the one thing they have made themselves incapable of doing. In fact, it is almost a curse in the West to say “discriminate.” But not too long ago the ability to discriminate was an essential element of moral action and adult behavior.

To discriminate is to recognize distinctions or differences which actually exist. A “discrimination” where there is no real difference is an act of prejudice, and this is rightly derided. But when a baby recognizes his father’s or mother’s face and does not recognize a stranger’s, this is to discriminate. When a teacher speaks loudly to an extrovert and softly to an introvert she is using discrimination to reach her students more effectively. When a citizen stops a man from assaulting his girlfriend but stands back while a policeman apprehends a shoplifter he is making a necessary discrimination. In short, there are many cases where preferences and distinctions have nothing to do with prejudice.

The word discriminate comes from a Latin root meaning to discern or notice. The basic idea is to notice crucial differences between things and to act accordingly. When it comes to noticing differences between individual people and between groups of people, the Western nations have become enormously skittish. But the fact is that no advanced society can survive without making some distinctions. For example, we distinguish between children and adults, and between citizens and foreign residents—such distinctions are not going to go away. Our task is to be reasonable and fair in making our distinctions.

With that said, I submit that a distinction must be made between Islam and the other cultural and religious creeds of the world. It is reasonable and fair for many reasons, but there are two which deserve to be highlighted here. The distinction is reasonable because Islam is different in its past and present behavior with regard to the other cultural and religious creeds of the world—most notably, it has tried and is still trying to exterminate them. The distinction is fair because Islam itself insists upon it! If we may make this distinction regarding Islam, then, we must look upon mass Muslim migration as a different order of threat. If Muslims are more isolated from their host cultures, more hostile and aggressive toward their host cultures, and more incompatible with their host cultures as compared with other immigrant groups, would it not be foolish to treat them the same as other immigrant groups?

Many of the arguments used to browbeat the Europeans into accepting Muslim migrants rely upon a complete absence of discrimination or distinction. Hungary is reminded that Americans and Europeans accepted its refugees from Soviet aggression in 1956. The implication is that they should therefore be more welcoming now toward Muslim refugees. But what happened to those Hungarian refugees? If you go to Cleveland, Ohio, you will find children of those immigrants—but you may have to look hard because they are largely assimilated into American culture.

We must be able to recognize and speak about obvious differences. It is simply obvious that Islam is different from other ideologies and its adherents therefore pose a danger that those of other ideologies do not. Until we can deal with these differences our difficulties with Islam will simply continue. Governments and the media have tried to deny the obvious facts for 50 years and it still does not make them any less true. Reality is what it is regardless of our ability to see it. Ignoring real differences causes real disaster.

The second truth is this: This is not a refugee crisis for Europe; it is a Muslim migrant crisis. Media coverage of this situation has largely been based on the assumption that the people streaming to enter Europe are refugees. Is the assumption accurate? According to a Wall Street Journal article, as few as 10% could be Syrians (judging from accents and dialects). More importantly, there is a brisk trade in fake Syrian passports taking place among so-called refugees now, suggesting that a significant percentage of the would-be migrants are not Syrians. German police have confiscated packages of these passports on their way to Germany.²⁰

It is completely understandable that people living in Iraq or Afghanistan or Syria might want to live in Germany. I would feel the same way living in a country where Muslims massacre each other on a daily basis over sectarian differences. But this situation should make Europeans more, not less, wary and defensive about importing problems en masse into their societies.

Also, while the press continues to assume Muslim migrants are Europe’s responsibility, the fabulously wealthy Muslim nations of the Gulf sit back and watch. “The Saudis stopped issuing work permits to Syrians in 2011 when the uprising against the Assad regime began,” the Journal again notes; meanwhile, “Gulf states also refuse to sign the U.N. convention governing treatment of asylum seekers. The Saudi contribution to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs amounts to a little more than $18 million—as compared to $1 billion from the U.S.”²¹ In short, the Saudis are simply refusing to pull their own weight. Yet the Saudis are more than willing to continue the spread of jihad, offering (as noted above) to build Wahhabi mosques in Germany for new Muslim immigrants.²²

The failure of wealthy Arab states to get involved demonstrates quite clearly that this is not a refugee crisis at all. It is a Muslim migrant crisis. Germany has indicated that it will accept one million people this year alone. This is a substantial number for a nation of just over 80 million total citizens. The Muslims Germany admits now are the sharp end of a spear that can destroy their civilization. As the last 50 years have shown, even if first generation Muslim immigrants may wish to integrate, the poison of Islamic fanaticism may well persuade their children to think and act differently.

Third: What is done in the name of compassion and tolerance will destroy both. This hard but crucially important truth has been a key theme of this book and is tragically relevant here. Consider, for example, the position of European Jews. The Jewish refugee crisis set off by the Holocaust has been used as an argument for Europe to take in unlimited Muslim migrants. As liberals love to argue, because Europeans were intolerant and uncompassionate toward Jews in the past, they must open their doors to Muslims now. The perverse irony in this argument is that it is Muslim immigrants above all who are driving anti-Semitism to a pitch not seen in Europe since the 1930s. Muslims have murdered Jews for being Jews in Paris, Copenhagen, Toulouse, and Brussels, and this is merely the tip of the iceberg. In France, Germany, and Spain, Muslims are four times more likely to have a negative view of Jews than the general population. In Britain, they are seven times more likely. These attitudes are reflected in anti-Semitic incidents across the continent, which are disproportionately committed by Muslims.²³

In the end, however, it is not only Jews who are in the crosshairs of Islamic jihad. Ultimately, all of us are. European Jews are only the canary in the coal mine for the problem of Islamic immigration in Europe. Their increasingly difficult situation reveals the emptiness and hypocrisy of arguing for more Muslim immigration on the basis of compassion and tolerance. Other minorities living in Europe will also feel the brunt of this new wave of immigration—where is the compassion and tolerance for them? Where is the compassion for the next generation of Germans who will have to live with the decision to admit one million Muslims to the country despite leaders’ admission that their policies of multiculturalism have failed?

Fourth and finally: Immigration is the primary source of Islamic imperialism in the West. Jihadist states like Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Pakistan are not yet in a position to destroy the West. Even terror groups like al-Qaeda have only marginal impact, despite their high-profile atrocities. Ultimately, Islam will succeed or fail in its goal to destroy the West by means of demographic growth, infiltration, subversion, intimidation, and replacement.

Is this mere paranoia? I ask the reader to consider where Islam would be without immigration. Why are there one million Muslims in the Netherlands, 2.2 million in Italy, and 4.7 million in France?²⁴ It is not because Islam has proven attractive and persuasive to Dutch, Italian, and French people. It is because these countries have admitted Muslim immigrants, who have children at a very high rate. Islam would hardly exist in the West without immigration.

This is not to say that Muslim immigrants are current or future jihadists. Of course only a minority will ever heed the call to jihad. But at a certain level of population, only a minority needs to answer the call for jihad to be successful. At a certain point, the Western nations will be destroyed from within. As the Explanatory Memorandum discovered by the U.S. government in its case against the Muslim Brotherhood reveals, this is indeed the plan for jihadist groups: “[our] work is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”²⁵ This is how jihadist describe their plans when speaking to one another.

The more demographic pressure that Islam can bring to bear on Western countries through immigration the more success their hostile organizations will have in silencing dissent and intimidating host cultures. America is fortunate in this regard, as the majority of our own illegal immigrants are not Muslims. Europe, however, is not so lucky. It borders are overwhelmed daily and the pace seems to be increasing.

CONCLUSION

Western Europe is on the verge of committing suicide through its immigration policies. Its native populations are declining in numbers and everywhere they are letting in hundreds of thousands of Muslims, who take advantage of generous social funding to have large families. It is demographic conquest on a continental scale, and Europe’s leaders are letting it happen. The same thing happened to India 1,400 years ago—the difference being that at that time Islam arrived via military invasion. But the results will be the same, and India’s past will become Europe’s future if nothing is done. Leader’s like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán should be praised rather than vilified when they speak out in defence of European culture.

America and Western Europe should be making common cause with the nations threatened by Islam. One case in point is Russia, which American Neoconservatives want to hit with more and tougher economic sanctions.²⁶ The Russians have just sent military assets to Syria to shore up the regime of Bashar Assad against anti-government rebels and the Islamic State. Russia is agitating in the UN to get ISIS specially listed as a terrorist group in the wake of revelations that ISIS may have elements necessary to put together weapons of mass destruction.²⁷ Russia is not our enemy; our enemy is Islamic imperialism. We should be working with the Russians—as well as the Chinese, the Indians, and others—to defeat this enemy.

Immigration in Europe is a battleground in the fight against Islamic imperialism. If Germany does indeed admit one million Muslim migrants, with still more distributed across the European continent, this will be a massive and perhaps decisive victory for Islam. The 200 mosques the Saudis have offered to build in Germany will become fortresses of a hostile and unassailable creed. They will stand as symbols in the heart of Europe of Islam’s 1,400 year drive to destroy all other religions and cultures.

Once made, such decisions are impossible to undo. Millions of Muslims means tens of millions of descendants. Past history and present fact suggest these people will not assimilate to their host culture, they will despise it and actively work to undermine and destroy it. Such attitudes could be laughed away when Muslims were less than one percent of the population. Europe cannot afford to laugh now. For its own sake, Europe today desperately needs more men and women who understand Islam’s path of destruction and refuse to sit back and let it happen to their own nations and in their own neighborhoods.

This is also a moment for America to transform its approach to Islam and the Middle East. During the Cold War, America and its allies supported militant Islam as a proxy against the Soviet Union. The Soviets are gone, but militant Islam still remains—and it is a far deadlier enemy than the Soviets or even the Nazis ever were. Militant Islam has in one form or another been destroying civilization after civilization for 1,400 years. This book has documented and detailed this scourge.

A new approach is needed, beginning with nurturing the forces of secularism and democracy across the Middle East. Democracy without secularism will only bring to power Islamist groups—as happened with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. A united front of non-Islamic countries would have the power and influence to demilitarize, secularize, and democratize the entire Middle East, once and for all. Not only would this save us from Islamic imperialism, it would also put an end to events such as the Syrian migrant crisis.

APPENDICES

APPENDIX ONE

Buddhist Jesus

Your eye is the lamp of your body. When your eyes are healthy, your whole body also is full of light. But when they are unhealthy, your body also is full of darkness. See to it, then, that the light within you is not darkness.

—Jesus, Luke 11:34-5

Like a man, who, having eyes and who bearing also a lamp, sees all objects is he who has heard the law of vice and of virtue; he will become perfectly wise … The fool who is held in bondage by his body is wrapped in darkness; they who covert worldly goods consider all other things in this same (sinful) way.

—Buddha, Udanavarga 22.5, 27.5

Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly they are ravenous wolves.

—Jesus, Matthew 7:15

Why your ascetic’s hair, fool? Why your animal-hide clothes? Your interior is a jungle, though you clean the outside!

—Buddha, Dharmapada¹

And the King will answer them, “Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.

—Jesus, Matthew 25:40

Whosoever, O monks, would wait upon me, let him wait on the sick.

—Buddha, Mahavagga 8.26²

Do you not see that whatever goes into the mouth passes into the stomach, and so passes on? But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this defiles a man. For out of the heart comes evil thoughts, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander. These are what defiles a man; but to eat with unwashed hands does not defile a man.

—Jesus, Matthew 15:17-20

One does not become pure by washing … he who casts away every sin both great and small, he, because he casts away sins is a holy man.

—Buddha, Udanavarga 33.13³

Destroying life, killing, cutting, binding, stealing, speaking lies, fraud and deceptions, worthless reading, intercourse with another’s wife – this is defilement, but not the eating of flesh.

—Buddha, Sutta-nipata 242⁴

Among the Abrahamic faiths—Judaism, Islam, and Christianity—Christianity has always been the odd man out. Islam and Judaism much more resemble one another with their dualistic ethics, legalistic theology, and strict monotheism than they do the Christian religion. Two of Christianity’s most essential features are its belief in the incarnation of God in the person of Jesus and the doctrine of the Trinity (the three persons or aspects of God in one). Both features are so seemingly antithetical to Semitic thought that Islam and Judaism completely reject them. At the same time, Christianity espouses a universal ethics that does not admit treating persons outside the faith according to a different code (both Judaic and Islamic ethics allow this).

We believe there is a non-Semitic element in Christian thought that gives it the character of being a rose between two thorns among the Abrahamic faiths. There is evidence that this non-Semitic element may well have been supplied by Buddhist thought. This chapter will make the case for Buddhist influence on Jesus himself as well as on early Christian thinking. This influence, we believe, is the primary origin of Christianity’s uniquely non-Semitic qualities and brings it closer to the Indic religious tradition.

BUDDHA AND JESUS: PARALLEL LIVES

Both Siddhartha Gautama (later known as the Buddha, lived c. 500 BC) and Jesus of Nazareth (c. 1st century AD) were obviously remarkable men in their time. Yet the stories told about Jesus often sound very familiar to those that built up around the Buddha five centuries before. These similarities have tempted generations of scholars to speculate about possible influence from India on the eastern Mediterranean region where the historical Jesus lived his life.

The similarities begin with their births. In both cases there are claims of divine incarnation. John the Evangelist says of Jesus: “and the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us.”⁵ In the Hindu Puranic texts, the Buddha is named as one of the avatars of the god Vishnu. Similarly, the births of both men are described in various texts as prophesied and accomplished by an immaculate conception. Singing angels attended the births of both, and both infants were said to be visited by wise men bearing gifts.

Both Buddha and Jesus gave early evidence of astounding gifts in their childhood, dazzling adult teachers with their knowledge. Both men set out on an itinerant ministry in their 30s, attracting followers who travel along with them. In both cases, one of these disciples turns out to be treacherous—Buddha had his Devadatta, a former monk who fell to envy and tried to murder him, and Jesus had Judas, an original disciple who betrayed him to the Jewish leadership (and ultimately to his death).

During their ministries we find further parallels. There are miracles attributed to both such as curing blindness. Both men renounced worldly goods and required the same of their followers. Namely, Buddhist monks and some of Jesus’ early disciples were both given a strict discipline to follow (although lay followers of Buddhism and Christianity are not held to this same strict standard). Buddha and Jesus are both depicted as ministering to persons cast out of ordinary society and using parables in the course of their teaching. Both men advocated a universal doctrine of peace and love.

When the Buddha delivered his first sermon to his disciples he revealed the existence of a “middle path” between the extremes of hedonist pleasure and painful mortification. The path is known as the Eightfold Path and stems from Buddha’s realization of Four Noble Truths about human existence.⁶ Jesus’ famous Sermon on the Mount begins with the eight Beatitudes. Although there is not a perfect match with Buddha’s speech, on five points the teachings are distinctly in harmony. The blessings upon the meek, those who hunger for righteousness, the merciful, the pure of heart, and the peacemakers compare favorably with the Buddha’s path of Right Aspiration, Right Conduct, Right Livelihood, and Right Endeavor.

The opposition to both men is also strikingly similar. The Buddha was opposed by the dominant religious elite of his day, the brahmanas. Jesus faced the same sort of opposition from the Pharisees. Their deaths are attended with various supernatural tales. Buddha told his followers he would enter Parinirvana, the final deathless state, after abandoning his earthly body. There are various tales told of his cremation relics that were divided among eight royal families and disciples and became associated with various legends and even political legitimacy. With Jesus, his followers believed he was resurrected after death and spoken to them again before ascending to heaven.

The parallels between the two even extend to the various collections of their sayings and teachings. There are innumerable collections of such parallels available on the internet and in various publications. However, these parallels cannot possibly be word for word because of the many different languages in which the sayings of Buddha and Jesus are recorded.

We know that both men were asked directly “Are you the Promised One?” In their lives, each consorted with supposed sinners while promoting a life of freedom from worldly attachments and worldly corruption. There are similar miracles associated with them, and both spoke of such miracles as becoming possible to those with great faith or concentration. Each of the two established a line of succession for their followers (although Protestants believe Jesus did not do this), yet at the same time they each live on by means of their word (“Logos” in the New Testament; “Dharma” in Buddhist scriptures). Both warn of the karmic wages of sin and of future degeneration setting in due to misguided leaders and false prophets.⁷

POSSIBLE SOURCES OF BUDDHIST INFLUENCE

The question is, if there is Buddhist influence on the historical Jesus and the early Christians, where did it come from? To begin with, the Buddha predated Jesus by more than five centuries. During that time, we know his teachings became widely diffused throughout the Middle East and had reached Judea and Palestine through traders and missionaries. Zoroastrian ideas had reached Palestine two centuries before Jesus’ lifetime and, as the scholar Roy Amore argues, “the same cultural connections that continued to bring Zoroastrian ideas … could have brought Buddhist ideas” as well.⁸

A major point of overland contact would have been the Silk Road, which passed from Egypt through Palestine and Mesopotamia through Persia and Central Asia all the way to northern China. A branch of this major trade route also went into northwest India. There is “ample evidence that many of the caravan cities along the silk route were predominantly Buddhist in the first Christian century and following.”⁹ We also have evidence that goods from India were sold in Jerusalem in Jesus’ lifetime.¹⁰ There was also a sea route connecting India to the eastern Mediterranean. Through archaeological discoveries we know there were Indian merchants in Egypt, and there is evidence of the presence of Roman traders in the Indian province of Andhra at an ancient city that boasted a large Buddhist temple.¹¹

Jesus himself is known to have spoken Hebrew and Aramaic and possibly knew Greek as well, since it was the common lingua franca spoken in the near eastern regions during his lifetime and the Septuagint (a Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures) had been made in Egypt two centuries before and was in wide circulation among Jewish populations in Palestine. If Jesus had known Greek, which is speculative but not unreasonable, he could have received some knowledge of Buddhism and India through that route.

The work of the Indian emperor Asoka, who ruled in the third century BC, also provides a point of contact between Buddhism and the West. Asoka was a Buddhist convert and a zealous exponent of his adopted religion. He set up large stone inscriptions called rock edicts in places where his forces or his missionaries were active. Asoka sent Buddhist missionaries to the Greek kingdoms near India. Tellingly, one of Asoka’s rock edicts has been found with inscriptions in both Aramaic and Greek.¹²

DOCTRINAL CONNECTIONS

There is even more evidence of Buddhist influence at work as Christian doctrine developed in the centuries after Jesus. These doctrinal connections come in various forms, and have been noticed both in the teachings of Jesus and in late developments within the Christian church.

One of the central connections involves the emphasis in both Buddhist and Christian ethical thought upon the need not only to act properly but to overcome improper states of mind.¹³ Jesus famously declared that whoever looks upon a woman with lust has already committed adultery in his heart. The Buddha made a strikingly similar comment as part of his ethical teaching: “commit no adultery; the law is broken by even looking at the wife of another man with lust in the mind.” A similar parallel can be seen in what the two men say about inspecting one’s own conscience before daring to pronounce upon the failings of others. Buddha says, “Do not look at the faults of others or what others have done or not done; observe what you yourself have done or not done.” Likewise, Jesus says, “Let anyone among you who is without sin cast the first stone” to a group eager to condemn a woman to death by stoning for adultery.

There are a number of connections in the ethical teachings of Jesus and Buddha that can be seen simply by putting their words side by side. Buddha says to “consider others as yourself.”¹⁴ Jesus says, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”¹⁵ Buddha teaches that it is an eternal law that hatreds do not cease by hatred but through love, encouraging people to “Overcome anger by love, overcome evil by good.” In similar fashion, Jesus says: “Love your enemies. Do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.” Both men taught the importance of self-control, such that Jesus tells his followers, “If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also.”¹⁶ The Buddha’s version of this reads, “If anyone should give you a blow with his hand, with a stick, or with a knife, you should abandon any desires and utter no evil words.”¹⁷

Both men taught an ethics that insists on the moral value of the unfortunate, even using their own example to illustrate the importance of caring for such persons. Jesus tells his followers, “just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.”¹⁸ Buddha tells his monks, “Whoever would tend me, he should tend the sick.”¹⁹ Buddhist ethical thought places a premium on nonviolence. Thus Buddha says, “Abandoning the taking of life, the ascetic Gautama dwells refraining from taking life, without stick or sword.”²⁰ In like fashion, Jesus tells his followers to “Put your sword back into its place; for all those who take the sword will perish by the sword.”²¹ But Jesus’ teaching about violence is a little more nuanced, since we also see him advising his disciples to carry swords with them.²²

Another critical early connection involves the stricter ethics enjoined upon the priesthood. Neither Islam nor post-temple Judaism follows a set priesthood. Christianity follows a practice far more similar to the practice of Indic religions, including shave the heads of monks and enjoining celibacy among the priestly orders. The practice of tonsuring monks was introduced to Christian practice around the 4th or 5th century and may have been directly prompted by a similar Buddhist practice of shaving all hair from the head of novitiate monks and nuns prior to their ordination.

Following Indic tradition, Buddhists draw a distinction between the life of the householder and the life of a monk. The householder’s ethic involves supporting a family, whereas the monk is meant to give up all such ties.²³ Jesus lays down similar rules for his first disciples. We also find parallels such as his injunction to “Follow me, and leave the dead to bury their own dead.”²⁴ Compare this with the Buddha: “Let the wise men leave the way of darkness and follow the way of light.”²⁵

An interesting link can also be found in the use of the rosary, which came to Christianity late and has a somewhat mysterious origin. Even the name is curious, as it isn’t immediately clear why a string of prayer beads should be called a garland or garden of roses. Yet compare this with the Buddhist term used for prayer beads, which is almost identical to a word meaning a rose garland.²⁶

Even Christian Saints’ lives will show evidence of Buddhist influence. One of the clearest examples of this comes in the medieval story of Barlaam and Josaphat. According to the story, Josaphat was an Indian prince who was heir to the throne of a ruthless idolater who hated Christians. When his father heard omens of his son’s future greatness, he kept him locked up. Eventually, Josaphat was permitted out to see the world. On one journey he happened to see a crippled man, a blind man, and a senile old man. After being raised secluded from such unpleasantness, these three men made a remarkable impression upon the young prince. Later, a monk named Barlaam came to speak with him. Josaphat was converted by this monk. Eventually, he would grow up to rule in his father’s place, but he abdicated his throne in favor of seeking out his former teacher. Finding him, the two lived as hermits until their deaths.²⁷

This story is almost entirely cribbed from the life of the Buddha and given a Christian covering. The Buddha was also of noble family, raised in a secluded manner. He likewise had a series of experiences, the “four sights,” through which he came to understand the nature of human life, decay, and suffering. In the Christianized version, the four sights become the three different men plus the monk Barlaam. Even the name “Josaphat” is itself a corruption of the original word “Bodhisattva,” the title used by the Buddha prior to the time of his enlightenment.²⁸

One of Christianity’s most evident non-Semitic elements is the doctrine of the Trinity. This doctrine has an interesting parallel in Buddhism as well. According to Mahayana Buddhism, the Buddha continues to manifest in the world of form and appearances (that is, in what we think of as the “real world”) in order to work for the liberation of all other beings. This is made possible by the existence of three “bodies” (named dharmakaya, sambhogakaya, and nirmanakaya; collectively called the Trikaya).²⁹ The idea of a three-in-one divine or supernatural agent working for the salvation of all beings is a striking parallel.

The other definitively non-Semitic element of Christianity is its doctrine of the incarnation of God in the person of Jesus. Yet this doctrine is perfectly at home in the Indic tradition. In the words of Swami Akhilananda:

Christianity and Hinduism are the two great religions which maintain that God incarnates Himself as a human being to establish the spirit of religion in the world. But for the advent of divine incarnations, Man would grope blindly for the experience of God. They are connecting links between God and man.³⁰

In Hinduism, the Buddha himself is understood as an incarnation in Akhilananda’s sense. He is sometimes pictured as an avatar of Vishnu. Ironically, while the fellow Abrahamic faiths of Judaism and Islam find the Christian doctrine abhorrent and intolerable, the Indic tradition has no trouble accepting it on its own terms.³¹ The key difference, as Akhilananda says, is that the Hindus say there have been many such incarnations of God, while the Christians say there has been only one.³²

It is telling that many of the most significant sectarian differences in Christianity have arisen due to efforts to integrate the non-Semitic elements of the religion with its roots in Semitic monotheism. The doctrines of Jesus’ nature (as incarnation of God) and the nature of the Trinity have been the central points of conflict in these sectarian divisions. Even as these elements have produced difficulty, however, they also provided early Christianity with a competitive edge over other religious cults in the Roman Empire. Perhaps it was grafting the Indic concept of Jesus as avatar onto the Jewish concept of the messiah as savior figure which allowed the gentiles to understand and absorb a religion which might otherwise have been completely foreign to them.³³

The late professor T.W. Rhys Davids goes so far as to argue,

Almost the whole of the moral teaching of the Gospels, as distinct from the dogmatic teaching, will be found in Buddhist writings, several centuries older than the Gospels; that, for instance, all the moral doctrines collected together in the so-called Sermon on the Mount, all those which can be separated from the theistic dogmas there maintained are found again in the Pitakas.³⁴

The connections between Christianity and Buddhism, in Rhys Davids’ view, extends beyond the content to the very form in which the doctrines are presented. Both Jesus and Buddha teach in parables, using ordinary and even homely figures of speech.³⁵

CHRISTIANITY AND UNIVERSALISM

Christianity’s non-Semitic qualities, which it may well have absorbed from Buddhism, provide it with an element of universalism more in harmony with the Indic tradition than with Judaism or Islam.³⁶ Swami Akhilananda has explored this element in detail in his Hindu View of Christ. Akhilananda describes human civilization as following one of two distinct ideals: the good or the pleasant. The pleasant was the ideal followed by Greco-Roman civilization (its great philosophers notwithstanding), and he believes it is also followed by modern European civilization to its detriment. By contrast, the good is “the path of religion which emphasize[s] the attainment of knowledge or realization of God or feeling the presence and grace of God.”³⁷ This path is the one followed by people such as the Hindus, the Chinese, and the (true) Christians.

From an Indic or Oriental point of view, Akhilananda argues, Jesus is a man of the highest spiritual authority. Through his experience on the Cross, Jesus advocates in the firmest possible way the spiritual method, which is the overcoming of evil by good. Regarding Jesus’ prayer for the people who were persecuting him, even as he was dying at their hands, Akhilananda concludes, “Can you find greater manifestation of spiritual power than this?”³⁸

From the same point of view, the supreme goal of human effort appears to be the attainment of eternal life through realization of the nature of God. Other human efforts aim at happiness in this world and the proper training and discipline needed to achieve this. While these efforts have their value, they are not ends in themselves. By emphasizing the supreme goal so strenuously, Akhilananda says, Jesus “appears thoroughly Oriental to the Hindu.”³⁹

The difficulty in accepting Christian teaching, from the point of view of the Indic tradition, lies not in its doctrine of Incarnation or the Trinity but in the exclusivist nature of its claims—a quality which it inherits from its Judaic roots. The Hindu has no objection in principle to the claim that Jesus is God become man. But the claim that Jesus is the sole ‘son of God’ and the one acceptable path to salvation is difficult if not possible for the Hindu to accept.

In her 2008 book Aryan Jesus, Dartmouth professor Susannah Heschel laments that fascination with the connections between Jesus and Indian Buddhism may have been promoted by a romantic but false fascination with India. Because of this fascination, she argues, Christianity came to be seen as derived from India’s Aryan mythology and Jesus himself became “drained” of his “Jewishness.”⁴⁰

Because of her polemical view, Heschel makes little effort to refute the arguments put forward over the course of more than 150 years by investigators of the study of Buddhist influence on Christianity. The work of scholars such as T.W. Rhys Davids, Otto Pfleiderer , Dr, Wintertmintz, Max Muller, Dr. S. Radhakrishnan, Sir Charles Eliot, Dr, Roy Amore, Dr. Micheal Lockwood, Dr. Zacharias Thundy, and others is largely ignored by Heschel. Yet these studies together present a far different look at the history of first century Palestine and Buddhist and Christian relations.

For example, Pfleiderer makes the case in his Christian Origins that the parallels between Buddhist stories and the childhood stories of Jesus told in Luke are “too striking to be classed as mere chance; some kind of historical connection must be postulated.”⁴¹ In Eastern Religions and Western Thought, Dr. Radhakrishnan makes the case that Buddha and Jesus each grew out of a tradition, and the differences in their respective traditions produce “certain deep differences beneath the resemblances” between their two doctrines. Thus, Buddha views the Absolute as a super-personal spirit, while Jesus believes in a personal God. This shows the theistic impulse Jesus picks up from Judaism, which is not present in Buddha’s teachings. The dogmatic Christian belief in the sole salvation of Jesus also has no parallel in Buddhism.⁴² Nevertheless, although some connections between Buddhism and Christianity may be mere chance parallels, Radhakrishnan argues, like Pfleiderer, that it is unlikely if not impossible that two men could have careers “with the same legends and embellishments” purely by accident.⁴³

By whatever means it came by them, Christianity has roots beyond Judaic monotheism. Those roots place it decidedly at odds with its fellow Abrahamic faiths, but bring it closer to the orbit of other world religions—notably religions of the Indic tradition. The exclusivist monotheism of Islam has left it an odd man out in the world throughout the modern age. Christianity, on the other hand, has considerably moderated its former exclusivist claims.⁴⁴

Most significantly, the possible Buddhist origins of Christian thought and doctrine also call into question the claim that Christianity (or the other Abrahamic religions for that matter) represents the completely independent revelation of a wholly other monotheistic God. There seems to have been too much borrowing from purely human, preexisting sources to believe that the whole truth of Christian thought was simply revealed to a handful of first century scribes in the eastern Mediterranean. While these borrowings do not enhance Christianity’s reputation as a “divine” faith, they do make it remarkably successful as a tolerant, universal, and humane religion.

APPENDIX TWO

The Classical Roots
of Western Civilization

The critical consciousness inherited from the Greeks has been the key to the remarkable ascendancy of the West. Science, technology, individualism, liberal democracy, natural rights … all are ultimately the precious cargo of the Greek way of looking at the World.

—Historian Bruce Thornton¹

The original thing in Greek science at its beginnings is that it offers us, for the first time in history, an attempt to supply a purely naturalist interpretation of the universe as a whole. Cosmology takes the place of myth. The ancient empires of the Near East … brought to a certain level of systematization and theoretical development a few officially approved sciences, such as astronomy, mathematics, and medicine. But there is no evidence of an attempt to give a naturalistic explanation of the universe as a whole. There is an official mythology, transmitted in priestly corporations and enshrined in elaborate ceremonial. There are no individual thinkers offering a rational substitute for this doctrine.

—Professor Benjamin Farrington²

Christ is the omnipotence of subjectivity, the heart released from all the bonds and laws of Nature, the soul excluding the world, and concentrated only on itself, the reality of all the heart’s wishes, the Easter festival of the heart, the ascent to heaven of the imagination: – Christ therefore is the distinction of Christianity from heathenism.

—Ludwig Feuerbach³

Then Jesus said to the woman, “I was sent only to help God’s lost sheep—the people of Israel.”

—Matthew 15:24

I am not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world.

—Socrates⁴

As all the ages of the world have not produced a greater statesman and philosopher united than Cicero, his authority should have great weight.

—John Adams⁵

Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise, every expanded prospect.

—James Madison⁶

What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?

—Tertullian (c 160 – 225 AD)

Except the blind forces of nature, nothing moves in this world which is not Greek in its origin.

—Sir Henry Maine⁷

It has become fashionable over the last few decades to describe the core of Western society and its values as “Judeo-Christian.” But if one simply walks around the great buildings and monuments of Washington, D.C. it will be clear that a major influence is completely overlooked by the phrase Judeo-Christian. From the towering marble columns and the frieze-covered triangular pediment of the Supreme Court to the temple-like grandeur of the Capitol Building, Washington’s architecture is an elaborate tribute to the classical world of Greece and Rome.⁸ Nor is that influence limited to architecture. From politics to literature to law, the concepts, ideas, and models that form the foundation of American life are Greco-Roman in their origins.

The Christian basis of American and Western societies is considerable, but it should not be forgotten that classical culture is also essential when it comes to understanding the particular character and genius of the European mind. Nor should we forget the contributions of the Teutonic peoples, the Anglo-Saxons, or the Celts in addition to those of the Romans and Greeks when it comes to the formation of Western man. It is inaccurate and improper to describe Western Civilization as simply Judeo-Christian. Indeed, it is in Christianity’s ability to adapt to and find synthesis with this classical inheritance that we find the secret of its success. Neither Islam nor Judaism (for the majority of its existence) was able to accomplish such a synthesis with the world of observation and reason. It is Islam’s particular inability to adapt to that world which both marks the borders of European civilization and ensures that Islamic imperialism will remain the principal existential enemy of the West.

For centuries, scholars in the West have puzzled over the different ways in which our civilization has synthesized its religious roots with its rationalist heritage. It would take an encyclopedia to fully explore their findings. Historian Bruce Thornton, however, provides a useful starting-point for understanding this synthesis:

One unique characteristic of the Greeks that more than anything else explains their innovative brilliance: the “critical spirit,” the way they made everything they encountered an object of thought to be discussed and analyzed free from the constraints of religion and government … Their curiosity, their relentless questioning, their drive to explain human existence rationally and coherently and to find meaning in experience, are the starting point for all the other intellectual achievements we attribute to them … all are Greek words, all are formalized expressions of this fundamental quality we can call “critical self-consciousness.”⁹

All the critical studies of modern life—physics, chemistry, all the “–ologies”—are named by Greek words, as Thornton points out. In each one it could be shown how ancient Greek and Roman philosophers first engaged in those critical empirical observations which are the basis of science. In the following pages we will focus generally on five areas of culture which illustrate the essential debt the West owes to ancient Greece and Rome. Those areas are government and politics, law, literature, education, and science.

GOVERNMENT AND POLITICS

Most of the words we use to describe political things and phenomenon were borrowed from the Greeks and Romans. The words ‘politics’, ‘policy’, and ‘police’ all come from the Greek word polis (city). The words ‘citizen’, ‘civic’, and ‘civil’ all come from the Latin word for city, civitas. For many concepts in common use today like ‘republic’ (from Latin res publica, meaning public affairs) or ‘democracy’ (from Greek demokratia, rule of the people) we not only borrowed the words we also studied the analysis of these concepts. Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Politics remain useful today for their observations about human political behavior.

One of the chief influences Greek and Roman political thought had on the later West can be found in the development of notions of public affairs. In the empires of ancient Egypt or Persia, there was, strictly speaking, no such thing as politics because there was no such thing as public affairs. Government was no more than the private affairs of the ruler and his ruling class.

The great advance made by Greece was to have recognized that public or common interests exist and to have provided, first for their management, and secondly for their study.¹⁰

In other words, the Greeks paved the way for the scientific study of politics and government by recognizing that there was a dimension to public affairs beyond the private interests of a king or pharaoh.

The basic political unit of the Greek and Roman world was the city, understood as a built-up urban core surrounded by the farmland, pastures, wood and stone which provided the necessary food and raw materials for ordinary human life. Today, we commonly refer to these cities of the classical world as “city-states.” They were in many ways both the laboratories and the classrooms of the West. The model of the Greek city-states from the seventh through the fourth centuries BC “provided Europe with its first concept of a reasonable society.”¹¹ In the words of historian Carl Richard, the Greeks of this period “formulated the theories of popular sovereignty, natural law, and mixed government that undergird modern democratic government.”¹² The Greeks also experienced the difficulties attending democratic rule—most notably in the relative lack of unity among the different cities which left them vulnerable to powerful empires with a stronger central government. It was the Romans under the Republic who would later combine the city-state model of the Greeks with powerful administrative and bureaucratic authority into a working and durable system of government. Through the Romans, the example of the Greeks was transmitted forward to what would become Western Europe.

