JOE BIDEN IS ALREADY IMPORTING PALESTINIANS AND THOUSANDS OF TERRORIST HAVE WALKED OVER JOE'S ABANDONED BORDER WITH NARCOMEX. ADD TO THIS BIDEN'S FUNDING OF ISLAMIC TERRORIST AROUND THE WORLD!
The Case for Foreign National Deportation
Conditional citizenship is the only way to keep our Republic safe.
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Republican presidential candidate and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced that he will rescind student visas of foreign nationals in the U.S. and deport them to their home countries if they expressed support for Hamas terrorists’ attack against Israel.
In unequivocal terms, the presidential hopeful made it clear that the United States had no place for terrorist-supporting foreign nationals attending U.S. colleges and universities, as many pro-Palestinian student groups at various institutions across the nation release statements and organize demonstrations endorsing Hamas’ largest attack against Israel in decades.
“You see students demonstrating in our country in favor of Hamas,” DeSantis said. “Remember, some of them are foreigners.”
DeSantis told them he will be “canceling your visa, and I’m sending you home” if he wins the presidency in 2024.
DeSantis’ statement comes against the backdrop of hundreds of pro-Hamas and Pro-Palestinian student rallies across the United States.
After the attack against Israel by Hamas on October 7, Harvard Palestine Solidarity Groups released a statement signed by about 30 student organizations that read, “We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.”
Students for Justice in Palestine chapters and other pro-Palestinian student groups at many other universities, including George Washington University, the University of Virginia, and the University of California, Berkley, also released similar statements on the weekend of Hamas’ attack.
Many other pro-Palestinian student groups at institutions across the U.S. still have their statements posted online and continue to participate in protests celebrating Hamas’ attack.
This is all reminiscent of Britain in 2019. In that year Britain stripped ISIS terrorist Jack Letts (known as Jihad Jack) of his British citizenship. Letts also possessed Canadian citizenship. Since the Islamic State fell in March of 2019, Britain faced the horrific possibility of scores of ISIS terrorists returning to the UK. Letts had travelled to Syria when ISIS declared its “caliphate” in 2014; there he admitted to fighting on the frontline with SIS and offered himself as a suicide bomber. After being wounded, he grew disillusioned with ISIS.
He had stated that he hated his family for the sake of Allah, and that he was an enemy of the West, and that he wanted to decapitate a British soldier. The British people have never forgotten the perils of returning UK citizens who are also terrorists. Salman Abebi was allowed back into the UK after living in a war zone with his family. After returning to England he detonated a suicide bomb that claimed the lives of 22 people in Manchester. The youngest victim was only 8 years old.
Earlier in the year the UK government also stripped Shamima Begum of her citizenship after she left her home in East London in 2015 at the age of 15 and married an Islamic fighter in Syria. No one forced her to marry and leave the UK.
In the case of Jihad Jack in England and the revocation of his citizenship, and of Shamima Begum, we should be impelled to think about the conditions and circumstances in the United States that legitimize DeSantis’ intentions. One ought to be grateful to the United States for the privilege of being a student here. By what infernal impertinence would one dare aspire to be in America and espouse support of her sworn enemies? Let us remember that the Charter/Covenant of Hamas not only calls for the elimination of Jewry from the region and the world, and the obliteration of Israel. It calls for the establishment of a Global Caliphate which would see—among other horrific occurrences—the destruction of Christianity and Judaism from the United States.
America will produce its own homegrown terrorists. Why would we import and support foreign nationals who come with a burning hatred of this country that runs so deep they would support terrorist groups that seek the destruction of the West – Israel and the United States in particular?
When I applied for US citizenship after years of being a legal immigrant by virtue of having a green card, I was asked a few citizenship disqualifying questions. One was whether I had ever been a member of any communist party in the United States; the other was if I had ever advocated and practiced polygamy. These questions were important ones. Polygamy challenged the fundamental tenets of the version of Judeo-Christianity on which most American religious values were based. Communism was and remains inimical to the political and economic DNA of this country. Its political antipode—capitalism—is the bedrock on which our socio-political and economic systems are derived. To promote the antithesis of such foundational systems would be to destroy the United States as we know it and as it ought to be.
I might go further than DeSantis. I would call for the revocation of citizenship of naturalized persons who not only support Hamas, the Taliban, and communism but who, by whatever means and through whatever medium, communicate a deep hatred for the United States.
We are in the midst of a civilizational crisis. It is time to close ranks and revert to type – that is, revert to being patriotic Americans. The right to demean and belittle the United States is not the first right granted to foreign nationals when they are graciously allowed on American soil. Given the war on the West, and the attacks on American civilization on so many fronts, I would recommend that each foreign national student be thoroughly vetted for any anti-American sentiments before entrance into our universities. They must sign a loyalty oath mandating them to defend—if called upon to do so—the reputation of the United States which has granted them refuge, an education, and a chance to make something of their lives which most of them were denied in their home countries. And let us not forget one thing: immigration is not a right; it is a privilege.
If we made naturalized citizenship conditional by literally requiring aspiring citizens to sign a pledge of allegiance and something on the order of a non-disclosure clause which prohibits them from making, not legitimate and rational criticisms of the state but rather, hateful invectives against our republic, we might see a reduction in the proclivities for defamation and destruction among many naturalized immigrants from certain groups who use and abuse this country, who become Americans or permanent residents for reasons of political and economic expediency—such as the 9-11 terrorists.
The time has come for great purges because in a civilizational war when the enemies announce themselves in the open and act with impunity, we must act in the spirit of self-preservation and exercise justice. Why should Americans live in fear of foreign nationals, supercilious young people, many of whom can barely write a term paper, but who want to dictate the terms of our domestic and foreign policy? By what right?
The recommendations laid out here call for a massive re-examination of our refugee and immigration policies. We not only need skilled and growth enhancing immigrants, we need patriots—folks who love America before they even arrive on her shores. We want immigrants who are assimilable and willing to adapt themselves to American culture and values and to grow into becoming Americans. People who, in the end, will see no distinction between their moral identities and their American identities. These are the vanguards and sentinels who will help us rebuild our crumbling civilization and defeat the nihilists and value-junkies from assuming ascendancy in our country.
If such recommendations seem harsh, look around you and consider the results. If you feel fearful of posting your value-laden views on social media for fear that you could be harmed by any sinister monster lurking in the shadows, ask yourself: Why? Why should our universities be the breeding ground for hatred, for bullying, for the celebration of the murder of innocent victims? Why should the universities and their students contribute to the radicalism, anti-Semitism, and anti-Americanism at the expense of the American people? And why should the visitors to our country, or those on whom citizenship was bestowed as a gift, start dictating the terms of their visit, and be given the freedom to participate in rewriting the American narrative which then determines a redefined way of life for us? One alien to the essence of who we are.
When guests in your own country begin to make you feel as if you cannot understand the order of your home any longer, then, in the words of the Chancellor of Germany, Olaf Schold—“Unfortunately, they cannot stay.”
Jason D. Hill
Jason D. Hill is professor of Philosophy at DePaul University and a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. His latest book is "What Do White Americans Owe Black People: Racial Justice in the Age of Post-Oppression". Follow him on Substack.
THE KORAN
BIBLE OF THE MUSLIM TERRORIST:
“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.” AMIL IMANI
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2018/08/new-novel-blasphemes-fornicating-dog.html
Koran 2:191 "s lay 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, k ill 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".
Islamic Jew-Hatred, Dhimmitude and the Doctrine of Sacred Space
For certain entities, the existence of Israel - and Jews - is intolerable.
In the wake of the savage HAMAS attack against Israel on the morning of 7 October 2023, many are waking up to its genocidal intent against Jews. Understandably, there are memories of pogroms past, of the horrific toll of the Holocaust, and references to “Nazis” and the “Einsatzgruppen”.
This time, though, as Israel prepares to do what must be done to wipe out the HAMAS presence in Gaza, we need to understand exactly who and what it is: an Islamic terror group, dedicated to the destruction of the Jewish State of Israel and the killing of as many Jews as possible. We might start with the HAMAS Covenant, published in 1988, the year that HAMAS was formally established. Its opening lines tell us exactly who HAMAS is and why it exists:
“Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it” (The Martyr, Imam Hassan al Banna, of blessed memory).
We’ll note here that this quote is from Hassan al-Banna, the 1928 founder of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. And here is the motto of the Muslim Brotherhood:
‘Allah is our objective; the Prophet is our leader; the Quran is our law; Jihad is our way; dying in the way of Allah is our highest aspiration.’
Why this fanatical hatred? We find the answer in the Qur’an, in the Islamic doctrine of Sacred Space, and the laws of dhimmitude. The Qur’an, believed by Muslims to be the literal word of Allah (the Arabic word for “God”), lays the foundation for HAMAS’ visceral Jew-hatred.
Those who reject (Truth) among the People of the Book [Christians and Jews]…will be in Hell-fire…They are the worst of creatures. (Q 98:6)
But when the forbidden months are past, then fight and kill the infidels wherever ye find them… (Q 9:5)
Curses were pronounced on those among the Children of Israel who rejected Faith [Islam]…(Q 5:78)
The HAMAS Covenant also includes this quote from the hadith collection of Sahih Muslim:
Judgment Day will not come until you fight the Jews and kill them. The Jews will hide behind stones and trees, and the stones and trees will call: Oh, Muslim, oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him…
Then there is the historical record, which informs us of the Islamic institution of dhimmitude and the doctrine of Sacred Space. As the armies of Islam overran formerly Christian and Jewish lands in the 7th century, there were too many to kill or convert; and so, beginning with the 638 CE Pact of Umar (the 2nd Caliph), the institution of the Ahl al-Dhimma was established to subjugate Christians and Jews to a rigid set of rules that would relegate them to a legally enforced inferior status intended to be so onerous as to compel them to convert to Islam.
Along with dhimmitude, the Muslim conquests developed a concept known as “Sacred Space”. That is, the Dar al-Islam (House of Islam) must conquer all the Dar al-Harb (House of War) because according to Islam, the entire world belongs to Islam and must be conquered and subjugated to it. Once conquered and/or occupied, such land is waqf, forever endowed to Muslims by Allah. Any such waqf, if ever lost to Islam, must be fought for by jihad until it is re-conquered.
As we look at the modern-day Jewish State of Israel, we can see that the Jewish people not only are no longer dhimmis but have established a powerful country in their ancestral homeland. These remarkable accomplishments are intolerable to the forces of jihad and help to explain why HAMAS and other Islamic terror groups like it have been so intent upon wiping Israel from the face of the map.
It’s Islam, Stupid
It’s not about Israel, colonialism, globalism or capitalism; it’s about Islam.
October 19, 2023 by Daniel Greenfield 44 Comments
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[Make sure to read Daniel Greenfield’s contributions in Jamie Glazov’s new book: Barack Obama’s True Legacy: How He Transformed America.]
Beslan. Mumbai. Paris. Manchester. New York City. Nairobi. Luxor. Sulu. Kibbutz Be’eri.
186 children murdered in a school in Beslan. Dozens of children taken hostage from a Catholic school in the Philippines. Two teachers were beheaded, but not the girls. “We do not kill women. We will just enslave them,” the Jihadists promised. 8-year-olds gunned down in the Westgate Mall in Nairobi. The terrorists asked their victims to name Mohammed’s mother to tell apart the non-Muslims from the Muslims. In Luxor, Egypt, the terrorists danced, sang and killed and mutilated the foreign tourists. They “took all the young women, the girls, and disappeared with them. I don’t know where they went with the women, but they hurt them. We could hear screams of pain.” Among the dead was Shaunnah Turner, a 5-year-old British girl.
Pregnant women and children murdered in Israel baffle the world. They seem implausible because each time they happen, we forget. A few days of horror pass and we move on.
When a Muslim terrorist set off a bomb in Manchester at a concert full of children and teens, there was shock and outrage. Nails were pulled out of children’s faces.
“This attack stands out for its appalling, sickening cowardice, deliberately targeting innocent, defenceless children and young people,” then Prime Minister Theresa May fumed.
That was 6 years ago. It might have been an eternity.
Our governments, talking heads and thought leaders find excuses for the killers. The Manchester Arena bomber was angry about the Syrian Civil War so he killed some British kids. Abu Sayyaf, ‘Bearers of the Sword’, keeps attacking Christian schools in the Philippines because it isn’t allowed to form its own state. The Jihadis who murdered children in Beslan were furious about Chechnya, in Nairobi, they were upset about Somalia, and in Luxor about the ban on the Muslim Brotherhood. In Israel, Hamas murdered children because the border wall makes their terror entity into an “open air prison” which prevents them from killing Israeli children.
We’re told not to look at the pattern. It’s Islamophobic. Instead we must take each attack not as a manifestation of Islam, but of local issues or a response to oppression. When Muslims gang raped and sawed in half a Hindu schoolteacher in Kashmir, it was about India’s treatment of Muslims. And when they rampaged through the Bataclan theater in Paris, killing everyone within reach, they were protesting France’s treatment of ISIS. And when they rape a woman at a concert in Israel by the bodies of her murdered friends, they’re protesting for Gaza.
But in 1929, Muslim mobs in the Jewish city of Safed burst into an orphanage and “smashed the children’s heads and cut off their hands.” During the Hebron Massacre that same year, a British policeman described how, “on hearing screams in a room I went up a sort of tunnel passage and saw an Arab in the act of cutting off a child’s head with a sword. He had already hit him and was having another cut, but on seeing me he tried to aim the stroke at me, but missed; he was practically on the muzzle of my rifle. I shot him low in the groin.”
Israel had not even come into existence yet. What were Muslims protesting then: Jews?
During the first siege of Vienna in 1529, when the invading Muslim horde decided that “children were cut out of their mothers’ wombs and stuck on pikes”, was that a protest against colonialism or capitalism? When a Muslim chronicle boasted that during the genocide against the Sikhs in the 18th century, “the shrieks of the women captives who were being raped, deafened the ears of the people”, was this a response to globalism or Zionism? Or was this just Islam.
