MOSUL AND THE TRUE FACE OF ISLAM
Those pesky verses of abrogation that just won’t go away.
November 7, 2018
I have lived and worked in the Muslim Middle East for the past thirty-five years, and have many dear friends who are Muslims. Most recently, I prayed with a 38-year old Muslim man in the ruins of his house in the old city of Mosul, as he told me his story of surviving the ISIS occupation.
I stumbled upon Azam Nejim Abdallah by accident, while inspecting the devastation wrought upon the magnificent 4th and 5th century churches of West Mosul with an Iraqi police brigadier general and activists from the Hammurabi Human Rights Organization, a local group dedicated to protecting Iraqi minorities.
Azam and an older neighbor, Abu Ibrahim Mohsen, were among the hardy few who had returned to the ruins and were attempting to rebuild. Their problem on this particular day was that they had no water, and no electricity. “People just three blocks down the street have water,” they complained to the brigadier general. Why not us?”
To us, the answer was obvious. The fact that Azam and his neighbors were alive was nothing short of miraculous. One neighbor’s house was just a pile of rubble. Bomb squads were still combing through the neighborhood, more than a year after the liberation, for ISIS booby-traps and unexploded ordinance. There was not a single house left standing in the neighborhood. Water? Electricity? Really?
When Azam saw me, he wanted to tell me the story of how his four-year son and father were killed in the final days of the ISIS occupation. He kept pointing to an alleyway, and in the end, I let him take me by the hand to his house a bit further away. He had already started to rebuild the walls, but that wasn’t what he wanted to show me: it was a picture of his four-year old son, Omar, and the jagged hole a coalition bomb had torn through a metal door. “I was crouching, right there,” he pointed. “Omar was crouching here, with my father. They were both killed,” he wept. All I could do as he showed me a photograph of his son was to pray with him.
I am reminded of this story by an encounter with a pastor in an Anglican church in Europe recently, who commented that ISIS and all their barbarity were “such a distortion of true Islam.”
I must have raised an eyebrow, for he went on: “You know, the Koran says to protect the People of the Book.”
“Those are the Meccan verses,” I countered. “In Medina, Mohammad preached violence and conquest.”
“You must read the Koran in its entirety,” he said. “It’s like the Bible: you can’t just take things out of context.”
I was floored by that statement, and not wanting to get into an argument in Church, I left it there. So instead, I am writing this column.
As anyone knows who has actually studied Islam – Islam itself, not the version purveyed by the apologists of the “religion of peace” – Mohammad changed his tune after the hijira or migration from Mecca to Medina.
While in Mecca, he attempted to win over local Christians and Jews, and so preached a doctrine that allowed for a modicum of tolerance, even while relegating the People of the Book to second-class citizen status, or dhimmitude.
But once in Medina, where he built a powerful army, he jettisoned that baggage and verbalized the famous Verse of the Sword proclaimed by ISIS and millions of Muslim warriors over the past fourteen centuries as they slaughtered unbelievers.
He also pronounced the Verses of Abrogation, which explicitly annulled the Mecca verses of relative tolerance. My Anglican friend was either ignorant of the doctrine of Abrogation, or for some reason felt that he, as a Christian, was somehow a better judge of its relative merit than the unanimous verdict of fourteen hundred years of Islamic scholarship, which has always upheld abrogation.
In other words, Islam as a religion explicitly rejects tolerance of others. The Koranic verses proclaiming relative tolerance have been declared null and void by Allah himself, according to Mohammad and 14 centuries of Muslim scholars.
My Anglican friend clearly preferred the illusion of Islam, rather than its harsh and often barbaric reality, the one I had witnessed in Mosul and the Nineveh Plain.
The overwhelming majority of ordinary Muslims I have met have little notion of what the Koran actually says. It is, frankly, an unreadable book. Much of it makes no sense at all. Some contemporary scholars believe this is because it was actually written in Syro-Aramaic, the common language of the time.
So most Muslims believe what their imam tells them to believe, or if they are not practicing, whatever their parents and grandparents have handed down to them. And for the most part, that is a religious code based on what we would call family values, aimed at keeping societies that are 100 percent Muslim from crime and disorder.
Over the centuries, these Muslims have coexisted with Christian and Jewish neighbors because those neighbors brought them prosperity and innovation, something the imams did not. From time to time, roused by Islamic “radicals,” these peaceful Muslims rose up and slaughtered their neighbors. In the most famous of these pogroms, Muslims slaughtered nearly half the Assyrian, Greek, and Armenian Christians in Iran, Iraq, and Turkey during the final years of WWI, just one hundred years ago.