The model of Athens in particular would serve as both a warning and an inspiration to later political thinkers. Classical Athens was ruled by a direct democracy, with all adult male citizens coming together to make political decisions in an assembly. This form of representation proved unwieldy and chaotic once Athens became a major seafaring power, and eventually led to crippling internal struggles between the wealthier citizens and those of humble means. Nevertheless, during the European Enlightenment the American Founding Fathers and their European counterparts revived the old Athenian values of free speech and open political deliberation, making them sacrosanct in the new model of liberal democracy they were creating. The great Athenian statesman Pericles had once declared, “instead of looking on discussion as a stumbling-block in the way of action, we think it an indispensable preliminary to any wise action at all.”¹³ The commitment Pericles showed to free inquiry and unfettered public expression still lies at the heart of America’s First Amendment today.¹⁴

The American concept of a divided government with a balance of powers among its different branches is a direct descendant of classical political philosophy. Plato was the first to identify the three forms of government (monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy—or rule by one man, by a few, or by the many) and observe that all three tended to descend over time into misrule. He proposed the solution of a mixed government in which the different classes of society would be represented and balanced against one another. Aristotle made this idea of mixed government the centerpiece of his Politics, discussing it as a mixture not just of classes but of different functions—legislative, executive, and judicial. By the second century BC, the Roman political historian Polybius produced a definitive version of the theory, arguing that such a government was necessary to avoid the cycle of discord and misrule that inevitably came with the other forms. Polybius regarded the Roman republic as a real-world model of mixed government.¹⁵

The Founding Fathers looked to Polybius and the example of Rome when framing a new model for what became the United States.¹⁶ Polybius described the three powers of government as represented by the Roman Senate, the magistrates, and the Assembly of the people. Later researchers such as German legal scholar Hans Julius Wolff have mostly agreed with Polybius’ assessment, with Wolff in particular calling it “an ingenious system of checks and balances.”¹⁷ The Founders used this model in the hope that a mixed government would be a bulwark against government oppression of the individual or of one group of society against another. The Constitution directly reflects the Founders’ reading of classical political theory and their understanding of the ideals and issues found there.¹⁸

In political affairs, the influence of classical Greece is so strong it extends even to non-Western cultures. Bruce Thornton describes how Chinese dissidents in 1989 made use of the Goddess of Democracy at their gathering in Tiananmen Square:

These Chinese freedom-fighters understood something too many Western intellectuals have forgotten: that political freedom is dependent on consensual government, a link forged in ancient Greece. There the concept of political freedom itself was first created and recognized as a value worth dying for.¹⁹

Above all, the Founding Fathers looked to Greece and Rome as crucial examples of liberty and political behavior. The Federalist Papers hearken back to examples of Rome in order to defend the advantages of the proposed Constitution. In describing the state of England in his time, John Adams quoted the Roman historian Sallust in describing as a venal place, “ripe for destruction.” Drawing from examples he learned from Greek and Roman writers, James Madison observed that history’s greatest tyrants have often hidden themselves in the cloak of democracy, only later to reveal themselves as power-hungry demagogues. This observation may well have come right from Thucydides, who describes the Athenian statesman Cleon in this same fashion. Most importantly, the Founders did not simply revere the classics in religious fashion, but read them with a critical eye—picking and choosing what they wished to preserve from what they found. When it came to the example of ancient Sparta, for instance, both Adams and Alexander Hamilton recoiled from the Spartans’ communal ownership of goods and excessive focus on military training (Hamilton called it “stark mad”). Instead, they preferred to preserve the Spartan dedication to the development of virtue but with a less brutal and collectivist model of education.²⁰

On the matter of slavery and freedom, the Greeks were even in some cases well advanced. In the historian Herodotus, it is taken for granted that the Greeks who fought for their liberty against the Persian invasion at Marathon and Salamis were also slave owners. Slavery was simply accepted as normal in the ancient world:

From time immemorial that was the attitude in all the world. There was never anywhere a dreamer so rash or so romantic as to imagine a life without slaves. The loftiest thinkers, idealists, and moralists never had an idea that slavery was evil. In the Old Testament it is accepted without comment exactly as in the records of Egypt and Mesopotamia. Even the prophets of Israel did not utter a word against it, nor, for that matter, did St. Paul. What is strange is not that the Greeks took slavery for granted through hundreds of years, but that finally they began to think about it and question it.²¹

The Bible contains no criticism of slavery. The book of Leviticus lays down rules concerning the ownership of slaves and how they may be passed down as permanent property.²² In the New Testament, slaves are taught to “obey your human masters with fear and trembling and with sincere devotion to Christ.”²³ The book of Timothy even presents guidance in proper conduct for Christians who are enslaved, telling them to “serve more faithfully” in order that “God’s name and our teaching won’t get a bad reputation.”²⁴

Compare this approach with the rational critiques that began to arise in the Greek world. With the Athenian playwright Euripides in the fifth century BC we find the sentiment that slavery is “that thing of evil, by its nature evil, forcing submission from a man to what no man should yield to.”²⁵ A generation later, the philosopher Plato would call a slave “an embarrassing possession” and Aristotle would describe in detail the arguments that had arisen describing slavery as an institution that violated nature. In the years after Aristotle, the Stoic school of philosophy denounced slavery as an intolerable wrong committed by man against man.²⁶ More than 2,200 years later America would fight a bloody Civil War to finally put an end to the institution of slavery within its borders.

LAW AND JUSTICE

If the ancients provided conceptual foundations for government and politics, when it comes to the law they provided even more. In law, the achievement of the Romans has been, as Wolff summarizes, “one of the foundations of Civil law … We are therefore entitled to call Roman Law one of the strongest formative forces in the development of Western civilization.”²⁷ What made Roman law so robust was that it was able to assimilate so many new concepts over a period of many centuries of activity. It was remarkably able to adapt to new developments while retaining its core identity of clear, rational thought and empirical evidence above all. Even when Roman power and sovereignty crumbled, its legal system lived on for centuries more, informing the legal codes of all Western Europe.²⁸

Unlike some of the other classical contributions to the West, Roman law never entirely disappeared from the scene. The so-called barbarians who gradually put an end to Roman sovereignty in Europe were in many cases quite noble and organized people with long histories of adaptation to Roman ways. Even as they claimed territory from a dying empire that was unable to administer or maintain it, they found the old Roman law supremely useful. The seminal act which ensured that Roman law would be passed down to future generations came in the sixth century AD in the surviving Eastern half of the Empire (the Byzantines). The great Byzantine Emperor Justinian assembled and codified the vast, dispersed tenets of Roman law into a central text, the Corpus Iuris Civilis (Body of Civil Law, c 529 – 533 AD). While Justinian’s motives were domestic and practical, the result of this great work was that a millennium of Roman legal wisdom was preserved and disseminated.²⁹

In the 11th century, Western Europe was reintroduced to a crucial portion of Justinian’s Corpus which contained the basic laws of the Romans along with commentary on the laws by Roman legal scholars.³⁰ Following this rediscovery, thanks to the emergence of medieval universities across Western Europe, “Roman law became the basis of a common western European legal culture.”³¹ Thanks to Justinian, as legal scholar Peter Stein puts it, “the idea of a common European culture” could be created.³² Today, legal codes across Europe and in Latin America are based on Roman law. While the law in Anglo-Saxon countries is founded on English Common Law, this too was influenced by Roman law (via Canon Law, the legal system employed by the Catholic Church). The crucial concept of natural law found in the Common law is also derived from Roman law. Therefore, it is not far-fetched to say Roman law has had a critical formative influence upon the legal systems of all of Europe.³³

Like all long-lasting cultural forces, Roman law has endured because diverse societies across time have found it adaptable and applicable to their own circumstances. The texts of Roman law have, in Stein’s words, “constituted a kind of legal supermarket, in which lawyers of different periods have found what they needed at the time. It has indelibly impressed its character on European legal and political thought.”³⁴ Perhaps nothing signifies the debt the West owes to the classical world so clearly as this.

LITERATURE AND THE IMAGINATION

While the legal texts of Rome shaped the codes of European law, the literatures of Greece and Rome were just as crucial in shaping the European imagination. The Roman Empire was a highly literate society, unmatched until the mass literacy programs of the modern post-industrial era.³⁵ In the words of legendary classicist Gilbert Highet:

The revelation of the Greco-Roman forms of literature, coming together with the introduction of so many stylistic devices, the expression in language, and the wealth of material provided by classical history and legend, stimulated the greatest production of masterpieces the modern world has ever seen: tragedy in England, France, and Spain; comedy in Italy, England, and France; epic in Italy, England, and Portugal; lyric and pastoral in Italy, France, England, Spain, and Germany; satire in Italy, France, and England; essays and philosophical treatises throughout western Europe; oratory throughout western Europe.³⁶

The literary heritage of Greece and Rome begins with the blind bard, Homer, who is believed to have lived and worked in or before the 8th century BC. His epic poems, Iliad and Odyssey became the standard and model of greatness for Greek literature. Rome’s greatest poet, Virgil, tried to emulate and surpass Homer with his own epic, Aeneid, which concerns the legendary foundations and essential moral values of Rome. In the 17th century another blind genius, the poet John Milton, walked consciously in the footsteps of Homer and Virgil when he created his own English epic, Paradise Lost. Thomas Jefferson regarded Homer as the greatest of poets, and Ralph Waldo Emerson claimed in the 19th century that “every novel is a debtor to Homer.”³⁷

While Homer is the jewel in the crown of classical literature, he is also only one among many. R. R. Bolgar emphasizes the importance of the Greeks in recording compositions written with the sole end of providing aesthetic pleasure to the reader. And just as Virgil followed Homer in composing a great epic, the Roman city fathers also embraced the literary example of Greece.³⁸ Today, in order to be fully conversant in the literature of Western civilization one must be familiar with the stories not only of epic poets such as Homer and Virgil, but dramatic poets like Euripides and Sophocles, and lyric poets like Juvenal and Horace. The myths retold by Ovid make their way down through the ages to modern literature and movies.

EDUCATION AND LEARNING

There may be no better way to summarize the impact of classical politics, law, and literature on the development of the West than to consider the general impact of Greco-Roman antiquity on Western education. Many of the norms, the topics, the methodologies, and even the purposes of Western education were inherited from the classical world. As in the other areas, this inheritance came through a process of influence and rediscovery. More than a millennium’s worth of educational advances from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance and the Enlightenment was shaped, informed, and catalyzed by Greek and Roman sources. “Much of the progress of the Middle Ages,” Highet explains, “was educational progress; and one of its chief marks was that the knowledge of classical thought, language, and literature expanded and deepened.”³⁹

The connection between classical learning and Western education was circular and reinforcing. The more connected to its classical inheritance the West became, the more its culture matured, and the more sophistication it attained, the more it sought out classical learning. This should not be surprising, given that educational advances in the classical era were likewise tied to social progress. Bolgar recounts:

Before the fifth century B.C. the Greeks had given their children a type of training which is common to all semi-primitive societies, and whose aim is to produce good fighting men versed in the usual religious practices and traditions.⁴⁰

The demands of Athenian democracy, however, necessitated a more involved training. Citizens had to be able to read, to investigate, to listen carefully, and to speak convincingly and coherently. As democracy emerged in the Greek cities, a premium was placed on the skills of communication and persuasion.⁴¹ Finding people who not only knew those skills but could pass them on to others became a critical issue.

Faced with these demands, two new types of teacher emerged: the grammarian and the rhetorician. The grammarians provided a general education covering all topics that the citizen would need to manage and master. Their approach is still alive today in the concept of a liberal arts education, with its design of producing “well-rounded” citizens. The rhetoricians focused on the specific art of making a case effectively to the political and legal assemblies.⁴² A speaker at the assembly was called a rhetor and was responsible for making his case with truthful vigor.⁴³ The political realities of direct democracy and free speech at Athens produced a new and sophisticated culture of education centered on the virtues of language acquisition.⁴⁴

A similar situation existed in Rome, where the leading men of the republican era were disciplined by a need to persuade both the Senate and the law courts. Before the imperial era, Rome’s greatest men were necessarily masters of rhetoric. The greatest of these was Cicero (109 – 43 BC) who, Richard insists, “was the acknowledged master of each of the three types of rhetoric: deliberative, epideictic, and forensic—speeches for the Senate building, the funeral hall, and the courtroom.”⁴⁵ It says a lot about the later importance of Cicero’s political knowledge and rhetorical skill that his words would become a staple of the Western educational diet. “For nearly two millennia,” Richard says, “every educated European and American read Cicero.”⁴⁶

During the Middle Ages, much of the sophistication of the old Roman educational system was lost. But as the culture revived, it began to look again for models and found them in its Greco-Roman forbears. It was part of Charlemagne’s great accomplishment to bring a new thirst for the Roman past to his people. By 900 AD it was again considered essential in Western Europe for an educated man to know how to read and write in Latin. Over the next two centuries, a new classically-grounded scholarship was established.

The re-establishment of classical scholarship in the late Middle Ages provided the necessary grounding for the birth of the medieval university. Starting in Italy and eventually encompassing all of Europe, the university model proved invaluable for the production and dissemination of knowledge and learning. The sad fate of Constantinople in the 15th century had the effect of infusing the West with the full glory of the classical heritage of Greek and Latin texts. The rallying cry of the era became ad fontes—“to the sources.” Neither the 18th century Enlightenment nor 19th century Romanticism would forsake the reverence for the classics which was by then so firmly established. Above all, the values placed by the classical world on being able to read, write, and speak reasonably, precisely, and eloquently remained well in place. At their best, Western educators still strive to reach these goals. As Jefferson remarked, “in a republic, whose citizens are led by reason and persuasion, and not by force, the art of reasoning becomes of the first importance.”⁴⁷

SCIENCE AND KNOWLEDGE

Just as important in the Greco-Roman heritage of the West was its irreplaceable contribution to scientific theory and inquiry. The Greeks did not just make seminal advances in what was known and understood about the world, they also taught us how to learn more. Their starting point was rigorous commitment to free and rational inquiry and to empirical observation of the world as it is. Unlike the more dogmatically limited and cloistered investigators of other ancient cultures, as Richard points out, “Greek scientists were laymen, to whom science was an avocation—men who could think and act independently, and who considered all questions open to debate.”⁴⁸

Science itself could be said to begin with Thales of Miletus in the sixth century BC, who was committed to finding the natural causes of phenomenon and insisted that the universe was governed by physical laws. Science as we now know it rests on precisely this intellectual breakthrough. Similarly crucial is the modern scientific revolution which began in earnest in the 17th century, following the theories of men such Francis Bacon and the observations of Galileo and Descartes. Bacon insisted on the importance of rigorous empirical observation proceeding according to a fixed method of induction that started from the facts of experience before deducing laws of nature. The discovery of these laws was aided by the foundations laid by the Greek atomists Leucippus and Democritus, who lived in the fifth century BC.⁴⁹

What Thales did for scientific inquiry, Hippocrates did for medicine. Hippocrates’ primary contribution was the principle that illness proceeded from natural causes. This principle required that symptoms of illness be observed and compared and that theories ought to be tested. His followers held to a high professional and ethical standard exemplified by the Hippocratic Oath (originally much more extensive than the confidentiality clause everyone is familiar with today). We can also thank Herophilus (335 – 280 BC) for seminal advances in human anatomy, and Erasistratus (304 – 250 BC) for developments in physiology.⁵⁰

The number of Greek and Roman contributors to scientific learning could be expanded almost indefinitely. Astronomers such as Aristarchus provided us with early theories concerning the movements and structure of the heavens. Archimedes and Pythagoras are just two of the most well-known among a whole group of mathematicians whose theories and insights are still with us. Even where theories are incorrect, such as Aristotle’s analysis of physics, they still retain value through their basis in observable reality. In all of these areas and more the Greeks brought an analytical mind, an observant eye, and a logical rigor to observation of the natural world which remains the model of the scientific inquirer.

Historian Will Durant provides one of the best summaries of the Greek impact on Western science and its conception of the life of the mind. Durant sees the impact beginning in the Greeks’ willingness to challenge tradition on the basis of reason:

Greek science itself was a child of Greek philosophy—of that reckless challenge to legend, that youthful love of inquiry, which for centuries united science and philosophy in one adventurous quest … Curious of every fact and every theory, they not only established philosophy as a distinct enterprise of the European mind, but they conceived nearly every system and every hypothesis, and left little to be said on any major problem of our life. Realism and nominalism, idealism and materialism, monotheism, pantheism, and atheism, feminism and communism … all the dreams and wisdom of philosophy are here, in the age and land of its birth. And in Greece men not only talked philosophy, they lived it; the sage, rather than the warrior or the saint, was the pinnacle and ideal of Greek life.⁵¹

It is no accident that one of the two great heroes of Greek epic poetry, Odysseus, was most renowned not for his military prowess but for his knowledge of men and their world.

TRIBAL EUROPE

Although the focus of this appendix is on Greco-Roman foundations, it would be remiss simple to ignore the contributions of other pre-Christian elements to the character of the West. It was fashionable for centuries to dismiss the contributions of Germanic and Celtic cultures (among others) simply because these were felt to be “barbarian.” This prejudice has since been discarded, and we can now see that the so-called barbarian world was much richer than the old stereotype suggests. In fact, we have the witness of the great Roman historian Tacitus himself to make this case.

The first century AD tribes Tacitus describes in his Germania were a liberty-loving, honest, generous, and moral people. Particularly noteworthy is their practice of decision-making, which may be considered a precursor to the parliamentary system later found in the Anglo-Saxon and Germanic world. Tacitus observes of these tribes:

Affairs of smaller moment the chiefs determine: about matters of higher consequence the whole nation deliberates, yet in such sort, that whatever depends upon the pleasure and decision of the people, is examined and discussed by the chiefs. [At the assembly,] the King or Chief is heard, as are others, each according to his precedence in age, or in nobility, or in warlike renown, or in eloquence; and the influence of every speaker proceeds rather from his ability to persuade than from any authority to command.⁵²

This communal approach to decision-making was matched to a more egalitarian notion of authority in general. Even kings did not possess arbitrary power, Tacitus notes with approval, and generals tended to be obeyed by force of example rather than by any particular authority they held. Although he regards the liberty of the German tribes as tending to excess, Tacitus also approves of their sexual restraint and unmatched hospitality.

From this small example it is clear that Western civilization draws from many elements beyond just the classical world. The love of liberty the Founding Fathers take for granted is as much a feature of their Anglo-Saxon heritage as it is of the Roman world. Even the sophisticated Jefferson praised ancient Anglo-Saxon England as “that happy system of our ancestors, the wisest and most perfect ever yet devised by the wit of man, as it stood before the 8th century.”⁵³

CHRISTIANITY AND SYNTHESIS

The rise of Christianity to a position of prominence within cultures shaped by Greco-Roman and tribal values is a story of great adaptability and synthesis. Christianity did not succeed in Europe by replacing Greco-Roman culture but by adapting to it. In adapting to the classical world, Christianity managed to overcome part of the violent exclusivism that it inherited from its Semitic roots. By accepting Greek philosophy, Christianity became more universal.

Christianity’s inheritance from the Semitic theory of revelation has produced countless pointless theological disputes, genocides, mass exterminations, and complete annihilations of perceived theological and racial enemies. As early as the Council of Ephesus in 449 disputes over the meaning of the Incarnation (i.e., was Jesus both God and man at once or was he purely human or purely divine) triggered violence between Christians who believed the “wrong” thing.⁵⁴ The Roman Emperor Marcian eventually had to impose order by force to prevent bloodshed in Alexandria over arguments with no real answers.⁵⁵ The Emperor Charlemagne waged war on the tribal Germanic people in the eighth century in an effort to convert them to Christianity. One episode in this effort is known as the Massacre of Verden, where 4,500 Saxons who resisted efforts to be Christianized were massacred even as they were being held captive following their surrender. Between the 15th and 18th centuries as many as 100,000 people in Europe were executed for alleged participation in witchcraft—despite obvious lack of evidence—simply on the basis of the Bible’s command that “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.”⁵⁶

The scholar Jason Long has provided a detailed comparison of the traditions inherited from the Hebrews and the Greeks. It was the Greeks who provided political progress (in the form of democracy and aristocracy), followed logical and rational thought, and laid the foundations for the scientific method by their insistence on investigating the natural causes of all phenomena. The Hebrews, meanwhile, were content with a theocratic monarchy, beliefs guided by faith and superstition, and regarded God (or YHWH) as fundamentally in control of all of reality. Where the Hebrews explained their past through myths and legends, Herodotus and Thucydides were establishing the principles of historiography by conducting research, checking sources, and putting tall tales to the test of reason.⁵⁷

Long uses the example of Hippocrates to illustrate the fundamental difference between the Hebrew approach to learning to the Greek approach. Writing around four centuries before the birth of Jesus, Hippocrates remarked, “Men think epilepsy divine, merely because they do not understand it.” Then 400 years later, we read in the New Testament that Jesus was allegedly curing epilepsy by casting out demons:

This leads us to perhaps the most important question I will pose … How is it that the all-knowing, all-powerful creator of the universe sent a messenger, the savior of all humanity, who knew less than an ordinary man who had been dead for centuries? How could Hippocrates have a better understanding of the world than Jesus? Why should we hold Jesus as a superior teacher?⁵⁸

But Christianity itself also has roots in Greek thought. It is well known that several of the most influential Fathers of the early Church were well versed in Platonic philosophy. Through these writers, there was a strong tendency early on to go beyond the literal words of a text and find an allegorical meaning in the sayings or teachings of Jesus.⁵⁹ These Fathers even admitted that philosophers such as Plato had discovered truths about the world through their own reason rather than from God alone—a fact which they reconciled by arguing that “God used philosophy to prepare the Greeks for Christ just like He used the law of Moses to prepare the Hebrew people for Christ.”⁶⁰ Such an argument is simply unthinkable in Islam, which regards all knowledge outside of itself as heathen ignorance.

Later Church Fathers argued that Greek philosophy was worth studying because it agreed with the teachings of Jesus. This was the position of Church historian Eusebius and the great theologian St. Augustine of Hippo. Augustine even believed that study of philosophy could be beneficial in religious conversion, writing: “when I read those books of the Platonists I was taught by them to seek incorporeal truth, so I saw your ‘invisible things, understood by the things that are made.’”⁶¹ Augustine’s position is particularly worth noting because many of his beliefs became the ordinary views of the Church all the way down to the modern era.⁶²

By accepting Plato and Greek philosophy, the Christian Church became open to admitting the validity of discoveries of human reason. In doing so, Christianity became a truly universal religion. The process by which Christianity became fertilized by classical learning can be seen in a summary view by a look at three main areas: law, logic, and language.

Until the rediscovery of Justinian’s Corpus, the Roman legal tradition was carried forward in the West by the Catholic Church. Far from abandoning Roman law as pagan ignorance, the Church embraced it as wise, useful, and noble. As the Church faced increasingly complex problems over the years, it came to rely increasingly on Roman law to understand and address those problems.⁶³ In the Western Church, Roman law became integrated into Canon law. Thus, as the Church expanded its dominion, through its influence Roman law spread to parts of Europe that had never known Roman rule. Other parts, such as England, experienced greater Roman influence through the Church than they had ever known as part of the Empire.⁶⁴

As the sophistication and reach of the western Church developed, it found itself increasingly reliant upon the sources and techniques of the ancient world. This pattern emerged from the fact that investigating Christian doctrine, Roman law, and Greek philosophy required a common set of commitments and skills. As historian David Lindberg notes, “the earliest Christian apologists undertook a reasoned defense of the faith; and scholars of the Middle Ages (inspired by the example of Boethius) made a persistent effort to apply Aristotelian logic to knotty theological problems.”⁶⁵ In other words, the same logical techniques used to interpret the law or philosophy proved invaluable in understanding theology and transmitting doctrine.⁶⁶

The process by which Christian thinkers came to rely on classical tools of thought only increased after the rediscovery of Justinian’s Corpus. Seizing upon this invaluable source of Roman law, scholars used the logical techniques they learned from the classics to understand and interpret what they were reading in the Corpus. In this way, Roman law and ordinary logic were used to assist the development of theology and doctrine. Thus, Bolgar concludes, “theologians discovered that dialectic was needed to solve their difficulties [and] logic rather than literary taste forged the strongest link that binds us to Greece and Rome.”⁶⁷

Finally, the synthesis of Christianity with Greco-Roman culture was also assisted and framed by language. Christian scriptures were originally written in Hebrew and Greek, a fact which in itself shows the marriage of Semitic and classical minds. This combination ensured that Christianity itself would rely upon cross-cultural connections. Like the Roman Empire, the Church found from a very early time that it needed to communicate with people in common, non-sectarian, and non-ethnic-specific language. The standard translation of the Bible in the western Church for centuries was called the Vulgate precisely because it was written in the simple and common (the original meaning of “vulgar”) Latin used by ordinary people across the continent.⁶⁸ It was only when the Romance languages developed and the use of Latin shrunk to the clergy alone that use of the Vulgate became a barrier rather than an open door to the masses.

Ironically, it was the rediscovery of classical learning which provoked a religious revolution in the western Church. As knowledge of Greek was recovered, men such as Martin Luther were able to read the New Testament in its original language. They soon identified distortions and errors which had made it into the Latin Vulgate (and thence into the Church itself). It was through the drive to recover their original meaning of the Bible that a movement arose to purify and purge the medieval Church of a number of abuses. But along with greater knowledge of Greek for religious purposes came a greater knowledge of and appreciation for all of Greek literature. So it was that a middle-class boy from East London named John Milton would learn Greek and base his great religious poem on the work of a two thousand year old Greek poet.

Christianity learned from and adapted to the classical heritage. Perhaps one of the greatest examples of this is in Augustine of Hippo. Augustine began his life as a Roman rhetorician, teaching young men the proper and eloquent use of Latin. After his conversion to Christianity, he wrote a great prose tract called City of God synthesizing the political ideas of Plato with Christian conceptions of the moral life and the nature of God. If even one of the most revered figures in Christianity can make use of the classics, anyone can.

THE IMPLACABLE OPPOSITION OF ISLAM

Contrast the approach of Christianity with the reality of the Islamic world. In Islam, the cultures and civilizations which preceded Islam are regarded as jahiliyya (ignorant). The conventional Islamic position is that no wisdom, no logic, and no understanding exist outside of Islam. Therefore, where Christianity came to terms with its pre-Christian roots and nourished itself on pre-Christian sources, Islam has consistently and violently rejected any debts to non-Islamic cultures. It is neither coincidence nor mistake that the spread of Islam has typically been characterized by genocide and refusal to adapt.

This refusal to adapt works the other way as well. Even in countries where Muslims are minority, they still agitate for the right to reject the culture of their hosts. The British Muslim Anjem Choudary is an example of this. In 2011, Choudary launched the Islamic Emirates Project, which aims to turn 12 British cities into Islamic states which implement Sharia law outside the reach of British law.⁶⁹ While many Muslims do not support such campaigns, the fact remains that it is acceptable and almost expected for Muslims to cling to their own creed in the West while other immigrants seek to integrate and thrive.

Despite 1,400 years in which Islam’s primary attitude to non-Arab civilizations has been war and contempt, some still try to argue that this is not inevitably the case. They typically cite the example of the so-called golden age of Islamic science and learning. While the myths and exaggerations that support this view have been dealt with elsewhere in this book, it would be useful to address a few of them here simply because the fate of Islam’s golden age confirms its inability to synthesize with Western cultures.

The West does not owe medieval Islam a debt of gratitude for preserving classical texts. Some Muslim rulers showed some interest in learning from Greek writers in physics, mathematics, and medicine, all contributions outside those areas were more or less ignored. Furthermore, medieval Muslims were almost completely uninterested in and ignorant of the entire Roman corpus. Many of the classical texts which medieval Muslims read were made available not by Arabs but by Jews and Christians living under Islamic rule.

Also, while classical knowledge became thoroughly integrated into every area of Western culture, Islam’s brief flirtation with Greek learning came to an end. The result was not synthesis or enrichment but an experiment which failed. Classical logic, philosophy, politics, literature, law, and language all helped make Western society astonishingly varied and rich in its cultural output. Today, Islamic societies are still locked into barbaric, restrictive, and repressively ignorant cultural modes.

This sad state of affairs is a result of religious dogma, not ethnicity. This fact is underlined by the accomplishments of Jewish people who have for the most part avoided the same fate. Arabs and Jews are Semitic cousins who share many of the same cultural and linguistic roots. Yet the Jewish people have demonstrated an aptitude for adaptation and a willingness to adopt beneficial practices from cultures they have encountered.

Islam stands almost alone among the world religions in its rigid rejection of all that did not emerge from seventh century Arabia. While some individuals may resist this tendency, as a whole the movement is irresistible. The conclusion we should draw from this, however, is not hopelessness but recognition of opportunity. Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, Atheists, and even skeptical Muslims can and should unite and work together in opposing the existential threat each faces in violent and intolerant Arab Islamic imperialism.

For those of us in the west, recognizing the pre-Christian and Greco-Roman origins of our civilization is an essential step on the way. Once we understand that the classical foundations of our society have been both the key to its success and the common ground on which both religious and secular persons have prospered, we can confront our common enemy rather than each other. The Western civilization we benefit does not belong to any particular one of us, after all. It is fertile ground for all who wish to use their minds and energies to develop and improve.

APPENDIX THREE

The Case for Universal Secular Ethics

How dismal it is to see present day Americans yearning for the very orthodoxy that their country was founded to escape.

—Christopher Hitchens

Ranged against naturalism and dealing in illusion and delusion, fantasy and nonsense, are the priests and mullahs, rabbis and ministers, who are burdened with ancient mythologies. They seek to intrude, cajole, persuade, convert others to their archaic world-views, and have no qualms about doing so … The new frontier for naturalism is applying normative ethics to better enable us to lead more reasonable and satisfying lives on the scale of individuals, communities, and the planetary civilization that has emerged.

—Professor Paul Kurtz¹

But the reality of the world today is that grounding ethics in religion is no longer adequate. This is why I believe the time has come to find a way of thinking about spirituality and ethics that is beyond religion.

—The Dalai Lama²

Faith in the possibilities of continued and rigorous inquiry does not limit access to truth to any channel or scheme of things. It does not first say that truth is universal and then add there is but one road to it.

—Philosopher John Dewey³

After conducting research on Scandinavian religious beliefs for more than a year, sociologist Phil Zuckerman came to a remarkable conclusion. The Danes and Swedes he had been painstakingly interviewing over the months weren’t reluctant to talk about religion, he decided—they were just profoundly uninterested in religion. What was remarkable about his finding was that, contrary to the expectations of ordinary Americans, this strong streak of irreligion was part of a society of perfectly normal and happy people. In Zuckerman’s words, it was “a markedly irreligious society—that was, above all, moral, stable, humane and deeply good.⁴

Zuckerman’s findings are interesting to compare with other studies which show that religiosity declines as individual prosperity increases. In country after country the same pattern emerges. Members of the poorest groups of a society are on average 17% more religious than members of the richest groups.⁵ The countries with the highest populations of convinced atheists are all developed nations—Japan, France, South Korea, Germany, the Netherlands, Austria—while the sole outlier, China, is home to one of the largest and fastest-growing economies in the world. By contrast, the most religious countries include third world nations such as Ghana, Nigeria, and Kenya and desperately poor former Soviet Bloc states such as Armenia, Romania, and Macedonia.⁶ Such studies show that religiosity correlates much more strongly with poverty than it does with morality.

Today, the greatest number of religious believers is found in the Middle East, Africa, and South America, while the greatest number of atheists is in Asia and Europe. The most compelling theory to date for this marked disparity is that religiosity declines as society becomes more secure in providing the necessities of life—food, health care, and housing in particular. Where food and shelter are scarce and human life is beset by insecurity, religious belief remains strong. In short, it is “levels of societal and individual security in any society [which] seem to provide the most persuasive and parsimonious explanation” for the global distribution of religious belief.⁷

If this theory is correct, American concerns about creeping immorality attending a drop in religious belief are completely misplaced. We should not be alarmed about rising unbelief, but rather we should regard that rise as quite natural as relative levels of wealth and security increase around the world. In the era of a global economy, where religion (in the form of Islam) presents a considerable threat rather than a bonus, the need is more pressing than ever for an ethical system based on natural reason rather than on metaphysics. We are in need of a universal secular ethics.

THE LIMITATIONS OF METAPHYSICAL ETHICS

Many people still think of ethical or moral ideas as bound to religion or metaphysics in some way. Nothing could be further from the truth, since morality is easily capable of existing completely independent of religion. The belief that religion is necessary for morality involves two critical errors. One error is the assumption, particularly common in cultures shaped by Semitic theology, that moral principles must be given or revealed to us by a divine being. The other error arises from mere ignorance of the fact that the most moral and beneficial actions today arise as a result not of religion but of secular science.

It is simply a mistake to say that moral principles must be given by God in order to be valid and binding. With metaphysical ethical systems, particularly Judaism and Islam, many of the principles or rules do not concern behavior which anyone ordinary thinks of as moral. For example, who other than a religious believer regards it is a moral issue whether or not to eat pork or to wipe your bottom with the left hand rather than the right? Such rules are not universal; they are only used to set one group apart from another. Indeed, both the Judaic and the Islamic ethical systems are dualistic, mandating one set of rules for believers to follow with other believers and another set of rules for believers to follow with everyone else (i.e., with gentiles or kafirs).

Particularly in the case of Islam, the set of rules for dealing with kafirs is almost the furthest thing from genuine morality as possible. As this book has shown repeatedly, the Islamic system permits murder, rape, destruction, theft, and all manner of abuse to be used with kafirs. It even demands its followers regard themselves as in a perpetual state of war with kafirs. How can it be called moral or ethical for actions which are clearly unethical in one context (Muslims dealing with Muslims) to be completely acceptable in another (Muslims dealing with non-Muslims)?

Furthermore, when it comes to moral rules or principles provided by religion which are genuinely universal, there is no need for divine revelation at all. The value of moral principles such as “do not murder” or “do not covet your neighbor’s wife” can be discovered by anyone solely by the use of his own reason. We do not need God to tell us not to murder people or to desire things which belong to other people. Metaphysical ethics seem to be either useless (making commands about behavior which has nothing to do with morality), immoral (as with Islam’s dualistic ethics), or unnecessary (because reason can reach the same principles on its own).

Next, if one compares the benefits provided by metaphysical systems with those provided by science, it is easy to see greater advantages being provided by the latter. Take the example of edX, a massive online course platform established by Harvard and MIT in 2012 and provided free of charge for users in the U.S. and around the world. Courses cover computer science, electronics, public health, and more. More than 250,000 Indians took courses through edX, gaining knowledge and earning certificates to boost their job-seeking.⁸ How much more advantage did Indian people gain from these free courses than from the free lentils and rice provided by Mother Teresa and the Sisters of Charity?

The American biologist and humanitarian Normal Borlaug fed more poor and hungry people than even a million Mother Teresas. Borlaug’s development of high-yield wheat produced an enormous worldwide increase in the food supply in the 1960s, eventually earning him a Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts. Thanks to his scientific efforts, hundreds of millions—perhaps as many as one billion, by some estimates—of human lives were saved from starvation. These lives were not saved by metaphysical declarations but by the investigation and application of scientific principles.

Such examples could easily be multiplied. How many lives have been saved or improved by the discovery of vaccination in the early 19th century, anesthesia in the 1840s, or penicillin and insulin in the 1920s? What benefits have come to humanity from the discovery of calculus in the 17th century, the development of chemistry in the 18th century, atomic theory in the 19th century, or quantum mechanics in the 20th? Which has had a more salutary benefit on humanity, the products of science or the ethics of Islam? There is no comparison.

In cases like the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, science and technology even contribute to our universal morality. Because of technology, many countries were able to cooperate with Malaysia in the search for its missing passenger jet. Because of internet and television coverage, the passengers were seen as human beings—members of our extended family. The interrelationships revealed by the coverage are turning the world into a global village, all thanks to the scientific progress of humanity. We see the same thing whether it’s coverage of a global story like the Winter Olympics which people share through YouTube and Google links and stories, or whether it’s people using Facebook, Twitter, and similar social media to raise awareness of atrocities such as the Rwanda Genocide. In all such cases it is secularism, science, technology, and human decency which are uniting people. Advancements in these areas have little or nothing to do with religion or metaphysics.

BEYOND METAPHYSICS: TOWARDS A SECULAR ETHICS

The common belief that metaphysics is necessary for moral behavior was famously expressed by the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky in Brothers Karamazov. Ivan, the tortured intellectual of the three brothers, suggests that “without God, all is permitted.” Ivan’s formula still echoes through philosophical and theological discourse today, where many feel there would be no basis for morality without religious belief. The feeling seems to be that science and reason alone cannot produce an effective morality. Although I agree with Dostoevsky, I agree in a very different sense than the usual one. Without God all is permitted only because we have not yet learned to live ethically without a religious or transcendental morality. This does not mean that no alternative is possible, but only that we have yet to develop one. A naturalistic ethics with no basis on metaphysics or religion, one which proceeds from the idea that valid moral principles can be derived only from facts about empirical reality, would be a promising alternative.

Developing such a naturalistic ethics is by no means an arbitrary or fruitless exercise. It stems from the acknowledgement that religion has been the root of considerable suffering throughout human history. Metaphysics is not the sole cause of such suffering, but it contributes significantly to the conditions which make unnecessary wars and unwarranted suffering possible and even likely. The conflict in the Middle East, which is ideologically and religiously driven, is a case in point. The religious morality there actually serves to justify the conflict and ensures that no reasonable end to it can be found.

