BOOK: HOSTILE TAKEOVER: HOW ISLAM IMPEDED PROGRESS AND THREATENS SOCIETY - By Thilo Sarrazin

September 16, 2018

Best-selling book on Islam has ignited firestorm in German media

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/09/bestselling_book_on_islam_has_ignited_firestorm_german_media.html

By Thomas Lifson

The German and European media establishment is outraged that a prominent business and political leader has written a best-selling book warning against problems with Islamic religious doctrine.  The criticisms, which are pervasive, seem to amount to this:  

Just because sharia law based on the sacred texts of Islam commands violence against Jews and other infidels, and imposes demeaning humiliations on non-Muslims permitted to live as second-class dhimmis, if they pay discriminatory taxes, there’s no reason to fear the growing presence of Muslims who refuse to assimilate to local culture in Germany.

Thilo Sarrazin, a former senator in the Berlin government, and a former member of the board of the Bundesbank, has written a book on Islam that quickly rocketed to best-selling nonfiction in Germany. The book, titled Hostile Takeover: How Islam Impeded Progress and Threatens Society, has been subject to withering criticism by the German and European press. American media, so far as I have seen, has been silent so far.

The Financial Times called it

An Islamophobic diatribe disguised as a work of scholarship

Sunday Times of London headlined:

German author Thilo Sarrazin ‘is fuelling fear of Muslims’

The German government-owned Deutsche Welle asked an “expert” to comment:

He explores Islam through the Quran, which he claims to have read in its entirety. Even though this approach sounds correct, his claim to be able to determine the core statements of Islam by reading the Quran without any knowledge of Arabic or theological background is an absurd presumption. Sarrazin openly admits that his analysis "exclusively" follows his own "direct understanding of the text," as if the Quran were really to be understood without taking into account the context of its origin and the history of its reception.

"If you take it literally, it leaves little room for misunderstanding," writes Sarrazin about the Quran. His reading does not see a separation of politics and religion in Islam as possible. "The more literally one takes the Quran, the clearer it appears that the world's governance can only find its legitimacy through God," he writes. Like many other Islam critics, Sarrazin picks up one of the Islamists' core arguments; he presents their interpretation of the Quran not only as a conclusive view, but also as the exclusive one.

Now, I am not an “expert” on Islam, nor have I ever received a grant from an Islamic nation or charity to fund my explorations of Islamic theology, but one thing I am pretty confident about is that Muslims regard the Holy Koran, as they always call it, as the infallible word of Allah. I also believe that it is settled doctrine that the later-written more militant passages, the Medina suras – written after Mohammed was driven out of Mecca – supersede or replace the earlier-written Mecca suras.

Now, it is true that all sorts of scholars find other interpretations beyond the seemingly clear literal injunctions against infidels and other threatening passages, but what matters in the real world is what millions of ordinary, non-scholar Muslims think and act upon. A substantial portion of Muslims worldwide support the imposition of sharia as the law of their nations:

The fact that groups like Al Qaeda and ISIS are able to attract large numbers of committed jihadis, and that polls indicate a  significant fraction of Muslims resident in Western countries feel support for such violent jihadi groups us what matters. In the U.K.:

The 615-page survey found that more than 100,000 British Muslims sympathize with suicide bombers and people who commit other terrorist acts. Moreover, only one in three British Muslims (34%) would contact the police if they believed that somebody close to them had become involved with jihadists.

In addition, 23% of British Muslims said Islamic Sharia law should replace British law in areas with large Muslim populations.

Nonetheless, other “experts” were equally devastating:

Filled with "ideological warheads" (Stern magazine), "apocalyptic," (newspaper Bild) and written with "master race views," (Süddeutsche Zeitung): These are just some of the reviews of Thilo Sarrazin's new book, Feindliche Übernahme: Wie der Islam den Fortschritt behindert und die Gesellschaft bedroht(which literally translates as Hostile Takeover: How Islam Impedes Progress and Threatens Society; no English version of the book is available).