Everything Hamas did during the bloody High Holy Days massacres has been done by Muslims throughout history and is still being practiced today. There is nothing new here whatsoever. Medieval barbarism never went away because Islam kept those grisly practices alive. It endures side by side with the modern world of smartphones, electric cars and AI because its worst crimes are an object of religious law and faith.
A Yazidi girl abducted by the Islamic State when she was only 12 described how the Jihadist who raped her explained to her that because she “practiced a religion other than Islam, the Quran not only gave him the right to rape her — it condoned and encouraged it”. He “bound her hands and gagged her. Then he knelt beside the bed and prostrated himself in prayer before getting on top of her. When it was over, he knelt to pray again”. The girl begged him to stop, but he “said that by raping me, he is drawing closer to Allah.”
This is Islam.
It’s not about Israel, India, Russia, America, England, France, the Philippines or any of the numerous other countries that have been marked by Islamic terrorism. It’s not about “oppression”, “colonialism”, “settlers”, “cartoons” or a lack of “integration”. None of the excuses ever hold up or explain the pattern that consistently and indelibly marks Islamic violence.
Hamas called its assault, ‘Al-Aqsa Flood’, a reference to the colonial mosque planted by Islamic conquerors in Jerusalem on top of the holiest place in Judaism, site of the former Temple. This wasn’t about “resistance”, Gaza being an “open air concentration camp” (with luxurious hotels, restaurants and mansions) or any of the excuses that the media has thrown at us.
It was a religious war. That’s why Hamas scheduled its attack on the Sabbath and on Simchat Torah, the final day of the High Holy Days and the most joyous day in Judaism. Just as the Yom Kippur War had been scheduled for the holiest day in Judaism. And the worst previous Hamas terrorist attack had been the bombing of a Passover seder in Netanya which killed 30 and wounded 140.
In Nigeria, Boko Haram has set off bombs in churches on Christmas. In 2015, a Muslim couple opened fire at a workplace Christmas party in San Bernardino, California, while a year later a Muslim terrorist drove through a Christmas market in Berlin and a 12-year-old Muslim boy tried to detonate a nail bomb at another Christmas market in Germany.
In India, Muslim terrorists set off bombs on the Hindu festival of Diwali. Massacring Christians, Jews and Hindus on their religious holidays is not a political statement: it’s a religious one.
Islamic terrorism is not an American problem, a British problem, a French problem, a Russian problem, a Chinese problem or an Israeli problem. It’s an Islamic problem. The only way we will ever triumph against it is to stop treating it as someone else’s problem. If only India gave up Kashmir, Israel gave up more of the West Bank, if America stopped being involved in the Middle East, if France hadn’t banned the hijab and the Netherlands hadn’t allowed cartoons of Mohammed, there would be no Islamic terrorism are the kinds of lies that are killing us.
We are not responsible for Islamic terrorism. None of us. Only Islam is responsible.
Islamic violence is over 1,000 years old. It predates most modern countries and it is not caused by anything we do. The only thing we are guilty of is our failure to smash the Jihad.
Nothing that we or anyone else does will appease the terrorists. Islam is not Northern Ireland: peace negotiations have never accomplished and will never accomplish anything. It cannot be reasoned or co-existed with. Its violence is a religious duty written into its scripture and its laws, its atrocities, murder, torture, mutilation and rape, are acts of sacred religious devotion. The Islamic kingdom of heaven can only be achieved when the entire world submits to Islam.
The horrors we have seen in the Jewish communities near Gaza are the same ones that Islam has perpetrated across Africa, Asia, Europe and America. In Nigeria, Boko Haram has kidnapped over 1,000 children from Christian schools. In the Philippines, Muslims burst into a school and took children hostage. In Algeria, they beheaded Trappist monks while in Thailand, they beheaded Buddhist monks. In Boston, they blew the legs off marathon runners while in France they drove a truck through a crowd on Bastille Day until the wheel well filled up with body parts.
This is grotesque, hideous, horrific and unimaginable. This is Islam.
We look away because we can’t bear it. When the attacks happen somewhere else, we pretend that it has nothing to do with us. And when it happens to us, then we let ourselves be persuaded that if we just avoided doing anything to upset the Muslims, like allying with the peoples and countries they’re trying to exterminate, drawing cartoons or mishandling korans, we’ll be fine.
It’s not a problem of “those people fighting over there and bringing their problems here.”
Islam is not just at war with us or with them, but with the entire world. If you are not a Muslim or the right kind of Muslim, then you are in a war whether you like it or not. You can be a peace activist and march with a ‘Queers for Palestine’ banner. You can welcome in migrants or blame the whole thing on conspiracy theories, but it still won’t matter. They will kill you if they can.
This is not about politics: it’s a thousand plus year crusade to subjugate all of mankind.
To win, we have to stop blaming ourselves, stop treating Islamic terrorism as someone else’s problem and stop pretending that it goes away when it’s not in the headlines. To win, we have to stand together and stop letting the enemies of mankind and their useful idiots divide us up. To win we have to recognize that we either fight or die. If we’re not faced with that choice right now, we will be, and if not us, then our children and grandchildren will one day come up against it.
We must reject terms like “senseless violence” because there is nothing senseless about it. Our enemies know who they are and what they want. We refuse to understand who they are. The only thing truly standing between us and victory are the lies that we tell ourselves. In moments of truth, the lies temporarily fall away and we see the enemy revealed for what it is.
Through a rain of paper and ash on a September in New York City, nails driven into the faces of children in Manchester and the mutilated legs of runners in Boston, the bloodied half-naked children of Beslan and the kidnapped children of kibbutzim in Israel, we glimpse the truth.
Hold on to that truth. We are not weak, we have been weakened by lies. And the greatest of those lies is that this endless catalog of crimes to which a new one is added every few weeks is about anything but Islam. It is about Islam. It has been about Islam for over 1,000 years.
Instead of “regional dispute”, say Islam. Instead of “cycle of violence”, say Islam. Instead of militants, say Islam. Instead of terrorists, say Islam. Instead of war, say Islam.
One little word explains all of this. One little world has led to an endless world of horror.
Our only hope for victory begins with ending the lies and telling the truth.
Daniel Greenfield
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
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Robert Spencer's 'The Critical Qur'an'
A must-read, essential book.
[Robert Spencer's new book, The Critical Qur'an, will be out May 3. Preorder now: HERE.]
If I were queen, I would reward every reader who completed Robert Spencer's new book, The Critical Qur'an: Explained from Key Islamic Commentaries and Contemporary Historical Research. The Critical Qur'an is an essential book that every thinking person would benefit from reading. About one in four humans is a Muslim. Given child marriage, polygyny, and women's low status, Muslims have high fertility rates and the percentage of the world's population that is Muslim is predicted to increase till Islam is the world's majority religion in 2075. While it is true that the Qur'an is often not read or understand by most Muslims, Muslims do revere the Qur'an. Muslims may have little idea what the book contains, but they are ready to kill over it. When, in 2005, Newsweek circulated false rumors that Americans were flushing Qur'ans down toilets – which is of course impossible – at least seventeen people were killed in ensuing violence and "a council of more than 300 mullahs …threatened to declare holy war."
In the past, reading the Qur'an was difficult. Some translations used pseudo-King-James English, for example archaic forms like "thee, thou, thine," in an attempt to make the Qur'an sound Biblical, and, therefore, holy. Some translations attempt to paper over the Qur'an's lack of clarity by adding parenthetical fixes. For example, Qur'an 2:1 begins "Alif Lam Meem." No one knows what this means. One translation tries to "help" the reader with a parenthetical explanation: "Alif-Lam-Mim. [These letters are one of the miracles of the Quran and none but Allah (Alone) knows their meanings]." The reader is left to wonder how the incoherent equals the miraculous. Translators try to draw a smiley face over darker Qur'anic passages. "Jihad," which clearly means actual warfare to claim territory, booty, corpses, and slaves for Allah, is translated as "struggle." Spencer's new translation avoids these pitfalls, and, on the sentence level, it is easy to read.
Many make assumptions about the Qur'an based on false comparisons to the Bible. The works are different in important ways. The King James Bible contains 783,137 words in 66 books. These books were composed over the course of hundreds of years in three different languages, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. Christians and Jews agree that their scriptures were not actually written by God himself, but by roughly forty different human authors. The genres of Biblical books include hymns,letters, proverbs, prophecy, erotica, history, allegory, andreportage. Jews and Christians have long engaged in exegesis of their sacred texts – that is, Jews and Christians debate what Bible passages mean and how they should be applied. Jews and Christians respect hard copies of their scriptures, but they do not worship these hard copies, nor do most attribute supernatural attributes to them. To do so would be idolatry.
The Qur'an contains c. 77,430 words, making it less than one tenth the length of the Bible. Islam teaches that the Qur'an was never written by anyone. It is uncreated. Like God himself, the Qur'an has always existed and will always exist. There are numerous rules for handling the Qur'an. Kufar – Non-Muslims – should never touch the Qur'an in Arabic, but may touch "interpretations" in other languages. One must say "interpretation" because the Qur'an exists only in Arabic, the language of Allah. Muslims must perform ablutions before reading the Qur'an. The Qur'an must be stored in a specially designated place, and never be put on the floor or taken into a bathroom.
To say that the Qur'an was created, as opposed to eternally existing, is a death penalty offense. Even Western scholars have hesitated to explore the Qur'an's origins. For example, scholar Christoph Luxenberg must hide behind a pseudonym to protect his life. The Qur'an "leaves no room for dispute"; see also Qur'an 33:36. Indeed, the Qur'an suggests that even a second of doubt will lead to an eternity in hell (e.g. 49:15) . Thus, rather than debating or discussing the meaning of the Qur'an, Islam places emphasis on memorization. A Muslim once said to Robert Spencer that he had memorized the entire Qur'an, and one day he was going to find out what it says. The hafiz, or Qur'an memorizer, did not speak Arabic, and had no idea of the meaning of the sounds he had memorized.
Mohammed Hijab, an Islamic apologist, demonstrated Muslim beliefs about the magic powers of the Qur'an in a November 10, 2021, YouTube discussion with Dr. Jordan Peterson. Hijab began to recite in Arabic, in the voice prescribed for reading the Qur'an. That prescribed voice is a singsong, nasal drone, with drawn out vowels. Peterson asked what Hijab's point was. Why recite Arabic to me, a non-Arabic speaker? Hijab said, "We believe that the Qur'an has divine qualities itself. We believe it is a physical cure." Just exposing Peterson to the sounds of the Qur'an might cause Peterson to convert to Islam. Ibn Kathir, an important exegete, claimed that recitation of Sura 2 causes Satan to fart. It can be argued that Islam treats the Qur'an as if it were a "divine, conscious agent."
Muslim history claims that Islam was founded by an orphaned, illiterate, seventh-century Meccan caravan driver named Muhammad who was visited by the angel Jibril (from the Biblical Gabriel) who ordered him to recite. Muhammad's followers wrote down his recitations and compiled them into the Qur'an. Textual criticism suggests that the Qur'an is a compilation of heavily edited, pre-existing material. Recent scholarship theorizes that, during the Arab Conquest, conquerors decided that their new, Arab empire, no less than the Christian Byzantine and Zoroastrian Persian empires, required a state religion. These Arab conquerors took bits and pieces of Jewish,Christian, Zoroastrian and Pagan material and compiled them into the Qur'an.
Christianity's early centuries were rocked by Christological debates. These debates asked, "What was the nature of Jesus?"Some said Jesus was human; others said he was divine; still others argued that Jesus was some combination of human and divine. Jesus' proposed divinity troubled many. They understood the divinity of Jesus as an assault on Judaism's monotheism. Some were offended by Jesus's divinity for a different reason. If Jesus was both fully divine and fully human, then God urinated and defecated. These bodily functions were seen as beneath a divinity.
Islam's emphasis on Jesus being merely a man, not a divinity, may testify to the influence of nontrinitarian Christianity on the formulation of Islam. The shahada is the Islamic confession of faith. "There is no god but Allah and Muhammad is the messenger of God." Merely stating the shahada makes one a Muslim, yet it may be a buried statement of nontrinitarian Christian creeds. "There is not God but Allah" is a rejection of Jesus' divinity and the trinity. According to new theories, "Muhammad is the messenger of God" may be a reference to Jesus. "Muhammad" is translated as "the praised one" and "the messenger of God" is a denial of Jesus' divinity. "The praised one" was but a messenger, not God himself. The nontrinitarian Christians' discomfort at the thought of God urinating or defecating is reflected in al-Wahidi's commentary on the Qur'an. "Our Lord does not eat or drink nor has He any need to relieve Himself" but Jesus "was fed like any other child, and then he ate and drank and relieved himself … Then how could he be the son of Allah?"
The Old Testament recounts the history of the creation of the world and God's choosing the Jewish people as his own, and leading them out of slavery in Egypt. The New Testament offers Jesus' biography, a short history of the early church, and the letters of early Christians. No clear history of what is conventionally thought of as the early days of Islam is to be found in the Qur'an itself. There's no caravan driver, no Mecca, no new religious revelation, and the word "Muhammad" is mentioned only four times, and it is not clear that the word refers to a person or if it means, only, "praised one." Many argue that early references to Muhammad may in fact be references to Jesus.
Muslims express exaggerated praise for the Qur'an. For example, Ibn Kathir said, "The Arabic language is the most eloquent, plain, deep and expressive of the meanings that might arise in one's mind. Therefore, the most honorable Book, was revealed in the most honorable language, to the most honorable Prophet and Messenger, delivered by the most honorable angel, in the most honorable land on earth, and its revelation started during the most honorable month of the year, Ramadan. Therefore, the Qur'an is perfect in every respect."