Islam in particular endeavors to establish a global caliphate through imperialistic campaigns and justifies this endeavor by reference to the Qur’an and the doctrine of Jihad. In response, many Christian groups suggest that Islamic imperialism be countered with what amounts to a Christian alternative. But metaphysics cannot be answered with metaphysics; such an approach only ensures an endless conflict, as the continuing struggle between Israelis and Palestinians makes clear. The real conflict is between that which threatens human wellbeing (i.e., literal Islam) and that which preserves it. We need to eliminate the monopoly religion claims on morality, and remove the assumption that religion is exempt from ethical criticism. Instead, we must look to the natural world—to objective, observable reality—for ethical wisdom. Such an approach to morality is known as ethical naturalism.

ETHICAL NATURALISM AND THE FAILURE OF OTHER ETHICAL SYSTEMS

Ethical naturalism has an unfairly tainted reputation. Some assume that it is merely a doctrine which suggests that “natural” actions are right and “unnatural” actions are wrong. Although this assumption is common, it is mistaken. Instead, “naturalism” should be understood in the same way as it is in the natural science—as referring to empirical epistemology which says, in essence, that all facts are facts about the natural world. Ethical naturalists begin from this idea because without basing our ethical ideas on scientific knowledge we have no way of justifying that any particular ethical claim is better than another.

Ethical naturalists have cast off many of the ideas which have weighted down philosophy for centuries. It is not necessary, from their perspective, to uncover absolute moral truth or certainty, or to arrive at an understanding of what is “good” in itself. Such ideas as free will, “the good,” and moral truth are in large part instances where philosophy has overstepped its boundaries and created unnecessary difficulties. Many of the criticisms of ethical naturalism proceed from misplaced assumptions and false problems which ethical naturalists do not actually need to solve. Although there are some valid criticisms, by no means has ethical naturalism truly been refuted.

One misplaced assumption made by many philosophers holds that the only alternative to metaphysical ethics is nihilism. Nihilism is the belief that there are no moral truths and that any moral claims are essentially fictitious. From a nihilist perspective, there is no justifiable grounds on which any moral claim can be justified or attacked. Nihilism is the reason why many, including some non-religious people, go along with the idea that “without God, all is permitted.” They believe that outside of a metaphysical foundation there is no proper basis for ethical beliefs. But this concern is unwarranted: a system of ethics which is not based in metaphysical claims is indeed possible.

Another problem which ethical naturalism avoids is absolutism. Absolutism is the belief that there are moral truths which are absolutely true and that we can and sometimes—particularly in the revealed religions—that we do know them. The problem with this system is that it presumes that simple principles can account for every possible experience in human life and will produce the best possible outcome in any situation. Take the case of the principle “You shall not steal,” which is common to the three Semitic monotheistic faiths. It is assumed that this precept is the command of an omniscient God, that it is absolutely true, and that it must be followed unconditionally on pain of eternal suffering.

However, consider a scenario where a mother chooses to steal food from a wealthy man to feed her starving children. The wealthy man does not suffer markedly for losing so little. Most people would forgive the woman, or at least would not condemn her absolutely for her action. Yet religious doctrine teaches that if the woman steals she has sinned and will suffer damnation for it—and it holds that this punishment is absolutely better than no punishment at all. Although this scenario is only hypothetical, there is no question that real life offers any number of similar situations. It is clear that absolutist beliefs are inadequate to such situations. In fact, when absolutist beliefs are applied to such situations, it increases the likelihood that unjust punishments will occur. The case of petty thieves in the Middle East having their hands cut off comes to mind. Islamic extremists generally invoke ethical absolutism all the time in order to justify acts of violence and murder.

If absolutism is used to justify immorality, it is ethical relativism which often keeps us from contesting such justifications. Relativism comes in many forms, but it can be loosely defined as a doctrine which holds that ideas of right and wrong are not universally applicable but are only relatively valid. Some relativists hold that moral ideas are defined either by each individual or by a given culture and are true only relative to that individual or culture. Others argue that there are multiple equally valid conceptions of morality in the world. From a relativist standpoint, it is impossible to judge the actions of al-Qaeda or the Muslim Brotherhood as “wrong.” This position is particularly popular in the western media, which prefers to ignore the religious or Islamic dimensions to the conflict in the Middle East, and refuses to make moral judgments about the constant parade of violence it portrays there.

In a sense, it is understandable why so many subscribe to a relativist position. The ethical systems which are currently established and available to all are each in their own way insufficient. It makes choosing an ethical position akin to choosing the least rotten egg of the bunch. Skeptics in particular tend to seek shelter from the conflicting and varied absolutist theories in the fuzzy haze of relativism.

REASONS FOR NATURALIZING ETHICS

If we assume that the empirical view of the world is right—that there are no gods or transcendent realms—then ethics have always been a product of the human mind alone. The problem is, for most of our history, this product of the human mind has not acknowledged itself as such. The Ten Commandments, for example, which are thought to be the revealed will of an omniscient God, are actually an invention of the mind. The mind is fallible, of course, and so are many of its products. When haphazard inventions of the mind such as the moral precepts found in religious texts are believed to be absolute truths, the original problem becomes compounded. Therefore, the process of naturalizing ethics must involve, on the one hand, getting people to acknowledge that ethical principles are necessarily products of human reason and, on the other, getting rationalists to admit that human reason possesses no transcendent powers.

Since ethical precepts are necessarily products of the imperfect human mind, we should approach all ethical claims with considerable skepticism. Given how varied and dynamic human existence is, it is impossible to produce ethical principles which are absolutely true in every case and to every possible extent. As far back as Aristotle, the best moral philosophers have long suspected that certainty or precision in ethical matters is simply impossible:

[Moral] actions … admit of much variety and fluctuation of opinion … and good [things] also give rise to a similar fluctuation because they bring harm to many people; for before now men have been undone by reason of their wealth, and others by reason of their courage. We must be content, then, in speaking about such subjects and with such premises to indicate the truth roughly and in outline … for it is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits.⁹

Ethical propositions are essentially claims as to how human beings should behave in order to achieve the highest state of human wellbeing possible. As such, they necessarily contain some assumptions about what constitutes human wellbeing. It is in these assumptions that we find many of the key disagreements. Christians, for example, identify the highest state of human wellbeing with salvation and may even prioritize obtaining salvation over any other form of wellbeing (such as having the resources to live well). From the view of naturalistic ethics, this priority on salvation is misplaced—humans are physical beings and salvation is a metaphysical construct. Looked at in this way, the mission to “save souls” can even be detrimental to human wellbeing in some cases. After all, the virtues necessary for salvation include unconditional faith in revealed doctrines and in the existence of God. If such virtues interfere with human wellbeing, they can lead to disaster. As Aristotle might say, many men have been undone by their faith as well as by their wealth or their courage.

Naturalistic ethics can bring significant benefit when it comes to identifying human wellbeing. As Sam Harris points out in The Moral Landscape, wellbeing ultimately comes down to human experience—and therefore, to states of consciousness. Human consciousness cannot be explored or examined by logic alone, we must also employ the empirical investigations of neuroscience (rather than mere philosophy or theology). Our brains are subject to natural laws and empirical investigation, so it stands to reason that our consciousness, which is produced by our brains, is also subject to such laws and such investigations. Ethical discourse needs to take into account the findings of the sciences, especially neuroscience, if it is going to produce a working account of human wellbeing.

Also when we ask questions about human wellbeing we are asking questions about human nature. Thus far, ethics have too often been based on accounts of human nature produced by metaphysical philosophy and theology—that is, by definition they have been based upon inventions of the mind rather than observations of reality. Since the discovery of evolution by Wallace and Darwin, the former belief that human nature was given and unchanging has been transformed by the realization that human nature developed and changed over time into what we recognize today (and will possibly change further into the future). A naturalistic approach to human nature can take into account the discoveries of science and evolution—both what we have discovered so far and what we are continuing to discover as we investigate man more fully.

OBJECTIONS TO METAPHYSICAL ACCOUNTS OF HUMAN NATURE

Metaphysical and theological accounts of human nature are limited by unwarranted and false assumptions. One of the most persistent of these falsehoods is belief in the existence of mind/body dualism. This is the doctrine that human beings consist of a physical body and a non-physical, transcendental mind. According to this doctrine, the body and mind may be mutually independent, but the mind nevertheless has a hierarchical priority over the body. As persistent as this doctrine has been over the years, the empirical evidence does not support it. First, we have accumulated considerable evidence that all the qualities we associate with the mind are purely physical and completely explicable in purely physical terms. Second, there has never been a satisfactory explanation for how our supposed transcendental half is connected to our physical half. Third, as a fact of experience we can witness how purely physical injuries to the brain affect the workings of the human mind. If the mind were transcendental, how could it be that mere physical damage could affect it so dramatically?

Another common practice in metaphysical and theological systems is to formulate some idea of human nature that separates the individual human will from the world of natural causes. This is usually done by asserting the existence of a soul which exists apart from physical reality but can affect it through its control of the human body. This claim about the soul is subject to the same objections raised above with regard to mind/body dualism. In addition, the claim requires some sort of belief in a transcendental realm to act as a sort of “home” for the soul. The problem is that the existence of the soul or a transcendental realm—or even the absolute freedom of the will itself—cannot be proven empirically.

One of the most persistent examples of the above problem is the metaphysical idea of human original sin. This is the idea that all human beings are flawed because of the failure of our first parents (Adam and Eve) to live up to the moral code established by God. But the idea that all human beings can be blamed for the fault of our original ancestors is a logical absurdity. As Ayn Rand argues:

A sin without volition is a slap at morality and an insolent contradiction in terms: that which is outside the possibility of choice is outside the province of morality. If a man is evil by birth, he has no will, no power to change it; if he has no will, he can be neither good nor evil; a robot is amoral. To hold, as man’s sin, a fact not open to his choice is a mockery of morality.¹⁰

In other words, the metaphysical approach which sees all human beings as flawed due to no direct choice or fault of their own flies directly in the face of what morality is. We do not blame people for things which they had no choice about or which were not their fault. How can we believe that God would blame people for the same things?

Some philosophers, most notably the German Idealists, go so far as to claim that empirical inquiry itself is inherently flawed and that only “pure reason” can bring us to an understanding of reality. J.G. Fichte claimed that his philosophy, although it made empirical claims about human psychology, was exempt from empirical standards of justification:

My system can be evaluated only on its own terms and cannot be judged by the principles of any other philosophy. It only has to agree with itself. It can be explained only by itself, and it can be proven—or refuted—only on its own terms.¹¹

Written in the late 18th century, Fichte’s request for a one-way relationship with empiricism wasn’t acknowledged as fallacious until the 20th century development of empirical philosophy.

While it is the role of philosophy to make the case that ethics should be derived from human nature, it is the role of the empirical sciences to discover and define that nature. We do not go to philosophers to distinguish between different animal species. We do not ask theologians to tell us the defining features of a dog or a tree. We accept in these cases that science tells us about the nature of animals and other living things. Man is in a sense just another animal or living thing. Science produces knowledge of such things, and philosophy works with this knowledge. When each discipline stays within its well define role, our investigations can make progress. Naturalistic ethics is based on the idea that our approach to ethics should proceed from the knowledge of human nature which science provides.

THE “OUGHT-IS” PROBLEM

One final objection to naturalistic ethics must be considered. This is the claim, supposedly derived from the philosopher David Hume, that one cannot derive an “ought” from an “is.” The objection here rests on the idea that factual claims (what “is” or “is not”) are essentially different from moral claims (what “ought” to be or not), and the latter cannot logically be deduced from the former. According to this objection, since “ought” cannot come from “is,” it’s impossible to have a naturalistic ethics (a system of ought’s) based on the findings of empirical science (the study of what is).¹²

As Flanagan, Sarkissian, and Wong point out, however, this criticism assumes that ethical naturalists are arguing that ethics is a science. This is not what the argument is. Ethical naturalists are not doing metaphysical philosophy, where it is common to construct propositions which purport to be valid claims about empirical reality based on nothing but mental chimeras. Ethical naturalists are not seeking to produce ethical certainty or rigorous deductive proof.

Instead, ethical naturalists are empiricists. They work with the empirical sciences and must have some understanding of the methods and discoveries employed by those sciences. They do not proceed by deductive reasoning from principles (the technique used by metaphysics since its principles come from assumptions about reality); they proceed by inductive reasoning based upon collections of data and observations of trends, tendencies, probabilities, patterns. When we argue that naturalistic ethics should replace metaphysical ethics we’re arguing that this methodology is superior. It’s better to collect and collate data about how people actually behave, how they think, what effects their actions have on themselves and others, and so forth than it is to make unwarranted assumptions about humanity and deduce hard and fast rules from these which can apply to any and all ethical situations.

In his book Ethics and Language, Charles L. Stevenson addresses this problem of deducing ethical precepts from factual statements. Stevenson points out that they type of validity we use in ethics is not the same that we use in formal logic. He argues that questions of “validity” which are raised by philosophers concerned by the “ought-is” problem are irrelevant. As he puts it, inferring from a set of reasons to an ethical conclusion will not be demonstratively valid—not because the inference is wrong but because the usual criteria of validity is incompatible. “When an inference does not purport to comply with the usual rules, any insistence on its failure to do so is gratuitous.”¹³ Complaints about the “naturalistic fallacy” or the ought-is problem are not warranted. Instead, they are false problems which ethical naturalists do not need to address.

In order to make the step from reasons to an ethical conclusion, all we need is a consideration of what constitutes human wellbeing. This will be done empirically, with reference to physical and mental conditions that can be measured and determined. It is important to realize that we will not be able to measure human wellbeing in a strict linear way. There is no straight line with the greatest possible suffering at one end and the best possible state at the other. Rather, when we take into account the dynamic nature of human existence we will find cases of suffering and wellbeing with varying intensities and even mixtures. It will be a three dimensional landscape, with many peaks of wellbeing and valleys of suffering. As we accumulate more knowledge, our understanding of what contributes to these peaks and valleys and how to negotiate them can only increase.

As a general rule, we propose no absolutist principles but instead promote conduct which promotes the lowest amount of suffering and the highest amount of wellbeing. In practice, this approach will involve more case-by-case sifting of facts rather than the establishment of rigid principles to be applied uniformly. This will be a longer and more difficult process, but the end result will be far better and more flexible than anything a metaphysical system of ethics could produce.

A SECULAR HUMANIST APPROACH TO ETHICAL THOUGHT

Professor and humanist Paul Kurtz has drafted a set of principles for ethical thinking which can serve as a model for what I mean by secular ethics. Kurtz’s principles are not absolutist commandments but principled and reasonable statements flexible enough to be adapted to a wide variety of human beliefs and situations. Rather than a list of rules revealed by God, the principles arise from observations of human life and contemporary concerns about how people can best behave with one another. For example, one of Kurtz’s principles is a commitment to an open, pluralistic, and democratic society as the best way of ensuring the protection of the human rights of all persons.¹⁴

Kurtz’s principles also strive for universal applicability—a quality which revealed religions notably lack. For instance: “We attempt to transcend divisive parochial loyalties based on race, religion, gender, nationality, creed, class, sexual orientation, or ethnicity, and strive for the common good of humanity.”¹⁵ Furthermore, he affirms commitment to what he calls “common moral decencies” such as altruism, honesty, and responsibility. A humanist ethics means that we reason together to find common cores of moral agreement rather than strive to impose our moral code upon others. A humanist ethics means that we learn to negotiate and compromise with others in order to transcend our individual differences. It is the complete opposite of any religion which seeks to impose its ideals by the sword.

Finally, Kurtz’s principles are committed to a foundation based on reason and science rather than on metaphysical beliefs. Therefore, he enunciates a belief in scientific discovery and new technology and opposition to efforts to seek answers to human problems outside of nature and human experience.¹⁶ To be committed to humanist ethics means to pursue answers through our own efforts and knowledge rather than from “trusting in a higher power.” To be committed to science is not an act of faith, but one based solidly on reason and experience. We do not trust in God or in the individual human agents of a God but in our collective wisdom. It is not a static system based on a singular revelation but a gradual and improving understanding of ourselves and the world. Kurtz’s principles show that it is possible to formulate principled ethical guidelines outside of references to God and religion. A fully developed secular ethics could easily proceed along the same course he began.

In conclusion, the endeavor to naturalize ethics is a necessary step in ending religious conflicts and contributing to world peace. The philosophical systems arranged against naturalistic ethics assume that it must conform to the methodologies they employ, but those methodologies are flawed. Since ethical certainty is impossible anyway, the inability of naturalistic ethics to produce absolutely true or certain ethical principles is no shortcoming. We must accept some amount of uncertainty in ethical matters, and we must be patient and meticulous enough to deal with problems on a case by case basis. In all things, the accumulated scientific knowledge of human nature will be our guide. Above all, we must learn to eliminate metaphysical language and assumptions from ethical discourse.

APPENDIX FOUR

Hillary Clinton and
Diplomacy of Delusions

A Critical Review of Her Memoir, Hard Choices

Relations between nations are based on shared interests and values—but also on personalities. The personal element matters more in international affairs than many would expect, for good or ill.

—Hillary Clinton on diplomacy¹

Perhaps our most delicate balancing act in the Middle East was with our partners in the Persian Gulf: Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and UAE. The United States had developed deep economic and strategic ties to these wealthy, conservative monarchies, even as we made no secret of our concerns about human rights abuses, especially the treatment of women and minorities, and the export of extremist ideology.

—Hillary Clinton on the Arab Spring²

Fix this on your own, and I won’t say a word.

—Hillary Clinton on a child marriage in Saudi Arabia³

Hillary Clinton’s Hard Choices memoir makes for some frustrating reading. She is a serious statesman who often grasps problems that many in the Obama and George W. Bush administrations did not. At the same time, however, her hard-headed political realism is constantly undermined by a fatal liberal idealism—one that leaves her completely unable to acknowledge the Islamic roots of the very problems she identifies. This idealism renders her solutions ineffective and her strategies impotent.

The problem at hand is that the U.S. government today is going out of its way to avoid even the appearance of criticizing Islam. Under pressure and intimidation from Islamic groups, in 2012 the FBI purged hundreds of documents and training materials because they contained descriptions that were reportedly offensive to Muslims. The 9/11 report necessarily mentions ‘jihad’ on 126 occasions and uses ‘Islam’ 322 times. Both words are entirely absent from the FBI’s new Counter-Terrorism Lexicon.

This “kid gloves” approach to Islam makes it impossible for the government to deal adequately with terror situations when they arise. Terrorists around the world have stated time and again that Islam was their inspiration and jihad their goal. Major Nidal Hasan, the Army psychiatrist who killed 13 people in a shooting rampage at Fort Hood in 2009 went so far as to say he killed his fellow soldiers in order to defend the Taliban leadership in Afghanistan.⁴ The Department of Defense classified Hasan’s massacre as a case of “workplace violence.”⁵

From reading Clinton’s memoir of her time as Secretary of State it is clear that she is committed to this same approach to Islam. It is not mere political correctness, where she avoids mentioning certain people or using certain words while still being aware of the real situation on the ground. No, Clinton genuinely fails to understand the roots, the sources of growth, and the fundamental implications of the problems facing us in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Israel, Syria, and Iran. Her failure leaves her unable to identify or even name some of the basic realities of the world we live in. This would be a shame in any politician. In the former highest-ranking diplomat in the U.S. government, and a Presidential front-runner, it is unforgivable.

The best illustration of Clinton’s difficulties can be seen in her analysis of the situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan. She recognizes the terrible consequences of the U.S. policy of Soviet containment in the 1980s. Determined to make the Soviets bleed in Afghanistan, the Americans armed and funded some of the most radical and conservative Muslims in the world. During her husband’s administration in the 1990s, these former allies took over Afghanistan and turned on us, “allowing the country to become a safe haven for terrorists.”⁶ As Secretary of State, Clinton pushed the Obama administration into rightly recognizing that Afghanistan and Pakistan constitute one inextricably linked challenge. Through her efforts, U.S. officials came to see Pakistan’s complicity in the resurgence of the Taliban.⁷

Unfortunately, Clinton is only able to see part of the picture. Her idea for a “comprehensive new strategy that addressed Pakistan’s role in the conflict” completely ignores one important element: Islam.⁸ No politician can understand what motivates either the Taliban or the Pakistanis without coming to grips with the Islamic beliefs that inspire them. Their strategies and even tactics come right from Islam’s most authoritative books. Yet over the course of nearly 600 pages Clinton refers to Islam only a dozen or so times and never even mentions the word ‘jihad’.

Clinton hasn’t the slightest idea what Islam is or means. For her, it is just another religious lifestyle easily reconcilable with others in a rational, pluralist society. This is why she calls the Taliban an “extremist group with medieval cultural views” led by a “radical cleric.”⁹ The Taliban and their leader advocate a very old, respected, and even (in Islamic terms) pious brand of religion. Many of the views and practices Clinton calls extreme were originally promoted by none other than the Prophet Muhammad himself. Guess which person holds more authority in the Muslim world.

Having completely misunderstood what the Taliban is, Clinton and her team come up with a supposedly clever plan to deal with it. They will isolate the ideologically committed leaders from the common soldiers, whom they think are more pragmatic. “With enough pressure,” Clinton predicts, “they might realize that armed opposition was futile and the road to any role in Afghan public life was through negotiations.”¹⁰ The problem with this analysis is that it assumes the Taliban has any interest whatsoever in Western concepts like “Afghan public life.” Islamic fundamentalists don’t want a seat at the table; they want the whole table. Their religion tells them Islam must dominate. It is the correct way of life, not an “equal partner” with any other.

Short-term improvements or temporary powers cannot tempt the likes of the Taliban. Jihadists know they are playing for long-term stakes and permanent victory. Indoctrinated in the tenets of jihad in grim Wahhabi madrasas, leaders and foot soldiers alike are happy to die fighting infidels and apostates, secure in the faith that their cause will succeed in the long run. Clinton is so determined to see the Taliban as a rational actor on the political stage that she completely misses the Islamic source of their deadly determination.

Even the concessions she seeks to extract from the Taliban demonstrate her unrealistic outlook. “If the Taliban could be persuaded or pressured to drop their ties with al Qaeda,” she writes, “and reconcile with the government in Kabul, then peace would be possible.”¹¹ This is the kind of statement that only makes sense in a Western press conference. Even if the Taliban agreed to cut ties with al-Qaeda and work with Afghanistan’s elected government, there is no reason to believe it would be anything other than a short-term tactical choice. Islam is very adept at making concessions when in a weak position, only to come back with a vengeance once given enough time to regroup and rearm.

Clinton’s assessment of Pakistan’s role in Afghanistan is plagued with the same essential difficulty. She is aware that the Pakistanis have been undermining American efforts since before we even arrived, but the way she describes and deals with their complicity shows how well they have eluded her. “We needed to get Pakistanis invested in the future of Afghanistan,” she claims, “and convince them they had more to gain from peace than from continued conflict.”¹² In fact, Pakistan has been “invested” in Afghanistan since the Soviet invasion. The manner of their investment in Afghanistan is precisely what is causing so many problems for the Americans.

For decades, the Pakistanis have been trying to turn Afghanistan into their own proxy state. To that end, they’ve been trying to establish a religiously conservative, Pashtun-dominated government in Kabul. This is why Pakistan supported Pashtun jihadists rather than one of the many other anti-Soviet mujahedeen forces in the 1980s. It is also why Pakistan sponsored the rise of the Taliban in the first place. The Taliban has been Pakistan’s most faithful and reliable supporter in the region since before 9/11. After the 9/11 attacks, on the eve of the American-led invasion in October 2001, the head of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) visited the Taliban ambassador in Pakistan and told him, “We want to assure you that you will not be alone in this jihad against America. We will be with you.”¹³

Despite this history, Clinton naively remarks, “if Afghans and Pakistanis could trade together, maybe they would learn to work together to combat the militants who threatened them both.”¹⁴ First of all, the decisions made by Pakistan and the Taliban clearly show that economic advancement is not a top priority for either. Trade isn’t all that appealing to leaders who rake huge profits from corruption and illegal trafficking. Second, the conflict is not between Afghans on one side and Pakistanis on the other; the conflict pits the Pakistanis and their Afghan allies against whichever Afghans that Pakistan has no interest in. Most importantly, why would Pakistan help the Afghan government in combating jihadists (or “militants,” to use Clinton’s Islam-ignoring lexicon)? Pakistan is the one who trained, funded, and directed those same jihadists in the first place.

Of course, the strategy Clinton implemented based on her misunderstandings failed to achieve victory. Referring to Pakistan, she recalls that “we needed their help in closing the safe havens from which Taliban insurgents were staging deadly attacks across the border.” Those safe havens are there in part due to the efforts of the Pakistani government. Needless to say, the Pakistanis were reluctant to undo their own hard work. Clinton is left to lament that “too many leaders of the Pakistani military and intelligence services were … turning a blind eye to the Taliban insurgency and other terrorist groups or, worse, aiding and abetting them.”¹⁵

The problem is much deeper than Clinton knows or wishes to acknowledge. Pakistan’s Army and its ISI actively sheltered the Taliban when it experienced setbacks in Afghanistan. They protected them, funded them, trained them, and even helped them to recruit new members. The army and the ISI, both pillars of the state of Pakistan, also provided logistical support for Taliban groups, ushering them across the border to kill NATO and Afghan soldiers then escorting them back to their safe havens.¹⁶ This behavior is nothing new for Pakistan, and is entirely consistent with its regional foreign policy. As former American envoy to Afghanistan Peter Tomsen notes, Pakistan strategizes “to harness radical Islamic fervor to gain strategic depth against India, liberate Kashmir, and fan the flames of religious holy war in the South Asian region and elsewhere.”¹⁷ Since 2004, it has been clear to Western intelligence agencies that the Pakistan army and the ISI were still extensively supporting the Taliban. Why does Clinton act as if this was not the case?¹⁸

Instead of pretending that she could offer Pakistan things it did not seek in return for helping to end a situation Pakistan had itself produced for its own benefit, Clinton should have asked why it was that Pakistan supported the Taliban. Their commitment to the Taliban in particular and jihadists in general has been consistent through multiple military and civilian administrations. From Benazir Bhutto to Pervez Musharraf to Nawaz Sharif, leaders have come and gone but Pakistan’s support for ideological Islam and the cause of jihad has continued without fail. Clinton and the entire Obama administration are blinded by political correctness. Unable to identify Islam as a problem, they can only insist unconvincingly that the issue is one of generic extremism or radicalism. They cannot understand the problem or produce the means of attacking it at its root.

Secular Western leaders like Clinton interact with leaders like former President Asf Ali Zardari (husband of the late Benazir Bhutto) and cannot imagine that such urbane and westernized individuals could also support jihad. But as former Pakistani ambassador to the U.S. Husain Haqqani points out, “this duality in Pakistani policy is a structural problem rooted in history and a consistent policy of the state. It is not just the inadvertent outcome of decisions by some governments … as is widely believed.”¹⁹ Pakistan’s very existence as a nation is based on Islam—that was the reason for its partition from India in 1948—and even General Zia ul-Haq’s infamous Islamization policy in the 1970s and 80s “was the extension of a consistent state ideology, not an aberration.”²⁰ Over time, as Haqqani shows, the political commitment to religious ideology expanded into a strategic commitment to jihadist ideology, the ideology of holy war.²¹

Under General Zia’s leadership, all Pakistani officers were required to read S.K.Malik’s The Quranic Concept of War. Malik’s book informed them that “the reward of those who fight for the cause of Allah is safe, splendid and sure” and “those who die fighting for the cause of Allah never actually die.”²² Such sentiments could hardly be stated more clearly by a follower of al-Qaeda or the Taliban. The current leaders of Pakistan’s military grew up studying this work, where they learned that “it is on the strength of our Faith, and the weakness of that of our adversary, that we can initiate plans and actions calculated to strike terror into the hearts of our adversaries.”²³

The root of Pakistan’s continual support of death and destruction is not “radicalism” but Islam itself. Clinton has been well trained to ignore this obvious fact. If diplomats cannot even use the word jihad and cannot acknowledge that Islam is the inspiration behind the killing in Afghanistan, how can they hope to stop it? Explaining the Obama administration’s frustrations with Afghan leader Hamid Karzai, Clinton says that “one of our problems with him was that he didn’t see the Taliban as his primary opponent in the war. He believed Pakistan was.”²⁴ It seems not to have occurred to Clinton that Karzai was right. Driven by the Qur’anic imperatives and jihadist ideology at the heart of their worldview, Pakistan has indeed ensured that Afghanistan remains in the grip of literal and brutal Islam.

“Future disagreements and distractions are inevitable,” Clinton continues blandly concerning Pakistan, “but if we want results we have no choice other than to stay focused and pragmatic.”²⁵ This alleged pragmatism, based as it is on the assumption that Pakistan is a secular nation that can be persuaded by promises of trade and mutual cooperation, is actually the opposite of pragmatic. It is delusional. So long as the U.S. ignores Islam as the root of the problem in Afghanistan and Pakistan, its strategies for dealing with the region are doomed to ineffectiveness and failure.

Clinton’s tendency to see Islam as unproblematic and only occasionally marred by “extremism” clouds her judgment across the globe. Despite mounting evidence of the Saudi government’s funding and directing of jihadist terrorism, Clinton continues to toe the government line and refuses to criticize the royal family. Again she describes the problem vaguely while neglecting to attack the source. “It was appalling,” she laments, “that money from the Gulf continued funding extremist madrasas and propaganda all over the world.”²⁶ The phrase “money from the Gulf” is diplomatic deception—if Clinton were truly appalled why was she not more specific about who is funding what? Why not take on the government that has funded and supported America’s deadliest Islamic enemies around the world for decades?

Clinton has been much more honest in private. In a leaked memo from 2009 she states quite clearly that Saudi Arabia is the “most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide.”²⁷ Of course, the issue is not simply a matter of the Saudis failing to crack down hard enough—it is that their Islamic “principles” direct them to actively and personally support people who massacre others in the name of religion. The same year that memo was written, lawyers for the 9/11 victims found, according to The New York Times, “new evidence of extensive financial support for al Qaeda and other extremist groups by members of the Saudi royal family.”²⁸

It has been thoroughly documented that support for al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and other jihadist groups comes from Saudi Arabia (often through Kuwait as an intermediary). Qatar has also been shown to be the world’s biggest supporter of genocidal terror group Hamas. So what does Clinton prioritize when it comes to the Gulf Cooperation Council [the GCC, which includes Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Qatar as charter members]? “I pressed [GCC] leaders,” she seems proud to recount, “on the need to open up their societies, respect human rights, and offer more opportunities to their young people and women.”²⁹ This is almost criminally delusional. While purportedly committed to the defeat of the Taliban and al-Qaeda, Clinton completely fails to confront the leaders of the very countries whose financial support gives life to those same mass murderers. Meanwhile she thinks she can cajole and persuade Muslims into giving up the repression and misogyny that are inextricable elements of their creed. You cannot cure consequences by ignoring the cause.

Perhaps the most ludicrous example of Clinton’s inability to appreciate the differences between herself and traditional Muslims comes in her naïve description of the Arab-Israeli impasse. Ignoring the troubling and disturbing reality, Clinton insists that “parents in Gaza and the West Bank share the same aspirations as parents in Tel Aviv and Haifa for a good job, a secure home, and better opportunities for their kids.”³⁰ If this were true, the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians would indeed be responsive to the pragmatic and material persuasions Clinton has in mind. Decades of enduring conflict suggest, however, that she is missing a large piece from this particular puzzle. Compounding the above mistake, Clinton goes on to pontificate that “understanding this is a vital starting point for bridging the gaps that divide the region and providing the foundation for lasting peace.”³¹ Such a statement is fatuous given the enormous lack of understanding on display. Quite simply put, Israeli Jews and Arab Muslims do not all have identical aspirations and desires. Believing that they do is a foundation for delusion and misunderstanding. Islam makes fundamentally different demands of its adherents than the material considerations Clinton puts forward.

Across Gaza and the West Bank, children and teens are raised to glorify suicide terrorism and to celebrate massacre and murder. “Your enemies seek life while you seek death,” proclaims a Palestinian Authority (PA) textbook, “they seek spoils to fill their empty stomachs while you seek a Paradise as wide as are the heavens and the earth.”³² Children are taught a message of hatred in schools named after so-called martyrs. Eight schools in the PA are named after al-Khansa, a female Muslim icon revered for her seventh century celebration of the martyrdom of four of her own sons. Another PA girls’ school is named after Shadia Abu Ghazaleh, who died when the bomb she was preparing for a terrorist attack in Tel Aviv prematurely exploded. One of that school’s students, when interviewed on PA television, explained the Ghazaleh “was a model of the wonderful female Palestinian fighter. We follow her path in this school.”³³

Meanwhile, young indoctrinated boys in Jenin pleased a Hamas television crew with their commitment to dying for violence. “We want to die as martyrs,” one boy claimed in an interview, “and among us, the martyrs are loved,” boasted another. Elsewhere on Hamas television, a Kuwaiti Muslim Brotherhood member encouraged the audience, “We are not like the children of Israel … we yearn for death and Martyrdom … Every mother—especially the mothers in Palestine, but every mother in the [Islamic] Nation, not just Palestine—must nurse her children on hatred of the sons of Zion.” On PA television, the father of a “martyr” suggested that “if every home would sacrifice two of its children, we would defeat the enemy. Let every house with 7 [children] sacrifice 2, as I have done.”³⁴

In the face of such statements, Clinton’s claim that Israelis and Palestinians want the same thing for their children rings hollow. Many more such statements could be easily found offered up by and for Palestinian Arabs. Parents in Gaza and parents in Tel Aviv do not share the same aspirations, regardless of what Mrs. Clinton would like to believe. And Islam is the difference between the latter culture, which seeks life, and the former that glories in blood and death.

Misunderstanding or ignoring the violence and intolerance implicit in Islam leads Clinton time and again to underestimate and misconceive her efforts in Muslim countries. Regarding Syria, despite acknowledging the terrible results of arming the Afghan mujahideen in the 1980s, Clinton and her colleagues “began exploring what it would take to stand up a carefully vetted and trained force of moderate Syrian rebels who could be trusted with American weapons.”³⁵ Such a statement simply topples under the sheer weight of the ridiculous assumptions loaded onto it. The idea that American “vetting” could keep weapons out of the hands of jihadists is wishful thinking at best, particularly given recent experience in Afghanistan. In 2012 alone, there were 30 “insider” attacks by Afghans in uniform, killing more than 50 American and allied troops.³⁶ In the first week of August 2014, a U.S. Major General was gunned down by an Afghan soldier inside the Afghan Army’s academy.³⁷ If this is what happens under close American supervision, how can Clinton or anyone else make sure American weapons are going to be used exclusively by these much-mythologized moderates?

Furthermore, the experience of Egypt and Tunisia ought to have demonstrated that it is not the group overthrowing a regime that matters, it is the group that subsequently wins control. Liberal Egyptians on Twitter may have played some role in putting pressure on Hosni Mubarak’s regime in Egypt, but once it crumbled the Muslim Brotherhood seized power. As Clinton herself testified, the young leadership of the anti-Mubarak demonstrations was “a disorganized group not prepared to contest or influence anything.”³⁸ Given the outcome in Egypt, which was only saved from complete disaster when the army stepped in to restore its own dominance over the Muslim Brotherhood in 2013, what makes Clinton think the result of a Syrian revolution would bring anything other than the dominance of Sunni fundamentalists?

Parroting typical western commentary regarding the country where the “Arab Spring” began, Clinton reports from Tunisia in February 2012 that “a moderate Islamist party had won a plurality of votes … Its leaders promised to embrace freedom of religion and full rights for women.”³⁹ Again, the delusions are enough to choke off any realistic assessment or potential solutions. The very notion of a “moderate Islamist” is an oxymoron. Even if it were possible, the party Clinton refers to here does not fit the description. Ennahda is linked to the Muslim Brotherhood and had engaged in terrorist attacks under the previous Tunisian regime. As is typical for jihadists who routinely hoodwink gullible western liberals, Ennahda offers “one message in the media and another in the mosques.”⁴⁰

The freedom of religion and rights for women Clinton wanted have both been damaged, not promoted, by the Arab Spring in Tunisia. As foreign correspondent John Bradley explains, before this so-called spring Tunisia was “ruled by the most secular Arab regime and was the most socially liberal and progressive Muslim country in the Middle East.”⁴¹ Abortion had been legalized and the veil banned for state employees. Tunisia “embraced secularism with a passion and loathed Islamist ideology.”⁴² Following the revolution in 2011 that was so celebrated in the West, “rates of the crimes of violence against women went up: rapes, verbal and physical harassment,” while a Tunisian female journalist witnessed “a creeping Islamization of Tunisia, women being the main target through indirect pressure.”⁴³ Clinton’s efforts to promote women’s rights will continue to meet with similar failures as long as she fails to face the fact that Islam encourages the degradation and abuse of women.