In my experience, there are three broad categories of self-aware Muslims in the world today, all of whom understand the Doctrine of Abrogation.
There are the Reformers, who dare to proclaim that Islam must be better than violence and the sword. These are brave or foolhardy people, most of them men. They have a better chance of surviving in the Shiite world, which has a long tradition of ijtihad – Islamic jurisprudence or interpretation – something that died among the Sunna in the 12th century, if indeed it had ever existed as more than an afterthought.
Then there are the Seducers, the public intellectuals and politicians who proclaim that Islam is a religion of peace and that anyone who says the contrary is committing blasphemy. These are powerful people, who have won much support from wishful thinkers in the West.
The wishful thinkers have so thoroughly bought into their denials of the Doctrine of Abrogation that it has now become illegal in Europe to even write about it, something the United Nations General Assembly has not managed to accomplish, despite the best efforts of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to support Resolution 1618.
Finally, there is the Muslim Brotherhood and its evil Salifist spawn, from al Qaeda and the Taliban to Hamas, ISIS, and beyond. They simply point to the Book, shout out “Koran says,” and eagerly behead Christians or Muslims who refuse to adopt their version of Sharia law, which happens to be drawn from authentic Islamic texts and 1400 years of unanimous Muslim scholarship.
Want to know the true face of Islam? Ask the Christians of Mosul and the Nineveh Plain. Or the Christians of Syria. Or the Muslims whose better nature rejected the barbarity of ISIS and who paid for their humanity with their lives.
Or ask Tara Fares, the former Miss Baghdad, who was gunned down last month in Iraq because she was a Christian who dared show her face in an outdoor market.
To my Anglican pastor friend, I say: wishful thinking will only get you dead. If not in this generation, then in the next.
THE UK'S MUSLIM RAPE GANGS AND MAAJID NAWAZ'S HYPOCRISY
The twisted world of the media’s go-to Muslim darling - and ex-terrorist self-promoter.
November 7, 2018
The media’s go-to Muslim darling and ex-terrorist self-promoter, Maajid Nawaz, is currently having a Twitter spat with Lily Allen (that virtuous pop singer who has promised and failed to give a room to even one single asylum seeker in any of her several properties, in spite of breaking down in tears on TV at Calais and apologizing to the world on behalf of the UK).
Maajid is using the usual buzzwords that keep the cash flowing in his direction: “the regressive left,” “Muslim fundamentalists,” and then he ends their debate by stating that Lily is discrediting the work of the three million British Pakistanis who are trying to address and improve the situation of the over-representation of Pakistanis in grooming gangs in the UK. In reality, however, the entire Pakistani community knew, and still knows, about the rape of white British girls. They are a close-knit community. They would have seen gangs of girls hanging around kebab shops. At no point did anyone try on-street intervention. They would have heard their friends bragging about who and how many non-Muslim girls they had raped last night. They would have heard about the rape parties where non-Muslim girls were drugged and passed around the men to be raped. The wives, too, would have heard these conversations on the telephone, in the next room, or in the shops where their husbands work. The taxi drivers who shuttled the non-Muslims girls back and forth to houses and hotels to be raped were also aware of what was going on.
Contrary to Maajid’s claims, none of these three million Pakistani Muslims chose to speak up. A handful of Ahmadiyyas protested on the streets, and the UK media were in a frenzy to let us know that Muslims oppose violence and rape. The media, as usual, neglected to note that Ahmadiyyas are not considered by mainstream Sunni Muslims to be real Muslims. They are considered apostates, who have every chance of being beaten and killed, just the same as any other non-Muslim does. Literature in the Muslim Council of Britain and Kennington mosque declare this sect to be apostates, and essentially fair game.
I remember a radio conversation in which a Muslima was being interviewed and she said that the entire Pakistani communities knew and still know what is going on. She was so sickened and appalled by what her community was doing to non-Muslim girls that she took her infant child and fled, for her safety, and in order that she could speak about it, from the South to the North of England. What a brave soul. A single mother, on her own, running into poverty and uncertainty in order that she could do one single radio interview.
Where are these three million Pakistanis Maajid is talking about? I’m seeing a handful on the TV who all exhibit the same tendency of bringing Jimmy Savile’s name into the conversation that they’re having about solving the Pakistani grooming gang problem. They’re not solving the problem so much as trying to shift the attention away from it. Jimmy Savile is a different problem to be solved. And we will solve it, and we won’t be called racist for doing so. We can’t solve all problems at once, and yet if we focus on Islamic rape gangs we’re racist and using the issue as a political tool. The same thing wasn’t said when the focus was on the Catholic Church. No one hesitated in attempting to get to the bottom and root cause of the pandemic of pedophile priests. Muslims tend to enjoy special status in relation to rape and grooming. If you talk about their behaviour, you’re a racist. Forget the lifetime trauma that the raped girls will never get over. Forget the ruined lives so that a bunch of animals could have five minutes of pleasure. Forget the suicide and drug addiction rates we will be seeing in later years as a result of Maajid’s community’s behaviour.