In fact, though, the Qur'an is possibly the world's worst-written influential book. Muslims will of course object to this assessment. Their first objection: only an Islamophobe would call the Qur'an badly written. My reply: No, I'm happy to acknowledge the excellence of many Islamic cultural products, for example, the Taj Mahal, calligraphy, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan's singing, and Muslim Arab folktales. Second objection: The Qur'an is the product of an oral culture. This objection lacks merit. Most people in the world have been illiterate. The Bible is the product of a population where most people could not read or write. Acknowledged masterpieces of world literature, including the Iliad, the Bhagavad Gita, and Zen Koans all emerged from predominantly oral cultures. One Thousand and One Nights, an Arabic-language collection of previously oral folklore, has entranced audiences around the world. Third objection: translations cannot capture the fine qualities of the Arabic Qur'an. I have never read The Iliad in Greek, the Vedas in Sanskrit, Psalm 23 in Hebrew, or Arabic folktales in Arabic, nor do I need to. The excellence and power of these works transcends translation. For those questioning the quality of Robert Spencer's new Qur'an translation, visit this site. You can find any Qur'an verse as translated by six different translators. Study that website all you might; you will not find a translation that can remedy the Qur'an's many problems.
What's wrong with the Qur'an? The Qur'an uses pronouns like "he," "we," and "they," but the Qur'an offers few clues as to whom is meant by these pronouns. The Qur'an hops from topic to topic, not just paragraph by paragraph, but within the same sentence, for example in 4:29: "Do not squander your wealth among yourselves in vanity, except in a trade by mutual consent, and do not kill yourselves." After telling men that they are superior to women and that men should beat their wives (4:34), the Qur'an offers, in 4:36, a sentence fragment, that is a sentence with a subject but no verb. "Kindness to parents." Other translators rescue this fragment by adding the missing verb, e.g.,"Show kindness to parents" or "Do good to parents." Spencer makes so such rescue effort. Qur'an 6:143 is a similar sentence fragment. It reads, "Eight pairs two of the sheep and two of the goats." There is no verb, and, therefore, no sense. Another sentence fragment, this one also missing a verb: "Those who chose unbelievers for their friends instead of believers." Another fragment, 74:30, reads "Above it are nineteen." Above what are nineteen what, exactly? There are more than a few verses that leave the reader scratching her head, e.g., "Would one of you love to eat the flesh of his dead brother?" 49:12, "We used to wade with waders" 74:45, and "Color from Allah, and who is better than Allah at coloring?" 2:138.
Scholar Gerd Puin estimates that twenty percent of the Qur'an is unclear to anyone. This lack of clarity is thanks in part to words, often of non-Arabic derivation, like "jibt," "sijill," "ghislin,""abb," "as-sakhkhah," "sijjin," "illiyyin," "tasnim," "saqar," and many others, whose meanings are uncertain. The full text of a scholarly, 1938 book entitled "The Foreign Vocabulary of the Qur'an" can be found here. The Qur'an acknowledges its own lack of clarity in 3:7, in which Allah states that he alone knows the meaning of some verses. Which verses? He never says. Readers can only guess which verses they are understanding correctly and which verses whose meaning is beyond their grasp.
The books of the Bible are arranged more or less chronologically, with some thematic arrangement, and events in those books are also arranged chronologically. For example in Luke's Gospel, Jesus is first born, then he preaches and heals, then he is crucified, then he rises from the dead. The Qur'an is not arranged chronologically. With the exception of the very short first chapter, the Qur'an's chapters are arranged from longest to shortest. This bizarre choice confounds the reader seeking coherence. Given that chapter length appears entirely arbitrary – the chapters contain more or less the same material, repeated endlessly – why some chapters are long and others are short escapes the reader. Chapter titles do not relate to the theme of the chapter. One of the Qur'an's most notorious verses, "Kill them wherever you find them" is found in the chapter entitled "Women." In any case, the phrase is repeated three times in the Qur'an. Sura 9, perhaps the most bloodthirsty chapter, is titled "Repentance."
That a Qur'an chapter is titled "Women" should not mislead the reader. Women are afterthoughts; they exists as the possessions of men. They appear as child brides, as sex slaves, as Heavenly whores, and as war captives. In verse 43 of "Women," females are identified as a source of pollution. Men should not pray if they have been sick, if they have urinated or defecated, or if they have had contact with a woman. After such contamination, men must cleanse themselves, possibly by rubbing their face and hands with dirt (a practice called Tayammum). Women are inferior to me n (2:282, 2:228, 4:34, 4:11). The Qur'an instructs men on how to handle divorce from pre-pubescent wives with whom they have had sexual intercourse. Females are a "field"that men should enter however they wish. There are dozens of named male characters, but only one named female character: Mary. Compare the Qur'an's lack of named female characters with the indelible females of the Bible, women who changed the course of Jewish and Christian history: Eve, Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah, Rahab, Deborah, Judith, Ruth, Esther, Elizabeth, Mary Magdalene, the sisters Martha and Mary, Junia, Priscilla, Anna the Prophetess, etc.
The Qur'an chapter entitled "Mary" is, as is the case with other chapter titles, not closely related to Mary. In a commentary on this chapter, Mary is given voice to mourn that she is not "an owned slave woman" – she is unfortunate because she is not some man's property. The Qur'an confuses Mary, mother of Jesus, with Miriam, sister of Moses, who lived over a thousand years before Jesus' mother. The Qur'an tells Mary, "Do not grieve. Your lord has placed a stream beneath you." It's not clear how this stream placement should cheer Mary up.
The Qur'an is repetitious. Repetition is frequently encountered in oral lore. See the Kumulipo, a Hawaiian creation chant.
"Born was Kumulipo in the night, a male
Born was Po'ele in the night, a female
Born was the coral polyp, born was the coral, came forth
Born was the grub that digs and heaps up the earth, came forth…"
This poetic repetition echoes creation itself; the multiplicity of lines with parallel construction reflects the abundance of creatures the chant catalogues, and also their place in an orderly universe. Repetition makes this important lore easy to remember and its has a hypnotic effect on the listener.
The Qur'an makes no such use of repetition. Rather, as Spencer's footnotes show, the Qur'an includes repetitive, garbledf ragments – not coherent retellings – of Jewish and Christian scriptural and folkloric material, and Zoroastrian and Pagan elements. The Qur'an offers repeated, fragmented mentions of the Exodus story from the Bible, and extra-biblical material like a folktale of Jesus making clay birds fly. A sixth-century Christian legend, The Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, tells of seven men who retreated to a cave during Roman persecution. The men awoke two hundred years later and were surprised to find that Christianity was now the empire's official religion. The Qur'an's telling of this tale, found in 18:9-26, is so thoroughly garbled that a reader with no previous knowledge of the Christian source would not have any idea what these verses allude to. Don Richardson, author of "Secrets of the Koran,"estimates that if all repetitions were removed, the Qur'an would be forty percent of its current size.
God's rebuke of David, recounted in 2 Samuel 12, is one of the most moving, terrifying passages in the Bible. I can hardly think of it without crying. Through the prophet Nathan, God rebukes David for murdering Uriah, the husband of Bathsheba, a woman David lusted after. The Qur'an takes this terrifically moving, cinematic passage and flubs it so badly in the retelling that it is a literary crime (38:21-25).
Qur'an 4:157 states that Jesus did not die on the cross. Muslims believe that Allah placed either a dummy or a Jesus lookalike on the cross. Spencer's footnotes identify this belief as an appropriation from a third century Gnostic text, "Second Treatise of the Great Seth." Gnostics were nontrinitarian Christians. As Spencer writes, they held an "abhorrence of the material world and the flesh, which led to their denying altogether the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation." Jesus was too supernatural to suffer death on the cross.
Ex-Muslim Ridvan Aydemir insists that Qur'an 4:157 deals a devastating blow to the Qur'an's integrity. Aydemir argues that, yes, the Gnostics had a reason, that was consistent with their own belief system, to tell a story in which Jesus did not die on the cross. Those compiling the Qur'an borrowed that passage from a Gnostic document, but could not borrow the logic behind the passage. The Jesus of the Qur'an is not, as was the Gnostic Jesus, a supernatural creature, too rarefied to be crucified. The Jesus of the Qur'an is simply a human being, comparable to any other mortal. Aydemir quotes Qur'an passages that mention other prophets being killed; similarly, Jesus, a mere prophet, could have been killed. The Qur'an's logic, that prophets are killed and that Jesus is merely a prophet, as human as anyone else, does not support Jesus' not being killed on the cross. Aydemir points out that the Qur'an borrows other belief system's narratives without borrowing the logic informing those narratives.
The Qur'an has a limited number of themes that it hits upon with a thudding monotony. Those themes include the following. Allah is all powerful. Allah saves and damns arbitrarily. Allah created some people just to send them to hell fire. Muslims must not pray for these damned souls or feel sad for them. Compare this to the Bible, which records that God wants all to be saved (1 Timothy 2:4, 2 Peter 3:9, Ezekiel 18:23) If Muslims don't please Allah, Allah can kill them all and create a new group of people who will please him. In a footnote, Spencer points out that Allah says that he "loves" only those who fight for him in jihad, and he does not love unbelievers. Allah has a very thin skin and grouses about humans who "mock" and "ridicule" his "warners." Allah promises sadistic tortures to scoffers. He will burn off their skins and replace those skins with new skins so that they can be burned off again "so that they may taste the torment" 4:56 He will turn white faces black. Kufar in Hell will consume boiling water, pus, and a fruit made of devils' heads. This fruit will boil in their bellies. "As for those who disbelieve, garments of fire will be cut out for them, boiling fluid will be poured down on their heads, By which what is in their bellies, and their skins too, will be melted, And for them are hooked rods of iron" (22:19-21). The Qur'an's narrator says that those who disagree with him should hang themselves (22:15). Allah promises an afterlife of pleasant gardens, fruits, and silk clothing to Muslim men.Heavenly beings with large, firm – "not sagging" – breasts will service Muslim men.
The Qur'an is ferociously hostile to non-Muslims. The Qur'an directs special fury at Christians and Jews. The very first chapter condemns Jews as having angered God, and Christians as having gone astray. Muslims who pray the full allotment of daily prayers repeat this condemnation of Christians and Jews seventeen times daily. Muslims are as superior to Christians and Jews as human beings are to animals (3:110, 98:6). Jews are so irredeemable that Allah turned them into apes and pigs. In 2:54, Moses tells sinning Jews to kill themselves; Ibn Kathir, a commentator, reports that 70,000 Jews lost their lives as a result of Moses' suicide command.
The Qur'an repeatedly emphasizes that one must not worship anyone but Allah. This point is hammered home in various ways. Don't assign a partner to Allah. Don't pray to anyone but Allah. Don't imply that Allah needs "helpers." All of these phrasings have one target: Christians, and their belief in the Trinity. The Qur'an misunderstands the Trinity, suggesting that Christians worship God the Father, Jesus, and Mary. This is not the Trinity. The Qur'an also drastically misunderstands the purpose of the incarnation. To say that Allah has a son is a "monstrous thing" (19:89) because to do so is to imply that Allah has some weakness or need and his son is a "helper." The incarnation of God as a human being was not so that Allah would have a "helper." Rather, the purpose of the incarnation is expressed succinctly in John 3:16, "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life."
No other world scripture is so obsessed with condemnation of two other belief systems, in this case, Judaism and Christianity. Without its condemnations of Jews and Christians, the Qur'an would not be a book-length work, but a pamphlet, .
Jihad is another main theme of the Qur'an. The Qur'an makes abundantly clear that jihad is warfare for the sake of expanding Islam's worldly power, not an interior struggle to, say, remain on a diet, a message promoted by a 2013 CAIR public relationscampaign. The Qur'an says, multiple times, that believers should strike the necks of kufar, kill them wherever the Muslims find them, etc. As if these passages were not grisly enough, a Qur'an commentator offers, "Strike them on their foreheads to tear them apart and over the necks to cut them off, and cut off their limbs, hands and feet." Other commentators are even more bloodthirsty, demanding that Muslims smite the very toes of the kufar.
Muslims should suspect even their wives and their children of being traitors to Allah (64:14). "Among your wives and your children there are enemies for you, therefore beware of them. Your wealth and your children are only a temptation, while with Allah is an immense reward." Other verses warn the believer against ties with parents and children who are not Muslims (9:23-24). Muslims are warned not to take Jews or Christians as friends (3:118, 5:51). Astute readers will, of course, recognize in these warnings the rules set down by cults, who demand that members sever ties with those not members of the cult.
The Qur'an is as remarkable for what it lacks as for what it contains. The Qur'an does not offer that new, world-changing expression of a timeless, soul-deep truth. There is nothing in the Qur'an that compares to the Jewish Ten Commandments, or tzelem Elohim, a loving God who creates humanity in his own image; the Christian Sermon on the Mount; the Hindu Kalidasa's Exhortation of the Dawn; Buddhism's Four Noble Truths; or the Greek Protagoras' observation that "Man is the measure of all things."
In a 2006 lecture at Regensburg University, Pope Benedict quoted a Byzantine emperor, Manuel II Paleologos. "Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." Mohammad himself is said to have said something similar. In hadiths, Mohammad announced that he was "superior" to other prophets because he alone was made "victorious with terror" and the earth's treasures were made lawful to him; in other words, he could violate the most primordial taboos. He could kill, he could steal, and he could rape other men's wives.
Spencer's new "Critical Qur'an" doesn't offer only an accurate and accessible translation. It offers commentary by canonical Islamic experts, including Ibn Kathir, a fourteenth century exegete, and Syed Abul Ala Maududi, a twentieth-century author. Thus, the reader knows not just what the Qur'an says, but how influential Muslims understand it. Spencer's footnotes also draw the reader's attention to variations in the Qur'an. These variations are of a utmost importance, as it is a tenet of Islam that the Qur'an is a perfect, eternal, unchanging and unchanged document that exists in Heaven. Variations in the text give the lie to this tenet.
Spencer's footnotes relate Qur'anic passages to taqiyya; to Islam's intellectual stasis; to suicide bombing; to Muslims'resistance to Israel's right to exist; to why it is morally acceptable for Muslim men to harass non-Muslim women; to why it takes four Muslim male witnesses to prove a rape case; and to treatment of dhimmis, that is, non-Muslims who live in Muslim states, and who must be economically fleeced and publicly humiliated. As Spencer points out, Qur'an verses, for example 10:94, record that the scriptures of Jews and Christians in the seventh century were authentically divine products. And yet Muslims today insist that Jews and Christians "corrupted"their scriptures. The Qur'an contradicts current Muslim belief about Jewish and Christian scripture. David Wood describes this as the "Islamic Dilemma."