In conclusion, Clinton’s memoir is a clinical example of how political correctness, moral relativism, and plain old-fashioned wishful thinking continue to blind American leaders to our worst enemy. Unable to identify or even name the real motivations of those who spread fear, misogyny, repression, and murder around the world, Clinton has no answers to offer to the threat they bring. Traditional Islam, imbued with the thirst for jihad and the imperatives of Islamic imperialism, is America’s and the free world’s greatest enemy. But you would never know it from Hard Choices, written by the woman who led American foreign policy for four years and may well be our next President.

Ironically, Clinton recognizes that liberal assumptions may not work in negotiations with Russia’s Vladimir Putin, for whom “geo-politics is a zero-sum game, in which, if someone is winning, then someone else has to be losing.”⁴⁴ But Putin’s approach pales in comparison with Islam’s Muslim-infidel dichotomy and the violent insistence across the world that no infidel or “apostate” power can be legitimate. Just as it was in the Cold War, Putin’s Russia is a power that can be reasoned with as it seeks to provide a better life for its people. The forces of Islam produce a far greater and far deadlier enemy—one whose nihilistic carelessness for the lives of others puts them beyond the reach of rational persuasion and conventional diplomacy. America needs leaders who, unlike Hillary Clinton, understand this.

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Notes

INTRODUCTION

1.   Saeed Malik, A Perspective on the Signs of Al-Quran (Booksurge, 2010), 19.

2.   Ali Nawaz Memon, The Islamic Nation: Status & Future of Muslims in the New World Order, (Beltsville, MD: Writers Inc. International, 1995).

3.   Islamic Voice, Volum 28-05, Number 341, February 15, 2015. http://islamicvoice.com/iina-report-on-literacy-40-of-muslim-worlds-population-is-illiterate/. [Note: 40 percent of Muslims worldwide are illiterate. Islam demands submission, not critical thought. They are unable to learn new information because of censors and repression of information.]

4.   BBC News, “Rotherham child sexual exploitation report: At a glance,” August 26, 2014.

5.   Bertrand Russell, Freedom and Organization. New York: Routledge, 2001. 220.

6.   Steve Hopkins, “Full horror of the Yazidis who didn’t escape Mount Sinjar,” Daily Mail (UK), October 14, 2014.

7.   Adam Withnal, “Saudi Arabia declares all atheists are terrorists in new law,” Independent (UK), April 1, 2014.

8.   Qur’an 47:35. All quotations from the Qur’an in this book are taken from Al-Hilali and Khan, trans., The Noble Quran (Dar-us-Salam, 1999).

CHAPTER 1: IS ISLAM A RELIGION?

1.   Muslim Brotherhood, “An Explanatory Memorandum,” 21. http://www.investigativeproject.org/documents/case_docs/445.pdf.

2.   Abdu A’la Maududi, Jihad in Islam, (Beirut: Holy Quran Publishing House, 1996), 10.

3.   Ibn Warraq, “The Two Faces of Feisal Rauf,” National Review, September 14, 2010.

4.   John Wesley, The Works of John Wesley Volume 12: Doctrinal and Controversial Treatises (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 2012), 186.

5.   Quoted in Patrick Roelle, Christians Under Siege (Bloomington, IN: Author House, 2009), 484.

6.   Ibid, 174-175.

7.   Political Islam, “Tears of Islam,” entry by Bill Warner, March 3, 2008.

8.   International Humanist and Ethical Union, “Saudi Arabia’s New Law Defines Atheism As Terrorism,” Entry by Bob Churchill, April 2, 2014

9.   Husain Haqqani, “Muslims: Scant cause for respect,” New York Times, December 20, 2002.

10. Michael Axworthy, A History of Iran: Empire of the Mind (New York: Penguin, 2008), op. cit.

11. Ilia Alon, “Dhimma,” Encyclopedia of the Modern Middle East and North Africa, 703-4.

12. Matthieu Aikins, “Afghanistan: The Making of a Narco State,” Rolling Stone, December 4, 2014.

13. Ibn Ishaq, 341-2.

14. Sahih al-Bukhari 2:26:710, and compare Qur’an 2:158.

15. Sahih al-Bukhari 5:58:172.

16. Answering Islam, “Muhammad the Borrower Still!,” entry by Sam Shamoun.

17. Qur’an 25:5.

18. Shabbir Akhtar, The Quran and the Secular Mind (New York: Routledge, 2008), 43-44.

19. Ibid, 44.

20. Ibid.

21. Ibid, 45.

22. Ibid, 48.

23. Quoted in Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 197.

24. Muslim Brotherhood, “An Explanatory Memorandum,” 19.

25. Iran Const. art. XI.

26. Quoted in Ayatollah Jafar Subhani, The Message, Ahlulbayt Organization.

27. Baron Bodessey “The Islamization of London,” Frontpagemag.com, October 15 2011.

28. Bill Warner, Sharia Law for Non-Muslims (Center for the Study of Political Islam, 2010), 6.

CHAPTER 2: 9/11—A NATION TRANSFORMED

1.   Quoted in Jed Babbin, In the Words of Our Enemies (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 2007), 22.

2.   Bush, “Statement to the United Nations General Assembly,” November 10, 2001.

3.   Culbertson, “NASA Radio Address,” September 11, 2001.

4.   Qur’an 33:21.

5.   Sahih al-Bukhari, 4:53:386.

6.   Ibid, 5:59:611.

7.   Culbertson, “Letter.”

8.   Benjamin Franklin, the Franklin Papers, http://franklinpapers.org/franklin/framedVolumes.jsp?vol=6&page=238a.

9.   Meena Hartenstein, “TSA defends decision to make 95-year-old cancer patient remove adult diaper for security screening,” New York Daily News, June 26, 2011.

10. Russia Today, “18-month-old baby yanked from airplane for being on no-fly list,” May 10, 2012.

11. Charles Krauthammer, “Don’t touch my junk,” Washington Post, November 19, 2010

12. Shan Carter and Amanda Cox, “One 9/11 Tally: $3.3 Trillion,” New York Times, September 8, 2011.

13. White House, “Budget,” 2014, 28.

14. Kimberly Amadeo, “How the 9/11 Attacks Still Affect the Economy Today,” News.About.com.

15. RAND Corporation, “Compensating the Victims of 9/11,” 2004.

16. IATA, “The Impact of September 11 2001 on Aviation,” 3.

17. FDIC, “The New York City Economy: Post 9/11,” May 2002.

18. New York Small Business Development Center, “Disaster Recovery,” http://www.nyssbdc.org/disaster.html.

19. Majid Khadduri, War and Peace in the Law of Islam (Clark, NJ: Lawbook Exchange, 2010), 170-171.

CHAPTER 3: OSAMA BIN LADEN

1.   Quoted in Peter L. Bergen, The Osama bin Laden I Know: An Oral History of al Qaeda’s Leader (Florence, MA: Free Press, 2006), 21.

2.   Ibid, 133. [Note: Ghafar was the imam of a mosque in Khartoum where Osama worshipped while he lived there.]

3.   Sahih al-Bukhari 8:387.

4.   Efraim Karsh, Islamic Imperialism: A History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 1.

5.   Michael Dobbs and John Ward Anderson, “Bin Ladens found fortune in building,” Washington Post, October 1, 2001.

6.   Lisa Beyer, “The Most Wanted Man in the World,” Time Magazine, September 24, 2001.

7.   Steve Coll, The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century (New York: Penguin, 2009), 148.

8.   Qur’an 33:50 (and see also 33:21 on Muhammad as a pattern of conduct for Muslims).

9.   Coll, 203.

10. Quoted in Coll, 204.

11. Paul Klebnikov, “Who is Osama Bin Laden?,” Forbes, September 14, 2001.

12. Quoted in Coll, 248.

13. Quoted in Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia, Second Edition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 132.

14. Adrian Hanni and Lukas Hegi, “The Pakistani Godfather: The Inter-Services Intelligence and the Afghan Taliban 1994-2010,” Small Wars Journal, Volume 9, Number 4, April 2, 2013.

15. Coll, 249.

16. Ibid, 8.

17. Bergen, 30.

18. Michael Phillips, “Launching the Missile that Made History,” Wall Street Journal, October 1, 2011.

19. Qur’an 3:110, 98:6.

20. World Islamic Front, “Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders,” February 23, 1998.

21. Quoted in AFP, “Hundreds in Pakistan pay tribute to bin Laden,” May 2, 2012.

22. Daily Mail (UK), “Herbal ‘Viagra’ found in medicine cabinet at bin Laden’s Pakistani compound,” May 9, 2011.

23. Elizabeth Flock, “Osama Bin Laden Tells His Children Not to Fight Jihad in His Will,” Washington Post, May 4, 2011.

24. Quoted in AFP, “Hundreds in Pakistan pay tribute to bin Laden,” May 2, 2012.

25. Quoted in Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, “Bin Laden’s ‘War of a Thousand Cuts’ Will Live On,” Atlantic, May 3, 2011.

26. Bill Dedman and John Schoen, “Adding up the financial costs of the Boston bombings,” NBC News, April 3, 2013.

CHAPTER 4: AFGHANISTAN—BEFORE 9/11

1.   Ronald Reagan, “Message on the Observance of Afghanistan Day,” March 21, 1983, transcribed by the American Presidency Project.

2.   In Martineau, trans., “Les Revelations d’un Ancient Conseilleur de Carter;” Georgy Gounev, The Dark Side of the Crescent Moon, (Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2014), 9. [Note: Brzezinski was a top foreign policy advisor to Presidents Carter and Obama.]

3.   Quoted in Washingtonsblog, “Sleeping With the Devil: How U.S. and Saudi Backing of Al Qaeda Led to 9/11,” posted on September 5, 2012.

4.   Quoted in George Crile, “Charlie did it,” Financial Times (UK), June 6, 2003. [Ed. Ul-Haq was head of Pakistan’s ISI during the period when Wilson and the CIA provided funding to mujahideen forces.]

5.   Quoted in Ken Herman, “Charlie Wilson pessimistic about future of Afghanistan,” Austin-American Statesman, December 18, 2009.

6.   Ibid.

7.   Michael Moran, “Bin Laden comes home to roost,” NBC News, August 24, 1998.

8.   Encyclopedia Britannica, “Taxila.”

9.   See Cardona, “Book review: Paninis Grammatik,” Journal of the American Oriental Society, July-September 2000, Vol. 120 Issue 3, p464-5.

10. TRN Rao, and Subhash Kak, Computing Science in Ancient India, Center for Advanced Computer Sciences, (Lafayette, LA: University of Southwestern Louisiana, 1998), 52.

11. Kenneth Katzman, Afghanistan: Post-Taliban Governance, Security, and US Policy, Congressional Research Service, April 27, 2015, 2.

12. Thanassis Cambanis, “The Carter Doctrine: A Middle East strategy past its prime,” Boston Globe, October 14, 2012.

13. In Martineau, trans. “Les Revelations d’un Ancient Conseilleur de Carter.”

14. Cambanis.

15. Todd Leopold, “The real Charlie Wilson,” CNN, April 23, 2008.

16. Ali Al-Ahmed, “Saudi Time Bomb?,” PBS, November 9, 2001.

17. Steve Coll, “Looking for Mullah Omar,” New Yorker, January 23, 2012.

18. Jerome Starkey, “Drugs for guns: how the Afghan heroin trade is fuelling the Taliban insurgency,” Independent (UK), April 29, 2008.

19. John F. Burns and Steve LeVine, “How Afghans’ stern rulers took hold,” New York Times, December 31, 1996.

20. Lionel Beehner, “Musharraf’s Taliban Problem,” Council on Foreign Relations, September 11, 2006.

21. Tony Karon, “TIME.com Primer: The Taliban and Afghanistan,” Time, September 18, 2001.

22. Ahmed Rashid, “After 1,700 years, Buddhas fall to Taliban dynamite,” Telegraph (UK), March 12, 2001.

23. Roger Hardy, “The Iran-Iraq war: 25 years on,” BBC News, September 22, 2005.

CHAPTER 5: AFGHANISTAN AFTER 9/11

1.   Quoted in Catherine E. Shoichet, “U.S. diplomat died ‘doing what she loved’ in Afghanistan,” CNN, April 8, 2013.

2.   Quoted in Heath Druzin, “With little fanfare, Afghanistan War drags into 13th year,” Stars and Stripes, October 6, 2013.

3.   Yalda Hakim, “Afghanistan’s Hamid Karzai says Nato caused ‘great suffering’,” BBC News, October 7, 2013.

4.   Bradley Klapper, “Anne Smedinghoff, American Diplomat Killed in Afghanistan, Mourned As ‘Selfless, Idealistic’,” Huffington Post, April 7, 2013.

5.   Josh White, “Tillman’s Parents Are Critical Of Army,” Washington Post, May 23, 2005.

6.   Nick B. Mills, Karzai: The Failing American Intervention and the Struggle for Afghanistan (New York: Wiley, 2007).

7.   Walter Pincus, “Afghan corruption, and how the U.S. facilitates it,” Washington Post, November 5, 2012.

8.   Ibid.

9.   Ibid.

10. Adam Kredo, “Waste, Fraud, and Abuse,” Washington Free Beacon, May 8, 2013.

11. John F. Tierney et al., Warlord, Inc.: Extortion and Corruption Along the U.S. Supply Chain in Afghanistan, U.S. House of Representatives, June 22, 2010 3.

12. Ben Arnoldy, “US commission finds widespread waste and corruption in wartime contracts,” Christian Science Monitor, September 1, 2011.

13. Transparency International, “Corruption Perceptions Index 2012.”

14. BBC News, “Kabul Bank fraud profited elite,” November 28, 2012.

15. Tierney, 3.

16. Jonathan Schroden et al., Independent Assessment of the Afghan National Security Forces, CNA for the U.S. Congress, January 24, 2014, 2.

17. Ibid, 4.

18. Quoted in Druzin.

19. Human Rights Watch, “World Report 2013: Afghanistan.”

20. Howard LaFranchi, “Why Afghanistan is nervous about the US troop withdrawal,” Christian Science Monitor, May 17, 2013.

21. Khalid Koser, “Afghanistan: More asylum seekers coming,” Interpreter (Lowy Institute for International Policy), May 31, 2013.

22. Kevin Sieff and Josh Partlow, “Afghan economy facing serious revenue shortage,” Washington Post, April 15, 2014.

23. World Bank, “Afghanistan.” http://www.worldbank.org/en/country/afghanistan.

24. Steven Nelson, “Muslims in Iraq, Afghanistan Most Likely to Want Sharia,” US News, May 1, 2013.

25. Ron Moreau, “The Taliban’s New Role as Afghanistan’s Drug Mafia,” Newsweek, June 12, 2013.

26. Gretchen Peters, How Opium Profits the Taliban, U.S. Institute of Peace, August 2009, 23, 33.

27. Ibid, 1.

28. Moreau.

29. Jamie Glazov, “Boys of the Taliban,” FrontPage, January 9, 2015.

30. Chris Mondloch, “Bacha Bazi: An Afghan Tragedy,” Foreign Policy, October 28, 2013.

31. RAWA, “On the Situation of Afghan Women,” http://www.rawa.org/wom-view.htm.

32. Ibid.

33. Sahel Mangal, “Violence against women rises in southeast,” Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), October 7, 2013.

34. AFP, “Afghan father guns down daughter over ‘affair’,” May 3, 2013.

35. UPI, “Afghan Muslim leader arrested for fatwa against girl later executed.” July 31, 2013.

36. Rajat Madhok, “10-year-old girl promised in marriage,” RAWA, July 30, 2013.

37. Human Rights Watch, “World Report 2013: Afghanistan.”

38. Patrick Quinn and Rahim Faiez, “In Afghanistan, 4 U.S. Soldiers Killed,” Associated Press, October 6, 2013.

39. Greg Scoblete, “French Diplomat Warns of Western Failure in Afghanistan,” Real Clear World, May 1, 2013.

40. Catholic Online, “American general on Taliban in Afghanistan,” May 30, 2013.

41. Yalda Hakim, “Afghanistan’s Hamid Karzai says Nato caused ‘great suffering’,” BBC News, October 7, 2013.

42. Rod Nordland, “War Deaths Top 13,000 in Afghan Security Forces,” New York Times, March 3, 2014.

43. Afghanistan Study Group, “The Cost of the Afghanistan War,” August 13, 2010.

44. Linda J. Bilmes, “The Financial Legacy of Iraq and Afghanistan,” Kennedy School of Government, March 2013, 1.

45. May Jeong, “Afghanistan, After the War Boom,” New Yorker, November 13, 2013.

46. Nate Rawlings, “Afghanistan’s Record Opium Year,” Time, November 13, 2013.

47. Euronews, “US warns Karzai ‘sign or we leave Afghanistan’,” November 26, 2013.

CHAPTER 6: IRAQ

1.   Quoted in CNN, “Cheney: No link between Saddam Hussein, 9/11,” June 1, 2009. [Taken from an appearance at the National Press Club.]

2.   Quoted in Global Security, “Iraq Survey Group Final Report,” September 30, 2004.

3.   Kevin M. Woods and James Lacey, Saddam and Terrorism, Institute for Defense Analyses, November 2007, 17.

4.   Robert Pape, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (New York: Random House, 2006), 114.

5.   David Johnston and John M. Broder, “F.B.I. Says Guards Killed 14 Iraqis Without Cause,” New York Times, November 14, 2007.

6.   Ibid.

7.   James Risen, “3 Blackwater Guards Called Baghdad Shootings Unjustified,” New York Times, January 16, 2010.

8.   Associated Press, “U.S. halts civilian travel outside Green Zone,” September 18, 2007.

9.   President George W. Bush, “President’s Radio Address.” (March 22, 2003)

10. William Lowther, “Rumsfeld ‘helped Iraq get chemical weapons’,” Daily Mail (UK), Archive.

11. Kessler, “History lesson: When the United States looked the other way on chemical weapons.” (Sep. 4, 2013)

12. Mohammed Shareef, The United States, Iraq and the Kurds: Shock, Awe and Aftermath (London: Routledge, 2014), 146.

13. See Krauss, “Congressman says girl was credible.” [New York Times story from January 12, 1992]

14. William Rivers Pitt and Scott Ritter, War on Iraq: What the Bush Team Doesn’t Want You to Know (New York: Context, 2002), 28. [Note: Ritter was a weapons inspector for the UN.]

15. Global Security.

16. Associated Press, “CIA’s final report: No WMD found in Iraq,” April 25, 2005.

17. CIA, “Iraq’s Chemical Warfare Program,” April 22, 2007.

18. Quoted in Tim Grieve, “Welcome back, Tony,” Salon.com, April 30, 2007. [Note: Emphasis added]

19. The 9/11 Commission Report, Claitor’s Law Books, July 22, 2004, 61-66.

20. Woods, 41-3.

21. Ibid, 21.

22. Ibid, 45-6.

23. Tarik Kafala, “The Iraqi Baath party,” BBC News, March 25, 2003.

24. Thompson, “How Disbanding the Iraqi Army Fueled ISIS.”

25. Shaheen, “Isis ‘controls 50% of Syria’ after seizing historic city of Palmyra.”

26. Peter Beaumont, “From a Tikrit boy to butcher of Baghdad,” Guardian (UK), December 30, 2006.

27. Kenneth R. Timmerman, The Death Lobby (New York: Houghton-Mifflin, 1991).

28. Seymour M. Hersh, “Selective Intelligence,” New Yorker, May 12, 2003.

29. James Moore, “How Chalabi and the White House held the front page,” Guardian (UK), May 28, 2004.

30. Ibid.

31. John Kampfner, Blair’s Wars (Florence, MA: Free Press, 2004), 156.

32. Hersh.

33. Hanna, Tawfeeq, and Mullen, “Fresh from Ramadi, ISIS pushes east.”

34. Associated Press, “Iraq: hundreds escape from Abu Ghraib jail,” July 22, 2013.

35. Ted Spain and Terry Turchie, Breaking Iraq (Palisades, NY: History, 2013).

36. Paul Richter, “Missing Iraq money may have been stolen,” Los Angeles Times, June 13, 2001.

37. Judicial Watch, “Billions For Iraq Reconstruction Lost To Fraud,” July 25, 2012.

38. David Wood, “Iraq Reconstruction Cost U.S. $60 Billion,” Huffington Post, March 6, 2013.

39. Associated Press, “Post-war Iraq ‘ still corrupt and unstable’,” March 6 2013.

40. Ibid.

41. Bassem Francis Hanna, “Decade of Violence Threatens To Uproot Iraq’s Christians,” Al-Monitor (UK), August 21, 2013.

42. Lee Kuan Yew, “The United States, Iraq, and the War on Terror,” Foreign Affairs, January 1, 2007.

43. J.J. Gould, “10 Years After the Fall of Saddam, How Do Iraqis Look Back on the War?,” Atlantic, June 28, 2013.

44. Democracy Index, “Democracy Index 2012.”

45. Transparency International, “Corruption Perceptions Index 2013.”

46. Iraq Const. I.ii.

47. Quoted in Gould.

48. See: costsofwar.org (numbers include casualties and expenses incurred in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan).

49. Catherine Lutz, “US and Coalition Casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan.” Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University, February 21, 2013.

50. Costs of War, “Iraq: At least 133,000 Civilians Killed.”

51. Costs of war, “Economic Cost Summary.”

52. Pew Research, “War and Sacrifice in the Post-9/11 Era,” October 5, 2011.

53. Quoted in Wong, “Clinton: Iraq vote was ‘a mistake, plain and simple’.”

54. Beutler, “Jeb Folded on Iraq.”

55. Quoted in New York Times, “Rand Paul Calls Hussein’s Ouster a ‘Mistake’.”

CHAPTER 7: SAUDI ARABIA: DE FACTO SUPERPOWER

1.   David E. Kaplan, “The Saudi Connection,” U.S. News and World Report, December 15, 2003, 3.

2.   Matthew Levitt, “Subversion from Within,” Washington Institute for Near East Policy, October 2, 2003.

3.   Curtin Winsor, “Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism and the Spread of Sunni Theofascism,” Online Opinion (Australia), July 16, 2007.

4.   Doug Ireland, “Royal Coke,” LA Weekly, May 6, 2004.

5.   Hassan Adawi, “Guest Worker May Lose Digits, Toes After Being Tied Up,” Arab News, March 23, 2005.

6.   BBC News, “How the Saudi hostage drama unfolded,” May 31, 2004.

7.   Telegraph Reporters, “Gay Saudi prince who killed manservant to serve jail term at home,” Telegraph (UK), February 6, 2013.

8.   The Economist, “Larger-than-life diplomacy,” November 6, 2008.

9.   Ibid.

10. Odah Sultan Odah, “Saudi-American Relations 1968-1978,” (thesis for dissertation, Salford, 1988) 17. http://usir.salford.ac.uk/14829/1/D083068.pdf and http://www.saudiembassy.net/about/country-information/history.aspx.

11. Subcommittee on Multinational Corporations, “Multinational Oil Corporations and U.S. Foreign Policy,” U.S. Congress, 1978.

12. James Ralph, “U.S. Middle East Oil: The Petroleum Reserves Corporation” (Carlisle PA: Army War College, 1972).

13. Jean-Francois Seznec, “Business as Usual,” Harvard International Review, Volume 25, Number 4, January 6, 2005.

14. CIA World Factbook, “Saudi Arabia,” and Bedu, “The Expatriate Population in Saudi Arabia,” June 6, 2009.

15. Index Mundi, “Saudi Arabia Economy Profile 2013.”

16. Ruth Kramer, “Saudi Arabia Declares Destruction of All Churches in Region,” Mission Network News, Aptil 1, 2013.

17. Ali Al-Ahmed, “Hypocrisy Most Holy,” Wall Street Journal, May 20, 2005.

18. Ibid.

19. Center for Religious Freedom, “Saudi Publications on Hate Ideology Invade American Mosques” (Washington, D.C.: Freedom House, 2005).

20. Daniel Greenfield, “Islamic Slavery and Racism,” FrontPage, April 2, 2013.

21. U.S. State Department, Trafficking in Persons Report: June 2009, 251.

22. Human Rights Watch, “World Report 2012: Saudi Arabia”

23. Cayce Manesiotis, “Saudi Arabia Exploits and Abuses Migrant Workers Then Deports Them,” Liberty Voice, November 4, 2013.

24. Human Rights Watch, “’Bad Dreams:’ Exploitation and Abuse of Migrant Workers,” July 14, 2004.

25. Global Jihad, “Saudi Sheikh: ‘Slavery Is A Part Of Islam,” November 10, 2003.

26. U.S. State Department, Trafficking in Persons Report: June 2009, 251.

27. Ibid.

28. Eleanor Abdella Doumato, Saudi Arabia (New York: Freedom House, 2010), 1-2, 12-13.

29. Translating Jihad, “Saudi Study: Nearly a Quarter of Children Raped,” Free Republic, February 24, 2012.

30. Center for Religious Freedom, Saudi Publications on Hate Ideology Invade American Mosques (Washington, D.C.: Freedom House, 2006), 8-9.

31. Ibid, 12-13.

32. Angus McDowall, “Saudi rulers reconsider ties to Wahhabi clergy,” Reuters, December 17, 2014.

33. Freedom House, Saudi Publications on Hate Ideology Invade American Mosques, 13.

34. Woolsey, 7-8.

35. Freedom House, Saudi Publications on Hate Ideology Invade American Mosques, 12, 19.

36. Ibid, 23.

37. Ibid, 24.

38. Ibid, 34-43.

39. Ibid, 45.

40. Ibid, 46.

41. Haviv Rettig, “Expert: Saudis have radicalized 80 percent of US mosques,” Jerusalem Post, December 5, 2005.

42. JINSA Online, “Al Qaeda, Other Terror Groups Swim in Global Sea of Saudi-Funded Wahhabi Institutions,” Center for Islam Pluralism, August 22, 2007.

43. Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia, “Private Saudi investments in US total $400 billion,” Press Release, November 8, 2009.

44. Clifford Krauss, “Texas Refinery Is Saudi Foothold in U.S. Market,” New York Times, April 4, 2013.

45. Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, “Advisory.”

46. United Nations, “International Islamic Relief Organization, Philippines, Branch Offices.” Press Release, January 6, 2014.

47. Brian Fairchild, “Key Organizations of the Islamic Infrastructure in the United States,” Higgins Foundation, 2002.

48. Matthew Levitt, “Tackling the Financing of Terrorism in Saudi Arabia,” Washington Institute, March 11, 2002.

49. Ibid.

50. Ibid.

51. Dore Gold, “Saudi Arabia’s Dubious Denials of Involvement in International Terrorism,” Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, October 1, 2003.

52. Eric Lichtblau and Eric Schmitt, “Cash Flow to Terrorists Evades U.S. Efforts,” New York Times, December 5, 2010.

53. Senate Committee on Finance, “Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Stuart Levey Testimony,” April 1, 2008.

54. Ibid.

55. Lichtblau and Schmitt, “Cash Flow to Terrorists Evades U.S. Efforts.”

56. Marilyn Brannan, “U.S. Devours Saudi Oil while Saudis Bankroll Terrorists,” Monetary and Economic Review, Volume 12, Number 3, 2007.

57. Quoted in theguardian.com, “US embassy cables: Terrorists use hajj as cover to collect donations.” December 5, 2010.

58. The 9/11 Commission Report, 169-173.

59. Winsor, “Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism and the Spread of Sunni Theofascism.”

60. Thomas Hegghammer, “Combattants saoudiens en Irak : modes de radicalisation et de recrutement,” Cultures and Conflits (France), Volume 4, Number 64, 2006, 1110126. [Note: Article in in French.]

61. Reuven Paz, “Arab volunteers killed in Iraq: an Analysis,” Global Research in International Affairs Center, March 4, 2005.

62. Ibid.

63. Freedom House, Saudi Publications on Hate Ideology Invade American Mosques, 3, 15.

64. Brannan, “U.S. Devours Saudi Oil while Saudis Bankroll Terrorists.”

65. Ibid.

66. Mitchell Bard, The Arab Lobby: The Invisible Alliance That Undermines America’s Interests in the Middle East (New York: Broadside, 2011), Introduction, xii.

67. Levitt, “Subversion from Within.”

68. Quoted in Aryn Baker, “Saudi Arabia Considers Nuclear Weapons After Iran’s Geneva Deal,” Time, November 26, 2013.

69. Ibid.

70. Ian Black, “Saudi Arabia’s foreign labour crackdown drives out 2m migrants,” Guardian (UK), November 29, 2013.

CHAPTER 8: PAKISTAN: FALSE FOUNDATIONS

1.   Iqbal Academy, “Iqbal and the Pakistan Movement.”

2.   Quoted in Quaid I Azam, “Jinnah-Gandhi Negotiations, 1944.”

3.   Quoted in Shahid Javed Burki, Pakistan: Fifty Years of Nationhood (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999), 52.

4.   Zardari, “Text of President Zardari’s address to UN General Assembly,” September 26, 2008.

5.   UPI, “Pakistan’s prime minister visits President Obama in White House,” October 23, 2013.

6.   Anatol Lieven, Pakistan: A Hard Country (New York: PublicAffairs, 2012), 53.

7.   Quoted in Singh and Roy, Indian Political Thought, 149.

8.   Ibid, 151.

9.   Jinnah spoke these words before the foundation of Israel in 1948. However, even in the case of Israel a plausible case can be made that ethnicity as well as religion is part of its foundation.

10. Lieven, Pakistan: A Hard Country, 54.

11. Ayesha Jalal, The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 35.

12. Husain Haqqani, Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2005), 7-9.

13. Ibid.

14. Lieven, Pakistan: A Hard Country, 57-8.

15. Haqqani, Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military, 10.

16. Muhammad Ali Jinnah, “Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s first Presidential Address to the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan,” August 11, 1947.

17. Quoted in Lieven, Pakistan: A Hard Country, 124.

18. Rafiq Zakaria, The Man Who Divided India (Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 2004), 2; Devendra Panigrahi, India’s Partition: The Story of Imperialism in Retreat (London: Routledge, 2010), 165; Salman Akhtar and Manasi Kumar, “Destiny and Nationalism,” Crosscurrents in Islam and Psychoanalysis (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008), 85.

19. PTI, “Daughter’s claim may fall flat as Jinnah’s will found,” March 31, 2010.

CHAPTER 9: PAKISTAN: WAR AND IDEOLOGY

1.   Quoted in Encyclopedia Britannica, “Nuclear Weapon.”

2.   Quoted in Raja Anwar, The Terrorist Prince (New York: Verso, 1997), 71.

3.   Mohammad Hanif, “Pakistan’s General Problem,” Open Magazine, June 11, 2011.

4.   S.K. Malik, The Quranic Concept of War (New Delhi: Himalayan, 1986), 59.

5.   John Schmidt, The Unraveling: Pakistan in the Age of Jihad (New York: Picador, 2012), 23.

6.   Ziad Haider, The Ideological Struggle for Pakistan (Stanford: Hoover Institution, 2010), 8.

7.   Victoria Schofield, Kashmir in Conflict (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2010), 49. [Note: There is a red herring argument that India compelled Singh to sign the decree. Schofield thoroughly dispels this argument (see p. 58 and context).]

8.   Quoted in Schofield, Kashmir in Conflict, 65.

9.   Husain Haqqani, Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2005), 52.

10. Eamon Murphy, The Making of Terrorism in Pakistan (London: Routledge, 2012), 66-8.

11. Quoted in Haqqani, Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military, 67.

12. Quoted in Anatol Lieven, Pakistan: A Hard Country (New York: PublicAffairs, 2012), 186. [Note: emphasis added.]

13. Murphy, The Making of Terrorism in Pakistan, 68.

14. Navnita Behera, Demystifying Kashmir (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 2006), 78.

15. Behera, 78; Schmidt, 29.

16. Schmidt, The Unraveling: Pakistan in the Age of Jihad, 30.

17. Behera, Demystifying Kashmir, 80.

18. Haqqani, Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military, 51-6.

19. Ibid, 62.

20. Ibid, 62-3.

21. Bina D’Costa, Nationbuilding, Gender and War Crimes in South Asia (London: Routledge, 2010), 110.

22. The Spectator (UK), “Another Final Solution,” June 18, 1971.

23. Neil Sheehan, “’The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide’ by Gary J. Bass,” Washington Post, October 4, 2013.

24. Gary J. Bass, “Nixon and Kissinger’s Forgotten Shame,” New York Times, September 29, 2013.

25. Schmidt, The Unraveling: Pakistan in the Age of Jihad, 33.

26. Zahid Hussain, Frontline Pakistan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 14.

27. Ibid, 14-15.

28. Hussain, Frontline Pakistan, 13-4.

29. Quoted in Haider, The Ideological Struggle for Pakistan, 19.

30. Langewiesche, “The Wrath of Khan,” Atlantic, November 2005.

31. Ibid.

32. Ibid.

33. Quoted in Hussain, Frontline Pakistan, 15.

34. Ibid; Schmidt, The Unraveling: Pakistan in the Age of Jihad, 64; Coll, Ghost Wars, 61, 180.

35. Malik, The Quranic Concept of War, 44.

36. Ibid, 144.

37. Steve Coll, Ghost Wars (New York: Penguin, 2004), 58-60.

38. Ibid, 131, 165.

39. Schmidt, The Unraveling: Pakistan in the Age of Jihad, 73.

40. Coll, Ghost Wars, 157.

41. Hussain, Frontline Pakistan, 17; Schmidt, The Unraveling: Pakistan in the Age of Jihad, 74.

42. Arif Jamal, Shadow War: The Untold Story of Jihad in Kashmir (New York: Melville House, 2009), 163, 169.

43. Schmidt, The Unraveling, 101-2; Coll, Ghost Wars, 296; Peter Tomsen, The Wars of Afghanistan: Messianic Terrorism, Tribal Conflicts, and the Failures of Great Powers (New York: PublicAffairs, 2013), 532.

44. Tomsen, The Wars of Afghanistan, 534-5.

45. Ibid, 538.

46. Ibid, 539-41.

47. Ahmed Rashid, Descent into Chaos: The U.S. and the Disaster in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia (New York, Penguin, 2009), 41-2.

48. Feroz Khan, Peter Lavoy, and Christopher Clary, “Pakistan’s Motivations and Calculations for the Kargil Conflict,” Asymmetric Warfare in South Asia: The Causes and Consequences of the Kargil Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 86-7.

49. Rashid, Descent into Chaos, 51.

CHAPTER 10: PAKISTAN: POST-9/11 DOUBLE GAME

1.   Quoted in James Forsyth, “Pakistan, the sum of all fears.” Spectator (UK), March 22, 2009.

2.   Quoted in Indian Express (India), “Osama Bin Laden had support system in Pakistan: envoy,” May 3, 2011.

3.   Quoted in U.S. Department of Defense, “CBC Television Interview with Secretary Panetta,” April 2, 2012.

4.   Quoted in CNN, “Many questions, few answers on how much Pakistan knew about bin Laden,” May 2, 2011.

5.   Pervez Hoodbhoy, “The curious case of Osama bin Laden,” Tribune (Pakistan), May 3, 2011.

6.   Quoted in Steve Coll, “Don’t Look Back,” New Yorker, March 1, 2010.

7.   Terry McDermott, “The Mastermind,” New Yorker, September 13, 2010.

8.   Ibid.

9.   Zahid Hussain, Frontline Pakistan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 130.

10. McDermott, “The Mastermind.”

11. Hussain, Frontline Pakistan, 131.

12. McDermott, “The Mastermind.”

13. Ahmed Rashid, Descent into Chaos: The U.S. and the Disaster in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia (New York, Penguin, 2009), 224-5.

14. John Schmidt, The Unraveling: Pakistan in the Age of Jihad (New York: Picador, 2012), 161.

15. Peter Tomsen, The Wars of Afghanistan (New York: PublicAffairs, 2013), 589.

16. Ibid.

17. Rashid, Descent into Chaos, 219.

18. Ibid, 265, 270.

19. Ibid, 222-3.

20. Matt Waldman, “The Sun in the Sky: The Relationship Between Pakistan’s ISI and Afghan Insurgents,” Crisis States Research Center (UK), 2010.

21. Joseph Trento, “Western Intelligence Convinced Pakistan’s ISI Hid Bin Laden,” DC Bureau, May 4 2011.

22. Ibid.

23. Ibid.

24. Ibid.

25. Schmidt, The Unraveling of Pakistan, 137.

26. Rashid, Descent into Chaos, 230-1.

27. Zachary Laub, “Pakistan’s New Generation of Terrorists,” Council on Foreign Relations, November 18, 2013.

28. Coll, “Don’t Look Back.”

29. Laub, “Pakistan’s New Generation of Terrorists.”

30. Schmidt, The Unraveling of Pakistan,164.

31. Williams, Afghanistan Declassified, 206.

32. Schmidt, The Unraveling of Pakistan, 174.

33. Jayshree Bajoria “Lashkar-e-Taiba,” Council on Foreign Relations, January 14, 2010.

34. Sebastian Rotella, “Terror Group Recruits From Pakistan’s ‘Best and Brightest’,” ProPublica, April 4, 2013.

35. Sebastian Rotella, “Militant Reaffirms Role of Pakistan in Mumbai Attack,” ProPublica, August 9, 2012

36. Erik Bleich, “Faith and State: British Policy Responses to ‘Islamist’ Extremism,” Araucaria, 2014, Volume 16, Issue 31, 68.