The other thing to note is that Maajid insists, with his spat on Twitter with Lily Allen (who apparently hasn’t yet been shamed enough to know when to keep her mouth shut), that he himself is a British Pakistani. Now how can this be? Unless you’re brought over to Britain after your formative years in Pakistan where you have been steeped in a cultural tradition, how can you be both things at once? Your roots might lie in Pakistan or Ireland, but if you’re brought up in the UK, then you are British – end of story. Maajid slips up at the end of their Twitter spat. He forgets to call himself a “Brit-Pakistani,” and he calls himself a “Pakistani” instead. Very Freudian.
AN IDEOLOGY THAT IS RACIST, SEXIST AND ANTI-CHRISTIAN THREATENS OUR DEMOCRACY
And the rot is deeper than you think.
The ruthless passions of the political left, which have been on full display in the campaign not just to defeat a Supreme Court justice nomination, but to destroy the nominee and his family, are inspired by an ideology that is racist, sexist, anti-Christian, and fundamentally anti-American. Just how powerful and entrenched this ideology is can be gauged by the following headline on the ABC News website: “Us white male Christians need to step back and give others room to lead.” The headline is explained in the article’s opening sentence: “In the great span of world history, nearly all change and progress has come from an under-served and out-of-power group pushing, prodding, and pounding on those who hold power to expand it to include a wider and more diverse population."
This is pure leftist claptrap. There is not a shred of historical evidence to support it. The greatest progress of the last 250 years, beginning in 1776 and 1789, has been the creation of liberal societies that support the principles of individual liberty and equality, and tolerance. In the case of England and America the supporters of these principles led the world in ending slavery, which is still practiced in Africa today. This progress was entirely the work of white Christian males, who were under no pressure from diverse, under-served and out of power groups. But what is truly striking about these false claims and their racist, sexist and anti-Christian prescription is that they are the words not of some fringe leftist, but of Matthew Dowd, a prominent Republican, who was the chief strategist for the 2004 Bush-Cheney presidential campaign.
Every American should be concerned that an ideology so antithetic to everything this country has stood for should now be the conventional wisdom of half the country (including all the persecutors of Judge Kavanaugh). The U.S. Constitution does not contain the words “white,” “black,” “male” or “female,” precisely because the Founders believed they were creating a society in which true equality would one day prevail. It took nearly two hundred years to bring about the social changes that would realize that dream.
For the last fifty years, however, the left and the Democratic Party have been working hard to turn back the clock and reverse these gains - to introduce racial and gender categories and quotas into virtually every aspect of social life, to portray white Americans as guilty before the fact, and non-white Americans as innocent even when the facts show they are not. The progressive goal is totalitarian in nature: to erase individuals, their achievements and failures and every aspect of the circumstances in which they find themselves, in order to judge them on the basis of their skin color, their gender and their sexual orientation.
Hatred for whites, males and Christians – falsely portrayed as “privileged” and “oppressors” and thus condemned on the basis of characteristics they were born with - is now the principal curriculum of our schools, starting as early as kindergarten and extending through graduate education. Under the leftist mantra of “social justice,” American society is falsely portrayed as a system of racial, gender and sexual hierarchies. As in Matthew Dowd’s article, the remedy proposed is to reverse the oppression. In other words, to indict, silence, and repress whites, males, heterosexuals and Christians as part of a scheme to establish the vaguely defined utopia of “social justice.” (Can anyone seriously believe that the lynch mob out to destroy Brett Kavanaugh, is capable of even understanding the concept of “justice,” let alone establishing a society committed to it?)
The ideology which now inspires the progressive left, and never Trumpers like Matthew Dowd, is called “identity politics” – a name that should be anathema to every American who cherishes our country’s commitment to individual freedom - to judging people by the content of their character and not the color of their skin or their gender or their sexual orientation. “Identity politics” is a euphemism for cultural Marxism, which takes Marx’s claim that societies are divided into oppressor and oppressed classes and imposes this dangerous and historically refuted claim onto races, genders and sexual orientations. Americans need to reject this destructive ideology as completely as they rejected its forerunner in the Communist movements of the past.
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