Spencer's footnotes describe Islamic traditions designed to justify changes in the Qur'an, a book that Islam teaches is perfect, unchanging, and unchangeable. Again, one current theory is that the Qur'an was not written as one document, the product of one man, Muhammad. Rather, many scholars now think that the Qur'an was pieced together from pre-existing materials, materials that were then heavily edited to meet the needs of Arab conquerors. These changes occurred over time. Some early Muslims might have witnessed, and questioned, such changes. Traditions were invented to explain away the changes. For example, Muhammad's child bride Aisha is made to say that sheep ate some Qur'an verses that previously existed but then went missing.
Spencer points out the Qur'an's contradictions. Iblis is identified as a jinn, but, contrarily, as an angel. Sometimes one can intercede for another; sometimes one cannot. In one Qur'anic retelling of Exodus, Pharaoh survives. In another, he drowns. The number of days it took Allah to create the world varies, as does the substance from which Allah created mankind. Muslims insist that the Qur'an contains prescient scientific knowledge. In fact, though, as Spencer points out in a footnote, the Qur'an presents a pre-scientific picture of the earth and the solar system 13:2. For example, the heavens rest on "invisible supports" and the sun sets in a muddy pool, 18:86.
Spencer's footnotes also help bridge the gap between the English translation and the Arabic original, pointing out words of non-Arabic origin and places in the text where the rhyme scheme and other formal features break down, indicating interpolations into a pre-existing source document that was then patched into the Qur'an.
An Islamic website offers attractive quotes from the Qur'an. One of the quotes says "speak to people kindly," but this appears in the midst of a text that calls non-believers apes, pigs, and the vilest of created beings, describes graphic tortures for them and tells Muslims never to befriend them, not even if they are parents or children. "Remember me; I will remember you," says one quote. This from an Allah who states repeatedly that if Muslims displease him, he will destroy them utterly and take up a better group of people . "Wives are a garment for you," says one quote. Yet this book includes instructions on how to divorce a pre-pubescent child; before dumping her, one must make sure that she has not somehow gotten pregnant. "Allah does not burden a soul more than he can bear," says another quote. This same Allah repeatedly says that he creates people for the specific purpose of sending them to Hell, a Hell he describes with fiendish enthusiasm. "The life of this world is only the enjoyment of deception." And yet Paradise is utterly earthbound. It's all about rivers of booze, delicious food, silk garments, and sex slaves with round, "not sagging" breasts. The only thing that's missing is big-screen color TVs. There is no description of what Heaven will entail for women. "Men are in charge of women" are superior to women, and should beat them, says 4:34. But this website translates that verse as saying that men should protect women.
Compare this to the matrix of Bible quotes. Hosea, a prophet, married Gomer, an adulteress. Even though she cheated on him, Hosea could not quit her. Their story reflects God's love for the Jewish people. When the ancient Hebrews went astray, God could not get over his love for them. In the book of Hosea, God speaks of his frustrated love, "I drew them with human cords, with bands of love; I fostered them like one who raises an infant to his cheeks; Yet, though I stooped to feed my child, they did not know that I was their healer." God's frustrated love for sinning humanity is also expressed in the New Testament which records, Christians believe, the son of God dying a torturous death for his love of humanity. In the extreme of pain, Jesus says, "Father, forgive them. They know not what they do."These quotes are deeply embedded in rich narratives that demonstrate the truths the quotes hope to convey. Compare this to the Qur'an that mentions "kindness to parents" just a few words away from the advice to husbands to beat their wives. Both quotes are completely free of any supportive, illustrative narrative.
Please buy and read Robert Spencer's "Critical Qur'an." I emphasize "buy" because his book is a gift to thinking people, and "the workman is worthy of his hire." The most moving sentence in this translation was written by Spencer himself. He dedicates his book thus, "Offered with love to all the people of the world who love the Qur'an." I do not see how anyone could read this book, and all of its footnotes, and conclude that the Qur'an is divinely inspired. Muslims deserve to have access to the research presented so very clearly herein.
Danusha Goska is the author of God through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery.
WE KNOW HOW EFFECTIVE THE REPUBLICANS ARE WHEN DEALING WITH BIDEN'S CRIMES AGAINST AMERICA! A BIT LESS THAN ZERO RECORD!
House Republicans: Joe Biden Has No Authority to Import Palestinians to U.S. Through Parole Loophole
A group of House Republicans is reminding President Joe Biden he does not have any authority under existing federal immigration law to bring Palestinians from Gaza to the United States via a parole pipeline.
Reps. Josh Brecheen (R-OK), Andy Ogles (R-TN), Jeff Duncan (R-SC), and Clay Higgins (R-LA) have sent a letter to Biden asking him to oppose resettling Palestinians across American communities — an issue the White House has been silent on even as Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) have voiced their support for such a plan.
The Republicans write that “no authority exists to grant categorical parole” to a group of foreign nationals, even as Biden opened parole pipelines for Afghans and Ukrainians in the last two years.
“… we are deeply opposed to any potential attempts to parole into the U.S. Palestinians en masse following Israel’s counteroffensive against Hamas in Gaza,” they continue:
We would remind you that the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) prohibits you from categorically paroling mass groups of aliens into the U.S. Section 212 (d)(5)(A) of the INA sets strict limits on DHS’s ability to parole aliens into the U.S., stating that such action may only be done “on a case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit.” Additionally, the law clearly states that parole authority cannot be used to circumvent the refugee program and parole an individual alien into the U.S., only “the [Secretary] determines that compelling reasons in the public interest” exist to do such according to Section 212 (d)(5)(B) of the INA. Your decision to flippantly violate such laws in the past two years is why 21 states have brought litigation against your administration in hope of terminating your unlawful Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela parole program. [Emphasis added]
Given concerns of terror attacks in our homeland, it is important as ever that matters are not made worse by attempting to parole Palestinians into our country. This should be obvious considering the DHS OIG report of Operation Allies Refuge which found your claim false that Afghans paroled by your administration “already completed extensive background checks,” and that information from many Afghan refugees like “name, date of birth, identification number, and travel document data, was inaccurate, incomplete or missing.” [Emphasis added]
The Republicans said Biden ought to “encourage Egypt to take in Palestinian refugees” which “would allow them to stay in a culturally akin country, separate them from Hamas, and simultaneously prevent Americans at home from being put in harm’s way.”
“At this critical time, our nation must remain committed to defending our homeland,” they write. “We remind you that you do not have the authority to grant parole en masse as specified under existing U.S. law. We oppose any efforts to parole into the U.S. any Palestinians from Gaza.”
Palestinians wait to cross into Egypt at the Rafah border crossing in the Gaza Strip, Oct. 16, 2023. (AP Photo/Fatima Shbair, File)
The letter comes as Republicans across the U.S. have demanded Biden to publicly oppose resettling Palestinians in American communities while also committing to deporting foreign visa-holders who espouse pro-Hamas views.
As Breitbart News has reported, Reps. Ogles and Tom Tiffany (R-WI) have introduced the “GAZA Act” to ban the Biden administration from importing Palestinians to the U.S. Last week, Sen. Steve Daines (R-MT), chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC), introduced the legislation in the Senate.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
Rubio: There Aren’t ‘Pro-Palestinian’ Protests, They’re ‘Pro-Hamas’ and Only Started After Hamas Killed Civilians
On Monday’s “Sean Hannity Show,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) stated that the “pro-Palestinian” demonstrations aren’t really pro-Palestinian and are really in favor of Hamas, because they only started after “Hamas came across and slaughtered a bunch of Jews in Israel, innocent people.”
Rubio said, “Well, Sean, I think it’s an unmasking of what’s happened in higher education in particular. Also, I think places like TikTok have become cesspools of this kind of misinformation and indoctrination. It’s actually brainwashing. It’s reflected in the polling, where Americans under a certain age, under 35, I think, or what have you, are amazingly pro-Palestinian — pro-Hamas in their views of what’s happening in the region. And these things don’t happen in a vacuum. It’s a constant bombardment of information, anti-colonial messaging, and all this other ridiculousness. That’s sort of made its way and this is what we’ve paid for. And I think the most shocking part about it is, you go out there and you see some of these people that stand for every liberal cause you can imagine…none of those rights exist in the places that they’re defending, so that’s number one. They’ll obviously say, we’re not pro-Hamas, we’re just pro-Palestinian. But none of these demonstrations were happening — think about it, what was the catalyst for these demonstrations? [It] was Hamas came across and slaughtered a bunch of Jews in Israel, innocent people. And that’s what this — and they didn’t start protesting once the bombardment started, they came out almost immediately as a counter-reaction. So, that’s very disturbing.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
Freed Israeli Says She ‘Went Though Hell’ in Hamas Terrorist Attack, Forcibly Moved to Gaza Captivity via ‘Spiderweb’ of Tunnels
Released hostage Yocheved Lifshitz, 85, said Tuesday she “went through hell” during her abduction by rampaging Hamas terrorists, being moved though a “spiderweb” of muddy tunnels before starting more than two weeks as a captive in Gaza.
AFP reports Lifshitz was a resident of Nir Oz kibbutz, one of the Israeli communities near the Gaza Strip which Hamas militants brutally attacked on October 7.
Some 180 of the kibbutz’s 400 residents were killed or abducted in the raid which left mass rape, torture and the slaughter of civilians in its wake.
Gunshots and blood stains are seen on a door and walls of a house where civilians were killed days earlier in an attack by Hamas militants on this kibbutz near the border with Gaza, on October 10, 2023 in Israel. (Alexi J. Rosenfeld/Getty Images)
Lifshitz is one of only four hostages to be released — and the first to speak publicly — of the more than 220 Israeli and foreign nationals believed held by Hamas.
“I went through hell, I didn’t think or know I’d get to this situation. They went on a rampage in our kibbutz, kidnapped me, lay me over a motorcycle… and sped off with me through the ploughed fields,” she said a day after her release.
WATCH: Protest in Tel Aviv by Families of Israeli Hostages Demanding Their Release
Joel B. Pollak / Breitbart NewsEn route to captivity, she says she was beaten with sticks, “not breaking my ribs” but “hurting me badly and making it hard for me to breathe.”
“They treated us well,” she told reporters at a Tel Aviv hospital, explaining a doctor visited her and fellow hostages every two to three days and provided medicines.
The terrorists removed her watch and jewelry and then forced her to walk through muddy fields before reaching a tunnel network, which she described as similar to “a spiderweb,” the AFP report sets out.
The Times of Israel recorded her thoughts on what happened next:
Once in captivity, Lifschitz says, she passed through a tunnel and arrived in a large hall where about 25 other hostages were gathered. (Some 220 hostages are believed to be held in Gaza in total.) “They told us they believe in the Quran and would not harm us, that they would give us the same conditions as they have in the tunnels,” she says of her captors.
After about 2-3 hours, she and about 4 other hostages from Kibbutz Nir Oz were taken into a separate room.
“A medic and a doctor came,” she says. They were put on mattresses. The doctor returned every couple of days, and the medic arranged for medicines. “The treatment towards us was good,” she says, describing how the medic treated another of the hostages who was injured. She says her captors made sure the conditions were sanitary. “They cleaned the toilets, not us,” she says. “They were afraid of contagion.”
Lifshitz described her captors as “very friendly” and “very courteous” people who held her with four other captives, AFP set out.
“They seemed ready for this, they prepared for a long time, they had everything that men and women needed, including shampoo,” she told journalists.
Members of the media surround Yocheved Lifshitz (C) alongside her daughter Sharone Lifschitz (L) during a press conference at Ichilov Hospital after she was released by Hamas last night, on October 24, 2023 in Tel Aviv, Israel. (Alexi J. Rosenfeld/Getty Images)
“We ate the same food they did — pitas with cream cheese, melted cheese, cucumbers. That was a meal for an entire day,” said Lifshitz.
The octogenarian was released along with fellow Nir Oz resident Nurit Cooper, 79, three days after an American woman and her daughter were freed.
MUSLIMS ARE GLOBAL TERRORIST. BEING NICEY- NICEY ISN'T GOING TO CHANGE THAT!
All of the major and most of the minor media are utterly without comprehension and have as usual defaulted to their prejudices and to repeating and amplifying the tsunami of propaganda generated by the murderers, their handlers, and the Israel- and Jew-haters of the fascist right and left.
THE KORAN
BIBLE OF THE MUSLIM TERRORIST:
“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.” AMIL IMANI
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2018/08/new-novel-blasphemes-fornicating-dog.html
Koran 2:191 "s lay 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, k ill 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".
Never Again: The Gates of Vienna Revisited
The murderous demonic sneak attack on Israel from Gaza on October 7 must be fully understood in the context of Islamic history, warfare and tactics. All of the major and most of the minor media are utterly without comprehension and have as usual defaulted to their prejudices and to repeating and amplifying the tsunami of propaganda generated by the murderers, their handlers, and the Israel- and Jew-haters of the fascist right and left.
Yes, this was an obscene, unspeakable sneak attack by barbarous hate-filled sub-humans, shouting prayers to their deity and displaying their murderous rampage via the 21st century internet. Raping and slaying their way through throngs of young innocents, the weak and aged, and even infants and angelic toddlers. Forcing parents to watch the murder of their children before killing them, too; binding whole families together and burning them alive in their homes. Bloody incongruity and savage insanity? Perhaps not.
The weak minds and ignorance of most modern folk are stunned by the horror and cruelty that was perpetrated and fall into easy explanations based on rational emotional responses. This must be the result of decades of anger because of cruel treatment by the Israelis. It’s perfectly understandable that people deprived of their land and dignity and under military occupation by jackbooted military thugs would explode this way, isn’t it?
Leave aside, for a moment, civilized people’s responsibility to behave with a degree of control and balance, even when very angry, and to direct vengeance only at the authors of their pain and suffering, and not at every opportune innocent bystander in their reach. There is a much darker and more sinister purpose to turning insane murderers loose to gain your victory.