37. Christopher Hitchens, “Londonistan Calling,” Vanity Fair, June 2007.

38. Nic Robertson, Paul Cruickshank, and Tim Lister, “Documents Give New Details on Al Qaeda’s London Bombings,” CNN, April 30, 2012; Andrew Alderson, “British terror mastermind Rashid Rauf ‘killed in US missile strike’,” Telegraph (UK), November 22, 2008; Theodore Bromund and Lisa Curtis, “The Pakistan-Britain Terror Connection: Lessons and Warnings for the United States,” Heritage Foundation, November 6, 2009.

39. Tomsen, The Wars of Afghanistan, 518; Jessica Stern, Terror in the Name of God (New York: Harper Perennial, 2004), 196-9.

40. Wiktorowicz, Radical Islam Rising (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), 1-2.

41. Bruce Crumley, “A Pakistan Link in Europe Arrests,” Time, January 21, 2008.

42. Waldman, “The Sun in the Sky.”

43. Ashish Shukla, “Drug Trafficking in Pakistan: Threat to Regional Security,” Himalayan and Central Asian Studies July 2010, Volume 14, Issue 3, 67-85.

44. Ibid.

45. Ibid.

46. Aryn Baker, “Saudi Arabia Considers Nuclear Weapons After Iran’s Geneva Deal,” Time, November 26, 2013.

47. Aatish Taseer, “Why My father Hated India,” Wall Street Journal, July 16, 2011.

48. Phillip Jenkins, “Clerical Terror,” New Republic, December 24, 2008

49. Tamanna Khan and Jamil Mahmud, “He never let us read his books,” Daily Star (Bangladesh), October 6, 2013.

CHAPTER 11: IRAN AFTER THE ISLAMIC REVOLUTION (1979)

1.   Quoted in Jalal Matini, “The Most Truthful Individual in Recent History,” Iranshenasi, Volume 14, Number 4, July 25, 2003. [Note: In English, part of this article is titled “Quotes from Ayatollah I Khomeini.”]

2.   Quoted in Jennifer Michael Hecht, Doubt: A History (New York: HarperOne, 2004), 227-230.

3.   Quoted in Alexander Zoltai, “Why should You care?” Blog Entry, https://amzuri.wordpress.com/2009/03/01/why-should-you-care/.

4.   Bernard Lewis, “Iran in History,” 2001.

5.   Carl Cannon, “Soraya M., Stoned to Death for Being an ‘Inconvenient Wife’,” Politics Daily, May 13, 2009.

6.   Ibid.

7.   Ibid.

8.   Marguerite Del Giudice, “Persia: Ancient Soul of Iran,” National Geographic, August 2008, 9; Ervand Abrahamian, Iran Between Two Revolutions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), 534-5.

9.   Ruhollah Khomeini, Islamic Government (London: Alhoda, 2002), 62-3. [Note: Publication information is for English translation. Previously, the book was limited to only a small number of people in Iran.]

10. Ibid, 54.

11. Moojan Momen, An Introduction to Shi’I Islam (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), 193.

12. Olivier Roy, The Failure of Political Islam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 173-4.

13. Abrahamian, Iran Between Two Revolutions, 502-3; Robert Graham, Iran: The Illusion of Power (Oxford: Berg Publishing, 1980), 213.

14. V. S. Naipaul, “Among the Believers,” Atlantic, July 1981, 4.

15. Ibid.

16. Khomeini, Islamic Government, 27, 137-8.

17. Jamsheed Choksy, “Why Iran’s Islamic Government Is Unraveling,” Hudson Institute, Current Trends in Islamist Ideology, Volume 10, 2010.

18. Mark Bowden, Guests of the Ayatollah (New York: Grove Press, 2007), 12, 93.

19. Ibid, 363-5, 400.

20. Baqer Moin, Khomeini (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2009), 227-8; Said Amir Arjomand, Turban for the Crown (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 139.

21. Nikki Keddie, Modern Iran: Roots and Results of Revolution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 252.

22. Shaul Bakhash, Reign of the Ayatollahs (New York: Basic Books, 1990), 236; Moin, Khomeini, 229.

23. Stephen Kinzer, All the Shah’s Men (Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley and Sons, 2004).

24. James Risen, “Secrets of History: The C.I.A. in Iran,” New York Times, April 16, 2000; David Halberstam, The Fifties (New York: Ballantine Books, 1994), 366-7.

25. Willis Stanley, “The Strategic Culture of the Islamic Republic of Iran,” October 31, 2006, 19. [Note: Prepared for the Defence Threat Reduction Agency.]

26. Khomeini, Islamic Government, 27-8, 127.

27. Naipaul, “Among the Believers,” 3.

28. Del Giudice, “Persia,” 9.

29. Stanley, “The Strategic Culture of the Islamic Republic of Iran,” 22.

30. Naipaul, “Among the Believers,” 5.

31. Ibid.

32. Ibid.

33. Allamah Sayyid Muhammad Husayn Tabatabai, Shi’ite Islam (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1979), 201-203.

34. Free Republic Website, “Iranian Muslims Women Are Free To Wear Or Not The Hejab,” December 13, 2003.

35. BBC News, “Top Iranian dissident threatened,” April 14, 2008.

36. BBC News, “Shirin Ebadi Nobel Peace Prize medal ‘seized by Iran’,” November 27, 2009.

37. Michael M. J. Fischer, Iran: From Religious Dispute to Revolution (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), 196.

38. Ibid, 154, 221-222; Joseph Kraft, “Letter from Iran,” New Yorker, Dec 18, 1978.

39. Lisa Daftari, “American pastor imprisoned without notice of charges,” Fox News, Dec 19, 2012; Rebecca Shimoni Stoil, “Saeed Abedini, DC’s other Iran issue,” Times of Israel (Israel), November 10, 2013.

40. Jamsheed Choksy, “How Iran persecutes its oldest religion,” CNN, November 14, 2011.

41. International Federation of Human Rights, “Discrimination against religious minorities in Iran,” August 2003, 11.

42. Ibid, 11-12.

43. Ibid, 12-13.

44. Del Giudice, “Persia: Ancient Soul of Iran,” 1.

45. Ibid, 4.

46. Stanley, “The Strategic Culture of the Islamic Republic of Iran,” 9.

47. Quoted in Reza Aslan, “The Epic of Iran,” New York Times, April 30, 2006; also, cf. Del Giudice, “Persia: Ancient Soul of Iran,” 3.

48. Stanley, “The Strategic Culture of the Islamic Republic of Iran,” 11-3.

49. Aakar Patel, “Why Parsis are India’s Finest Citizens,” Tribune (Pakistan), December 29, 2012.

50. Del Giudice, “Persia: Ancient Soul of Iran,” 9.

51. Choksy, “Why Iran’s Islamic Government Is Unraveling.”

CHAPTER 12: GULF COOPERATION COUNCIL

1.   Human Rights Watch, “Bad Dreams,” July 14, 2004.

2.   Quoted in Michelle Fe Santiago, “Tortured Filipina Maid Cries For Justice,” Arab Times (Kuwait), April 10, 2013.

3.   Quoted in Richard Morin, “Indentured Servitude in the Persian Gulf,” New York Times, April 12, 2013. [Note: Beydoun spent 685 days as an “economic hostage” in Qatar before being permitted to leave, as per Morin’s article.]

4.   Sara Anabtawi, “Maid locked up without pay for 17 years in Saudi,” Arabian Business (UAE), March 26, 2012.

5.   Froilan T. Malit Jr., Ali Al Youha, “Labor Migration in the United Arab Emirates: Challenges and Responses,” Migration Policy Institute, September 18, 2013.

6.   Brian Ross and Jill Rackmill, “Dark Side of Dubai’s Boomtown,” ABC News, November 17, 2006.

7.   Brad Lendon, “Man dies in jump from world’s tallest building,” CNN, May 10, 2011.

8.   Nesrine Malik, “Dubai’s skyscrapers, stained by the blood of migrant workers,” Guardian (UK), May 27, 2011.

9.   Human Rights Watch, “Building a Better World Cup,” June 12, 2012.

10. Ibid.

11. Manolo Abella, “Asian migrant and contract workers in the Middle East,” Cambridge Survey of World Migration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 420; Douglas Massey et al., Worlds in Motion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 139.

12. Abella, 420.

13. Giovanna Campani, “Women Migrants: From Marginal Subjects to Social Actors,” Cambridge Survey of World Migration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 546-550.

14. Human Rights Watch, “Building a Better World Cup.”

15. Andrzej Kapiszewski, “Arab Versus Asian Migrant Workers In The GCC Countries,” United Nations Expert Group Meeting On International Migration And Development In The Arab Region, May 17, 2006, 6-7.

16. Malik, “Dubai’s skyscrapers, stained by the blood of migrant workers.”

17. Ibid.

18. Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, “’We need slaves to build monuments,’” Guardian (UK), October 7, 2008.

19. Bhanu Bhatnagar, “Lost in the Gulf: India’s Missing Migrants,” Al Jazeera, November 11, 2007.

20. Basharat Peer, “A Maid’s Execution,” New Yorker, January 11, 2013.

21. Kaminer and O’Driscoll, “Workers at N.Y.U.’s Abu Dhabi Site Faced Harsh Conditions.”

22. Saul, “N.Y.U. Professor is Barred by United Arab Emirates.”

23. Human Rights Watch, “Building Towers, Cheating Workers,” November 12, 2006, 27.

24. Ibid, 28-9.

25. Ibid, 28.

26. Ibid, 46.

27. Chen Zhi, “Ten Bangladeshi workers die in house fire,” Xinhua (China), May 27, 2012.

28. Ians, “78 workers not paid for six months by Saudi company,” Gulf News (Saudi Arabia), July 7, 2012.

29. Human Rights Watch, “Building Towers, Cheating Workers,” 33.

30. Human Rights Watch, “Bad Dreams.”

31. Ibid.

32. Ibid.

33. Ibid.

34. TNN, “Indian migrant workers return home,” Times of India (India), February 13, 2013. [Note: Journalist’s name abbreviated only.]

35. Human Rights Watch, “Bad Dreams.”

36. Ibid.

37. Human Rights Watch, “Building a Better World Cup.”

38. Saleh Al-Shaibany, “Thousands of South Asian workers strike at Oman airport,” Reuters, March 12, 2013.

39. Human Rights Watch, “Building Towers, Cheating Workers,” 45.

40. Telegraph (UK), “Maid’s beheading in Saudi Arabia,” June 23, 2011.

41. Human Rights Watch, “Bad Dreams.”

42. Jakarta Globe (Indonesia), “Indonesian Migrant Worker Shares Horror Story,” June 17, 2012.

43. Arab Times (Kuwait), “Nepali Maid Says Victim Of Torture,” March 14, 2013.

44. Santiago, “Tortured Filipina Maid Cries For Justice.”

45. Tahira Yaqoob, “British woman ‘kidnapped and gang-raped in Dubai’,” Daily Mail (UK), December 6, 2012.

46. EU Times, “Australian woman abused in UAE, jailed for 8 months for complaining to police,” March 28, 2011.

47. Ponce de Leon, “What to do if our maid absconds.”

CHAPTER 13: MUHAMMAD

1.   ¹ Michael Hart, The 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History (New York: Citadel, 2000), 33.

2.   ² Quoted in Jamaal Zarabozo, What is Islam? (Saudi Arabia: Ministry of Islamic Affairs, 2007), 167.

3.   ³ Warner, The Life of Mohammed: A Taste of Islam (Center for the Study of Political Islam Publishing, 2010), 1

4.   ⁴ Ibid.

5.   ⁵ Ibid, 11-12.

6.   ⁶ Ibn Ishaq, 341-2

7.   ⁷ Jonathan Brockopp (editor), The Cambridge Companion to Muhammad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 6-7; John Esposito (editor), The Oxford Dictionary of Islam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 280.

8.   ⁸ David Lamb, The Arabs: Journeys Beyond the Mirage (New York: Vintage, 2002), 55.

9.   ⁹ Ibid, 56; Reuven Firestone, Jihad: the Origins of Holy War in Islam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 114.

10. ¹⁰ Richard Gabriel, Muhammad: Islam’s First Great General (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007), 179.

11. ¹¹ Vaglieri, The Cambridge History of Islam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 58.

12. ¹² Cf Ibn Ishaq 675-6.

13. ¹³ Sahih Bukhari 1:4:234.

14. ¹⁴ Qur’an 5:33.

15. ¹⁵ Ibn Ishaq 145-6.

16. ¹⁶ Lamb, 55; Robert Spencer, The Truth About Muhammad (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 2007), 130-131; Judith Miller, God Has Ninety-Nine Names (New York: Touchstone, 1997), 91.

17. ¹⁷ Ibn Ishaq 820.

18. ¹⁸ Ibid, 821, 824.

19. ¹⁹ Karl Jaspers, Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, Jesus (New York: Mariner, 1966), 87.

20. ²⁰ Qur’an 4:34

21. ²¹ Qur’an8:1, 41.

22. ²² Qur’an4:24

23. ²³ Qur’an9:5

24. ²⁴ Christopher Phillips, Socrates in Love (New York: Norton, 2008), 131; BBC News (UK), “Confucian family tree ‘triples’,” September 25, 2009.

25. ²⁵ Fred Donner, The Early Islamic State (Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2008), 251-270.

26. ²⁶ Ibid, 90.

27. ²⁷ Ibid, 92.

28. ²⁸ Arvind Ghosh, The Koran and the Kafir (self-published, 1983), xiv.

29. ²⁹ Suhas Majumdar, Jihad: The Islamic Doctrine of Permanent War (New Delhi: Voice of Dharma, 1994), 29.

30. ³⁰ Qur’an 4:24.

31. ³¹ In the judgment of Karl Jaspers, quoted in Kotta Satchidananda Murty, Revelation and Reason in Advaita Vedanta (Whitefish, MT: Literary Licensing, 2012), xvii.

CHAPTER 14: THE QUR’AN, SHARIA LAW, AND THE MOSQUE

1.   Quoted in Jack Smith, Islam—the Cloak of Antichrist (WinePress Publishing, 2011), 151.

2.   Quoted in The Message, 599.

3.   Vijay Kumar, “Islam and Divine Deception,” supplement to Rutherford Reader, March 2011.

4.   Ibid.

5.   Ibid.

6.   Qur’an 26:192-204.

7.   Cf Qur’an 3:187, 5:15, 9:29ff.

8.   Qur’an 5:13.

9.   Qur’an 30:30.

10. Qur’an 4:95.

11. All unbelievers are included under this term. Although Christians and Jews may receive a protected status in Islamic societies, they are still kafirs as much as any polytheist or agnostic and are to be treated as such by Muslims.

12. Qur’an 4:24, 33:50; Sahih Bukhari 3:46:693.

13. The Sunna consists in the accepted biographies of Muhammad (collectively known as the Sira) and the authoritative collections of Muhamad’s sayings and doings (collectively known as the Hadith).

14. Saudi Arabia Const. Ch. I, Art. 1.

15. Dhammapada 1:5.

16. Ibid, 17:221.

17. Matthew 5:43-47

18. Matthew 5:27-30

19. Matthew 5:11-12.

20. Cf Qur’an 33:57-61.

21. Matthew 22:35-40.

22. Qur’an 47:4.

23. Qur’an 86:15.

24. Qur’an 8:12.

25. Qur’an 3:28.

26. Qur’an 23:97.

27. Qur’an 8:65.

28. Cf Qur’an 30:42 and context.

29. Qur’an 42:7.

30. Cf Javed Ahmad Gahmidi, Islam: A Comprehensive Introduction (Lahore, Pakistan: Al-Mawrid, 2012), 46-7ff. [Note: Published as Mizan in some contexts; title is in English.]

31. Mitchell Bard, “The Treatment of Jews in Arab/Islamic Countries,” Jewish Virtual Library, https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/anti-semitism/Jews_in_Arab_lands_%28gen%29.html.

32. American Center for Law and Justice, “Sharia Law: Radical Islam’s Threat to the U.S. Constitution,” 5.

33. The two most authoritative collections in the Hadith are known as Sahih Bukhari and Sahih Muslim. “Sahih” just means authoritative, and “Bukhari” and “Muslim” are the names of the two collectors who wrote down what they heard. Both collections were made long after Muhammad’s lifetime and therefore rely on oral traditions. Other collections also exist in the Hadith, but Bukhari and Muslim are the most prestigious and widely accepted.

34. American Center for Law and Justice, “Sharia Law: Radical Islam’s Threat to the U.S. Constitution,” 6.

35. Ibid.

36. Bill Warner, Sharia Law for the Non-Muslim (Center for the Study of Political Islam, 2010), 6-9.

37. Cf Qur’an 33:57-61.

38. Cf Qur’an 9:29.

39. Jeremy Grunert, “How do you Solve a Problem like Sharia?,” Pepperdine Law Review, Volume 40, Issue 3, April 8, 2013, 696. See fn 4-7 for examples.

40. Quoted in Grunert, “How do you Solve a Problem Like Sharia?” 695-6.

41. Qur’an 9:29.

42. Qur’an 2:228.

43. Qur’an 2:282.

44. Qur’an 4:34.

45. Quoted in Morgan, “Saudi Arabia’s Export of Radical Islam.” Family Security Matters, January 16, 2007.

46. Abbasali Farahati, “The Mosque as the First Political-Ideological Base in the Islamic Society,” Journal of Politics and Law Volume 4, Number 1, March 2011, 1-4.

47. Ibid, 5.

48. Enza Ferreri, “Mosques are the Battleground of the War between Islam and the West,” Blog Entry, April 29, 2013, http://enzaferreri.blogspot.com/2013/04/mosques-are-battleground-of-war-between.html#axzz3ahmOIDp2.

49. Institute for the Study of Islam and Christianity, “Implications of Saudi funding,” February 7, 2006.

50. Morgan, “Saudi Arabia’s Export of Radical Islam.”

51. Emma Graham-Harrison, “Saudi Arabia Funding $100m Kabul Mosque and Education Centre,” Guardian (UK), November 2, 2012.

52. Morgan, “Saudi Arabia’s Export of Radical Islam.”

53. Ibid.

54. Stephen Schwartz, “Al Qaeda, Other Terror Groups Swim in Global Sea of Saudi-Funded Wahhabi Institutions,” Center for Islamic Pluralism, August 22, 2007.

55. Nina Shea, “Saudi Publications on Hate Ideology Invade American Mosques,” Freedom House, 2005, 40.

56. Ibid, 19.

57. Ibid, 28.

58. Ibid, 57.

59. Ibid, 58.

CHAPTER 15: THE UMMAH

1.   See Qur’an 23:52.

2.   Fazlur Shaikh, The Chronology of the Prophetic Events (London: Ta-Ha Publishers, 2001), 72.

3.   Quoted in Subhani, “The Message.”

4.   Bader Saleh Almansour, “On ‘non-Arabic speaking’ Muslims,” Griffith Working Papers in Pragmatics and Intercultural Communication, Volume 3, Issue 1, 2010).

5.   Pew Research, “Muslim-Majority Countries,” Jan 27, 2011.

6.   Cf Willem Floor, “The Economic Role of the Ulama in Qajar Persia,” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 57.

7.   Ibid, 58.

8.   Belle, Shah, Parfitt, and Thomas, “Y chromosomes of self-identified Syeds from the Indian subcontinent show evidence of elevated Arab ancestry but not of a recent common patrilineal origin,” Archaeological and Anthropological Science, 2010.

9.   Floor, “The Economic Role of the Ulama in Qajar Persia,” 58.

10. Sikand, “Islam and Caste Inequality Among Indian Muslims,” CounterCurrents.org, February 15, 200.

11. Ibid.

12. Ibid.

13. Ibid.

14. Ibid.

15. Ibn Ishaq 243.

16. Sahih Bukhari 9:28:256.

17. Stephen Brown, “Al-Qaeda’s Anti-Black Racism,” FrontPage, February 5, 2013.

18. Ibid.

19. Ibid.

20. Mona Eltahawy, “The Arab world’s dirty secret,” New York Times, November 10, 2008.

21. Daniel Greenfield, “Islamic Slavery and Racism,” FrontPage, April 2, 2013.

22. Paul Bairoch, Mythes et paradoxes de l’histoire économique (Paris: La Decouverte, 2005).

23. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 159.

24. The Muslim Issue, “Racism against blacks in Iraq,” blog posted on September 18, 2013. https://themuslimissue.wordpress.com/2013/09/18/video-racism-against-blacks-in-iraq-blacks-are-still-viewed-as-inferior-slaves-unimportant-useless-objects/

25. Jeff Grabmeier, “When Europeans were slaves,” Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500-1800 (New York: Palgrave, 2004).

26. Murray Gordon, Slavery in the Arab World (Lanham, MD: New Amsterdam Books, 1998), 21.

27. Bernard Lewis, Race and Slavery in the Middle East (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 10.

28. Patrick Manning, Slavery and African Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 28.

29. R. Brunschvig, “Abd,” Encyclopedia of Islam (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1961), 15.

30. Suzy Hansen, “Islam’s black slaves.” Salon, April 5, 2001.

31. Hansen, “Islam’s black slaves.”

32. Gordon, Slavery in the Arab World, 79.

33. Quoted in Paul Halsall, “Medieval Sourcebook: Pact of Umar, 7th Century?” (New York Fordham University, 1996).

34. George Thomas, “Christian, Jewish Persecution Up in Muslim Nations,” Christian Broadcasting Network, May 24, 2013.

35. Raymond Ibrahim, “Muslim Persecution of Christians: 2013,” FrontPage, March 28, 2013.

36. Ibid.

37. Ibid.

38. Qur’an 3:118, 4:89.

39. Qur’an 46:26-7.

40. Sahih Bukhari 1:3:111, 4:52:283, 9:83:50.

41. Sahih Muslim 26:5389, 26:5390.

42. Al Jazeera, “Hajj: Major incidents,” November 19, 2009.

43. Guardian (UK), “A history of hajj tragedies,” January 13, 2006.

44. Ibid.

45. Ibid.

46. Rebecca Kreston, “The Endless Public Health Challenges of the Hajj,” Discover, October 9, 2013.

47. Ahmed Maher, “The economics of Hajj: Money and pilgrimage,” BBC News, October 25, 2012.

48. Ibid.

49. Sharaf Mowjood, “The Price of a Pilgrimage,” New York Pulse, December 4, 2009.

50. Miriam Puttick, “Managing the Hajj: Pilgrimage and the Politics of Race and Class,” International Political Forum, October 8, 2013.

51. Ibid.

52. Reuters, “Up to 2.5 million Muslims performed hajj this year,” December 22, 2007.

53. Angus McDowall and Asma Alsharif, “Saudi’s illegal immigrants draw fear of ‘infiltrators’,” Reuters, march 27, 2013.

54. Ibid.

CHAPTER 16: SUFISM

1.   Al-Biruni was a famous 10th century Persian Muslim scholar. He spent several decades studying and writing in India.

2.   R.C. Zaehner, Hindu and Muslim Mysticism (London: Oneworld, 1995), 2.

3.   Annemarie Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina, 1978), 404.

4.   Philip Jenkins, “Mystical power,” Boston Globe, January 25, 2009.

5.   Carl Ernst, “Situating Sufism and Yoga,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Volume 15, Number 1, April 2005, 22.

6.   Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam, 3-4.

7.   Evelyn Underhill, Practical Mysticism (New York: Digireads.com, 2010), 45-6.

8.   Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam, 283.

9.   Zaehner, Hindu and Muslim Mysticism, 2-3.

10. Ibid, 100.

11. Ibid, 102.

12. Ibid, 104-5.

13. Ibid, 106-7.

14. Ibid, 102.

15. Quoted in Zaehner, Hindu and Muslim Mysticism, 101-2.

16. Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam, 345.

17. Ibid.

18. Quoted in Rajeshkumar Gambhava, “Sufis and Sufism in India X-rayed,” archived at http://www.scribd.com/doc/60700109/Sufis-and-Sufism-in-India-X-Rayed#scribd.

19. Ibid.

20. Ibid.

21. Zaehner, Hindu and Muslim Mysticism, 38.

22. Ibid, 108.

23. Ibid, 91.

24. Quoted in Zaehner, Hindu and Muslim Mysticism, 108.

25. Quoted in Swami Nikhilananda, Self-Knowledge: Atmabodha (New York: Ramakrishna Vivekananda Center, 1974), 126.

26. Quoted in Suhas Majumdar, Jihad: The Islamic Doctrine of Permanent War (Voice of Dharma, 2014), 12.

27. Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam, 65-8.

28. Ibid, 263.

29. Ibid, 403.

30. Ibid, 359.

31. Ibid, 362-3.

32. Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam, 213-4.

33. Arnott, “Thousands gather to see a hair from Muhammad’s beard,” NBC News, February 16, 2011.

34. Cf Sahih Bukhari 1.8.419, 1.8.427.

35. Jenkins, “Mystical power.”

36. Juan Eduardo Campo, Encyclopedia of Islam (New York: Checkmark Books, 2009), 601.

37. Benoit-Lavelle, “Tunisian Salafis on the Rise.”

38. Jamal Al-Sharif, “Salafis in Sudan: Non-interference or Confrontation,” Al Jazeera, July 3, 2012.

39. Owais Tohid, “In Pakistan, militant attacks on Sufi shrines on the rise,” Christian Science Monitor, November 5, 2010.

40. David Nakamura, “Attacks on Pakistan’s Sufi Islamic shrines complicate war on militants,” Washington Post, October 30, 2010

41. Yusuf Hijazi, “Sufism: Its Origins,” Nida’ul Islam,(Australia), February-March 1998. http://www.islam.org.au.

42. Ibid.

CHAPTER 17: UNIVERSAL JIHAD

1.   Quoted in Efraim Karsh, Islamic Imperialism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 232.

2.   Winston Churchill, The River War (London: Longmans, Green, 1899), 248-50.

3.   Vahakn Dadrian, Warrant for Genocide: Key Elements of Turko-Armenian Conflict (Piscataway NJ: Transaction Publishing, 2003), 25.

4.   Ibid, 12-3.

5.   Veccia Vaglieri, “Khaybar,” Encyclopedia of Islam (Boston, MA: Brill Academic, 2003); David Margoliouth, Mohammed and the Rise of Islam (New York: Cosimo Classics, 2010), 362-3.

6.   Bernard Lewis, The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years (New York: Scribner, 1997), 233-4.

7.   Quoted in Karsh, Islamic Imperialism: A History, 4.

8.   Lewis, The Middle East, 138.

9.   Bernard Lewis, The Crisis of Islam (New York: Random House, 2004), 7.

10. Karsh, Islamic Imperialism, 62.

11. Michael Axworthy, A History of Iran: Empire of the Mind (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 66

12. Philip Jenkins, The Lost History of Christianity (New York: HarperOne, 2009), 101.

13. Lewis, The Middle East, 36.

14. Axworthy, A History of Iran: Empire of the Mind, 75.

15. Ilia Alon, “Dhimma,” Encyclopedia of the Modern Middle East and North Africa (Farmington Hills, MI: Gale Group, 2004), 703-4.

16. Ibid.

17. Jenkins, The Lost History of Christianity, 100.

18. Ibid, 104.

19. Paul Fregosi, Jihad in the West (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 1998), 126-8.

20. John Joseph Saunders, A History of Medieval Islam (London: Routledge, 1978), 89.

21. Hafizullah Emadi, Culture and Customs of Afghanistan (Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood, 2005), 54.

22. Jamal Malik, Islam in South Asia (Boston, MA: Brill Academic, 2008), 42-8.

23. Fred Donner, “Muhammad and the Caliphate,” Oxford History of Islam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 30.

24. Lewis, The Middle East, 87.

25. Carter Vaughn Findley, The Turks in World History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 66.

26. Lewis, The Middle East, 87.

27. Findley, The Turks in World History, 71-2.

28. Lewis, The Middle East, 95.

29. Jenkins, The Lost History of Christianity, 116.

30. J.B. Segal, Edessa: The Blessed City (Piscataway NJ: Gorgias, 2005), 252-4.

31. Akbar Ahmed, quoted in Rodney Stark, God’s Battalions: The Case for the Crusades (New York: HarperOne, 2010), 4.

32. Bernard Lewis, quoted in Robert Spencer, Religion of Peace?, (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2007), 102.

33. Robert Spencer, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2005), 122-5.

34. See Karsh, Islamic Imperialism, 72.

35. Lewis, The Crisis of Islam, 48-9.

36. Carole Hillenbrand, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 592.

37. Karsh, Islamic Imperialism, 87.

38. Ibid, 88.

39. Jenkins, The Lost History of Christianity, 125-9.

40. Lewis, The Middle East, 111.

41. James Reston, Defenders of the Faith (New York: Penguin, 2010), 171, 186-99.

42. Dannis Hupchick, The Balkans (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 140.

43. John Cox, The History of Serbia (Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood, 2002), 39.

44. Quoted in Laurence Mitchell, Serbia (Buckinghamshire, UK: Bradt Travel Guides, 2013), 360.

45. Hupchick, The Balkans, 212-5.

46. Florian Bieber & Zhidas Daskalovski, “Claims to Kosovo,” Understanding the War in Kosovo (London: Frank Cass, 2003), 15-6.

47. Samuel McClure, Obstacles to Peace (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1918), 400-1; Yair Auron, The Banality of Indifference (Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2001), 181-3.

48. Vahakn Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide (New York: Berghahn, 2003), 224; Robert Fisk, The Great War for Civilisation (New York: Vintage, 2007), 329-31.

49. Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide, 349.

50. New York Times, “Exiled Armenians Starve in the Desert,” August 8, 1916.

51. BBC News, “French in Armenia ‘genocide’ row,” October 12, 2006.

52. Quoted in Robert Spencer, “The Myth of Islamic Tolerance,” (Amherst, Prometheus Books, 2005), 53-4.

53. Qur’an 47:4.

54. Qur’an 9:29.

55. Kristen Stilt, Islamic Law in Action (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 122.

56. Quoted in James Lindsay, Daily Life in the Medieval Islamic World (Cambridge, MA: Hackett Publishing, 2008), 121.

57. Bat Ye’or, Islam and Dhimmitude: Where Civilizations Collide (Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2001), 71.

58. Stilt, Islamic Law in Action, 123.

59. Ibid.

60. Ibid, 126.

61. Ye’or, “A Christian Minority,” 235.

62. Tom Holland, In the Shadow of the Sword (2013), 401.

63. Spencer, “Protected Peoples Under Islam,” 93.

64. Quoted in Alfonso, Islamic Culture through Jewish Eyes, 107-8.

65. Harris, The End of Faith, 114.

66. Spencer, “Dhimmi Peoples: Oppressed Nations,” 134.

67. Gordon, Slavery in the Arab World, 7-11.

68. Holland, In the Shadow of the Sword (New York: Anchor, 2012), 396-7.

69. Caroline Finkel, Osman’s Dream: The History of the Ottoman Empire (New York: Basic Books, 2007), 75.

70. Peter Golden, Central Asia in World History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 64.

71. Murray Gordon, Slavery in the Islamic World (Lanham, MD: New Amsterdam Books, 1998), 6.

72. Karsh, Islamic Imperialism, 65.

73. Giles Milton, White Gold (New York: Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux, 2005), 30.

74. Ibid.

75. Ibid, 271.

76. Milton, White Gold, 13-5.

77. Gordon, Slavery in the Arab World, 5.

78. Ibid, 78.

79. Ibid, 105.

80. Ibid, 79.

81. Ibid, 79-80.

82. Milton, White Gold, 29.

83. Finkel, Osman’s Dream: The History of the Ottoman Empire, 466.

84. Spencer, “The Myth of Islamic Tolerance,” 46.

85. Lewis, The Middle East, 69.

86. Joel Kraemer, Maimonides: The Life and World of One of Civilization’s Greatest Minds (New York: Doubleday, 2010), 4.

87. Karsh, Islamic Imperialism, 63.

88. Ibid, 63-4.

89. Ibid, 64.

90. Jenkins, The Lost History of Christianity, 77.

91. Axworthy, A History of Iran: Empire of the Mind, 68, 81-3.

92. www.thereligionofpeace.com

93. Quoted in Robert Spencer, Stealth Jihad (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2008), 94.

94. Soeren Kern, “In Germany, Turkish Muslims Hope for Muslim Majority,” Jewish Press, August 27, 2012.

CHAPTER 18: WHAT ISLAMIC CIVILIZATION?

1.   Quoted in Moyers, “Bill Moyers on Faith & Reason.”

2.   Arthur Goldschmidt and Lawrence Davidson, “A Concise History of the Middle East,” (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2012).

3.   André Servier, L’Islame et la psychologie du musulman (Paris, 1923), 153.

4.   Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President On a New Beginning,” June 4, 2009 at Cairo University.

5.   Jane Smith, “Islam and Christendom,” http://www.oxfordislamicstudies.com/article/book/islam-9780195107999/islam-9780195107999-chapter-7.

6.   Salim, Al-Hassani, 1001 Inventions: The Enduring Legacy of Muslim Civilization (Washington, DC: National Geographic, 2012), 17.

7.   Banister Fletcher, A History of Architecture on the Comparative Method (Charleston, SC: Nabu Press, 2011), 476; Richard Krautheimer, Early Christian and Byzantine Architecture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984), 285.

8.   Oleg Grabar, The Formation of Islamic Art (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), 70.

9.   Rina Avner, “The Dome of the Rock in Light of the Development of Concentric Martyria in Jerusalem: Architecture and Architectural Iconography,” Muqarnas: An Annual on the Visual Culture of the Islamic World, Volume 27, 2010, 43-4.

10. De Lacy O’Leary, “How Greek Science Passed to the Arabs,” London: Routledge, 1949, http://www.aina.org/books/hgsptta.htm.

11. “Islam, the Greeks, and the Scientific Revolution,” Assyrian International News Agency: http://www.aina.org/articles/greek2.pdf (Accessed: August 28, 2013).

12. Ibid.

13. O. Neugebauer, The Exact Sciences in Antiquity (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1969), 239 (and op. cit).

14. Richard Bulliet, et al., The Earth and Its Peoples: A Global History (Cengage Learning), Volume 1, 192. [Note: Information was retrieved from a reprint, which is cited in this endnote.]

15. M. A. Khan, Islamic Jihad: A Legacy of Forced Conversion, Imperialism, and Slavery (Felibri.com, 2011), 168-9.

16. Catherine Holmes, “Written Culture in Byzantium and Beyond,” Literacy, Education and Manuscript Transmission in Byzantium and Beyond, (Piscataway, NJ: Brill Academic, 2002) 5.

17. See endnote 7.

18. Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong? The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East (New York: Harper Perennial, 2003), 139.

19. Jonathan David Carson, “The Not-So Golden Age of Islamic Philosophy,” American Thinker, August 19, 2005.

20. Glick, ed., “William of Moerbeke,” New Catholic Encyclopedia, 2003.

21. Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics II: Renaissance Virtues (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 30-1.

22. A. C. Crombie, The History of Science from Augustine to Galileo (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1996), 53.

23. Donald Nicol, Byzantium and Venice: A Study in Diplomatic and Cultural Relations (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992), 419.

24. Ibid, 420.

25. William McNeill, Venice: The Hinge of Europe (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1974), 1081-1797, 158.

26. Fjordman quoted in Robert Spencer, “Islam, the Greeks, and the Scientific Revolution,” http://www.jihadwatch.org/2007/09/fjordman-islam-the-greeks-and-the-scientific-revolution-part-1.

27. McNeill, 160.

28. Robert Spencer, Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions About the World’s Fastest Growing Faith (Jackson, TN: Encounter Books, 2003), 122.

29. Ibn Rushd…

30. Carson, “The Not-so Golden Age…”

31. Jonathan David Carson, “What Islamic Science and Philosophy,” American Thinker, December 1, 2006.

32. Ibid.

33. Philip Hitti, Islam: A Way of Life (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1970), 107.

34. Spencer, 124.

35. David Pryce-Jones, The Closed Circle: An Interpretation of the Arabs (Lanham, MD: Ivan R. Dee, 2009), 33.

36. Glenn Fairman, “The ‘Closed Circle’ of the Arab,” American Thinker, January 13, 2013.

CHAPTER 19: SUICIDE BOMBERS

1.   Shaykh Yusuf ibn Salih Al-Uyayri, “The Islamic Ruling on the Permissibility of Self-Sacrificial Operations,” This is our Aqidah, 10. https://books.google.com/books?id=frA_GYWDROUC&dq=Al-Uyayri,+The+Islamic+Ruling+on+the+Permissibility+of+Self-Sacrificial+Operations&source=gbs_navlinks_s. [Note: A key passage used to justify suicide bombing.]