His publishers see things differently, describing it as a work that draws parallels between statements from the Quran and the Muslim mentality, using the arguments to explain the peculiarities and problems of Muslim states and societies as well as the attitudes and behavior of Muslims who immigrated to the western countries.

Another expert summarizes the book this way: "In an overwhelming pretense of objectivity, he justifies why the bogeyman he had already described in Deutschland schafft sich ab (Germany Abolishes Itself) can only be attributed to Islam," writes a Freiburg University Islamic Studies professor, Johanna Pink, in her review for the weekly Die Zeit.

All of these experts know that we Westerners dwell in what Muslims call the Dar al Harb, literally, “The House of War,” meaning that we have not yet been subdued into to submission to Islam (which literally means “submission.”) I truly wish that their understanding of Islam as a benign and peaceful ideology were embraced by all Muslims worldwide. But I don’t think it is possible to make the argument that this is the case right now.

Living in an imaginary world in which people behave as we wish they would is never a sound policy, yet seems to be the approach of Western establishments toward Islam.

THE KORAN

BIBLE OF THE MUSLIM TERRORIST:

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2018/08/new-novel-blasphemes-fornicating-dog.html

Koran 2:191 "slay the unbelievers wherever you find them"
Koran 3:21 "Muslims must not take the infidels as friends"
Koran 5:33 "Maim and crucify the infidels if they criticize Islam"
Koran 8:12 "Terrorize and behead those who believe in scriptures other than the Koran"
Koran 8:60 " Muslims must muster all weapons to terrorize the infidels"
Koran 8:65 "The unbelievers are stupid, urge all Muslims to fight them"
Koran 9:5 "When the opportunity arises, kill the infidels wherever you find them"
Koran 9:123 "Make war on the infidels living in your neighborhood"
Koran 22:19 "Punish the unbelievers with garments of fire, hooked iron rods, boiling water, melt their skin and bellies"
Koran 47:4 "Do not hanker for peace with the infidels, behead them when you catch them".

September 17, 2018

The Myth of the Moderate Muslim

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/09/the_myth_of_the_moderate_muslim.html

By Amil Imani

Is “Moderate Islam” an illusion? Moderate Islam is a wedge that will jam open the door to Jihad, and "evil will triumph when good Muslims do nothing." The great majority of Muslims are not adherents of the radical line. Yet, because Islamists wage their war under the name of Islam, they receive immense direct and indirect support from rank-and-file ordinary Muslims. It is this support of moderate Muslims that keeps the Jihadists alive.

Perhaps it is wishful thinking on the part of non-Muslims to believe that one can be a moderate Muslim who does not participate in any shape or form the crimes of the jihadist. Good-hearted Americans, rightfully weary of wars, are voicing their opposition for the use of force in combating Islamic ideology.

"I am already against the next war," read the bumper sticker on a car ahead of me. I wish I could tell the driver that the next war is already here; Islamists are waging it in every corner of the globe and "moderate Muslims" are either knowingly or not, support them. In our conflict with jihadists, moderate Muslims either fault the West, or simply look the other way. Islam strives to wipe out everything free people cherish, including the right to freedom of expression.

But Islam is a religion of peace and the great majority of Muslims are not a party to any plans or actions of radicals, so claim academic pundits, leftist journalists, and hired Islamic apologists. The incantation of these "authorities" is the lullaby that puts the people into a sleep of complacency. For an average free human being busy with all manner of demands on his time and resources, hardly wants to worry about the threat of Islam when those he believes "in the know" emphatically claim that there is nothing to see here. Some of these advocates of Islam go even further by accusing those who sound the alarm as racist, bigoted hatemongers and much more.

But where are all the peace-loving moderate Muslims that supposedly are in the great majority? Muslims who are neither jihadist themselves, nor support them? I and others, time and again, have been calling upon them to stand up and show the world they oppose fanatical Islamists. It is small comfort even if most Muslims are not fanatic radicals, when they do nothing to demonstrate their proclaimed nonviolent stance. It is instructive to recall that it is invariably a minority, and more often than not, a very small minority, that launches a campaign of death and destruction with great success.