Even the Hamas death squads and their masters know the warning of Admiral Yamamoto when he received word of the success of Japan’s sneak attack on Pearl Harbor: “I fear we may have awakened a sleeping giant. A military man cannot be proud of smiting a sleeping enemy.”
In the long history of warfare between Islam and Christendom (and nearly everyone else), savagery and murderous cruelty were often tools and not simply the result of hard-fought battles. We live in a soft and relatively pampered age, and most know nothing of the wonton murder of tens of thousands which regularly occurred with the sack of cities and towns all across the ancient world. When a city’s walls were breached, all possessions, including wives and children who survived, were taken as booty by the winners. Sometimes, all remaining inhabitants were murdered, and carcasses left to rot on the ground.
Tattoed fist reading "jihad" in Arabic
The Great Khan often achieved his ends by murdering everyone in a city, making a mountain of the corpses and warning adjacent cities that this would be their fate if they failed to surrender forthwith. This was very effective.
The purpose of wanton, bloodlust killing, breaking any and all civilized taboos, was done to challenge and intimidate your adversary, to break his will and resolve, to frighten his soldiers. During World War 2, in our island-hopping battles with the dug-in Japanese across the Pacific, if an American fighter was captured he might very well be strung out and tortured on the battlefield so his suffering and cries of pain could be heard by and demoralize his fellow soldiers.
Hamas has delivered a carefully crafted message to the Israelis and to the world. The people of the Middle East know it very well. Most recently, ISIS was the Muslim messenger, murdering, raping, torturing the non-Muslims or non-cooperating Muslims within their reach. Kurds, Christians, Yazidis, and dozens of other ethnic groups were told that they must submit to the rule of this restored Islamic Caliphate or they would be tortured and killed.
Today, what we quaintly refer to as antisemitism or hatred of Jews, plays a part in the violence, but as the great scholar of Islam, Bernard Lewis, instructed us, we are living through a “Clash of civilizations.” There are many positive values in Islamic history and civilization and many thorny negatives throughout Western history. Resolution here cannot come from a “zero sum” game.
What’s to be done? In the context of the Middle East, Israel has had an almost magical luster, defeating much larger enemies, continuing against great odds to develop a vibrant and creative society, and a robust economy. Over seven decades, Israel has shown an almost biblical success streak. This has made Israel the major insult to Muslim extremists and revanchists. Add to this that Mohammed himself had an angry run-in with the Jews of his time on his rise to power, and one that he never forgave.
Israel has been given a bloody nose. Its appearance as a champion has been badly damaged. Lowly Hamas has been able to ridicule and insult the great Zionist enterprise and may now lure it into a deadly confrontation which Hamas can use to inflame the Muslim world. Hezb’allah sits across the border, armed with enough rockets to kill and destroy many Israelis and much of its infrastructure. And the Syrians (the remnant still there) may be tempted to open another front in this war.
The United States under Biden is of only marginal utility, if that, in this moment. The two aircraft carrier battle groups that have been dispatched are not needed by Israel. Their only purpose seems to be to help Biden quiet the Jewish fundraising and support backbone of his party and to try to keep the Israelis from a long overdue elimination of Iran’s nuclear program and decapitation of the regime of Mullahs.
I believe that Israel must now eliminate Hamas, and they must do this without the loss of many soldiers made to engage in house-to-house battle. They know where the tunnels lie, where the outside air comes from, and where entrance and egress are hidden. Israel must close the tunnel city Hamas has created, killing virtually all the benighted souls therein. They should begin this process, by holding a prayer service for the dead, all of those, including the hostages (God bless them, this is the most difficult element) and the Hamas lunatics who will be entombed beneath the sands of Gaza.
Hezb’allah, has already been warned that Hell awaits them if they intervene. I believe that the Israelis should deploy several low yield nuclear weapons on a hair trigger, to be used the moment that any rocket volley from Lebanon is initiated. Terrible, but it must be done, or a major portion of Israel will be laid waste and there will be a dreadful civilian death toll.
Lastly, Israel must, if it has not already planned this to the last detail, be ready, on its own schedule to destroy Iran’s nuclear program and leadership. This may also require unconventional weapons.
Israel must remember that “Never Again” means, recognizing that you are living amongst primitive savages who play by the rules of the Old Testament. You must answer the insult and prevent the ridicule. Bin Laden said, “The people want to follow the strong horse.” You must be the strong horse to shock the world into attention and remind all of us that the Lord will smile upon those who treat His people with love and respect, but Woe to those who forget His Covenant.
Patricia Henry is the pen name of a veteran California political activist.
Photo credit: Jaehad Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.
Islamic Jew-Hatred, Dhimmitude and the Doctrine of Sacred Space
For certain entities, the existence of Israel - and Jews - is intolerable.
In
the wake of the savage HAMAS attack against Israel on the morning of 7
October 2023, many are waking up to its genocidal intent against Jews.
Understandably, there are memories of pogroms past, of the horrific toll
of the Holocaust, and references to “Nazis” and the “Einsatzgruppen”.
This
time, though, as Israel prepares to do what must be done to wipe out
the HAMAS presence in Gaza, we need to understand exactly who and what
it is: an Islamic terror group, dedicated to the destruction of the
Jewish State of Israel and the killing of as many Jews as possible. We
might start with the HAMAS Covenant,
published in 1988, the year that HAMAS was formally established. Its
opening lines tell us exactly who HAMAS is and why it exists:
“Israel
will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it,
just as it obliterated others before it” (The Martyr, Imam Hassan
al Banna, of blessed memory).
We’ll
note here that this quote is from Hassan al-Banna, the 1928 founder of
the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. And here is the motto of the Muslim
Brotherhood:
‘Allah
is our objective; the Prophet is our leader; the Quran is our law;
Jihad is our way; dying in the way of Allah is our highest aspiration.’
Why
this fanatical hatred? We find the answer in the Qur’an, in the Islamic
doctrine of Sacred Space, and the laws of dhimmitude. The Qur’an,
believed by Muslims to be the literal word of Allah (the Arabic word for
“God”), lays the foundation for HAMAS’ visceral Jew-hatred.
Those
who reject (Truth) among the People of the Book [Christians and
Jews]…will be in Hell-fire…They are the worst of creatures. (Q 98:6)
But when the forbidden months are past, then fight and kill the infidels wherever ye find them… (Q 9:5)
Curses were pronounced on those among the Children of Israel who rejected Faith [Islam]…(Q 5:78)
The HAMAS Covenant also includes this quote from the hadith collection of Sahih Muslim:
Judgment
Day will not come until you fight the Jews and kill them. The Jews will
hide behind stones and trees, and the stones and trees will call: Oh,
Muslim, oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill
him…
Then
there is the historical record, which informs us of the Islamic
institution of dhimmitude and the doctrine of Sacred Space. As the
armies of Islam overran formerly Christian and Jewish lands in the 7th century, there were too many to kill or convert; and so, beginning with the 638 CE Pact of Umar (the 2nd Caliph),
the institution of the Ahl al-Dhimma was established to subjugate
Christians and Jews to a rigid set of rules that would relegate them to a
legally enforced inferior status intended to be so onerous as to compel
them to convert to Islam.
Along
with dhimmitude, the Muslim conquests developed a concept known as
“Sacred Space”. That is, the Dar al-Islam (House of Islam) must conquer
all the Dar al-Harb (House of War) because according to Islam, the
entire world belongs to Islam and must be conquered and subjugated to
it. Once conquered and/or occupied, such land is waqf, forever endowed
to Muslims by Allah. Any such waqf, if ever lost to Islam, must be
fought for by jihad until it is re-conquered.
As
we look at the modern-day Jewish State of Israel, we can see that the
Jewish people not only are no longer dhimmis but have established a
powerful country in their ancestral homeland. These remarkable
accomplishments are intolerable to the forces of jihad and help to
explain why HAMAS and other Islamic terror groups like it have been so
intent upon wiping Israel from the face of the map.
It’s Islam, Stupid
It’s not about Israel, colonialism, globalism or capitalism; it’s about Islam.
|
[Make sure to read Daniel Greenfield’s contributions in Jamie Glazov’s new book: Barack Obama’s True Legacy: How He Transformed America.]
Beslan. Mumbai. Paris. Manchester. New York City. Nairobi. Luxor. Sulu. Kibbutz Be’eri.
186
children murdered in a school in Beslan. Dozens of children taken
hostage from a Catholic school in the Philippines. Two teachers were
beheaded, but not the girls. “We do not kill women. We will just enslave
them,” the Jihadists promised. 8-year-olds gunned down in the Westgate
Mall in Nairobi. The terrorists asked their victims to name Mohammed’s
mother to tell apart the non-Muslims from the Muslims. In Luxor, Egypt,
the terrorists danced, sang and killed and mutilated the foreign
tourists. They “took all the young women, the girls, and disappeared
with them. I don’t know where they went with the women, but they hurt
them. We could hear screams of pain.” Among the dead was Shaunnah
Turner, a 5-year-old British girl.
Pregnant
women and children murdered in Israel baffle the world. They seem
implausible because each time they happen, we forget. A few days of
horror pass and we move on.
When
a Muslim terrorist set off a bomb in Manchester at a concert full of
children and teens, there was shock and outrage. Nails were pulled out
of children’s faces.
“This
attack stands out for its appalling, sickening cowardice, deliberately
targeting innocent, defenceless children and young people,” then Prime
Minister Theresa May fumed.
That was 6 years ago. It might have been an eternity.
Our
governments, talking heads and thought leaders find excuses for the
killers. The Manchester Arena bomber was angry about the Syrian Civil
War so he killed some British kids. Abu Sayyaf, ‘Bearers of the Sword’,
keeps attacking Christian schools in the Philippines because it isn’t
allowed to form its own state. The Jihadis who murdered children in
Beslan were furious about Chechnya, in Nairobi, they were upset about
Somalia, and in Luxor about the ban on the Muslim Brotherhood. In
Israel, Hamas murdered children because the border wall makes their
terror entity into an “open air prison” which prevents them from killing
Israeli children.
We’re
told not to look at the pattern. It’s Islamophobic. Instead we must
take each attack not as a manifestation of Islam, but of local issues or
a response to oppression. When Muslims gang raped and sawed in half a
Hindu schoolteacher in Kashmir, it was about India’s treatment of
Muslims. And when they rampaged through the Bataclan theater in Paris,
killing everyone within reach, they were protesting France’s treatment
of ISIS. And when they rape a woman at a concert in Israel by the bodies
of her murdered friends, they’re protesting for Gaza.
But in 1929, Muslim mobs in the Jewish city of Safed burst into an orphanage and “smashed the children’s heads and cut off their hands.” During the Hebron Massacre that same year, a British policeman described how,
“on hearing screams in a room I went up a sort of tunnel passage and
saw an Arab in the act of cutting off a child’s head with a sword. He
had already hit him and was having another cut, but on seeing me he
tried to aim the stroke at me, but missed; he was practically on the
muzzle of my rifle. I shot him low in the groin.”
Israel had not even come into existence yet. What were Muslims protesting then: Jews?
During
the first siege of Vienna in 1529, when the invading Muslim horde
decided that “children were cut out of their mothers’ wombs and stuck on
pikes”, was that a protest against colonialism or capitalism? When a
Muslim chronicle boasted that during the genocide against the Sikhs in
the 18th century, “the shrieks of the women captives who were being
raped, deafened the ears of the people”, was this a response to
globalism or Zionism? Or was this just Islam.
Everything
Hamas did during the bloody High Holy Days massacres has been done by
Muslims throughout history and is still being practiced today. There is
nothing new here whatsoever. Medieval barbarism never went away because
Islam kept those grisly practices alive. It endures side by side with
the modern world of smartphones, electric cars and AI because its worst
crimes are an object of religious law and faith.
A
Yazidi girl abducted by the Islamic State when she was only 12
described how the Jihadist who raped her explained to her that because
she “practiced a religion other than Islam, the Quran not only gave him
the right to rape her — it condoned and encouraged it”. He “bound her
hands and gagged her. Then he knelt beside the bed and prostrated
himself in prayer before getting on top of her. When it was over, he
knelt to pray again”. The girl begged him to stop, but he “said that by
raping me, he is drawing closer to Allah.”
This is Islam.
It’s
not about Israel, India, Russia, America, England, France, the
Philippines or any of the numerous other countries that have been marked
by Islamic terrorism. It’s not about “oppression”, “colonialism”,
“settlers”, “cartoons” or a lack of “integration”. None of the excuses
ever hold up or explain the pattern that consistently and indelibly
marks Islamic violence.
Hamas
called its assault, ‘Al-Aqsa Flood’, a reference to the colonial mosque
planted by Islamic conquerors in Jerusalem on top of the holiest place
in Judaism, site of the former Temple. This wasn’t about “resistance”,
Gaza being an “open air concentration camp” (with luxurious hotels,
restaurants and mansions) or any of the excuses that the media has
thrown at us.
It
was a religious war. That’s why Hamas scheduled its attack on the
Sabbath and on Simchat Torah, the final day of the High Holy Days and
the most joyous day in Judaism. Just as the Yom Kippur War had been
scheduled for the holiest day in Judaism. And the worst previous Hamas
terrorist attack had been the bombing of a Passover seder in Netanya
which killed 30 and wounded 140.
In
Nigeria, Boko Haram has set off bombs in churches on Christmas. In
2015, a Muslim couple opened fire at a workplace Christmas party in San
Bernardino, California, while a year later a Muslim terrorist drove
through a Christmas market in Berlin and a 12-year-old Muslim boy tried
to detonate a nail bomb at another Christmas market in Germany.
In India, Muslim terrorists set off bombs on
the Hindu festival of Diwali. Massacring Christians, Jews and Hindus on
their religious holidays is not a political statement: it’s a religious
one.
Islamic
terrorism is not an American problem, a British problem, a French
problem, a Russian problem, a Chinese problem or an Israeli problem.