2.   Quoted in Bobby Ghosh, “The Mind of a Female Suicide Bomber,” Time, June 22, 2008. [Note: The speaker is a cameraman who filmed the deadly suicide bomb attack of Hasna Maryi, who volunteered for the mission.]

3.   BBC, “Iraq’s ‘female bomber recruiter’,” February 4, 2009.

4.   Ibid.

5.   Riaz Hassan, “Global Rise of Suicide Terrorism: An Overview,” Asian Journal of Social Science, Volume 36, Issue 2, 2008, 277-8.

6.   Ibid.

7.   RiazHassan, “What Motivates the Suicide Bombers?,” Yale Center for the Study of Globalization, September 3, 2009.

8.   Wright, The Looming Tower, 340-76.

9.   Ghosh, “The Mind of a Female Suicide Bomber.”

10. Bloom, “Terror’s Stealth Weapon: Women.”

11. Tenochtitlan, “Pregnant woman persuaded to bomb airline by boyfriend.”

12. Crenshaw, “Explaining Suicide Terrorism: A Review Essay,” 139-40.

13. Ibid, 140-1; Hassan, “What Motivates the Suicide Bombers?”

14. Martha Crenshaw, “Explaining Suicide Terrorism: A Review Essay,” Web of Science (London: Routledge, 2007), 134-5.

15. Ibid, 140.

16. Qur’an 6:151.

17. Sahih Bukhari 4:52.

18. Cf Qur’an 4:29.

19. Cf Qur’an 3:169-170.

20. Cf Qur’an 4:74.

21. Al-Uyayri, The Islamic Ruling on the Permissibility of Self-Sacrificial Operations, 8.

22. Ibid, 10-28.

23. Ibid, 35.

24. Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj al-Naysaburi, Sahih Muslim, 42:7148. http://sunnah.com/muslim [Note: Translation retrieved from Sunna translation website as noted above.]

25. Al-Uyayri, The Islamic Ruling on the Permissibility of Self-Sacrificial Operations, 13. [Note: The story of the boy and the king is later called the “strongest evidence” for their cause (p. 37).]

26. Nuh Ha MIM Keller, Reliance of the Traveler: A Classic Manual of Islamic Sacred Law (Beltsville, MD: Amana 1997), 710.

27. Crenshaw, “Explaining Suicide Terrorism: A Review Essay,” 140.

28. Ibid, 137.

29. Hassan, “Global Rise of Suicide Terrorism: An Overview,” 274.

30. M. H. Hicks et al., “Casualties in civilians and coalition soldiers from suicide bombings in Iraq, 2003-10.” National Institutes of Health, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21890055.

31. Hassan, “Global Rise of Suicide Terrorism: An Overview,” 271-2.

32. Ibid, 274.

33. Al-Uyayri, The Islamic Ruling on the Permissibility of Self-Sacrificial Operations, 9.

34. Ibid.

35. BBC, “Pakistan: Teenager tells of failed suicide bomb mission,” April 18, 2011.

36. Ibid.

37. Crenshaw, “Explaining Suicide Terrorism: A Review Essay,” 141.

38. Ibid, 146.

39. Ibid, 142.

40. Al-Uyayri, The Islamic Ruling on the Permissibility of Self-Sacrificial Operations, 37-9.

41. Henry Dodd, “A Short history of suicide bombing,” Action on Armed Violence, August 23, 2013.

42. Nikki Murfitt, “Taliban tried to make eight-year-old a suicide bomber,” Daily Mail (UK), July 20, 2013.

43. Associated Press, “Police: Pakistani Girl Forced to Wear Suicide Vest,” June 20, 2011.

44. Indian Express (India), “For hire, only in Pakistan: Suicide bombers!,” December 24, 2008.

45. Ibid.

CHAPTER 20: WOMEN’S RIGHTS IN ISLAM

1.   Robert Spencer and Phyllis Chesler, “The Violent Oppression of Women in Islam,” January 31, 2007, 17. http://www.terrorismawareness.org/islamo-fascism/81/the-violent-oppression-of-women-in-islam/.

2.   http://www.politicalislam.com/trilogy-project/

3.   Jamie Glazov, “Islam and the Submission of Women,” Front Page, October 10 2007.

4.   Bill Warner, The Islamic Doctrine of Women, Center for the Study of Political Islam, 2010, 7-8.

5.   Ibid, 10-11.

6.   Qur’an 2:228.

7.   Ibid, 4:34.

8.   Al-Tirmidhi 3272.

9.   Cf Sahih Bukhari 1:4:148, 8:74:257.

10. Cf Qur’an 33:55.

11. Qur’an 24:60.

12. Warner, The Islamic Doctrine of Women, 13.

13. V. S. Naipaul, “Among the Believers,” Atlantic, July 1981, 3.

14. Qur’an 2:282.

15. Cf Sahih Bukhari 1:6:301.

16. Qur’an4:11; repeated in Sahih Bukhari 4:176.

17. Qur’an 4:19.

18. Sahih Muslim 4:1039.

19. Arab News, “Proposal to raise blood money limit gets royal consent,” September 7, 2011.

20. Warner, The Islamic Doctrine of Women, 14-5.

21. Qur’an 2:223.

22. Cf Sahih Bukhari 62:81.

23. Warner, The Islamic Doctrine of Women, 16.

24. Spencer and Chesler, “The Violent Oppression of Women in Islam,” 13.

25. Ibid, 15; Andrew Bushell, “Child Marriage in Afghanistan and Pakistan,” America, March 11, 2012.

26. Spencer and Chesler, “The Violent Oppression of Women in Islam,” 12.

27. Qur’an 2:228, 2:232.

28. Abu Dawud 2142.

29. Spencer and Chesler, “The Violent Oppression of Woman in Islam,” 9.

30. Ibid, 16.

31. Quoted in Spencer and Chesler, “The Violent Oppression of Woman in Islam,” 8.

32. Cf Sahih Muslim 3:684; Ibn Ishaq 564.

33. Warner, The Islamic Doctrine of Women, 27-8.

34. Quoted in Spencer and Chesler, “The Violent Oppression of Woman in Islam,” 9.

35. BBC, “Failure to stop FGM is a ‘national scandal’, say MPs,” July 3, 2014.

36. Glazov, “Islam and the Submission of Women.”

37. Voice of America, “Women in Syria’s Kurdistan Region Work to Stop Sexual Violence,” November 27, 2013.

38. Warner, The Islamic Doctrine of Women, 17-8.

39. Spencer and Chesler, “The Violent Oppression of Woman in Islam,” 20.

40. Ibid, 21.

41. Ibid, 22-3.

42. Ibid, 23-4.

43. Judy Bachrach, “Twice Branded: Western Women in Muslim Lands,” World Affairs Journal, Summer 2009, 137.

44. Wafa Sultan, A God Who Hates (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2011), 137.

45. http://en.europenews.dk/Video-Wafa-Sultan-Islam-was-created-to-serve-Muhammad-and-legitimize-his-desires--79031.html

46. Quoted in Kathryn Lopez, “We Don’t Like to Hear That Here,” National Review, November 20, 2006.

47. Ibid.

CHAPTER 21: ISLAM IS ARAB IMPERIALISM

1.   Massimo Calabresi, “America’s Twilight War,” Time, January 30, 2014.

2.   Ibid.

3.   Massimo Calabresi, “Dutch Supreme Court Blocks Extradition of Al-Qaeda Suspect to U.S,” Time, July 11, 2014.

4.   Caroline May, “Obama admin unilaterally changes law to allow immigrants,” Daily Caller, February 5, 2014.

5.   American Dream, “Islamic Terror Groups Killing Christians All Over The World,” RightSideNews.com, September 24, 2013.

6.   Barack Obama, “Text: Obama’s Speech in Cairo,” New York Times, transcript published on June 4, 2009.

7.   Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President to the UN General Assembly,” transcribed by The White House, September 25, 2012.

8.   “Text: Obama’s Speech in Cairo.”

9.   Ibid.

10. Ibid.

11. Susan Page, “Poll: Grim assessment of wars in Iraq, Afghanistan,” USA Today, January 31, 2014.

12. Martin Robinson, “War in Afghanistan has ‘failed’,” Daily Mail (UK), November 16, 2012.

13. Costs of War Project, Watson Institute for International Studies, Brown University. http://costsofwar.org/.

14. Daniel Davis, “To Salvage What we can From Afghanistan, Our Leaders Must Admit that the War has Failed,” Daily Beast, January 23, 2014.

15. Phyllis Bennis, “Iraq War a Failure on All Fronts,” U.S. News, November 11, 2011; United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees, “2014 UNHCR country operations profile – Iraq,” October 14, 2014. http://www.caofisr.org/news_detail.php?news=11.

16. Palestinian Media Watch, “Rewriting History: Jewish History Rewritten.” http://www.palwatch.org/main.aspx?fi=487. [Note: Videos have various publications dates on the same webpage.]

17. Ibid.

18. Itamar Marcus and Barbara Cook, “’Kill a Jew - Go to Heaven:’ A Study of the Palestinian Authority’s Promotion of Genocide,” Palestine Media Watch, 2005. www.pmw.org.il/KAJ_eng.htm, citing and quoting from Palestinian Authority Televsion, May 25, 2004.

19. Palestinian Media Watch, “Religious War: All Israel is Islamic Holy Land.”

20. Quoted in André Wink, Al-Hind: The Making of the Indo-Islamic World: : Early Medieval India and the Expansion of Islam 7Th-11th Centuries (Boston, MA: Brill Academic, 2002), 192-3.

21. Bruce Bawer, “Not all Muslims want to integrate,” Christian Science Monitor, November 17, 2005.

22. Bruce Bawer, While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within (New York: Anchor, 2007), 239.

23. G.M. Davis, Religion of Peace? Islam’s War Against the World (Washington, DC: World Ahead Publishing, 2006), 115.

24. Dore Gold, Hatred’s Kingdom: How Saudi Arabia Supports the New Global Terrorism (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2004), 127.

25. Ibid, 131-44.

26. Ibid, 184.

27. Eric Lichtblau, “Documents Back Saudi Link to Extremists,” New York Times, June 23, 2009.

28. BBC News, “Wikileaks: Saudis ‘chief funders of Sunni militants’,” December 5, 2010.

29. “Saudi Arabia Terrorist Financing Issues,” CRS Report for Congress, September 14, 2007.

30. Investigative Project, “Qatar’s Duplicitous Game,” May 9, 2013.

31. Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizationsand the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Shuster, 2011), 207.

32. Ibid, 33.

33. Majid Khadduri, War and Peace in the Law of Islam (Clark, NJ: Lawbook Exchange, 2010), 59.

34. Huntington, 209.

35. Khadduri, War and Peace in the Law of Islam, 59.

36. Ibid, 80.

37. Huntington, 256.

38. Ibid, 257-258.

39. Ibid.

40. Ibid.

41. Ibid, 263.

CHAPTER 22: ISLAM IN THE 21ST CENTURY

1.   S.K. Malik, The Quranic Concept of War (Mumbai, India: Himalayan Books, 1986), 144.

2.   Majid Khadduri, War and Peace in the Law of Islam (Clark, NJ: Lawbook Exchange, 2010), 52.

3.   Ibid, 64.

4.   Aminu Abubakar and Josh Levs, “’I will sell them,’ Boko Haram leader says of kidnapped Nigerian girls.”

5.   Hinshaw, Barnes, and Vogt, “Distrust Hampers Search for Nigerian Girls Abducted by Boko Haram,” CNN, May 6, 2014.

6.   Agence France-Presse, “’Al-Qaeda financed Bali’ claims Hambali report,” October 6, 2003.

7.   Associated Press, “Terror group says it bombed Philippines ferry; 180 missing,” February 29, 2004.

8.   BBC News, “Obituary: Shamil Basayev,” July 10, 2006.

9.   CNN Library, “Beslan School Siege Fast Facts,” CNN, August 21, 2014.

10. Quoted in BBC News, “Excerpts: Basayev claims Beslan,” September 17, 2004.

11. Paul Hamilos, “The worst Islamist attack in European history,” Guardian (UK), October 31, 2007.

12. Quoted in BBC News, “London bomber: Text in full,” September 1, 2005.

13. IBN Live (India), “The 1993 Mumbai blasts: what exactly happened on March 12 that year,” March 21, 2013.

14. Press Release, “Boko Haram and U.S. Counterterrorism Assistance to Nigeria,” U.S. Department of State, May 14, 2014.

15. This is why claims that Islam is a “religion of peace” are simply erroneous. Even within Islam, theological disagreements still provoke violent reprisals on a large scale.

16. Edwin Mora, “Sunni Muslum ‘Extremists’ Committed 70% of Terrorist Murders in 2011,” CNS News, August 3, 2012.

17. Peter Bergan and David Sterman, “U.S. right wing extremists more deadly than jihadists,” CNN, April 15, 2014.

18. Henrik Clausen, “The profound problem of Muslim immigration,” Europe News (Denmark), December 26, 2010.

19. Quoted in Sahih Muslim, The Messenger, 599.

20. Qur’an3:85.

21. Ibid, 9:5.

22. Efraim Karsh, Islamic Imperialism: A History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 62.

23. Khadduri, War and Peace in the Law of Islam, 59.

24. Qur’an 9:19-20.

25. See Part 3, Chapter 1, “Muhammad.”

26. See Part 4, Chapter 1, “Universal Jihad.”

27. See Rees, “The shared genetic heritage of Jews and Palestinians.” Blogged at Epephenom, January 20, 2009. http://www.patheos.com/blogs/epiphenom/2009/01/shared-genetic-heritage-of-jews-and.html.

28. Nikita Khrushchev, “On Peaceful Coexistence,” Foreign Affairs, October 1959. Compare Khrushchev’s comments with Islam, which cannot accept such a relationship with the non-Islamic world even in theory. It necessarily seeks to alter both the government and the mode of life of all non-Islamic countries everywhere.

29. Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, “Al Qaeda’s Nuclear Ambitions,” Foreign Policy, November 16, 2010.

30. Quoted in Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, “Islam and the Bomb,” Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School, January 2011, 72.

31. Quoted in Alan Johnson, “Plagued by Optimism,” Guardian (UK), July 13, 2008.

32. Quoted in Jeremy Bernstein, “Iran and the Bomb: An Update,” New York Review of Books, June 2, 2011.

CHAPTER 23: INDIA BEFORE ISLAM

1.   Quoted in Steven Knapp, The Power of the Dharma (Bloomington, IN: iUniverse, Inc, 2006), 11.

2.   Quoted in Alfred Deakin, Irrigated India (W. Thacker, 1893), 15.

3.   Quoted in H.L. Singh, The Treasury of Hinduism (Punjab India: Adarsh Enterprises, 2007), 199.

4.   A.L. Basham, The Wonder That Was India (New York: Picador, 2014), 9.

5.   “King Piyadasi” is Ashoka himself.

6.   I.3.28.

7.   William Durant and Ariel Durant, The Story of Civilization, Volume 1 (New York: MJF Books, 1993), 393.

8.   Basham, 4.

9.   Ibid, 8-9.

10. Ibid, 4.

11. Ibid, 217.

12. Ibid, 88-9.

13. Ibid, 114.

14. Ibid, 101.

15. Ibid, 93.

16. Ibid, 123-4.

17. Ibid, 96.

18. Ibid, 125.

19. Ibid, 127.

20. Ibid, 112.

21. Ibid, 91.

22. Durant, 451.

23. Basham, The Wonder That Was India, 70.

24. Aryabhata, Aryabhatiya, translated by Walter Eugene Clark, 1.3.

25. Durant, 528.

26. Andrew Leibs, Sports and Games of the Renaissance (Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood, 2004), 92.

27. Durant, 565.

28. Ibid, 567.

29. Ibid, 568.

30. Ibid, 451.

31. Ibid, 530.

32. Ibid, 532.

33. Ibid, 452-3.

34. Ibid, 599-600.

35. Ibid, 599.

36. Basham, 67, 115.

37. Ibid, 120.

38. Ibid, 117.

39. Ibid, 139.

40. Ibid, 149-51.

41. Ibid, 152.

42. Ibid, 143.

43. Ibid, 153.

44. Ibid, 154.

45. Durant, 453.

46. Ibid, 526.

47. Ibid, 535.

48. Ibid, 534.

49. Ibid, 533.

50. Ibid, 552.

51. Ibid, 557-8.

52. Ibid, 558.

53. Basham, 202-3.

54. Ibid, 102-3.

55. Durant, 556-7.

56. Ibid.

57. Basham, 162.

58. Ibid, 156.

59. Ibid, 162.

60. Ibid, 174.

61. Ibid, 70.

CHAPTER 24: JIHAD IN INDIA

1.   William Durant and Ariel Durant, The Story of Civilization, Volume 1 (New York: MJF Books, 1993), 459.

2.   Fernand Braudel, History of Civilizations (New York: Penguin, 1995), 235-6.

3.   Irfan Husain, “Demons from the Past,” Daily Times (Pakistan), August 30, 2004.

4.   Karl Marx, “Declaration of War—On the History of the Eastern Question,” New-York Herald Tribune, March 28, 1854.

5.   S.A. Thiruvananthapuram, “Render unto Padmanabhaswamy,” Economist (UK), February 19, 2013.

6.   Jamal Elias, Aisha’s Cushion: Religious Art, Perception, and Practice in Islam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 127-8.

7.   Romila Thapar, Somanatha: The Many Voices of History (New York: Verso, 2005), 65.

8.   Quoted in Diana L. Eck, India: A Sacred Geography (New York: Harmony, 2013), 222-4.

9.   Andre Wink, Al-Hind: The Making of the Indo-Islamic World, Volume 1 (Boston, MA: Brill Academic, 2002), 192-3.

10. Ibid, 202.

11. Derryl Maclean, Religion and Society in Arab Sind (Boston, MA: Brill Academic, 1989), 37-9.

12. Wink, 112.

13. Quoted in Stephen Knapp, “Islamic Destruction of Hindu Temples”

14. Ibid.

15. Quoted in S.M. Ikram, Muslim Civilization in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), 31.

16. Alain Danielou, translated by Kenneth Hurry, A Brief History of India (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2003), 197-8.

17. Ikram, 48, 111.

18. Fouzia Farooq Ahmed, “The Delhi Sultanate: A Slave Society or a Society with Slaves,” Pakistan Journal of History and Culture, Volume 30, Number 1, 2009, 2.

19. Ibid, 6-7.

20. Ibid, 8-14.

21. Abraham Eraly, The First Spring: The Golden Age of India (New York: Penguin, 2011), 588-9.

22. Ibid, 590.

23. Sultan Firuz Shah Tughlaq in Futuhat-i-Firuz Shahi.

24. Ikram, 109.

25. P.N. Chopra, B.N. Puri, M.N. Das, and A.C. Pradhan, A Comprehensive History of India (Lancaster, UK: Gazelle Distribution, 2006), 40; Stephen Knapp, Crimes Against India and the Need to Protect its Ancient Vedic Tradition (Bloomington, IN: iUniverse, 2009), 40.

26. Quoted in Knapp, “Islamic Destruction of Hindu Temples.”

27. Salma Ahmed Farooqui, A Comprehensive History of Medieval India: From the Twelfth to the Mid-Eighteenth Century (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, 2011), 82.

28. Knapp, “Islamic Destruction of Hindu Temples.”

29. Wink, Volume 3, 163-4.

30. Danielou, A Brief History of India, 209, 218-9.

31. Quoted in Henry Miers Eliot, ed. History of India in Nine Volumes (out of print), Volume 5, 175.

32. Ibid, 189-90.

33. Ibid, 198, 203.

34. Ibid, 221-2.

35. Agha Hussain Hamadani, The Frontier Policy of the Delhi Sultans (Islamabad, Pakistan: National Institute of Historical and Cultural Research, 1986), 157-8.

36. Munis Faruqui, The Princes of the Mughal Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 27.

37. Knapp, “Islamic Destruction of Hindu Temples.”

38. John F. Richards, The Mughal Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 20-1.

39. Ikram, 156-64.

40. Ibid, 97.

41. Amita Sarin, Akbar and Birbal (New York: Penguin Global, 2005), 95.

42. Rajmohan Gandhi, Revenge and Reconciliation: Understanding South Asian History (New York: Penguin, 1999), 86-7.

43. William McWhirter, “The Majesty of Taj Mahal,” Life Magazine, November 3, 1967, 60-3.

44. Claude Markovits, ed. A History of Modern India: 1480-1950 (London, UK: Anthem, 2004), 101.

45. Ibid, 102; J.M. Mehta, Advanced Study in the History of Modern India: 1707-1813 (Berkshire, UK: New Dawn Press, 2005), 105-6.

46. Lisa Balabanlilar, Imperial Identity in Mughal Empire (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2012), 89-91.

47. Eraly, The First Spring, 100-5.

48. Abraham Eraly, Emperors of the Peacock Throne: The Saga of the Great Mughals (New York: Penguin, 2000), 306.

49. François Bernier translated by Irving Brock, Travels in the Mogul Empire 1656-1668 (Westminster: Archibald Constable, and Co., 1891), 11.

50. Fergus Nicoll, Shah Jahan: The Rise and Fall of the Mughal Emperor (London: Haus Publishing, 2009), 207.

51. Ibid.

52. Bernier, Travels in the Mogul Empire, 98-100.

53. Ibid, 103-4.

54. Danielou, A Brief History of India, 250.

55. Durant, 475.

56. Wendy Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternative History (New York: Penguin

57. 2010), 538.

58. Stanley Wolpert, New History of India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 149.

59. Ibid.

60. Vinay Lal, “Enslavement of Hindus by Arab and Turkish Invaders,” Legacy of Jihad (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2010) edited by Andrew Bostom, 549-554.

61. Ibid.

62. Vinay Lal, “Slave-taking During Muslim Rule,” Legacy of Jihad, 535.

63. Ibid.

64. Vinay Lal, “Ghilmans and Eunuchs,” Muslim Slave System in Medieval India (New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan, 1994).

65. Ibid.

66. Vinay Lal, “Sex Slavery,” Muslim Slave System.

67. Ibid.

68. Ibid.

69. Ibid.

70. Y.G. Bhave, From the Death of Shivaji to the Death of Aurangzeb (Delhi: Northern Book Centre, 2000), 24-9; Charles Kincaid and Rao Parasnis, A History of the Maratha People, Volume 1 (Charleston, SC: Nabu Press, 2010), 235.

71. Vinay Lal, “British India,” Economic and Political Weekly, Voume 28, Numbers 29-30, July 17-24, 1993,1511-13.

72. Ibid.

CHAPTER 25: THE PARTITION OF INDIA

1.   Quoted in Sujit Das, “Indian Muslims – Are They Trustworthy?,” Faithfreedom.org, January 3, 2014.

2.   Ibid.

3.   Ibid.

4.   Quoted in Ramachandra Guha, Makers of Modern India (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2013), 159-60.

5.   Prashant Bharadwaj, Asim Khwaja, and Atif Mian, “The Big March: Migratory Flows after the Partition of India,” Economic and Political Weekly, August 30, 2008.

6.   S.S. Toshkhani, “Early Kashmiri Society and the Challenge of Islam,” Kashmir and It’s People: Studies in the Evolution of Kashmiri Society (New Delhi, India: Aph, 2004) edited by M. K. Kaw 87.

7.   Mohan Lal Koul, “Sultan Sikandar – A Cruel Crusader,” Kashmir: Wail of a Valley (New Delhi, India: Gyan Sagar, 1999).

8.   Ibid.

9.   Abraham Eraly, The Mughal World: India’s Tainted Paradise (Quezon City, Philippines: Phoenix, 2008), 284.

10. Time, “India: Nizam’s Azam and Moazzam,” November 23, 1931.

11. Time, “World: Cutting Off the Princes’ Pay,” September 14, 1970.

12. Time, “India: The Nizam’s Daughter,” January 19, 1959; Kalyani Devaki Menon, Everyday Nationalism: Women of the Hindu Right in India (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 40.

13. Aravind Adiga, “My Kingdom for a Sheep,” Time, August 21, 2006.

14. Time, “India: The Happy War,” September 27 1948.

15. Time, “Hyderabad: Silver Jubilee Durbar,” February 22, 1937.

16. Ibid.

17. Adiga, “My Kingdom for a Sheep.”

18. Walid Phares, The Confrontation: Winning the War Against Future Jihad (New York: Palgrave, 2009), 217.

19. Bruce Riedel, “Terrorism in India and the Global Jihad,” Brookings Institution, November 30, 2008.

20. Phares, The Confrontation: Winning the War Against Future Jihad, 218.

21. Yoginder Sikand, Muslims in India Since 1947: Islamic Perspectives on Inter-Faith Relations (London: Routledge, 2004), 155; Christine Fair, “Students Islamic Movement of India and the Indian Mujahideen,” Asia Policy, Volume 9, January 2010, 2.

22. Fair, 7-8, 15-16.

23. Ibid.

24. Bhattacharya, “Indian Mujahideen: Evolving Challenge,” South Asia Intelligence Review, Volume 12, Number 17, October 28, 2013.

CHAPTER 26: INDIA: ISLAM, INDEPENDENCE, AND THE MISGUIDED MAHATMA

1.   George Santayana, Reason in Common Sense (New York: Dover, 1905), 284.

2.   Jia Lal Kilam, “Spread of Islam,” History of Kashmiri Pandits (New Delhi, India: Utpal, 2004).

3.   Mohibbul Hasan, Kashmir under the Sultans (New Delhi, India: Aakar Books, 1959), 65, 67.

4.   Jagdishchandra Jain, Gandhi, the Forgotten Mahatma (Columbia, MO: South Asia Books, 1987), 38.

5.   Ibid.

6.   Quoted in Stanley Wolpert, Gandhi’s Passion: The Life and Legacy of Mahatma Gandhi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 216.

7.   Hitchens, “The Real Mahatma Gandhi,” Atlantic, July/August 2011.

8.   Gail Minault, The Khilafat Movement: Religious Symbolism and Political Mobilization in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 80.

9.   Wolpert, Gandhi’s Passion, 112.

10. Walid Phares, The Confrontation: Winning the War Against Future Jihad (New York: Palgrave, 2009), 217.

11. Ibid, 218.

12. Bhattacharya, “Indian Mujahideen: Evolving Challenge,” South Asia Intelligence Review, Volume 12, Number 17, October 28, 2013.

13. Quoted in Hitchens, “The Real Mahatma Gandhi.”

14. Gyanesh Kudaisya, “Beyond the ‘Himalayan Pearl Harbor,’” History Today, Volume 62, Issue 11, November 2012.

15. AIML, “Lahore Resolution,” archived at http://historypak.com/lahore-resolution-1940/.

16. CPI, “CPI Resolution, September 19, 1942,” archived at http://dilipsimeon.blogspot.com/2013/09/history-archive-communist-party-of_6.html.

17. C.I. Isaac, “Madhani Factor: Curse of Kerala Politics,” Vijayvaani.com, April 2, 2009.

18. Ibid.

19. M.N. Roy, “Historical Role of Islam: An Essay on Islamic Culture,” Vora and Company Publishers, 1938.

20. Prakash Karat, “A Broad Platform against Communalism,” Online Petition, October 30, 2013.

21. CPI-M, “Against RSS-BJP Communal Agenda,” http://cpim.org/content/against-rss-bjp-communal-agenda.

22. V.S. Naipaul, Beyond Belief, Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (New York: Vintage, 1999), xi.

23. Huffington Post, “On World Toilet Day, World Bank Warns Over 600 Million Indians Defecate In The Open.” November 19, 2013.

24. Jeremy Hance, “India, not China, has the world’s worst urban air pollution,” Mongabay.com, May 12, 2014.

25. Prasenjit Chowdhury, “India is still world’s hunger capital,” Deccan Herald, August 27, 2009.

26. Mridu Bhandari, “Hunger kills 6,000 Indian kids daily,” CNN and IBN, March 29, 2008.

27. India Together, “A children’s manifesto,” http://indiatogether.org/manifesto-children, April 1, 2004.

28. Ram Mashru, “India’s Worsening Water Crisis,” The Diplomat (Japan), April 19, 2014.

29. Phys.Org, “Much of rural India still waits for electricity,” November 4, 2013.

30. Rediff.com, “India among world’s most corrupt nations,” December 4, 2013.

31. Sruthi Gottipati, “Corruption curse follows Congress party to the polls,” Reuters, October 7, 2013.

32. BBC, “India’s corruption scandals,” April 18, 2012.

33. Quoted in M.A. Khan, Islamic Jihad, A legacy of forced conversion, imperialism, and slavery (Bloomington, IN: iUniverse.com, 2009), 212.

34. Ibid.

35. Khan, 199-200.

36. Quoted in Khan, 200.

CHAPTER 27: AMERICA: THE CIVILIZATIONAL JIHAD

1.   Quoted in Osama Bin Laden, “Full text: bin Laden’s ‘letter to America’,” Guardian (UK), November 24, 2002.

2.   Bush, “President’s Message for Eid Al-Fitr,” remarks made at the Islamic Center of Washington, D.C., December 5, 2002.

3.   Obama, “A New Beginning,” remarks made at Cairo University (Egypt), June 4, 2009.

4.   Quoted in Laurie Sterling, “What Will It Be America?,” Lady Patriots blog, September 3, 2003. http://lady-patriots.com/what-will-it-be-america-the-constitution-or-sharia-law/.

5.   Quoted in Adrian Morgan, “Muslim Brotherhood’s Long-Standing War On The West; Part 1,” discoverthenetworks.org, June 5, 2007.

6.   Discover The Networks, “The Muslim Brotherhood’s ‘General Strategic Goal’ for North America;” Mohammed Akram, “An Explanatory Memorandum,” (translator unknown) Investigative Project on Terrorism, May 22, 1991, 21.

7.   Andrew McCarthy, The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America (New York: Encounter, 2010), 61, 66, 69.

8.   Ibid, 72.

9.   Quoted in David Patterson, A Genealogy of Evil: Anti-Semitism from Nazism to Islamic Jihad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 73.

10. Quoted in David Gaubatz and Paul Sperry, Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld that’s Conspiring to Islamize America (Los Angeles, CA: WND, 2009), 229.

11. Muslim Brotherhood, “An Explanatory Memorandum,” 22-5.

12. Noreen S. Ahmed-Ullah, Sam Roe and Laurie Cohen, “A rare look at secretive Brotherhood in America,” Chicago Tribune, September 19, 2004.

13. Noreen S. Ahmed-Ullah, Kim Barker, Laurie Cohen, Stephen Franklin and Sam Roe, “Hard-liners won battle for Bridgeview mosque,” Chicago Tribune, February 8, 2004.

14. Azzam Tamimi, Hamas: A History from Within (Northampton, MA: Olive Branch, 2011), 10-11.

15. Steven Emerson, American Jihad : The Terrorists Living Among Us (Florence, MA: Free Press, 2003), 80.

16. Matthew Levitt, Hamas: Politics, Charity, and Terrorism in the Service of Jihad (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 149.

17. Ibid, 40.

18. Ibid, 40 and 150; McCarthy, The Grand Jihad, 140; Emerson, American Jihad, 86-7.

19. See U.S. District Court, Northern District of Texas, “USA v. Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development.” Sept. 29, 2008 (http://www.txnd.uscourts.gov/judges/hlf2.html)

20. Ibid.

21. Ibid.

22. Ibid.

23. See Gaubatz and Sperry, Muslim Mafia, 42-46.

24. The Investigative Project on Terrorism, “Government’s Memorandum in Opposition,” February 5, 2008.

25. Gaubatz and Sperry, Muslim Mafia, 32.

26. Ibid, 27-30.

27. Ibid.

28. Ibid, 41.

29. Quoted in Sterling, “What Will It Be America?”

30. Gaubatz and Sperry, Muslim Mafia, 208-9.

31. Amer Taleb, “Anti-Islamic hate-crime rate differs greatly among states,” Scripps Howard Foundation Wire, April 12, 2003.

32. Daniel Pipes and Sharon Chadha, “CAIR’s Hate Crimes Nonsense,” FrontPageMagazine.com, May 18, 2005

33. Gaubatz and Sperry, Muslim Mafia, 141-2.

34. Jeff Jacoby, “The blacklisting of an investigative journalist,” Boston Globe, August 31, 1998.

35. John Leo, “Pushing the Bias Button,” Townhall.com, June 2, 2003.

36. See U.S. District Court, Northern District of Texas, “USA v. Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development.” Sept. 29, 2008 (http://www.txnd.uscourts.gov/judges/hlf2.html)

37. Gaubatz and Sperry, Muslim Mafia, 74-80.

38. Ibid, 101.

39. Ibid, 98, 114-6.

40. Patrick S. Poole, “Blind to Terror,” Rubin Center: Research in International Affairs, June 4, 2013.

41. Lee Ferran, “Nidal Hasan Admitted Jihadist Motive,” ABC News, June 5, 2013.

42. Ryan Mauro, “Brotherhood Influence Op Inside U.S. Academia: Success,” Clarion Project, May 5, 2014.

43. See Muslim Brotherhood, “Explanatory Memorandum,” 15.

44. Ryan Mauro, “Muslim Brotherhood Inside American Colleges,” Clarion Project, May 16, 2013.

45. Ryan Mauro, “Islamic Infiltration,” Clarion Project, June 25, 2013.

46. Lee Kaplan, “The Saudi Fifth Column On Our Nation’s Campuses,” Frontpage.com, April 5, 2004.

47. Ibid.

48. Ibid. Also, see Robert Spencer, Onward Muslim Soldiers: How Jihad Still Threatens America and the West (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2003), 13.

49. Ibid.

50. Eric Rupp and Christian Erickson, “Prisons, Radical Islam’s New Recruiting Grounds?,” paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association March 22, 2006.

51. Alex Wilner, “We must make sure that prison isn’t terrorism school.” Globe and Mail (Canada), October 19, 2009.

52. Dennis Ballas, “Prisoner Radicalization,” FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin, October 2010.

53. Lee, “Does the United States really have 5 percent of the world’s population.”

54. Michael Waller, “Testimony of Dr. Michael Waller,” Accessed at Free Republic, October 14, 2003.

55. Donald Van Duyn, “Testimony Before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs,” January 8, 2009.

56. Brian Michael Jenkins, “The New Age of Terrorism,” RAND Corporation, 2006.

57. Ibid.

58. Rupp and Erickson, “Prisons, Radical Islam’s New Recruiting Grounds?”

59. David Schanzer, Charles Kurzman, and Ebrahim Moosa, “Anti-Terror Lessons of Muslim-Americans,” National Institute of Justice, January 6, 2010.

60. Robert Mueller, “Remarks Prepared for Delivery by Director Robert S. Mueller III,” James Fox Memorial Lecture, April 26, 2006.

61. Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY), “Hearing before the Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology and Homeland Security,” June 26, 2003.

62. Anonymous, Terrorist Hunter: The Extraordinary Story of a Woman Who Went Undercover to Infiltrate the Radical Islamic Groups Operating in America (New York: Ecco, 2003), 109-110.

63. McCarthy, The Grand Jihad, 274.

64. Ibid, 359.

65. Scott Shane and Souad Mekhennet, “Imam’s Path From Condemning Terror to Preaching Jihad,” New York Times, May 8, 2010.

66. Emerson, American Jihad, 129-131.

67. Joseph Fried, “The Terror Conspiracy,” New York Times, October 2, 1995.

68. Sara Carter, “’For the Record’ Exposes Radicalized Foundation of the Mosque Attended by the Accused Boston Bombers,” The Blaze, September 25, 2013; Poole, “Blind to Terror;” Emerson, American Jihad, 206.

69. Gilbert Sewall, “Islam in the Classroom: What the Textbooks Tell Us,” American Textbook Council, 2008.

70. Ibid.

71. Daniel Pipes, “Islam in American Textbooks,” Fox News, March 8, 2009.

72. Kari Huus, “Texas school board debates ‘pro-Islamic’ bias in textbooks,” NBC News, September 23, 2010.

73. Daniel Greenfield, “The Islamic Political Takeover of America,” Frontpage.com, August 19, 2011.

74. Quoted in Bob Taylor, “Further evidence of Islamic influence in the U.S.,” Washington Times, January 10, 2013.

75. Tiffany Gabbay, “Want to Know Just How Close the Muslim Brotherhood is to the Obama Admin?,” The Blaze, April 26, 2012.

76. Ryan Mauro, “A Window on the Muslim Brotherhood in America,” Center for Security Policy, September 2013; Clarion Project, “Quotable Quotes,” http://www.clarionproject.org/quotes; Ryan Mauro, “Homeland Security’s Mohammed Elibiary: Caliphate Inevitable,” Clarion Project, June 25, 2014.