It seems wishful thinking on the part of non-Muslims to believe that one can be a moderate Muslim, given that Islam is radical at its very core. To be a moderate Muslim demands that the person explicitly renounce much of the violent, exclusionary, and radical teachings of the Quran. By so doing, the individual issues his own death warrant in Islamic countries and is condemned as apostate. And if he lives in a non-Islamic land, he may even earn a fatwa on his head.

It is deadly, in any confrontation, to assess the adversary through one's own mental template, because both templates can be vastly different from each other. People in the West are accustomed to relativistic rather than absolutistic thinking. To Westerners, just about all matters range from black to white with an array of gray shades in between the two poles. To Muslims, by contrast, nearly everything is in black and white and with virtually no shades of gray. The former type of thinking is typical of more mature minds, while the latter is that of young children and the less enlightened.

This absolutist thinking is enshrined in the Quran itself. When the starting point for a Muslim is the explicit fanatical words of Allah in the Quran, then the faithful are left with no choice other than to literally obey its dictates or even take it to the next level of fanaticism. Good Muslims, for instance, do not shake hands with women, even though the Quran does not explicitly forbid it. Although the Quran stipulates that men rule over women, good Muslim men take it upon themselves to rule women not much better than they treat their domesticated animals.

All extreme systems operate outside of the constraints of checks-and-balances and according to the principle of the negative feedback loop. That is, once it starts, the extreme becomes more and more extreme until it self-destructs and takes the larger system down with it. Cancer is a case in point. It begins with only a few cells. Left unchecked, the few cells continue expanding and stop only with the death of the host.

Fanatical Islam may indeed be a minority. Yet it is a deadly cancer that has metastasized throughout the body of the world. Urgent confrontation of this advancing disease is imperative to stave it off.

Dozens of Islamist bloodlettings are presently raging in the world, aided and abetted by a "moderate Muslim" majority. The so-called moderate Muslims, even if they do exist, are complicit in the crimes of the radicals either by providing them with funds, logistics, and new recruits, or by simply failing to actively confront and unequivocally renounce them.

As is the case with cancer cells, it is the malignant minority that is death-bearing.

In the Germany of the 1930s, for instance, very few people were Nazis and most Germans dismissed them as a bunch of hot-headed louts. Before long, the hot-headed few cowed the dismissive masses and as a result, millions lost their lives.

The tentacles of the Islamist hydra have deeply penetrated the world. The Egyptian-based Muslim Brotherhood poses a clear threat in Egypt. The Muslim Brotherhood also wages its deadly campaign through its dozens of well-established and functioning branches all over the world.

The Wahhabis finance thousands of madrassahs throughout the world where young boys are brainwashed into becoming fanatical foot-soldiers for the petrodollar-flush Saudis and other emirs of the Persian Gulf.

The end-of-the-world believers of bomb-aspiring Iran's Khomeinism are busy establishing Shi’a hegemony in an arc extending from the Gulf of Oman to the Mediterranean Sea.

Al Qaeda and dozens of its like-minded jihadists relentlessly carry their barbaric campaigns in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kashmir, the Philippines, the former Soviet republics, the Russian federation, Somalia, North Africa and parts of Europe, as well as other lands.

I keep hoping those purported peace-loving moderate Muslims are indeed the great majority who would arise and demonstrate their peacefulness and moderation in action. Thus far, only a faint murmur of equivocation is all that I hear from these people.

The only viable alternative for peaceful people of an Islamic background, therefore, is to leave the bondage of violent Islam altogether and join ranks with humanity's free people.

I hope and pray that the force of freedom also abandons its reverse gear and stops retreating in the face of Islam’s surge. It is this hope that sustains me in my efforts to continue sounding the clarion.