It’s an Islamic problem. The only way we will ever triumph against it is
to stop treating it as someone else’s problem. If only India gave up
Kashmir, Israel gave up more of the West Bank, if America stopped being
involved in the Middle East, if France hadn’t banned the hijab and the
Netherlands hadn’t allowed cartoons of Mohammed, there would be no
Islamic terrorism are the kinds of lies that are killing us.
We are not responsible for Islamic terrorism. None of us. Only Islam is responsible.
Islamic
violence is over 1,000 years old. It predates most modern countries and
it is not caused by anything we do. The only thing we are guilty of is
our failure to smash the Jihad.
Nothing
that we or anyone else does will appease the terrorists. Islam is not
Northern Ireland: peace negotiations have never accomplished and will
never accomplish anything. It cannot be reasoned or co-existed with. Its
violence is a religious duty written into its scripture and its laws,
its atrocities, murder, torture, mutilation and rape, are acts of sacred
religious devotion. The Islamic kingdom of heaven can only be achieved
when the entire world submits to Islam.
The
horrors we have seen in the Jewish communities near Gaza are the same
ones that Islam has perpetrated across Africa, Asia, Europe and America.
In Nigeria, Boko Haram has kidnapped over 1,000 children from Christian
schools. In the Philippines, Muslims burst into a school and took
children hostage. In Algeria, they beheaded Trappist monks while in
Thailand, they beheaded Buddhist monks. In Boston, they blew the legs
off marathon runners while in France they drove a truck through a crowd
on Bastille Day until the wheel well filled up with body parts.
This is grotesque, hideous, horrific and unimaginable. This is Islam.
We
look away because we can’t bear it. When the attacks happen somewhere
else, we pretend that it has nothing to do with us. And when it happens
to us, then we let ourselves be persuaded that if we just avoided doing
anything to upset the Muslims, like allying with the peoples and
countries they’re trying to exterminate, drawing cartoons or mishandling
korans, we’ll be fine.
It’s not a problem of “those people fighting over there and bringing their problems here.”
Islam
is not just at war with us or with them, but with the entire world. If
you are not a Muslim or the right kind of Muslim, then you are in a war
whether you like it or not. You can be a peace activist and march with a
‘Queers for Palestine’ banner. You can welcome in migrants or blame the
whole thing on conspiracy theories, but it still won’t matter. They
will kill you if they can.
This is not about politics: it’s a thousand plus year crusade to subjugate all of mankind.
To
win, we have to stop blaming ourselves, stop treating Islamic terrorism
as someone else’s problem and stop pretending that it goes away when
it’s not in the headlines. To win, we have to stand together and stop
letting the enemies of mankind and their useful idiots divide us up. To
win we have to recognize that we either fight or die. If we’re not faced
with that choice right now, we will be, and if not us, then our
children and grandchildren will one day come up against it.
We
must reject terms like “senseless violence” because there is nothing
senseless about it. Our enemies know who they are and what they want. We
refuse to understand who they are. The only thing truly standing
between us and victory are the lies that we tell ourselves. In moments
of truth, the lies temporarily fall away and we see the enemy revealed
for what it is.
Through
a rain of paper and ash on a September in New York City, nails driven
into the faces of children in Manchester and the mutilated legs of
runners in Boston, the bloodied half-naked children of Beslan and the
kidnapped children of kibbutzim in Israel, we glimpse the truth.
Hold
on to that truth. We are not weak, we have been weakened by lies. And
the greatest of those lies is that this endless catalog of crimes to
which a new one is added every few weeks is about anything but Islam. It
is about Islam. It has been about Islam for over 1,000 years.
Instead
of “regional dispute”, say Islam. Instead of “cycle of violence”, say
Islam. Instead of militants, say Islam. Instead of terrorists, say
Islam. Instead of war, say Islam.
One little word explains all of this. One little world has led to an endless world of horror.
Our only hope for victory begins with ending the lies and telling the truth.
Daniel Greenfield
Daniel
Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom
Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the
radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
Reader Interactions
Comments
Robert Spencer's 'The Critical Qur'an'
A must-read, essential book.
[Robert Spencer's new book, The Critical Qur'an, will be out May 3. Preorder now: HERE.]
If I were queen, I would reward every reader who completed Robert Spencer's new book, The Critical Qur'an: Explained from Key Islamic Commentaries and Contemporary Historical Research. The Critical Qur'an is
an essential book that every thinking person would benefit
from reading. About one in four humans is a Muslim. Given child
marriage, polygyny, and women's low status, Muslims have high fertility rates and the percentage of the world's population that is Muslim is predicted to increase till Islam is the world's majority religion in 2075.
While it is true that the Qur'an is often not read or understand by
most Muslims, Muslims do revere the Qur'an. Muslims may have little idea
what the book contains, but they are ready to kill over it. When, in
2005, Newsweek circulated false rumors that Americans were flushing Qur'ans down toilets –
which is of course impossible – at least seventeen people were killed
in ensuing violence and "a council of more than 300 mullahs …threatened
to declare holy war."
In
the past, reading the Qur'an was difficult. Some translations used
pseudo-King-James English, for example archaic forms like "thee, thou,
thine," in an attempt to make the Qur'an sound Biblical, and, therefore,
holy. Some translations attempt to paper over the Qur'an's lack of
clarity by adding parenthetical fixes. For example, Qur'an
2:1 begins "Alif Lam Meem." No one knows what this means. One translation tries
to "help" the reader with a parenthetical explanation: "Alif-Lam-Mim.
[These letters are one of the miracles of the Quran and none but Allah
(Alone) knows their meanings]." The reader is left to wonder
how the incoherent equals the miraculous. Translators try to draw a
smiley face over darker Qur'anic passages. "Jihad," which clearly means
actual warfare to claim territory, booty, corpses, and slaves for Allah,
is translated as "struggle." Spencer's new translation avoids these
pitfalls, and, on the sentence level, it is easy to read.
Many
make assumptions about the Qur'an based on false comparisons to the
Bible. The works are different in important ways. The King James Bible
contains 783,137 words in 66 books. These books were composed over the
course of hundreds of years in three different languages, Hebrew,
Aramaic, and Greek. Christians and Jews agree that their scriptures were
not actually written by God himself, but by roughly forty
different human authors. The genres of Biblical books include
hymns,letters, proverbs, prophecy, erotica, history, allegory,
andreportage. Jews and Christians have long engaged in exegesis of their
sacred texts – that is, Jews and Christians debate what Bible passages
mean and how they should be applied. Jews and Christians respect hard
copies of their scriptures, but they do not worship these hard copies,
nor do most attribute supernatural attributes to them. To do so would be
idolatry.
The
Qur'an contains c. 77,430 words, making it less than one tenth the
length of the Bible. Islam teaches that the Qur'an was never written by
anyone. It is uncreated. Like God himself, the Qur'an has always
existed and will always exist. There are numerous rules for handling the
Qur'an. Kufar – Non-Muslims – should never touch the Qur'an in Arabic,
but may touch "interpretations" in other languages. One must
say "interpretation" because the Qur'an exists only in Arabic, the
language of Allah. Muslims must perform ablutions before reading the
Qur'an. The Qur'an must be stored in a specially designated place, and
never be put on the floor or taken into a bathroom.
To say that the Qur'an was created, as opposed to eternally existing, is a death penalty offense. Even
Western scholars have hesitated to explore the Qur'an's origins. For
example, scholar Christoph Luxenberg must hide behind a pseudonym to
protect his life. The Qur'an "leaves no room for dispute";
see also Qur'an 33:36. Indeed, the Qur'an suggests that even a second
of doubt will lead to an eternity in hell (e.g. 49:15) . Thus, rather
than debating or discussing the meaning of the Qur'an, Islam places
emphasis on memorization. A Muslim once said to Robert Spencer that he
had memorized the entire Qur'an, and one day he was going to
find out what it says. The hafiz, or Qur'an memorizer, did not speak
Arabic, and had no idea of the meaning of the sounds he had memorized.
Mohammed Hijab, an Islamic apologist, demonstrated Muslim beliefs about the magic powers of the Qur'an in a November 10, 2021, YouTube discussion with
Dr. Jordan Peterson. Hijab began to recite in Arabic, in the voice
prescribed for reading the Qur'an. That prescribed voice is a singsong,
nasal drone, with drawn out vowels. Peterson asked what Hijab's point
was. Why recite Arabic to me, a non-Arabic speaker? Hijab said, "We
believe that the Qur'an has divine qualities itself. We believe it is a
physical cure." Just exposing Peterson to the sounds of the Qur'an might
cause Peterson to convert to Islam. Ibn Kathir, an important exegete,
claimed that recitation of Sura 2 causes Satan to fart. It can be argued that Islam treats the Qur'an as if it were a "divine, conscious agent."
Muslim
history claims that Islam was founded by an orphaned, illiterate,
seventh-century Meccan caravan driver named Muhammad who was visited by
the angel Jibril (from the Biblical Gabriel) who ordered him to recite.
Muhammad's followers wrote down his recitations and compiled them into
the Qur'an. Textual criticism suggests that the Qur'an is a compilation of heavily edited, pre-existing material. Recent scholarship theorizes that,
during the Arab Conquest, conquerors decided that their new, Arab
empire, no less than the Christian Byzantine and Zoroastrian Persian
empires, required a state religion. These Arab conquerors took bits and
pieces of Jewish,Christian, Zoroastrian and Pagan material and compiled
them into the Qur'an.
Christianity's
early centuries were rocked by Christological debates. These debates
asked, "What was the nature of Jesus?"Some said Jesus was human;
others said he was divine; still others argued that Jesus was some
combination of human and divine. Jesus' proposed divinity troubled many.
They understood the divinity of Jesus as an assault
on Judaism's monotheism. Some were offended by Jesus's divinity for a
different reason. If Jesus was both fully divine and fully human, then
God urinated and defecated. These bodily functions were seen as beneath a
divinity.
Islam's
emphasis on Jesus being merely a man, not a divinity, may testify
to the influence of nontrinitarian Christianity on the formulation of
Islam. The shahada is the Islamic confession of faith. "There is no god
but Allah and Muhammad is the messenger of God." Merely stating the
shahada makes one a Muslim, yet it may be a buried statement of
nontrinitarian Christian creeds. "There is not God but Allah" is a
rejection of Jesus' divinity and the trinity. According to new
theories, "Muhammad is the messenger of God" may be a reference to
Jesus. "Muhammad" is translated as "the praised one" and "the messenger
of God" is a denial of Jesus' divinity. "The praised one" was but a
messenger, not God himself. The nontrinitarian Christians' discomfort at
the thought of God urinating or defecating is reflected in al-Wahidi's commentary on the Qur'an. "Our
Lord does not eat or drink nor has He any need to relieve Himself" but
Jesus "was fed like any other child, and then he ate and drank and
relieved himself … Then how could he be the son of Allah?"
The
Old Testament recounts the history of the creation of the world and
God's choosing the Jewish people as his own, and leading them out of
slavery in Egypt. The New Testament offers Jesus' biography, a short
history of the early church, and the letters of early
Christians. No clear history of what is conventionally thought of as the
early days of Islam is to be found in the Qur'an itself. There's no
caravan driver, no Mecca, no new religious revelation, and the
word "Muhammad" is mentioned only four times, and it is not clear that
the word refers to a person or if it means, only, "praised one." Many argue that early references to Muhammad may in fact be references to Jesus.
Muslims
express exaggerated praise for the Qur'an. For example,
Ibn Kathir said, "The Arabic language is the most eloquent, plain, deep
and expressive of the meanings that might arise in one's mind.
Therefore, the most honorable Book, was revealed in the most honorable
language, to the most honorable Prophet and Messenger, delivered by the
most honorable angel, in the most honorable land on earth, and its
revelation started during the most honorable month of the year, Ramadan.
Therefore, the Qur'an is perfect in every respect."
In
fact, though, the Qur'an is possibly the world's worst-written
influential book. Muslims will of course object to this assessment.
Their first objection: only an Islamophobe would call the Qur'an badly
written. My reply: No, I'm happy to acknowledge the excellence of many
Islamic cultural products, for example, the Taj Mahal, calligraphy,
Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan's singing, and Muslim Arab folktales. Second
objection: The Qur'an is the product of an oral culture. This objection
lacks merit. Most people in the world have been illiterate. The Bible
is the product of a population where most people could not read or
write. Acknowledged masterpieces of world literature, including the
Iliad, the Bhagavad Gita, and Zen Koans all emerged from predominantly
oral cultures. One Thousand and One Nights, an Arabic-language
collection of previously oral folklore, has entranced audiences around
the world. Third objection: translations cannot capture
the fine qualities of the Arabic Qur'an. I have never read The Iliad in
Greek, the Vedas in Sanskrit, Psalm 23 in Hebrew, or Arabic folktales in
Arabic, nor do I need to. The excellence and power of these works
transcends translation. For those questioning the quality of
Robert Spencer's new Qur'an translation, visit this site.
You can find any Qur'an verse as translated by six different
translators. Study that website all you might; you will not find a
translation that can remedy the Qur'an's many problems.
What's
wrong with the Qur'an? The Qur'an uses pronouns
like "he," "we," and "they," but the Qur'an offers few clues as to whom
is meant by these pronouns. The Qur'an hops from topic to topic, not
just paragraph by paragraph, but within the same sentence, for example
in 4:29: "Do not squander your wealth among yourselves in vanity, except
in a trade by mutual consent, and do not kill yourselves." After
telling men that they are superior to women and that men should beat
their wives (4:34), the Qur'an offers, in 4:36, a sentence fragment,
that is a sentence with a subject but no verb. "Kindness to parents." Other translators rescue
this fragment by adding the missing verb, e.g.,"Show kindness to
parents" or "Do good to parents." Spencer makes so such rescue
effort. Qur'an 6:143 is a similar sentence fragment. It reads, "Eight
pairs two of the sheep and two of the goats." There is no verb, and,
therefore, no sense. Another sentence fragment, this one also missing a
verb: "Those who chose unbelievers for their friends instead of
believers." Another fragment, 74:30, reads "Above it are
nineteen." Above what are nineteen what, exactly? There are more than a
few verses that leave the reader scratching her head, e.g., "Would one
of you love to eat the flesh of his dead brother?" 49:12, "We used to
wade with waders" 74:45, and "Color from Allah, and who is better than
Allah at coloring?" 2:138.