77. Andrew McCarthy, “Huma Abedin’s Muslim Brotherhood Ties,” National Review, July 25, 2012.

78. Andrew McCarthy, “The Huma Unmentionables,” National Review, July 24, 2013.

79. Christine Pelisek, “Inside the Child Prostitution Sting,” Daily Beast, November 9, 2010.

80. Michael Martinez, “Federal crackdown on child prostitution results in 884 arrests,” CNN, November 9, 2010; Mara H. Gottfried, “29 charged in bust of sex slave ring tied to 3 Minneapolis gangs,” Pioneer Press, November 9, 2010.

81. Jerry Gordon, “Somalis, Shelbyville and Severe Culture Shock,” New English Review, February 2008; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Chapter 1, Somali History and Immigration to the United States,” Promoting Cultural Sensitivity: Somali Guide, September 1, 2012.

82. Ibid.

83. Steve Karnowski, “Somalis still leaving Minn. to join terror group,” Associated Press, September 26, 2013.

84. Quoted in Gordon, “Somalis, Shelbyville and Severe Culture Shock.”

85. Allen Breed and Ramit Plushniuk-Masti, “Terror act or workplace violence?,” Arizona Daily Star, August 11, 2013.

86. Ibid.

87. Michael Cooper, Michael S. Schmidt, and Eric Schmitt, “Boston Suspects Are Seen as Self-Taught and Fueled by Web,” New York Times, April 23, 2013.

88. Center for Security Policy, “Shariah Law vs. the Constitution,” blog posted at Counter Jihad Report, April 11, 2013. http://counterjihadreport.com/2013/04/11/a-guide-to-shariah-law-vs-the-constitution/.

89. Qur’an 5:38.

90. Qur’an 24:2.

CHAPTER 28: THE U.S. AND THE UNGRATEFUL ARAB

1.   Quoted in Jennifer Delaney, “The Unlikely Partnership: The State of the U.S.-Saudi Relationship,” Masters Thesis, Hawaii Pacific University, Summer 2009, 1.

2.   Quoted in Mukund Padmanabhan, “’There is no right not to be offended.’” Hindu (India), October 8, 2012.

3.   Quoted in S. Noble, “Egypt’s Morsi Despises Zionist ‘Blood-Suckers’, ‘Descendants of Apes and Pigs’.” Independent Sentinel, January 4, 2013.

4.   Delaney, 2.

5.   Ibid, 3.

6.   Christopher Blanchard, “Saudi Arabia: Background and U.S. Relations,” Congressional Research Service, April 29, 2015, 5-8; Office of the United States Trade Representative, “Saudi Arabia,” May 6, 2014.

7.   See Part 2, Chapter 6, “The Gulf Cooperation Council.”

8.   See Part 2, Chapter 1, “Saudi Arabia: De Facto Superpower.”

9.   Delaney, 5.

10. Ibid, 38.

11. Ibid, 32-33.

12. Ibid, 38.

13. Ora Coren and Nadan Feldman, “U.S. aid to Israel totals $233.7b over six decades,” Haaretz (Israel), March 20, 2013.

14. Census.gov, “Foreign Trade.” https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/balance/c5081.html#2013

15. Ibid.

16. Aarti Nagraj, “GCC Oil And Gas Reserves Worth $65trn,” Gulf Business, March 12, 2012.

17. Jeremy Sharp, “Egypt: Background and U.S. Relations,” Congressional Research Service, March 3, 2015.

18. The White House, “Fact Sheet: United States-Saudi Arabia Bilateral Relationship,” March 28, 2014.

19. Database, “TIV Data,” SIPRI, http://www.sipri.org/databases/armstransfers.

20. Barney Gimbel, “The richest city in the world,” Fortune, March 12, 2007.

21. Ibid.

22. Economist (UK), “The GCC in 2020: Resources for the future,” 2010. [Note: Special Supplement.]

23. Kevin Whitelaw, “Dubai Rides the Oil Boom,” US News, June 5, 2008.

24. Ibid.

25. John Glaser, “Valued ‘Ally’ Saudi Arabia Supports Terrorism, Urges US War in Syria,” blogged at antiwar.com, February 18, 2014.

26. Declan Walsh, “WikiLeaks cables portray Saudi Arabia as a cash machine for terrorists,” Guardian (UK), December 5, 2010.

27. Ibid.

28. Paul Sperry, “Inside the Saudi 9/11 coverup,” New York Post, December 15, 2013; Eric Lichtblau, “Saudi Arabia May Be Tied to 9/11, 2 Ex-Senators Say,” New York Times, February 29, 2012.

CHAPTER 29: HOW THE WEST BACKS ISLAMIC FUNDAMENTALISM

1.   Frank Gaffney Jr., “Don’t Hollow Out the Military,” National Review, August 4, 2011.

2.   Iqbal Z. Quadir, “Foreign Aid and Bad Government,” Wall Street Journal, January 30, 2009.

3.   Michael Dobbs, One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War (New York: Vintage, 2009), 303, 317.

4.   Rachel Bronson, Thicker Than Oil (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 27.

5.   Ibid, 94.

6.   Quoted in Dennis Kux, India and the United States: Estranged Democracies (Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 1992), 128, 154-5.

7.   Quoted in Michel Chossudovsky, “Hillary Clinton: ‘We Created Al Qaeda’,” Global Research Centre for Research on Globalization, June 1, 2013.

8.   Steve Coll, Ghost Wars (New York: Penguin, 2004), 51.

9.   Ibid, 58-60.

10. Bronson, Thicker Than Oil, 10.

11. Coll, Ghost Wars, 61, 67.

12. Ibid, 97-8, 104.

13. Dwight Eisenhower, “Address at the Freedoms Foundation, Waldorf-Astoria, New York City,” December 22, 1952, archived at Presidential Library, http://www.eisenhower.archives.gov/all_about_ike/quotes.html.

14. Jeff Lee, “The Failure of Political Islam in Indonesia,” Stanford Journal of East Asian Affairs, Volume 4, Issue 1, Winter 2004, 92.

15. Fred Halliday, Political Journeys: The Open Democracy Essays (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 82.

16. Quoted in David Ottaway, The King’s Messenger: Prince Bandar bin Sultan and America’s Tangled Relationship With Saudi Arabia (New York: Walker & Company, 2008), 16.

17. Coll, Ghost Wars, 201-2, 207-16.

18. Quoted in Abdy Javadzadeh, Iranian Irony: Marxists Becoming Muslims (Pittsburgh, PA: RoseDog Press, 2010), 70.

19. Ervand Abrahamian, Tortured Confessions: Prison and Public Recantations in Modern Iran (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 209-10.

20. Ibid, 178.

21. Maryam Namazie, “Siding With the Oppressor,” One Law for All Campaign, London, 2013, 7-8.

22. Douglas Murray, “A Gross Double Standard Over Hate Speech,” Spectator (UK), June 27, 2013.

23. Namazie, 60.

24. Meredith Tax, “Double Bind: Tied Up in Knots on the Left,” Open Democracy (webzine), February 5, 2013.

25. Gita Sahgal, “A Statement by Gita Sahgal on Leaving Amnesty International,” New York Review of Books, May 13, 2010.

26. Quoted in Namazie, Siding With the Oppressor, 59.

27. Quoted in Afghanistan Liberation Organization, “The Communist Part of India (Maoist) and Islamic Fundamentalists,” 2. (http://www.scribd.com/doc/258744294/cpi-and-fundamentalism-alo-pdf#scribd)

28. Ibid, 3.

29. Ibid.

30. R. Upadhyay, “Muslims and Indian Communists – Strange Allies?,” South Asia Analysis Group, Paper Number 1107, January 9, 2004.

31. Jews Against Islamophobia Coalition, “About Us,” http://www.jewsagainstislamophobia.org/?page_id=6.

32. JAIC, “Letter to the Department of Justice requesting investigations,” October 28, 2013.

33. JAIC, “Jewish Coalition Reaffirms Commitment to Challenging Islamophobia,” April 15, 2013.

34. Human Rights Watch, “Saudi Arabia,” https://www.hrw.org/middle-eastn-africa/saudi-arabia.

35. Ibid.

36. Human Rights Watch, “Pakistan,” https://www.hrw.org/asia/pakistan.

37. Ibid.

38. Ibid.

39. Human Rights Watch, “South Asia: Protect Migrant Workers to Gulf Countries,” December 18, 2013.

40. Christopher Hitchens, “Of Sin, the Left, and Islamic Fascism,” Nation, October 8, 2001.

41. John Bradley, After the Arab Spring: How Islamists Hijacked the Middle East Revolts (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 1.

42. Ibid, 12-3.

43. Ibid, 1.

44. Ibid, 5-6.

45. Giuliana Sgrena, “Islamic Force Rises in Tunisia,” Inter Press Service, July 31, 2011.

46. Daily Telegraph (UK), “Tunisia extremists firebomb home of ‘blasphemous’ TV station head,” October 15, 2011.

47. Barnabas Fund, “Christians Flee as Islamist Influence Grows in Tunisia,” June 6, 2011.

48. Bradley, After the Arab Spring: How Islamists Hijacked the Middle East Revolts, 26-8.

49. Pew Research, “Arab Spring Adds to Global Restrictions on Religion,” June 20, 2013.

50. Laura King, “Attack on wedding is latest horror for Egypt’s Coptic Christians,” Los Angeles Times, October 21, 2013.

51. Lawrence Davidson, Islamic Fundamentalism: An Introduction (Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood, 2003), 57; Joseph Manning, Threats to the Saudi Arabian Monarchy (Carlisle Barracks, PA: U.S. Army War College, 1998), 16.

52. Manning, 17.

53. Bradley, 84.

54. Kirsten Powers, “A Global Slaughter of Christians, but America’s Churches Stay Silent,” Daily Beast, September 27, 2013.

55. Christian Post, “Abduction of Nuns in Syria Aims to Force Christians to Emigrate,” December 10, 2013.

56. Robert Fisk, “Syria crisis: In sacred Maaloula where they speak the language of Christ,” Independent (UK), September 25, 2013.

57. Ruth Sherlock, “Syrian Shias flee to Lebanon to escape Sunni militias,” Daily Telegraph (UK), May 3, 2013.

58. Omar Fahmy, “Sunni clerics call for jihad against Syria’s Assad allies,” Reuters, June 13, 2013.

59. Ibid.

60. Benny Morris, “Arab Spring or Islamist Surge?,” National Interest, November 3, 2011.

61. Tim Arango and Anne Barnard, “With Victories, ISIS Dispels Hope of a Swift Decline,” New York Times, May 23, 2015.

62. Ahmad Al-Rubaye, “ISIS releases horrifying sex-slave pamphlet, justifies child rape,” RT.com, December 11, 2014.

63. Ibid.

64. Youssef Boudlal, “ISIS sex atrocities,” RT, May 9, 2015.

CHAPTER 30: EUROPE: THE DEMOGRAPHIC CONQUEST

1.   Quoted in Steven Evans, “Merkel says German multicultural society has failed,” BBC News, October 17, 2010.

2.   David Cameron, Speech at Munich Security Conference, Feb. 5, 2011.

3.   Quoted in Citizen Warrior, “Geert Wilders’ March 25th Speech in Rome,” April 2011.

4.   Quoted in Ian Fisher, “Oriana Fallaci, Incisive Italian Journalist, Is Dead at 77,” New York Times, September 16, 2006.

5.   Quoted in Daily Mail (UK), “’Have more babies and Muslims can take over the UK’ hate fanatic says,” September 13, 2008.

6.   Anders Behring Breivik, 2083: A European Declaration of Independence, posted online by Washington Post, July 24, 2011, 4.

7.   Quoted in blog post on Global Jihad, “Gadhafi: Islam Taking Over Europe,” World Net Daily, May 3, 2006.

8.   Pew Research, “Region: Europe,” January 27, 2011.

9.   Eurostat, “Total fertility rate in European countries, 2000-2011,” European Union website. http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/Fertility_statistics_in_relation_to_economy,_parity,_education_and_migration.

10. Mark Steyn, America Alone (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2008), 16.

11. Jeffrey Alexander, “Theorizing the ‘Modes of Incorporation’: Assimilation, Hyphenation, and Multiculturalism as Varieties of Civil Participation,” Sociological Theory, Volume 19, Issue 3, December 17, 2002, 237.

12. Dwight Murphey, “Multiculturalism’s Context and Ideological Implications,” Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies, Summer 2005, 203-239.

13. Quoted in Ray Furlong, “Germans argue over integration,” BBC News, November 30, 2004.

14. Ibid.

15. Charalambos Kasimis, “Greece: Illegal Immigration in the Midst of Crisis,” Migration Policy Institute, March 8, 2012.

16. Ibid.

17. Elena Becatoros, “Greece: Europe’s gateway for illegal immigration,” Associated Press, November 4, 2010.

18. Yardley, “Hundreds of Migrants Are Feared Dead as Ship Capsizes.”

19. International Centre for Prison Studies, “Greece.” (Retrieved June 2, 2015)

20. Pew Research, “Region: Europe.”

21. Economist (UK), “A new balance”; McPartland, “France expels ‘record number’ of immigrants.”

22. Sanya Khetani, “93 Percent of French Muslims Voted For Hollande,” Business Insider, May 8, 2012.

23. Soeren Kern, “Muslims Converting Empty European Churches into Mosques,” Gatestone Institute, January 16, 2012.

24. Le Figaro (France), “Manif hostile a la police a Trappes,” July 20, 2013.

25. Euronews, “Young French Muslim convert admits attacking soldier,” May 29, 2013.

26. Andrew Hussey, The French Intifada: The Long War Between France and Its Arabs (London: Faber and Faber, 2014), 57-61.

27. Edward Cody, “Mohammad Merah, face of the new terrorism,” Washington Post, March 22, 2012

28. Liam Keegan, “French Terrorist Suspect Merah: Who Was He?,” Newsy World, March 23, 2012. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCLndO69pGw.

29. Office for National Statistics (UK), “Census data,” March 27, 2011.

30. Leon Moosavi, “Why Has the Number of Muslims in the UK Risen So Much?,” Huffington Post, December 12, 2012.

31. Pamela Gellar, “UK Trial of Muslim Group That Plotted to Start a ‘War on the Streets of Britain’,” blogged at pamelagellar.com, June 6, 2013.

32. Quoted in Telegraph (UK), “Woolwich attack: the terrorist’s rant,” May 23, 2013.

33. Ask.com, “Londonistan (term),” http://www.ask.com/web?q=Londonistan&qsrc=0&o=0&l=dir&qo=homepageSearchBox, accessed on May 25, 2015.

34. Soeren Kern, “Britain: Muslim Prison Population Up 200%,” Gatestone Institute, August 2, 2013; Nick Dorman and Sean Rayment, “Top-security UK prison where terror fanatics serve life sentences is ‘al-Qaeda recruiting centre,’” Mirror (UK), March 29 2014.

35. News Writers, “House of Commons inquiry hears from MP Kris Hopkins,” Telegraph and Argus (UK), January 30, 2013.

36. Suzannah Hills, “UK’s biggest child sex gang uncovered,” Daily Mail (UK), August 18, 2013.

37. Katerina Nikolas, “Police in UK investigating 54 paedophile grooming gangs,” Digital Journal (Canada), May 22, 2013

38. Pew Research, “Region: Europe.”

39. Ronald Rovers, “The silencing of Theo van Gogh,” Salon, November 24, 2004.

40. Pew Research, “The Future of the Global Muslim Population, Region; Europe,” January 27, 2011; Soeren Kern, “The Islamization of Belgium and the Netherlands in 2013,” Gatestone Institute, January 13, 2014.

41. Geert Wilders, Marked for Death: Islam’s War Against the West and Me (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2012), 141.

42. Bruce Bawer, While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within (New York: Anchor, 2007), 3.

43. Kathy Shaidle, “Islamists on Welfare: Paid to Plot the West’s Demise,” Pajamas Media, April 4, 2011.

44. Staff, “Suspected Muslim polygamist charged with welfare fraud,” France24.com, June 9, 2010.

45. Economist (UK), “Many wives’ tales,” May 6, 2010.

46. EU Times, “French government cuts immigrants welfare by 83%,” December 28, 2012.

47. Baroness Flather, “Polygamy, welfare benefits and an insidious silence,” Daily Mail (UK), September 16, 2011.

48. Sue Reid, “The truth about polygamy,” Daily Mail (UK), September 24, 2011.

49. Melanie Hall, “Muslim preacher urges followers to claim ‘Jihad Seeker’s Allowance’,” Telegraph (UK), February 17, 2013.

50. BBC News, “Birth defects warning sparks row,” February 10, 2008.

51. Tim Stewart and David Pilditch, “NHS pays for Muslim virginity operations,”Express (UK), July 30, 2010.

52. Home Affairs Committee, “Child sexual exploitation and the response,” House of Commons, Oct 18, 2014, 69.

53. Helen Carter, “Rochdale gang jailed for sexually exploiting vulnerable girls,”Guardian (UK), May 9, 2012.

54. Taj Hargey, “The Oxford sex ring and the preachers who teach young Muslim men that white girls are cheap,” Daily Mail (UK), May 15, 2013.

55. Ibid.

56. Nic Robertson, Paul Cruickshank, and Tim Lister, “Documents give new details on al Qaeda’s London bombings,” CNN, April 30, 2012.

57. Elizabeth Nash, “Madrid bombers ‘were inspired by Bin Laden address’,” Independent (UK), November 7, 2006.

58. BBC News, “The Hamburg connection,” August 19, 2005.

59. Quoted in Ian Traynor, “’I don’t hate Muslims. I hate Islam’, says Holland’s rising political star,” Guardian (UK), February 16, 2008.

60. Quoted in Brendan Bernhard, “The Fallaci Code,” LA Weekly, March 15, 2006.

61. Ibid.

62. Quoted in Frances D’Emilio, “Atheist gifts pontifical school in will,” Free Republic, October 21, 2006.

63. Bryan Fischer, “Time to stop Muslim immigration to U.S. before it’s too late,” blogged at RenewAmerica.com, January 31, 2011.

64. Jamie Glazov, “The Persecution of Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff,” interview accessible at Frontpage.com, December 26, 2011.

65. Radio Netherlands Worldwide, “Handling of Amsterdam sharia group criticized,” May 27, 2012.

66. Helen Gibson, “What Makes Youths Volunteer?,” Time, November 12, 2001.

67. Quoted in MEMRI, “British Islamist Anjem Choudary: As Muslims We Reject Human Rights,” April 11 2013. http://www.memritv.org/clip/en/3842.htm.

68. Gabriel DeMarco, “Minority rules: Scientists discover tipping point for the spread of ideas,” Press Release from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, July 25 2011.

69. Peter Cluskey, “Dutch anxiety over ‘Sharia triangle’ police no-go area in The Hague,” Irish Times (Ireland), May 24, 2013.

CHAPTER 31: A WARNING TO EUROPE

1.   Quoted in EU Times, “Norway Pays Bitter Price for Mass Immigration,” January 18, 2010.

2.   Quoted in Soeren Kern, “France Seeks to Reclaim ‘No-Go’ Zones,” Gatestone Institute August 24, 2012.

3.   Quoted in Anthony Browne, “I feel no sympathy for you, killer tells van Gogh family,” Daily Telegraph (UK), July 13, 2005. [Note: The self-confessed killer of Theo van Gogh delivered this line in court to van Gogh’s widow.]

4.   Qutoed in Daniel Greenfield, “Muslim Imam Claims Women Who Don’t Wear Hijabs,” Frontpagemag.com, March 7, 2013.

5.   Ian Buruma, Murder in Amsterdam: Liberal Europe, Islam, and the Limits of Tolerance (New York: Penguin, 2007), ##.

6.   Geert Wilders, Marked for Death: Islam’s War Against the West and Me (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2012), 141.

7.   Quoted in RT, “Night 7 in Sweden: Cars ablaze, police attacked as nation debates immigrant policy,” March 26, 2013.

8.   Ibid.

9.   Bruce Bawer, While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within (New York: Anchor, 2007), 3.

10. EU Times

11. Katerina Nikolas, “Police in the UK investigating 54 paedophile grooming gangs,” Digital Journal, May 22, 2013.

12. Ibid.

13. Wilders, 139-141.

14. Melanie Phillips, Londonistan: How Britain Is Creating a Terror State Within (New York: Encounter Books, 2006), 11.

15. Ibid, 12.

16. Christopher Hitchens, “Assassins of the Mind,” Vanity Fair, February 2009.

17. Ronald Rovers, “The Silencing of Theo van Gogh,” Salon.com, November 24, 2004.

18. Bruce Bawer, “Not all Muslims want to Integrate,” Christian Science Monitor, November 17, 2005.

19. Andrew Gilligan, “State schools isolate non-Muslims,” Daily Telegraph (UK), April 18, 2014.

20. Andrew Gilligan, “Guide to school Islamization,” Daily Telegraph (UK), April 26, 2014.

21. Times of Israel (Israel), “French Jews Migrate To Israel Citing Rising Anti-Semitism,” February 8, 2014.

22. Christopher Caldwell, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West (New York: Anchor, 2010), 106.

23. Ibid, 249.

24. Quoted in Mathieu von Rohr, “Interview with Marine Le Pen,” Spiegel (Germany), June 3, 2014.

25. Pew Research, “Rise of Greek nationalist ‘Golden Dawn’ party coincides with Greece’s economic crisis,” October 2, 2013.

26. Charalambos Kasimis, “Greece: Illegal Immigration in the Midst of Crisis,” Migration Policy Institute, March 8, 2012.

CHAPTER 32: ISRAEL AND PALESTINE: COUSINS IN CONTINUOUS CONFLICT

1.   Quoted in Eli Hertz, “Children Dying To Kill,” http://www.mythsandfacts.org/Conflict/9/childrendyingtokill1.htm, accessed May 25, 2015.

2.   Isaac Asimov, Asimov Laughs Again : More Than 700 Jokes, Limericks, and Anecdotes (New York: William Morrow, 1993), #92.

3.   Quoted in Ali Waked, “Hamas gunmen parade in Gaza,” ynetnews.com, September 19, 2005.

4.   Quoted in Frank Crimi, “Voices of Palestine: Mahmoud al-Zahar,” Frontpage.com, October 26, 2011.

5.   Martin Bentham, “Census data shows 100 different languages spoken in almost every London borough,” Standard (UK), January 30, 2013.

6.   Sam Roberts, “Listening to (and Saving) the World’s Languages,” New York Times, April 29, 2010.

7.   London School of Economics and Political Science, “The Impact of Recent Immigration on the London Economy,” July 2007, 14.

8.   Press Release, “The Newest New Yorkers,” New York City Department of City Planning, 10; BBC News, “Census shows rise in foreign-born,” December 11, 2012.

9.   Gabriel Project Mumbai, “The Need: Poverty in India,” http://gabrielprojectmumbai.org/Poverty_in_India.html; Rafiq Maqbool, “Census: 1 in 6 India City Resident Lives in Slums,” Associated Press, March 22, 2013.

10. Singapore Department of Statistics, “Population Trends 2009,” May 29, 2009, 4.

11. Walter Laqueur, A History of Zionism: From the French Revolution to the Establishment of the State of Israel (New York: Fine Communications, 1997), 86.

12. Ibid, 42.

13. Efraim Karsh, Palestine Betrayed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 8-9.

14. Quoted in Saul Friedman, A History of the Middle East (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006), 226.

15. Karsh, Palestine Betrayed, 12-13.

16. League of Nations, “An Interim Report on the Civil Administration of Palestine,” July 1, 1920-June 30, 1921. [Note: Archived with the United Nations, http://unispal.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/0/349B02280A930813052565E90048ED1C.]

17. Christopher Browning and Jurgen Matthaus, The Origins of the Final Solution (Lincoln, NE: Bison Books, 2007), 406; David Yisraeli, The Palestine Problem in German Politics (Ramat Gan, Israel: Bar-Ilan University, 1974), 1889-1945, 310.

18. Karsh, Palestine Betrayed, 16-20, 109.

19. Ibid, 31.

20. Ibid, 31-2.

21. Ibid.

22. Ibid, 82-3.

23. Tomas Rees, “The shared genetic heritage of Jews and Palestinians,” blogged at Patheos blog, January 20, 2009. http://www.patheos.com/blogs/epiphenom/2009/01/shared-genetic-heritage-of-jews-and.html.

24. Daniel Pipes, “The Jewish-Muslim Connection,” Present Tense, 1981.

25. David Rosen, “Jewish-Muslim Relations, Past and Present,” http://www.ajc.org/site/c.7oJILSPwFfJSG/b.8451917/k.7F8D/MuslimJewish_Relations.htm.

26. Alice Faber, “Genetic Subgrouping of the Semitic Languages,” Semitic Languages, Routledge, 2013, 4.

27. Pipes, “The Jewish-Muslim Connection.”

28. Rosen, “Jewish-Muslim Relations, Past and Present.”

29. Quoted in Esperanza Alfonso, Islamic Culture through Jewish Eyes: Al-Andalus from the Tenth to the Twelfth Century (London: Routledge, 2007), 108.

30. Hamas, “The Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement,” Avalon Project, Yale Law School, August 18, 1988

31. Mahmoud Al-Zahar, “Interview,” Al Jazeera, February 8, 2009.

32. Mitchell Bard, Myths and Facts: A Guide to the Arab-Israeli Conflict (Chevy Chase, MD: American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise, 2002), 329.

33. Quoted in Mattar, Philip, “Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO),” Encyclopedia of the Modern Middle East and North Africa, 2004. Accessed from Encyclopedia.com on May 25, 2015. http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-3424602110.html.

34. Quoted in BBC News, “Iran leader plays down war talk,” July 8, 2008.

35. Quoted in CAMERA, “Hassan Nasrallah: In His Own Words,” July 26, 2006.

36. Qur’an 5:64.

37. Sahih Bukhari 41: 6985.

38. Quoted in Joel Richardson, “Islam’s Ancient Hatred For The Jews,” Antichrist: Islam’s Awaited Messiah (Enumclaw, WA: Pleasant Word, 2006), 114.

39. Karsh, Palestine Betrayed, 26.

40. Marian Wang and Theodoric Meyer, “Everything You Need to Know About U.S. Aid to Egypt,” Real Clear World, Julu 10, 2013.

41. Congressional Record Vol. 145, Part 2, 2210.

42. Jim Zanotti, “U.S. Foreign Aid to the Palestinians,” Congressional Research Service, July 3, 2014, 2.

43. Ibid.

44. Edwin Black, “How British and American aid subsidises Palestinian terrorism,” Guardian (UK), November 11, 2013.

45. Ibid.

46. Ibid.

CHAPTER 33: ISRAEL AND PALESTINE: SEMITES AND ANTI-SEMITISM

1.   Quoted in Memri.org. http://www.memri.org/clip_transcript/en/2527.htm

2.   Quoted in Palestinian Media Watch, palwatch.org. [Note: Bahar was then acting as Speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council.]

3.   Quoted in Jonathan Hunt, “Son of Hamas Leader Turns Back on Islam and Embraces Christianity,” Fox News, August 12, 2008. [Note: Yousef is the son of a Hamas leader.]

4.   Albert Einstein, Letter to Gutkind, 1954.

5.   Genesis 16:9-10.

6.   New York University Medical Center And School Of Medicine. “Jews Are The Genetic Brothers Of Palestinians, Syrians, And Lebanese,” Science Daily, May 9, 2000.

7.   Qur’an 3:112.

8.   Qur’an 5:51 and Ibn Ishaq 262.

9.   Qur’an 9:29.

10. See Qur’an 9:30.

11. Deuteronomy 7:6.

12. Ibid 28:13.

13. Isaiah 60:12.

14. Quoted in Frank Crimi, “Voices of Palestine: Mahmoud al-Zahar,” Frontpagemag.com, October 26, 2011.

15. Hamas, “The Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement,” Avalong Project at Yale Law School, August 18, 1988.

16. Reuters, “94-Year-Old Auschwitz Guard Hans Lipschis Ruled ‘Unfit’ for Trial,” February 28, 2014.

17. Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry (New York: Verso, 2015), 45.

18. Ibid, 48.

19. Quoted in Sam Sokol, “Far-right’s election success worries European Jewry,” Jerusalem Post, May 27, 2014.

20. Ibid.

21. Ibid.

22. World Jewish Congress, “Muslims, Jews warn Europe: Mainstreaming of far-right parties is unacceptable,” March 7, 2011.

23. Quoted in Anders Nystrom, “Jews In Panic Over Victories Of European Right-Wing, Want To Ally With Muslims,” blogged at Islam Versus Europe, May 30, 2014.

24. Foundation for Ethnic Understanding, “European Muslim and Jewish Leaders Determined to Combat Hateful Agenda,” May 25, 2014.

25. Shlomo Shamir, “Jewish and Muslim leaders join forces to combat xenophobia,” Haaretz (Israel), May 13, 2011.

26. Quoted in Johannes Cardinal Willebrands, Church and Jewish People: New Conisderations (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1991), 60.

27. Ibid.

28. Jonathan Kirsh, God Against Gods, The History of the War Between Monotheism and Polytheism (New York: Penguin, 2005), 12.

29. Deuteronomy 7:2.

30. Ibid 13:15-16.

31. Ibid 15:6.

32. Ibid 23:20.

33. Quoted in Allen Nadler, “Charedi Rabbis Rush To Disavow Anti-Gentile Book,” Forward, December 19, 2003.

34. Nadler.

35. Quoted in Marilyn Silverstein, “Drew University scholar defends article.” New Jersey Jewish News, 2003.

36. Robert Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad (New York: Random House, 2010), 9.

37. Quoted in S. Radhakrishnan, Religion and Society (Charleston, SC: Nabu, 2011), 78.

38. Tia Ghose, “Most Ashkenazi Jews are genetically Europeans, surprising study finds,” Live Science, October 8, 2013.

39. Aryeh Gelblum in Haaretz (Israel), January 4, 2011.

40. Meyrav Murmser, “Post-Zionism and the Sephardi Question,” Middle East Forum, February 23, 2009.

41. Tony Jassen, “Racism Alive and well in Israeli Society,” Jerusalem Post (Israel), March 22, 2005.

42. Roee Nahmias, “’Marriage to an Arab is national treason,’” YNet News, March 27, 2007.

43. Ibid.

44. Matthew Kalman, “The Jewish Religious Conflict Tearing at Israel,” Time, June 17, 2010.

45. Quoted in Shmarya Rosenberg, “Israel’s New Haredi Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi Makes Racist Remark,” blogged at Failed Messiah, July 30, 2013.

46. Jonathan Cook, “Israel’s rights groups condemn ‘Jews only’ businesses,” The National (United Arab Emirates), August 10, 2011.

47. Quoted in Patrick Cockburn, “Black Israelis riot over insult to their blood,” Independent (UK), January 29, 1996.

48. Elise Knutsen, “Israel Forcibly Injected African Immigrants with Birth Control, Report Claims,” Forbes, January 29, 2013.

49. Quoted in Harriet Sherwood, “Israel PM: illegal African immigrants threaten identity of Jewish state,” Guardian (UK), May 20, 2012.

50. Quoted in Jeffrey Goldberg, “Remembering Ovadia Yosef, the Israeli Ayatollah,” Bloomberg, October 8, 2013. [Note: As Goldberg’s article makes clear, Yosef was not an outlier but a powerful political figure with enough pull to draw 700,000 people to his funeral.]

CHAPTER 34: WHAT IS RELIGION?

1.   John 14:6

2.   Bhagavad Gita 10:32.

3.   Dhammapada 19:270.

4.   Sahih Muslim 33.

5.   Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, 1843, “Introduction.”

6.   Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, The Age of Sacred Terror (New York: Random House, 2003), 90; Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (New York: Vintage, 2007), 88-94.

7.   Yaroslav Trofimov, The Siege of Mecca (New York: Anchor, 2008), 108-115.

8.   See Will Durant, Story of Civilization, Volume 1 (New York: MJF, 1993), 434; Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, Indian Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 272.

9.   Bhikku 2004.

10. See Thera 1994; Sayadaw 1993.

11. Douglas Burns, Buddhism, Science, and Atheism (Kandy: Sri Lanka: Buddhist Publication Society, 2006), 32.

12. Durant, 536-8.

13. Ibid, 538.

14. Quoted in Sharma, “An Indic Contribution Towards an Understanding,” 11. http://www.swamij.com/religion-indic-sharma.htm.

15. Sharma, “An Indic Contribution Towards an Understanding,” 12.

16. Qur’an 5:3. Also cf 3:67: “Abraham was not a Jew nor Christian, but an upright Muslim.”

17. Sharma, “An Indic Contribution Towards an Understanding,” 12-3.

18. Deuteronomy 7:6.

19. See Havilland et al 2009.

20. Matthew 10:34-5. Cf Luke 12:51

21. Qur’an 3:85.

22. Sharma, “An Indic Contribution Towards an Understanding,” 14.

23. Ibid, 18.

24. Ibid, 19.

25. Ibid, 28.

26. Ibid, 32.

27. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 1748.

28. Robert Evans, “Atheists Face Death Penalty in 13 Countries,” Reuters, December 10, 2013.

CHAPTER 35: MONOTHEISM AND ITS DISCONTENTS

1.   Quoted in Majid Khadduri, War and Peace in the Law of Islam (Clark, NJ: Lawbook Exchange, 2010), 74.

2.   Quoted in David Margoliouth, Mohammed and the Rise of Islam (New York: Cosimo Classics, 2010)), 365.

3.   Quoted in Guardian (UK), “Full text: bin Laden’s ‘letter to America,’” November 24, 2002.

4.   See Sharma, “An Indic Contribution Towards an Understanding,” 12.

5.   Genesis 22:12.

6.   Anwar Shaikh, “Nationalism, The Basic Element of Prophethood,” Islam: The Arab National Movement (Principality, 1995).

7.   Ibid, “The Prophet Muhammad.”

8.   James I. Packer, “Contemporary Views of Revelation,” Carl F.H. Henry, ed., Revelation and the Bible. Contemporary Evangelical Thought. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1958

9.   Quoted in Gunapala Dharmasiri, A Buddhist Critique of the Christian Concept of God (Port Talbot, UK: Golden Leaf Publishing, 1988), 237.

10. John Henry Newman, Discourses to Mixed Congregations, 1849.

11. Sahih Bukhari 4.52.204.

12. Newman.

13. Numbers 31:7-11.

14. Ibid, 31:17-8.

15. Deuteronomy 2:32-34.

16. Joshua 6:20-1.

17. Deuteronomy 7:2.

18. John 1:1.

19. Sahih Bukhari 9.93.549.

20. Bernard Lewis, The Crisis of Islam (New York: Random House, 2004), 7.

21. Karsh, Islamic Imperialism: A History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 62.

22. Bill Warner, “Statistical Islam,” Center for the Study of Political Islam, 2.

23. Qur’an 9:29.

24. Cf Qur’an 33:9-10, 25-7; Sahih Bukhari 4:52:68.

25. Quoted in Karsh, 4.

26. Radhakrishnan, The Hindu View of Life: the Famous Upton Lectures of 1926 (Crows Net, Australia: George Allen and Unwin, 1957).

27. Radhakrishnan, 91.

28. S.N. Dasgupta, Hindu Mysticism (Cheshire, UK: A&D Publishing, 2008), 42.

29. Bhagavad-Gita 6.29.

30. Arnold Joseph Toynbee, “A Study of History.”

31. Brian Hebblethwaite, The Problems of Theology, Revelation and Rationality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 85.

32. John M. Robertson, Pagan Christs: Studies in Comparative Hierology (1911; Reprint, Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2010), 18.

33. Hubert Albertz Papers, 1938.

34. Mark S, Smith, The Origins of Biblical Monotheism, Israel’s Polytheistic Background and the Ugaritic Texts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 44-48.

35. Dever, 2005.

36. Wright 1950.

37. Cf Qur’an 2:125.

38. Cf Sahih Bukhari 2:26:710.

39. Georges Dreyfus, “Procedures and Rules of Debate,” Tibetan Monastic Education, Tibertan & Himalayan Library, 2001.

40. Ibid.

41. Quoted in Edward Sachau, Alberuni’s India (New Delhi, India, Fifth Edition, 2007), 3.

42. William James, “The Will to Believe,”New World, 1896.

43. Ibid.

44. Regina Schwartz, The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998), 33.

45. Ibid.

46. Peters, 1996.

47. Mark Hartwig, “Spread by the Sword?,” http://www.answering-islam.org/Terrorism/by_the_sword.html.

48. Christopher Key Chapple, editor, Jainism Introduction, Center for the Study of World Religions, Harvard Divinity School, Religions of the World and Ecology Series, Jainism and Ecology Volume.

49. Radhakrishnan, The Hindu View of Life, 13.

CHAPTER 36: THE ELIMINATION OF METAPHYSICS

1.   Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason (1796).

2.   Rand, The Lexicon: Objectivism from A to Z (New York: Plume, 1988, 412.

3.   Christopher Hitchens, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice (New York: Twelve, 2012), 3.

4.   Greg Watts, Mother Teresa: Faith in the Darkness (Oxford, UK: Lion Hudson, 2010), 146.

5.   Quoted in Hitchens, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice, 41.

6.   Susan Shields, “Mother Teresa’s House of Illusions,” Free Inquiry, Volume 18, Number 1, February 13, 2004.

7.   Ibid.

8.   Quoted in Valerie Tarico, “Was Mother Teresa a Masochist,” Salon.com, April 30, 2013.

9.   Quoted in Aroup Chatterjee, Mother Teresa: The Final Verdict (Mumbai, India: Meteor, 202).

10. Christopher Hitchens, “Christopher Hitchens Takes On Mother Teresa,” Newsweek, August 28, 2007.

11. Quoted in London Times (UK), “Mother Teresa Did Not Feel Christ’s Presence,” August 24, 2007.

12. Ibid.

13. Kolten Parker, “Polygamist sect leader Warren Jeffs hospitalized in Texas,” Houston Chronicle, March 17, 2014.

14. Jyoti Thottam, “Sathya Sai Baba: The Man Who Was God Is Dead,” Time, April 26, 2011.

15. Ashley Fantz, “Reality show snake-handling preacher dies – of snakebite,” CNN, February 18, 2014; Bill Estep, “Snakebite death of Middlesboro pastor was quick, son says; medical treatment refused,” Herald-Leader (Lexington, KY), February 16, 2014.

16. Charles Kimball, When Religion Becomes Evil (New York: HarperOne, 2008).

17. Quoted in Anwar Shaikh, “Islam, the Self-Perpetuating Tool of Arab Imperialism,” from Islam: The Arab Imperialism, June 17, 2007.

18. A.J. Ayer, Language Truth & Logic (1936), 14.

19. Ibid, 15.

20. Ibid, 16-7.

21. Ibid, 16 (emphasis added).

22. Stuart Chase, The Tyranny of Words (New York: Mariner, 1959), 88, 101.

23. Ibid, 316.

24. Ibid, 356.

25. Ibid, 359.

26. Karl Popper, “What is Dialectic,” Conjectures and Refutations (London: Routledge & Kegan Pauk, 1963), 312-335.

27. Ibid.

28. Ibid, 425 (emphasis in original).

29. Chase, The Tyranny of Words, 80.

30. Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (New York: Norton, 2005), 71-72.

31. Ibid.

32. Shaikh, “Nationalism, the Basic Element of Prophethood.”

33. Shaikh, “The Prophet Muhammad.”

34. Maurice Cornforth, Marxism and the Linguistic Philosophy (New York: International Publishers, 1965), 94.

35. Bertrand Russell, Our Knowledge of the External World (1914), 33.

36. Quoted in S.T. Joshi, Atheism: A Reader (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2000), 94.

CHAPTER 37: THE AXIS OF JIHAD

1.   Liz Sly and Ahmed Ramadan, “Insurgents seize Iraqi city of Mosul as security forces flee,” Washington Post, June 10, 2014.

2.   Colleen Curry, “The Dramatic Gains ISIS Has Made in Iraq,” ABC News, August 7, 2014.

3.   Rukmini Callimachi, “Militant Group Says It Killed American Journalist in Syria,” New York Times, August 19, 2014.

4.   Mirren Gidda, “ISIS to US: ‘We Will Drown All of You in Blood,’” Time, August 19, 2014.

5.   Benjamin Hall, “Mosul’s Christians recount flight from historic home under ISIS threat,” Fox News, August 19, 2014.

6.   Jane Arraf, “Islamic State persecution of Yazidi minority amounts to genocide,” Christian Science Monitor, August 7, 2014.

7.   Ibid.

8.   BBC News, “Iraq conflict: Diyala Sunni mosque attack kills dozens,” August 22, 2014.

9.   Avi Issacharoff, “Hamas funded killing of 3 teens, says ringleader,” Times of Israel, August 6, 2014.

10. Jim Sciutto, Ashley Shoichet, and Catherine Fants, “U.S. general killed in Afghanistan,” OzzModz blog, August 6, 2014.

11. Osama bin Laden, “Letter to America.” Guardian (UK), November 24, 2002.

12. Hamas Charter.

13. Col. S.C.Dhiman, “The Promise of Allah,” Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) Reconciliation, Democracy and Terror, 2015, Google, 118.

14. John Bradley, After the Arab Spring: How Islamists Hijacked the Middle East Revolts (New York: Palgrave, 2012), 1.

15. Benny Morris, “Arab Spring or Islamist Surge,” National Interest, November 3, 2011.

16. Claude Moniquet, “The Involvement of Salafism/Wahhabism in the Support and supply of Arms to Rebel Groups Around the World,” Directorate-General for External Policies, European Parliament, June 2013, 5.

17. Ibid, 6.

18. Patrick Cockburn, “Al-Qa’ida, the second act,” Independent (UK), March 21, 2014.

19. Alex Spillius, “Wikileaks: Saudis ‘chief funders of al-Qaeda’,” Telegraph (UK), December 5, 2010.

20. Ibid.

21. Moniquet, 7.

22. Mark Piggott, “ISIS Attacks: Iraq Accuses Saudi Arabia of Supporting ‘Genocide’,” International Business Times (UK), June 17, 2014.

23. Steve Clemons, “’Thank God for the Saudis’: ISIS, Iraq, and the Lessons of Blowback,” Atlantic, June 23, 2014.

24. Husain Haqqani, “How Pakistan Lets Terrorism Fester,” New York Time, May 10, 2012.

25. Quoted in John Bentley, “Leon Panetta: U.S. ‘reaching the limits of our patience’ with Pakistan terror safe havens,” CBS News, June 7, 2012.

26. Carlotta Gall, “What Pakistan Knew About Bin Laden,” New York Times, March 19, 2014.

27. Ibid.

28. Greg Bruno, “State Sponsors: Iran,” Council on Foreign Relations, October 13, 2011.

29. Ibid.

30. John Byman, “Iran’s Support for Terrorism in the Middle East,” Brookings Institution, June 25, 2012.

31. James Langton, “Hitler’s lost relatives found on Long Island,” Telegraph (UK), July 16, 2000.

32. Telegraph (UK), “Lenin’s last surviving relative dies in Moscow at 89,” March 25, 2011.

33. Douglas Martin, “Lana Peters, Stalin’s Daughter, Dies at 85,” New York Times, November 28, 2011.

34. Andrew Jacobs, “Mao’s Grandson Rises in Chinese Military,” New York Times, September 24, 2009.

35. Simon Sebag Montefiore, “At Home With Karl Marx,” New York Times, September 23, 2011.

36. Joshua Project, “Sayyid.”

37. Global Security, “Jamaat-e-Islami,” August 22, 2013.

38. Suhaib Anjarini, “Al-Baghdadi following in bin Laden’s footsteps,” Al-Akhbar (Lebanon), July 2, 2014.

CHAPTER 38: THE FACES OF JIHAD

1.   Bill Warner, “A Taste of Islam,” Center for Political Islam, 25.

2.   Sahih Bukhari 1:4:234.

3.   Qur’an 5:33.

4.   Ibn Ishaq 675-676.

5.   See John Ward Anderson, “Cartoons of Prophet Met With Outrage,” Washington Post, January 31, 2006.

6.   Cf Qur’an 33:9-10, 33:25-27; Sahih Bukhari 4:52:68, 4:57:66.

7.   Abhishek Bhalla, “Al-Qaeda plans final jihad for India,” Daily Mail (UK), July 16, 2013.

8.   Guardian (UK), “British jihadist warns of ‘black flag of Islam’ over Downing Street,” July 4, 2014.

9.   Our Correspondent, “GDP: 40pc of Muslim states’ population fall below poverty line,” Tribune (Pakistan), June 15, 2013.

10. Ibid.

11. Reuters, “Factbox: Gulf Arab countries’ population, economy, military,” May 14, 2012.

12. Saleem Ali, “Science as Salvation for Muslims,” National Geographic, September 26, 2012.

13. Center for Security Policy, Shariah: The Threat to America, September 27, 2010, 14.

14. Ibid, 4-5.

15. Ibid, 66.

16. Ibid, 26.

17. Ibid, 43.

18. Qur’an 9:5.

19. Qur’an 9:29.

20. Qur’an 2:256.

21. Qur’an 3:85.

22. Qur’an 98:6.

23. Quoted in Center for Security Policy, Shariah: The Threat to America, 21.

24. Ibid, 58.

25. Ibid, 31.

26. Muslim Brotherhood, “An Explanatory Memorandum,” Clarion Project Archive, 4-7.

27. Ibid, 18.

28. Ibid, 4-7.

29. Ibid, 25-6.

30. Jethro Mullen, “U.S. officials: Terrorist seizure of nuclear materials in Iraq of minimal concern,” CNN, July 10, 2014.

31. Todd Johnson and Gina Zurlo, editors, World Christian Database, http://worldchristiandatabase.org/wcd/home.asp.

32. Ibid.

33. Ibid.

34. Pew Research, “The Future of the Global Muslim Population,” January 27, 2011.

35. Ibid.

36. Spiegel, “Islamic Justice in Europe: It’s Often a Dictate of Power,” September 1, 2011.

37. James Arlandson, “The Ultimate Goal of Islam,” http://www.answering-islam.org/Authors/Arlandson/ultimate_goal.htm.

38. Ibid.

CHAPTER 39: ISLAM AND THE CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS

1.   Daniel Bolger, Why We Lost: A General’s Inside Account of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars (New York: Eamon Dolan, 2014), Author’s Note xiii.

2.   Quoted in Carlotta Gall, The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan 2001-2014 (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014).

3.   Gall, The Wrong Enemy, Foreword xiv.

4.   Quoted in Efraim Karsh, Islamic Imperialism: A History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 232.

5.   Ruhollah Khomeini, The Sayings of the Ayatollah Khomeini (New York: Bantam, 1980), 47.

6.   Obama, “Address to the United Nations,” September 25, 2012.

7.   Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizationsand the Remaking of the World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 21.

8.   Ibid, 183.

9.   Ibid, 256.

10. Ibid.

11. Ibid, 183.

12. See Thomas Patrick Hughes, A Dictionary of Islam (Chicago: Kazi, 2007), 245.

13. Cf Qur’an 2:216.

14. Cf Qur’an 4:89.

15. Muslim Brotherhood, “Explanatory Memorandum.”

16. Ed Morrissey, “Pew: Majority of Americans believe Iraq, Afghanistan wars failed,” Memorandum blog, January 31, 2014.

17. Costs of War, “Economic Costs,” “Human Costs,” costsofwar.org.

18. Quoted in Tabassum Zakaria, “General Casey: diversity shouldn’t be casualty of Fort Hood,” Reuters, November 8, 2009.

19. Bolger. page: xiv, Author’s Note

20. Ibid.

21. Ibid.

22. Ibid.

23. Shabbir Akhtar, The Quran and the Secular Mind: A Philosophy of Islam (New York: Routledge, 2008), 35.

24. See Jack Miles, editor, “General Introduction,” The Norton Anthology of World Religions Volume 1 (New York: Norton, 2014), 6-7.

25. Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 107-9.

26. Dale Riepe, The Naturalistic Thought in Indian Tradition (Delhi, India: Motilal Banarsidass, 1996), 247-8.

27. Akhtar, 23.

28. Ibid, 91.

29. See Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood, The Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali (Hollywood, CA: Vedanta Press, 2007), 141-154.

30. Karl Jaspers, The Great Philosophers (New York: Mariner, 1966), 6.

31. Ibid, 102.

32. Luke 23:34 (ESV).

33. Richard Gabriel, Muhammad: Islam’s First Great General (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007), 123.

34. Sadakat Kadri, Heaven on Earth: A Journey Through Shari’a Law from the Deserts of Ancient Arabia to the Streets of the Modern Muslim World (New York: Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux, 2013), 252.

35. Jaspers, 103.

36. Ibid, 31.

37. Ibid, 49.

38. Sahih Bukhari, 1:234.

39. Ibid.

40. John 18:36 (ESV).

41. Jaspers, 67.

42. Matthew 5:17 (ESV).

43. Gabriel, 27-8.

44. Ibid.

45. Ibid.

46. Ibid, 70-1.

47. Ibid, 101.

48. Ibid.

49. Ibid, xxvii.

50. Ibid, 144.

51. Ibid, 47.

52. Christopher Hitchens, God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (New York: Twelve, 2009), 128-30.

53. Ibid.

54. Radio Free Europe, “For Displaced Pakistani Father, 36 Children Is Not Enough,” July 29, 2014.

55. Quoted in Abraham Kuenen, “National Religions and Universal Religions,” (reprinted by Kessinger; original, 1979), 5-6.

56. Volodymyr Ischchenko, “The Guardian Finally Admits Ukraine Has a Neo-Nazi Problem,” Russia Insider, November 14, 2014.

57. Obama, “President Obama: our fight against violent extremism,” White House, February 18, 2015.

58. Graeme Wood, “The Islamic State is Islamic. Very Islamic,” Atlantic, March 2015.

59. Nomani and Arafa, Article.

60. Ibid. http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/defining-islam-end-of-the-world/comment-page-1/

61. Obama, “President Obama: our fight against violent extremism.”

62. Matthew Levitt, “Iran’s Support for Terrorism Worldwide,” Washington Institute, March 3, 2014.

63. Ibid.

64. Maryam Rajavi, “The enemy of your enemy is not your friend,” US News, October 28, 2014.

65. PRNewswire, “Iranian Opposition Leader Maryam Rajavi,” April 29, 2015.

66. Ibid.

67. Damien Gale, “Jihad will only end when society can get rid of America,” Daily Mail (UK), May 26, 2014.

68. Gall, ##.

69. Ibid, 147.

70. Ibid, 150-151.

71. Ibid, 160-162, 284-285.

72. Ibid, 88.

73. Ibid, 282.

74. Congressional Research Service, “Saudi Arabia: Terrorist Financing Issues,” September 14, 2007.

75. Ibid.

76. Scott Shane, “Moussaoui Calls Saudi Princes Patrons of Al Qaeda,” New York Times, February 3, 2015.

77. Bob Kerrey, “Moussaoui, Saudis & the full 9/11 truth,” New York Daily News, February 6, 2015.

78. Peter Walker, “Margaret Thatcher funeral: US opts for low-key official representation,” Guardian (UK), April 16 2013.

79. Michael Gordon and Peter Baker, “Top Officials Join Obama in Brief Visit to Saudi King,” New York Times, January 27, 2015.

80. Phyllis Chesler, “The four Saudi princesses: Obama mum on plight of Muslim women,” New York Post, January 27, 2015.

81. Chris Green, “Raif Badawi,” Independent (UK), March 1, 2015.

82. CNN, “Transcript: President Obama’s Speech on Combating ISIS and Terrorism,” September 10, 2014.

83. Terrence McCoy, “Boko Haram may have just killed 2,000 people,” Washington Post, January 9, 2015.

84. Amnesty International, “The Dark Side of Migration,” November 17, 2013.

85. Owen Gibson, “More than 500 Indian workers have died in Qatar since 2012, figures show,” Guardian (UK), February 18, 2014.

86. Barney Guiton, “ISIS Sees Turkey as its Ally,” Newsweek, November 7, 2014.

87. John Cooley, Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism (London: Pluto Press, 2002), 1-5.

88. Robert Kaplan, “The U.S. Helps Reconstruct the Ottoman Empire,” Gatestone Institute, May 29, 2013.

89. Investigative Project on Terrorism, “Philadelphia Conference Transcript,” October 2-3, 1993.

90. Ibid.

91. Quoted in David Gaubatz and Paul Sperry, Muslim Mafia (Washington, DC: WND, 2009), 46.

92. Ibid, 27-30.

93. Daniel Pipes, Militant Islam Reaches America (New York: Norton, 2002), 172.

94. Scribbs Howard Foundation Wire, “Anti-Islamic hate crime differs greatly among states.” http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/hate-crime/2011/tables/table-1

95. Christopher Hitchens, “Facing the Islamist Menace,” City Journal, January 29, 2007.

96. Karen De Young, “New estimates put Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal at more than 100,” Washington Post, January 31, 2011.

97. See Times of India, “I am a Marxist, Dalai Lama says,” January 13, 2015.

98. Quoted in Esperanza Alfonso, Islamic Culture Through Jewish Eyes (New York: Routledge, 2007), 108.

99. Raphael Israeli, Blood Libel and its Derivatives: the Scourge of Anti-Semitism (Piscataway, NJ: Transaction, 2012), 118.

100. For further discussion of this see Andrew Bostom’s The Legacy of Jihad (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2008), Foreword by Ibn Warraq.

101. See Qur’an 4:55, 4:60, 58:14-19, 98:6.

102. Qur’an 9:29.

103. Qur’an 7:28.

104. Quoted in Karsh, 26.

105. Federation of American Scientists, “The Covenant of the Hamas.” http://www.mfa.gov.il/mfa/mfa-archive/1980-1989/pages/the%20covenant%20of%20the%20hamas%20-%20main%20points%20-%2018-aug-8.aspx

106. Ivan Davidson Kalmar, “Islam as Judaism gone mad: Reflections on Hegel,” University of Toronto, 2008.

107. AJ Ayer, Language, Truth & Logic (1936; reprinted by New York: Dover, 1952), 15.

108. Qur’an 5:115.

109. Ibid, 5:31.

110. Ibid, 6:100, 112.

111. Ibid, 54:1-2.

112. Sune Engel Rasmussen, “There’s almost no help for Afghanistan’s 1.6 million drug addicts,” Public Radio International, December 4, 2014.

113. Ernesto Londono, “Afghanistan’s ‘dancing boys’ are invisible victims,” Washington Post, April 4, 2012.

114. Akhil Reed Amar and Alan Hirsh, For the People: What the Constitution Really Says About Your Rights (New York: Touchstone, 1999), xii.

115. Jefferson, First Inaugural Address (1801).

116. Jethro Mullen and Greg Botelho, “ISIS threatens to kill 2 Japanese hostages unless Tokyo pays $200 million,” CNN, January 20, 2015.

117. Joe Sterling and Josh Levs, “Nearly 100 dead—mostly ‘terrorists’—in attack, China says,” CNN, August 4, 2014.

118. Daniel Greenfield, “Saudi Offers ‘Castrated African Slave’ For Sale On Facebook,” Frontpagemag.com, November 30, 2012.

119. Shabbir Akhtar, The Quran and the Secular Mind (New York: Routledge, 2008), 90.

120. Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748).

CHAPTER 40: POSTSCRIPT

1.   http://www.searchtruth.com/book_display.php?book=40&translator=3

2.   Naipaul, V.S. “A Grotesque Love of Propaganda.” Daily Mail (UK). March 21, 2015.

3.   Ingraham, Christopher. “It’s official: the U.S. drug war in Afghanistan is a $7.6 billion failure.” Washington Post. October 22, 2014.

4.   “Exiled Iranian Opposition Leader Says Iran Will Cheat on Nuclear Deal to Build Bomb.” People’s Mujahadin Organization of Iran . July 16, 2015.

5.   Latif, Alaa. “Fed Up With Islam and Sectarianism, Some Iraqis Embrace Zoroastrianism.” Assyrian International News Agency. May 31, 2015.

6.   Zezima, Katie. “Rand Paul calls for release of 9/11 documents.” Washington Post. June 2, 2015.

7.   Sarwan, Rahim. “Afghanistan’s Karzai Blasts Pakistan.” Voice of America. June 4, 2015.

8.   Qadri, Mustafa. “Pakistan’s army: as inept as it is corrupt.” Guardian (UK). May 3, 2009.

9.   Ibid.

10. Langewiesche, William. “The Wrath of Khan.” The Atlantic. November 2005.

11. Abbasi, Ansar. “How did Musharraf become a billionaire?” The International News (Pakistan). January 8, 2012.

12. Ibrahim, Azeem. “U.S. Aid to Pakistan—U.S. Taxpayers Have Funded Pakistani Corruption.” The Belfer Center at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. June 2009.

13. Miller, Zeke. “Obama Says ‘We Don’t Have a Strategy Yet’ for Fighting ISIS.” Time. August 28, 2014.

14. The Secular Alliance at the University of Chicago.

15. Quoted in Kislah, Kemalism, Laiklik vs Demokrasi.

CHAPTER 41: POSTSCRIPT TWO

1.   Quoted in Washington Post, “Read Putin’s U.N. General Assembly speech.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/09/28/read-putins-u-n-general-assembly-speech/

2.   Quoted in Cowlishaw, “Japan offers MORE than Saudi Arabia to help refugees.” http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/609413/Japan-refugee-migrant-crisis-money-pledge-Saudi-Arabia

3.   Quoted in Reuters, “Wilders tells Dutch parliament refugee crisis is ‘Islamic invasion’.” http://www.breitbart.com/london/2015/09/10/wilders-tells-dutch-parliament-refugee-crisis-is-islamic-invasion/

4.   Arviinth, “EU migrant crisis.” http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/eu-migrant-crisis-germany-expects-record-800000-asylum-requests-2015-1516224

5.   “Most CIA-backed rebels in Syria ‘anti-American, anti-Western and anti-democracy’.” RT interview with Charles Shoebridge. http://www.rt.com/op-edge/316397-crisis-isis-terrorism-syrian/

6.   Rayner, “People smugglers using Facebook to sell fake passports to economic migrants.” http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/11880979/People-smugglers-using-Facebook-to-sell-fake-Syrian-passports-to-economic-migrants.html

7.   Stancati, “Taliban Seize Control of Kunduz,” Wall Street Journal. http://www.wsj.com/articles/afghanistan-city-of-kunduz-largely-under-taliban-control-1443447706

8.   Sly, “8 reasons Europe’s refugee crisis is happening now.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/09/18/8-reasons-why-europes-refugee-crisis-is-happening-now/

9.   Quoted in Noack, “Muslims threaten Europe’s Christian identity, Hungary’s leader says.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/09/03/muslims-threaten-europes-christian-identity-hungarys-leader-says/

10. Quoted in Chadwick, “Timmermans: Central Europe has ‘no experience with diversity’.” http://www.politico.eu/article/migration-news-diversity-timmermans/

11. Lowry, “Europe’s immigration problem.”

12. CBS News, “Many British Muslims Put Islam First.”

13. Cowlishaw, “Japan offers MORE than Saudi Arabia to help refugees.” http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/609413/Japan-refugee-migrant-crisis-money-pledge-Saudi-Arabia

14. Dr. Abbas Kadhim, Twitter post 11:31 pm – 2 September 2015, @DrAbbasKadhim.

15. Quoted in Novinite.com, “Bulgarian Troops Guarding Macedonia, Greece, Turkey Borders over Migrant Influx.” http://www.novinite.com/articles/170916/Bulgarian+Troops+Guarding+Macedonia%2C+Greece%2C+Turkey+Borders+over+Migrant+Influx

16. Quoted in Williams, “German Authorities: Every Refugee Pretends to be Syrian.” http://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2015/09/15/german-authorities-every-refugee-pretends-syrian-least-25-per-cent-liars/

17. Quoted in Kern, “German’s Sharia Refugee Shelters.” http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/6614/germany-sharia-refugee-shelters

18. Ibid.

19. Quoted in “creeping sharia” blog, September 20, 2009. https://creepingsharia.wordpress.com/2009/09/20/islam-wishes-to-destroy-all/

20. “Migrants Pose as Syrians to Open Door to Asylum in Europe,” Wall Street Journal (September 12, 2015): http://www.wsj.com/articles/migrants-pose-as-syrians-to-open-door-to-asylum-in-europe-1442013612 (Accessed September 24, 2015).

21. “Not Their Brothers’ Keepers,” Wall Street Journal (September 8, 2015).

22. Ibid.

23. “Anti-Semitic Attitudes among Muslims in Europe: A Survey Review,” Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy: http://isgap.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Jikeli_Antisemitic_Attitudes_among_Muslims_in_Europe.pdf (Accessed September 25, 2015), 1-11.

24. “5 facts about the Muslim population in Europe,” Pew Research Center (January 15, 2015): http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/01/15/5-facts-about-the-muslim-population-in-europe/ (Accessed September 26, 2015).

25. “Muslim Brotherhood Explanatory Memorandum,” The Clarion Project: http://www.clarionproject.org/Muslim_Brotherhood_Explanatory_Memorandum (Accessed September 26, 2015).

26. Dobriansky and Rivkin, “Congress Can Respond to Putin With More Sanctions.” http://www.wsj.com/articles/congress-can-respond-to-putin-with-more-sanctions-1443996688

27. RT, “ISIS militants in Iraq, Syria have WMD components, Lavrov warns UN Security Council.” https://www.rt.com/news/317073-lavrov-isis-wmd-components/

CHAPTER 42

1.   Quoted in Roy C. Amore, Two Masters, One Message (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1978), 75.

2.   Ibid, 43.

3.   Ibid, 42.

4.   Ibid.

5.   John 1:14.

6.   See T.W. Rhys Davids and Hermann Oldenberg, trans., “Vinyaya Texts,” Sacred Books of the East (Clarendon/Oxford, 1881-1885) 94-7, 100-2.

7.   See Michael Lockwood, Buddhism’s Relation to Christianity (Chennai, India: T.R. Publications, 2011), 80-5.

8.   Amore, Two Masters, One Message, 110-111.

9.   Ibid, 112.

10. Ibid, 111.

11. Ibid, 113-4.

12. Ibid, 111-3.

13. Ibid, 66.

14. Dhammapada 10:1.

15. Luke 6:31.

16. Luke 6:29.

17. Majjhima Nikaya, 21:6.

18. Matthew 25:45.

19. Vinaya, Mahavagga 8:26:3.

20. Digha Nikaya 1:1:8.

21. Matthew 26:52.

22. Cf Matthew 10:34, Luke 22:36.

23. Amore, Two Masters, One Messagei, 117.

24. Matthew 8:18-22.

25. Dhammapada v. 87.

26. Amore, Two Masters, One Message, 125-6.

27. Ibid, 119-20.

28. Ibid, 120.

29. Barbara O’Brien, “Trikaya: The Three Bodies of the Buddha.”

30. Swami Akhilananda, Hindu View of Christ (1919; reprinted by Kessinger, 2006), 11.

31. Note that in the first century after Jesus’ death some members of the Jewish community obviously accepted the teaching of the Incarnation, and many of the New Testament writers insisted that Jewish scriptures predicted it. Over time, however, those who remained Jewish necessarily rejected the Christian teachings about Jesus and the two religious communities began to diverge more obviously.

32. Ibid, 21.

33. Amore, Two Masters, One Message, 185-6.

34. Dhirendranath Chowdhuri, “In Search of Jesus Christ,” Sadharan Brahmo Samaj, 1927, 219.

35. Ibid.

36. This argument does not necessarily mean that Judaism lacks any universal element at all. Obviously, Jewish Scriptures are full of the idea that Jews are supposed to be a blessing to the entire world (Cf. Genesis 12:2-3, 18:18, and 22:18). Nevertheless, the blessings the Jews are supposed to provide are also attached to an exclusivist idea which holds that the Jewish people are set apart from the rest of humanity by God.

37. Akhilananda, Hindu View of Christ, 47.

38. Ibid, 183.

39. Ibid, 56.

40. Susannah Heschel, Aryan Jesus (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 38-41.

41. Quoted in Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, Eastern Religions and Western Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 184-6.

42. Radhakrishnan, Eastern Religions and Western Thought, 173-4.

43. Ibid.

44. Again, there are exceptions here. Most mainline Protestant denominations have moderated their positions, but evangelical Christianity for the most part has not. The Catholic and Orthodox churches have not officially changed much, either, although one could argue that many believers in these two branches of the faith have done so.

CHAPTER 43

1.   Bruce Thornton, Greek Ways: How the Greeks Created Western Civilization (New York: Encounter, 2002), 196.

2.   Quoted in Thornton, 143.

3.   Ludwig Feuerbach, Essence of Christianity (1841), Ch. XVI.

4.   Quoted in Plutarch, “Of Banishment.”

5.   John Adams, Defense of the Constitution (1787).

6.   James Madison, “Letter to William Bradford, Jr., April 1, 1774.”

7.   Quoted in Will Durant, The Story of Civilization, Volume 3, 667.

8.   Architect of the Capitol, “Capitol Hill Neoclassical Architecture.”

9.   Thornton, 188.

10. Richard Mulgan, “Liberty in Ancient Greece,” cited in Thornton, Greek Ways, 137-138.

11. R.R. Bolgar, The Classical Heritage and Its Beneficiaries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 17.

12. Carl Richard, Twelve Greeks and Romans Who Changed the World (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 1.

13. Quoted in Keith Werhan, “The Classical Athenian Ancestry of American Freedom of Speech,” Supreme Court Review, 2008, 26.

14. Ibid, 28.

15. Carl J. Richard, The Founders and the Classics: Greece, Rome, and the American Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 125-126.

16. Marshall Davies Lloyd, “Polybius and the Founding Fathers: the separation of powers,” 1998.

17. Hans Julius Wolff, Roman Law: An Historical Introduction (Norman, OK: Oklahoma University Press1976), 25-26.

18. Richard, 132-133.

19. Thornton, 162.

20. Carl J. Richard, Greeks and Romans Bearing Gifts (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009), 32.

21. Edith Hamilton, The Greek Way (New York: Norton, 1993), 117-119.

22. Cf Leviticus 25:44-46.

23. Ephesians 6:5.

24. 1 Timothy 6:1-2.

25. Quoted in Hamilton, 117.

26. Ibid, 119.

27. Wolff, Roman Law: An Historical Introduction, 4.

28. Carl J. Richard, Why We’re All Romans (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2011), 53.

29. Ibid.

30. Ibid.

31. Ibid.

32. Peter Stein, Roman Law in European History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 1.

33. See Richard, Why We’re All Romans, 53; Wolff, Roman Law: An Historical Introduction, 5.

34. Stein, Roman Law in European History, 2.

35. Gilbert Highet, The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 3.

36. Ibid, 20.

37. Quoted in Richard, Twelve Greeks and Romans Who Changed the World, 14.

38. Bolgar, The Classical Heritage and Its Beneficiaries, 17, 22.

39. Highet, The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature, 11.

40. Bolgar, The Classical Heritage and Its Beneficiaries, 28.

41. Ibid.

42. Ibid, 28-32.

43. Werhan, “The Classical Athenian Ancestry of American Freedom of Speech,” 11, 25.

44. Bolgar, The Classical Heritage and Its Beneficiaries, 42.

45. Richard, Greeks and Romans Bearing Gifts: How the Ancients Inspired the Founding Fathers, 8.

46. Ibid, 8-12.

47. Quoted in Richard, Greeks and Romans Bearing Gifts, 18.

48. Richard, Twelve Greeks and Romans Who Changed the World, 17-18.

49. David C. Lindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992), 366.

50. Richard, Twelve Greeks and Romans Who Changed the World, 22-25.

51. Durant, The Story of Civilization Volume 2, 668-670.

52. Tacitus, Germania, translated by Thomas Gordon.

53. Quoted in Markus Dirk Dubber, The Police Power: Patriarchy and the Foundations of American Government (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2005), 9.

54. In fairness, it must be observed that early Christians were often persecuted by the Roman Empire for their beliefs as well. Justin Martyr, writing in the second century AD, that merely taking the name “Christian” was enough to be persecuted at times.

55. J.B. Bury, History of the Later Roman Empire (Mineola, NY: 2011), 359.

56. Exodus 22:18.

57. Long, “Hebrews and Greeks.”

58. Ibid.

59. Michael Vlach, “Platonism’s Influence on Christian Eschatology,” Theological Studies, 3.

60. Ibid. This argument was first put forward by Clement of Alexandria (ca. 120 – ca. 215).

61. Augustine, Confessions, 7.20.

62. Vlach, “Platonism’s Influence on Christian Eschatology,” 4.

63. Stein, Roman Law in European History, 40.

64. Highet, The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature, 9.

65. Lindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science, 206-7.

66. This practice became widespread during the Middle Ages, but it was appreciated by Christians as far back as the first and second centuries AD. Origen, for example, wrote about taking pagan Greek learning for Christian use in the same way that the Hebrews plundered the Egyptians before beginning their exodus. Note that not all Church Fathers agreed with this practice. For example, Tertullian (died ca. 220) famously asked, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” There were always believers who were skeptical of the use of “pagan learning.”

67. Bolgar, The Classical Heritage and its Beneficiaries, 149, 380.

68. Before the Vulgate was available, both the early Christian Church and the Judaic community used the Septuagint, a Greek translation of the Old Testament which was made around 200 BC.

69. Soeren Kern, “Britain’s ‘Islamic Emirates Project’,” Gatestone Institute, July 21, 2011.

CHAPTER 44

1.   Paul Kurtz, Secular Humanism and Its Commitments (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 1983), 31.

2.   Dalai Lama, Beyond Religion, Ethics for a Whole World (New York, NY: Mariner, 2012).

3.   John Dewey, A Common Faith (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991).

4.   Quoted in Peter Steinfels, “Scandinavian Nonbelievers, Which is Not to Say Atheists,” New York Times, February 27, 2009.

5.   Win-Gallup International, “Global Index of Religiosity and Atheism – 2012,” 3.

6.   Ibid, 4.

7.   R. Inglehart, “Atheism: Contemporary Rates and Patterns,” Pitzer College, 18-9.

8.   Sujit John, “Indians are second largest users of MIT-Harvard online courses,” Times of India, March 21, 2014.

9.   Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1.3.

10. Ayn Rand, The Ayn Rand Lexicon (New York: Plume, 1988), 315.

11. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Introductions to the Wissenschaftslehre (Hackett, 1994), 5.

12. David Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, 1738, 469.

13. Charles Stevenson, Ethics and Language, 1944, 153.

14. Paul Kurtz, “Affirmations of Humanism – A Statement of Principles,” Center for Inquiry.

15. Ibid.

16. Ibid.

CHAPTER 45

1.   Hillary Clinton, Hard Choices (New York, Simon & Schuster, 2014), 207.

2.   Ibid, 351.

3.   Ibid, 352.

4.   Manny Fernandez, “Fort Hood Suspect Says Rampage Was to Defend Taliban Leaders,” Portland Daily Sunday, June 4, 2013.

5.   Lee Ferran, “Nidal Hasan Admitted Jihadist Motive, Ft. Hood Victims’ Attorneys Say,” ABC News, June 5, 2013.

6.   Clinton, Hard Choices, 147, 461.

7.   Ibid, 186.

8.   Ibid, 131.

9.   Ibid, 130.

10. Ibid, 151.

11. Ibid, 150-151.

12. Ibid, 155.

13. Steve Coll, “Don’t Look Back,” New Yorker, March 1, 2010.

14. Clinton, Hard Choices, 155.

15. Ibid, 156, 186.

16. John Schmidt, The Unraveling: Pakistan in the Age of Jihad (New York: Picador, 2012), 161.

17. Peter Tomsen, The Wars of Afghanistan: Messianic Terrorism, Tribal Conflicts, and the Failures of Great Powers (New York: PublicAffairs, 2013), 589.

18. Ahmed Rashid, Descent into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building (New York: Penguin, 2009), 222-223.

19. Husain Haqqani, Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2005), 2.

20. Ibid, 3.

21. Ibid.

22. S.K. Malik, The Quranic Concept of War (New Delhi, India: Himalayan Books, 1986), 44.

23. Ibid, 144.

24. Clinton, Hard Choices, 145.

25. Ibid, 199.

26. Ibid, 351.

27. BBC Online, “Wikileaks: Saudis ‘chief funders of Sunni militants,’” December 5, 2010.

28. Eric Lichtblau, “Documents Back Saudi Link to Extremists,” New York Times, June 23, 2009.

29. Clinton, Hard Choices, 352.

30. Ibid, 305.

31. Ibid.

32. Palestinian Media Watch, “Schoolbooks.”

33. Palestinian Media Watch, “Names of Schools in the PA.”

34. Palestinian Media Watch, “Promoting Child Martyrdom.”

35. Clinton, Hard Choices, 461.

36. Felbab-Brown, Aspiration and Ambivalence: Strategies and Realities of Counterinsurgency, Brookings Institution, 2012, 218.

37. Bill O’Leary, “Afghan troops’ rocky past offers clues into shooting that killed U.S. general,” Washington Post, August 6, 2014.

38. Clinton, Hard Choices, 346.

39. Ibid, 360.

40. Barnabas Fund, “Christians Flee as Islamist Influence Grows in Tunisia,” June 6, 2011.

41. John Bradley, After the Arab Spring: How Islamists Hijacked the Middle East Revolts (New York: Palgrave, 2012), 1.

42. Ibid, 5.

43. Lina Ben Mhenni, “The Double Discourse of Tunisia’s Moderate Islamists,” Your Middle East (Sweden), November 12, 2013.

44. Clinton, Hard Choices, 227.