Scholar Gerd Puin estimates that twenty percent of
the Qur'an is unclear to anyone. This lack of clarity is thanks in part
to words, often of non-Arabic
derivation, like "jibt," "sijill," "ghislin,""abb," "as-sakhkhah," "sijjin," "illiyyin," "tasnim," "saqar," and
many others, whose meanings are uncertain. The full text of a
scholarly, 1938 book entitled "The Foreign Vocabulary of the Qur'an" can
be found here. The
Qur'an acknowledges its own lack of clarity in 3:7, in which Allah
states that he alone knows the meaning of some verses. Which verses? He
never says. Readers can only guess which verses they are understanding
correctly and which verses whose meaning is beyond their grasp.
The
books of the Bible are arranged more or less chronologically, with some
thematic arrangement, and events in those books are also arranged
chronologically. For example in Luke's Gospel, Jesus is first born, then
he preaches and heals, then he is crucified, then he rises from the
dead. The Qur'an is not arranged chronologically. With the exception of
the very short first chapter, the Qur'an's chapters are arranged from
longest to shortest. This bizarre choice confounds the reader seeking
coherence. Given that chapter length appears entirely arbitrary – the
chapters contain more or less the same material, repeated endlessly –
why some chapters are long and others are short escapes the reader.
Chapter titles do not relate to the theme of the chapter. One of the
Qur'an's most notorious verses, "Kill them wherever you find them" is
found in the chapter entitled "Women." In any case, the phrase is
repeated three times in the Qur'an. Sura 9, perhaps the most
bloodthirsty chapter, is titled "Repentance."
That
a Qur'an chapter is titled "Women" should not mislead the reader. Women
are afterthoughts; they exists as the possessions of men. They appear
as child brides, as sex slaves, as Heavenly whores, and as war
captives. In verse 43 of "Women," females are identified as a source of
pollution. Men should not pray if they have been sick, if they have
urinated or defecated, or if they have had contact with a woman. After
such contamination, men must cleanse themselves, possibly by rubbing
their face and hands with dirt (a practice called Tayammum). Women are
inferior to me n (2:282, 2:228, 4:34, 4:11). The Qur'an instructs men on
how to handle divorce from pre-pubescent wives with whom they have had
sexual intercourse. Females are a "field"that men should enter however
they wish. There are dozens of named male characters, but only one named
female character: Mary. Compare the Qur'an's lack of named female
characters with the indelible females of the Bible, women who changed
the course of Jewish and Christian history: Eve, Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel
and Leah, Rahab, Deborah, Judith, Ruth, Esther, Elizabeth, Mary
Magdalene, the sisters Martha and Mary, Junia, Priscilla, Anna the
Prophetess, etc.
The Qur'an
chapter entitled "Mary" is, as is the case with other chapter titles,
not closely related to Mary. In a commentary on this chapter, Mary is
given voice to mourn that she is not "an owned slave woman" – she is
unfortunate because she is not some man's property. The Qur'an confuses
Mary, mother of Jesus, with Miriam, sister of Moses, who lived over a
thousand years before Jesus' mother. The Qur'an tells Mary, "Do not
grieve. Your lord has placed a stream beneath you." It's not clear how
this stream placement should cheer Mary up.
The Qur'an is repetitious. Repetition is frequently encountered in oral lore. See the Kumulipo, a Hawaiian creation chant.
"Born was Kumulipo in the night, a male
Born was Po'ele in the night, a female
Born was the coral polyp, born was the coral, came forth
Born was the grub that digs and heaps up the earth, came forth…"
This
poetic repetition echoes creation itself; the multiplicity of
lines with parallel construction reflects the abundance of creatures the
chant catalogues, and also their place in an orderly universe.
Repetition makes this important lore easy to remember and its has a
hypnotic effect on the listener.
The
Qur'an makes no such use of repetition. Rather, as Spencer's footnotes
show, the Qur'an includes repetitive, garbledf ragments – not
coherent retellings – of Jewish and Christian scriptural and folkloric
material, and Zoroastrian and Pagan elements. The Qur'an
offers repeated, fragmented mentions of the Exodus story from the Bible,
and extra-biblical material like a folktale of Jesus making clay birds
fly. A sixth-century Christian legend, The Seven Sleepers of Ephesus,
tells of seven men who retreated to a cave during Roman persecution. The
men awoke two hundred years later and were surprised to find that
Christianity was now the empire's official religion. The Qur'an's
telling of this tale, found in 18:9-26,
is so thoroughly garbled that a reader with no previous knowledge of
the Christian source would not have any idea what these verses allude
to. Don Richardson, author of "Secrets of the Koran,"estimates that if all repetitions were removed, the Qur'an would be forty percent of its current size.
God's rebuke of David, recounted in 2 Samuel 12, is
one of the most moving, terrifying passages in the Bible. I can hardly
think of it without crying. Through the prophet Nathan, God rebukes
David for murdering Uriah, the husband of Bathsheba, a woman David
lusted after. The Qur'an takes this terrifically moving, cinematic
passage and flubs it so badly in the retelling that it is a literary
crime (38:21-25).
Qur'an
4:157 states that Jesus did not die on the cross. Muslims believe that
Allah placed either a dummy or a Jesus lookalike on the cross. Spencer's
footnotes identify this belief as an appropriation from a third
century Gnostic text, "Second Treatise of the Great Seth." Gnostics were
nontrinitarian Christians. As Spencer writes, they held an "abhorrence
of the material world and the flesh, which led to their denying
altogether the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation." Jesus was too
supernatural to suffer death on the cross.
Ex-Muslim Ridvan Aydemir insists
that Qur'an 4:157 deals a devastating blow to the Qur'an's
integrity. Aydemir argues that, yes, the Gnostics had a reason, that was
consistent with their own belief system, to tell a story in
which Jesus did not die on the cross. Those compiling the Qur'an
borrowed that passage from a Gnostic document, but could not borrow the
logic behind the passage. The Jesus of the Qur'an is not, as was the
Gnostic Jesus, a supernatural creature, too rarefied to be crucified.
The Jesus of the Qur'an is simply a human being, comparable to any other
mortal. Aydemir quotes Qur'an passages that mention other prophets
being killed; similarly, Jesus, a mere prophet, could have been killed.
The Qur'an's logic, that prophets are killed and that Jesus is merely a
prophet, as human as anyone else, does not support Jesus' not being
killed on the cross. Aydemir points out that the Qur'an borrows other
belief system's narratives without borrowing the logic informing those
narratives.
The
Qur'an has a limited number of themes that it hits upon with a thudding
monotony. Those themes include the following. Allah is all powerful.
Allah saves and damns arbitrarily. Allah created some people just to
send them to hell fire. Muslims must not pray for these damned souls or
feel sad for them. Compare this to the Bible, which records that God
wants all to be saved (1 Timothy 2:4, 2 Peter 3:9, Ezekiel 18:23) If
Muslims don't please Allah, Allah can kill them all and create a new
group of people who will please him. In a footnote, Spencer points out
that Allah says that he "loves" only those who fight for him in jihad,
and he does not love unbelievers. Allah has a very thin skin and grouses
about humans who "mock" and "ridicule" his "warners." Allah promises
sadistic tortures to scoffers. He will burn off their skins and replace
those skins with new skins so that they can be burned off again "so that
they may taste the torment" 4:56 He will turn white faces
black. Kufar in Hell will consume boiling water, pus, and a fruit made
of devils' heads. This fruit will boil in their bellies. "As for those
who disbelieve, garments of fire will be cut out for them, boiling fluid
will be poured down on their heads, By which what is in their bellies,
and their skins too, will be melted, And for them are hooked rods of
iron" (22:19-21). The Qur'an's narrator says that those who disagree
with him should hang themselves (22:15). Allah promises an afterlife of
pleasant gardens, fruits, and silk clothing to Muslim men.Heavenly
beings with large, firm – "not sagging" – breasts will service Muslim men.
The
Qur'an is ferociously hostile to non-Muslims. The Qur'an
directs special fury at Christians and Jews. The very first chapter
condemns Jews as having angered God, and Christians as having gone
astray. Muslims who pray the full allotment of daily prayers repeat this
condemnation of Christians and Jews seventeen times daily. Muslims are
as superior to Christians and Jews as human beings are to
animals (3:110, 98:6). Jews are so irredeemable that Allah turned them
into apes and pigs. In 2:54, Moses tells sinning Jews to kill
themselves; Ibn Kathir, a commentator, reports that 70,000 Jews lost
their lives as a result of Moses' suicide command.
The
Qur'an repeatedly emphasizes that one must not worship anyone but
Allah. This point is hammered home in various ways. Don't assign a
partner to Allah. Don't pray to anyone but Allah. Don't imply that Allah
needs "helpers." All of these phrasings have one target: Christians,
and their belief in the Trinity. The Qur'an misunderstands the Trinity,
suggesting that Christians worship God the Father, Jesus, and Mary. This
is not the Trinity. The Qur'an also drastically misunderstands the
purpose of the incarnation. To say that Allah has a son is a "monstrous
thing" (19:89) because to do so is to imply that Allah has some weakness
or need and his son is a "helper." The incarnation of God as a human
being was not so that Allah would have a "helper." Rather, the purpose
of the incarnation is expressed succinctly in John 3:16, "For God so
loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever
believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life."
No
other world scripture is so obsessed with condemnation of two other
belief systems, in this case, Judaism and Christianity. Without its
condemnations of Jews and Christians, the Qur'an would not be a
book-length work, but a pamphlet, .
Jihad
is another main theme of the Qur'an. The Qur'an makes abundantly clear
that jihad is warfare for the sake of expanding Islam's worldly power,
not an interior struggle to, say, remain on a diet, a message promoted
by a 2013 CAIR public relationscampaign. The
Qur'an says, multiple times, that believers should strike the necks
of kufar, kill them wherever the Muslims find them, etc. As if these
passages were not grisly enough, a Qur'an commentator offers, "Strike
them on their foreheads to tear them apart and over the necks to cut
them off, and cut off their limbs, hands and feet." Other commentators are even more bloodthirsty, demanding that Muslims smite the very toes of the kufar.
Muslims
should suspect even their wives and their children of being traitors to
Allah (64:14). "Among your wives and your children there are enemies
for you, therefore beware of them. Your wealth and your children are
only a temptation, while with Allah is an immense reward." Other verses
warn the believer against ties with parents and children who are not
Muslims (9:23-24). Muslims are warned not to take Jews or Christians as
friends (3:118, 5:51). Astute readers will, of course, recognize in
these warnings the rules set down by cults, who demand that members
sever ties with those not members of the cult.
The
Qur'an is as remarkable for what it lacks as for what it contains. The
Qur'an does not offer that new, world-changing expression of
a timeless, soul-deep truth. There is nothing in the Qur'an that
compares to the Jewish Ten Commandments, or tzelem Elohim, a loving God
who creates humanity in his own image; the Christian Sermon on the
Mount; the Hindu Kalidasa's Exhortation of the Dawn; Buddhism's Four
Noble Truths; or the Greek Protagoras' observation that "Man is the
measure of all things."
In a 2006 lecture at
Regensburg University, Pope Benedict quoted a Byzantine emperor, Manuel
II Paleologos. "Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and
there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to
spread by the sword the faith he preached." Mohammad himself is said to
have said something similar. In hadiths,
Mohammad announced that he was "superior" to other prophets because
he alone was made "victorious with terror" and the earth's treasures
were made lawful to him; in other words, he could violate the most
primordial taboos. He could kill, he could steal, and he could rape
other men's wives.
Spencer's
new "Critical Qur'an" doesn't offer only an accurate and accessible
translation. It offers commentary by canonical Islamic
experts, including Ibn Kathir,
a fourteenth century exegete, and Syed Abul Ala Maududi, a
twentieth-century author. Thus, the reader knows not just what the
Qur'an says, but how influential Muslims understand it. Spencer's
footnotes also draw the reader's attention to variations in the Qur'an.
These variations are of a utmost importance, as it is a tenet of Islam
that the Qur'an is a perfect, eternal, unchanging and unchanged document
that exists in Heaven. Variations in the text give the lie to this
tenet.
Spencer's footnotes
relate Qur'anic passages to taqiyya; to Islam's intellectual
stasis; to suicide bombing; to Muslims'resistance to Israel's right to
exist; to why it is morally acceptable for Muslim men to harass
non-Muslim women; to why it takes four Muslim male witnesses to prove a
rape case; and to treatment of dhimmis, that is, non-Muslims who live in
Muslim states, and who must be economically fleeced and publicly
humiliated. As Spencer points out, Qur'an verses, for
example 10:94, record that the scriptures of Jews and Christians in the
seventh century were authentically divine products. And yet Muslims
today insist that Jews and Christians "corrupted"their scriptures. The
Qur'an contradicts current Muslim belief about Jewish and Christian
scripture. David Wood describes this as the "Islamic Dilemma."
Spencer's
footnotes describe Islamic traditions designed to justify changes in
the Qur'an, a book that Islam teaches is perfect, unchanging, and
unchangeable. Again, one current theory is that the Qur'an was not
written as one document, the product of one man, Muhammad. Rather, many
scholars now think that the Qur'an was pieced together from pre-existing
materials, materials that were then heavily edited to meet the needs of
Arab conquerors. These changes occurred over time.
Some early Muslims might have witnessed, and questioned, such changes.
Traditions were invented to explain away the changes. For example,
Muhammad's child bride Aisha is made to say that sheep ate some Qur'an
verses that previously existed but then went missing.
Spencer
points out the Qur'an's contradictions. Iblis is identified as a jinn,
but, contrarily, as an angel. Sometimes one can intercede for another;
sometimes one cannot. In one Qur'anic retelling of Exodus, Pharaoh
survives. In another, he drowns. The number of days it took Allah to
create the world varies, as does the substance from which Allah created
mankind. Muslims insist that the Qur'an contains prescient scientific
knowledge. In fact, though, as Spencer points out in a footnote, the
Qur'an presents a pre-scientific picture of the earth and the solar
system 13:2. For example, the heavens rest on "invisible supports" and
the sun sets in a muddy pool, 18:86.
Spencer's
footnotes also help bridge the gap between the English translation and
the Arabic original, pointing out words of non-Arabic origin and places
in the text where the rhyme scheme and other formal features break down,
indicating interpolations into a pre-existing source document that was
then patched into the Qur'an.
An Islamic website offers
attractive quotes from the Qur'an. One of the quotes says "speak to
people kindly," but this appears in the midst of a text that calls
non-believers apes, pigs, and the vilest of created beings, describes
graphic tortures for them and tells Muslims never to befriend them, not
even if they are parents or children. "Remember me; I will remember
you," says one quote. This from an Allah who states repeatedly that if
Muslims displease him, he will destroy them utterly and take up a better
group of people . "Wives are a garment for you," says one quote. Yet
this book includes instructions on how to divorce a pre-pubescent child;
before dumping her, one must make sure that she has not somehow gotten
pregnant. "Allah does not burden a soul more than he can bear," says
another quote. This same Allah repeatedly says that he creates people
for the specific purpose of sending them to Hell, a Hell he describes
with fiendish enthusiasm. "The life of this world is only the enjoyment
of deception." And yet Paradise is utterly earthbound. It's all about
rivers of booze, delicious food, silk garments, and sex slaves with
round, "not sagging" breasts. The only thing that's missing is
big-screen color TVs. There is no description of what Heaven will entail
for women. "Men are in charge of women" are superior to women, and
should beat them, says 4:34. But this website translates that verse
as saying that men should protect women.
Compare
this to the matrix of Bible quotes. Hosea, a prophet, married Gomer, an
adulteress. Even though she cheated on him, Hosea could not quit her.
Their story reflects God's love for the Jewish people. When the ancient
Hebrews went astray, God could not get over his love for them. In the
book of Hosea, God speaks of his frustrated love, "I drew them with
human cords, with bands of love; I fostered them like one who raises an
infant to his cheeks; Yet, though I stooped to feed my child, they did
not know that I was their healer." God's frustrated love for sinning
humanity is also expressed in the New Testament which records,
Christians believe, the son of God dying a torturous death for his love
of humanity. In the extreme of pain, Jesus says, "Father, forgive them.
They know not what they do."These quotes are deeply embedded in rich
narratives that demonstrate the truths the quotes hope to convey.
Compare this to the Qur'an that mentions "kindness to parents" just a
few words away from the advice to husbands to beat their wives. Both
quotes are completely free of any supportive, illustrative narrative.
Please
buy and read Robert Spencer's "Critical Qur'an." I emphasize "buy"
because his book is a gift to thinking people, and "the workman is
worthy of his hire." The most moving sentence in this translation was
written by Spencer himself. He dedicates his book thus, "Offered with
love to all the people of the world who love the Qur'an." I do not see
how anyone could read this book, and all of its footnotes, and conclude
that the Qur'an is divinely inspired. Muslims deserve to have access to
the research presented so very clearly herein.
Danusha Goska is the author of God through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery.
*** WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT *** Horror: IDF Screens Raw Footage of Hamas Terror Attack for Media
GLILOT BASE, Israel — I wanted it to stop at 17 minutes in. But I had to watch. We had to bear witness.
This is what we saw.
A father and two sons, in their underwear, having just woken up, are trying to flee from their home.
The father picks up one boy and all three run to a shelter in the back yard.
A terrorist peers over the fence and lobs a grenade into the shelter. It bounces off the back wall and explodes.
The father’s body falls forward. A boy appears, covered in his father’s blood, looking at his father.
For a moment, you think the terrorists will shoot him.
Instead, the armed terrorists bring the boys inside, into the home.
One boy sits on a chair, the other on a couch, both still in their underwear, both covered in trickles of blood, theirs and their father’s. They wail: “Daddy! Daddy!” The boy on the couch says, “Itay, I think they are going to kill us.”
A terrorist — with a Palestinian flag patch on his flak jacket — opens the fridge and asks if they want water — “mayim,” in Hebrew. The one on the couch replies, in English, that he wants his mother — not “mayim,” but “mommy.” He repeats: “Mommy. Mommy.”
Then comes the worst moment of all.
We see the boy on the couch, now doubled over on the rug. “Why am I alive?” he wails.
He then looks at the brother in the chair. There is a red, black space where his eye used to be. He asks if his brother can see out of that eye. He says that he cannot. The other brother asks again. Are you joking? He repeats that he cannot see.
Somehow, the boys escape together, out the back door.
Later, the footage shows the mother coming to the home with local security guards. She sees her husband’s body and her legs give way. She screams, and the security guards place a hand on her mouth and try to drag her away. The attack is still going on, and they are still at risk of being killed.
That was the worst, for me — the footage of that event compiled from multiple surveillance cameras in a town that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) asked us not to reveal, since the relatives of the dead have not yet seen the footage.
On Monday, the IDF invited journalists onto a military base to view 43 minutes of raw footage of the attack by the Palestinian Hamas terrorist group on October 17 — an attack that claimed over 1,400 lives and saw over 4,000 people wounded, and more than 200 taken prisoner.
A female IDF soldier displays an ISIS / Daesh flag found on the body of a terrorist killed during the Palestinian Hamas attack on Kibbutz Sufa in southern Israel on Oct. 7. Glilot military base, Israel, October 23, 2023 (Joel Pollak / Breitbart News)
The footage was compiled from both victims and perpetrators, from GoPro cameras, dashboard cameras, social media, surveillance cameras, and even audio recording apps on mobile phones. It is just a small part of what the IDF still possesses.
We were not allowed to bring cell phones, cameras, or laptops into the room, because the IDF does not want the public to see the footage before the families of the victims have seen it — if it is ever seen again at all. We were only allowed notepads and pens.
Throughout the screening, there were gasps, and cries in the audience. I heard some journalists whisper: “Make it stop.”
Some of the footage had already appeared in snippets of news coverage, or on social media, during the attack on October 7, and in the hours that followed. But most had never been screened publicly before, or in full context.
We saw — we still see, in our memories — civilian drivers being murdered in their cars. We saw terrorists setting fires to homes. We saw the aftermath — burned bodies; corpses of people who had been bound and gagged; bodies of murdered children and babies; a decapitated soldier.
We see and hear the terrified screams of female IDF soldiers who had taken shelter against the attack. Some are murdered underneath a table as they scream — the incoherent, terrified scream of a living human being facing violent death, helplessly.
Again and again, we see Hamas terrorists pumping bullets into people who are already dead — just to make sure.
Some of the terrorists are visibly and audibly nervous in the footage. But they are not in a combat situation: they are coming for civilians.
They are hunting Jews, trying to find them in their hiding places, reveling in the piles of bodies, mutilating corpses, looting the victims.
The film also containes an audio sequence, recorded on the phone of one of the victims, used by a terrorist to call his parents back home in Gaza to boast that he had killed 10 Jews. His father replies: “Allahu akbar!” (God is great!).
But then the realization sets in that his son is probably not coming back — that he intends to become a martyr, and to die fighting, so that he can kill as many Jews as possible. The mother comes to the phone and pleads with him to come back.
She is not, after all that murder, proud of him.
We see scenes of the carnage at the music festival — terrorists shooting into the closed doors of portable toilets, murdering those within. We see victims hiding in a dumpster; we see hostages, bloodied, in agony, being loaded onto trucks as their captors laugh.
There is no moment of redemption in the footage. We do not see the end, when the good guys arrive and save the victims. The only comfort is the knowledge that the GoPro footage, at least, was retrieved from the terrorists after they were killed or captured.
After the video was done, we were allowed to go outside to retrieve our equipment. I needed to start writing as soon as I did so.
But first, I had to sit down. I leaned against a wall and cried. I kept thinking about those little boys and the nightmare they endured.
IDF Spokesman Admiral Daniel Hagari said that the military had hesitated before sharing the footage. But he said the IDF ultimately decided to do so because “we want to understand, ourselves, what we are fighting for.” He spoke about the duty to create a “collective memory,” noting that Israel was doing so even while it was still fighting the enemy that had attacked it.
Hagari also said that the attacks had nothing to do with Islam. But it was impossible to ignore the shouts of “Allahu Akbar!” that accompanied so much of the killing, and that greeted the dead bodies and the bloodied captives when they arrived in Gaza.
Whatever this attack had to do with Islam is something that Islam has to deal with. For now, Israel has a war to fight and win.
And this is why: a terrible crime, a crime against humanity, demands justice.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
Meet the Major US Philanthropy Financing an Israeli-Designated Terror Group
The Rockefeller Brothers Fund has given more than $3.4 million to Hamas-friendly groups since 2018
The Rockefeller Brothers Fund touts its commitment to advancing "social change that contributes to a more just, sustainable, and peaceful world." It also bankrolls an Israeli-designated Palestinian terror group and has given millions more to groups that fund Hamas or have justified the terrorist group’s attacks against Israel.
Established by the heirs of John D. Rockefeller Jr., the Rockefeller Brothers Fund has since 2018 funneled more than $3.4 million to Hamas-friendly groups including Defense for Children International-Palestine, which serves as a critical cog in the terror group’s propaganda machinery.
In fact, the Israeli government declared Defense for Children International-Palestine a terror organization in October 2021, arguing that it effectively operates as an extension of the terror group Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and employs senior PFLP members.
Defense for Children International-Palestine has received $165,000 from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund since 2018 and propagates shoddy research that is weaponized by Israel’s detractors to delegitimize the Jewish state. Since Israel began retaliatory strikes against Hamas, it has amplified the false claim that an Israeli airstrike killed 500 Palestinians at the Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza on Tuesday. Democratic lawmakers have relied on the group’s flawed statistics to push anti-Israel legislation in the House. In May, nearly 30 Democrats led by Rep. Betty McCollum (Minn.) introduced a bill accusing Israel of wrongfully detaining Palestinian children, the Washington Free Beacon reported.
Defense for Children International-Palestine’s ties to terror were public knowledge long before Israel designated the group a terrorist organization in 2021. The Jerusalem Post reported in 2018 that many of the group's top officials and board members were linked to the PFLP, a U.S.-designated terrorist group. At the time, Stephen Heintz, the fund’s president, defended the group’s support for Defense of Children International-Palestine, telling the Jerusalem Post in a letter to the editor that he was "convinced" that none of the group’s resources funded terrorist activity.
The fund, which former vice president Nelson Rockefeller and his four brothers launched in 1940, has been responsive to pressure from left-wing groups to amend its portfolio. The group pledged in 2014 to divest from fossil fuels, a move that vice chair Valerie Rockefeller Wayne described as a "moral obligation." Heintz agreed, saying it "felt like we were compromising ourselves" by holding stakes in oil companies.
Heintz has made no such argument when it comes to Palestinian terrorism as his fund pledges to work toward a "peaceful world."
The Rockefeller Brothers Fund has also doled out $580,000 to the Education for Just Peace in the Middle East, a group that has been accused of abusing its charity status to bankroll Hamas and other Palestinian terror groups. Other recipients of the fund’s largess include Jewish Voice for Peace, which organized a Wednesday raid on a congressional office building, resulting in the arrests of over 300 pro-Palestinian protesters.
Jewish Voice for Peace, which has received $490,000 from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund since 2019, argued in the hours after Hamas launched its attacks that "Israeli apartheid and occupation" was the sole source of the violence. "Inevitably, oppressed people everywhere will seek—and gain—their freedom. We all deserve liberation, safety, and equality," the group said in a statement.
The Rockefeller Brothers Fund has given an additional $2.2 million since 2018 to other groups that have issued statements either justifying Hamas or blaming Israel for the terrorist attacks.
Rockefeller Brothers Fund trustee Peter Beinart gave his full-throated endorsement of Jewish Voice for Peace’s move to storm the congressional office building. In a series of tweets, he praised the courage of the demonstrators and claimed they care deeply about the 1,400 Israelis murdered by Hamas.
Beinart isn’t the only Rockefeller Brothers Fund Trustee with anti-Israel tendencies. Three other trustees of the fund—David Rockefeller Jr., Miranda Kaiser, and Marnie Pillsbury—are
members of the Council on Foreign Relations, an influential Washington
D.C., think tank that came under fire in September for hosting a private, invitation-only event with Iranian president Ebrahim Raisi, who has threatened Israel’s destruction and praised the Hamas terrorist attacks as a "glorious operation."
The Rockefeller Brothers Fund did not return a request for comment.
Published under: Anti-Semitism , Climate Change , Fossil Fuels , Hamas , Israel , Liberal Billionaires , Palestine , Terrorism
Israeli President: Hamas Terrorists Had Instructions to Manufacture Cyanide Gas
Israel’s ceremonial president, Isaac Herzog, told Britain’s Sky News on Sunday that Hamas terrorists were found with USB drives that included instructions on how to manufacture cyanide gas for use against Israelis.
The Times of Israel elaborated:
Herzog shows off materials recovered from USB drive on the body of a Hamas terrorist in Israel which was copied from al-Qaeda and included “detailed instructions on creating chemical weapons,” including “precise instructions for preparing a device for dispersing cyanide agents,” the President’s Office says.
“It’s official Al Qaeda material. We’re dealing with ISIS, Al Qaeda, and Hamas,” Herzog told Sky News, holding a printout of a file obtained from a USB found on one of the dead terrorists killed during the attack on Oct. 7.
“In this material, there were instructions how to produce chemical weapons. This is — it speaks about arson and it speaks about various chemicals that come out and produce chemical weapons.”
Cyanide was used as a chemical weapon during the First World War, though questions remain about its lethality in battlefield conditions outdoors. It may have been intended for indoor use — and perhaps could be used against Israeli soldiers fighting in tunnels in Gaza.
The Sky News presented then pressed Herzog on the “severing” of services from Israel to Gaza. Herzog replied that Hamas, not Israel, was responsible for cutting off Gaza’s electricity with rockets; that Gaza only obtained 7% of its water supplies from Israel; and that the UN was providing fuel.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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