Centuries of Wahhabi Jihad
On October 7, some 3,000 Hamas fighters crossed into Israel. There they killed roughly 350 Israeli soldiers and policemen. They then murdered more than a thousand mostly unarmed Jewish men, women, and children.
Hamas then crowded its own women and children into buildings it used to hide its fighters and store its weapons. This supported its “victim” narrative by keeping its civilian deaths higher than those of Israel.
God’s Terrorists, a book by British historian Charles Allen, suggests that today’s war in Israel has little to do with the “occupation” of Palestine or Arab refugees. It is instead part of a worldwide “modern jihad” that has been going on for nearly 300 years. Allen wrote that book in 2006. He did it to explain why “Islamic extremists” based in distant Afghanistan murdered nearly 3,000 Americans on September 11, 2001.
According to Allen, it began in the 1700s, when Muhammad al-Wahhab and other Islamic scholars in Arabia were angry and disgusted with their Muslim leaders.
The core Muslim belief is that there is no God but Allah and that Muhammad was his last messenger. All humanity must obey the eternal and unchanging laws of Allah. Those laws, the “sharia,” are understood, applied, and enforced by an “ulama,” a close-knit group of Islamic scholars, teachers, and judges. Most are Arabs in and around Mecca and Medina. That is because they naturally speak the language of the Koran and other books that teach the words and deeds of Muhammad.
Al-Wahhab believed that if all Muslims submitted to sharia and got all humanity to do the same, Allah would bless the world with peace and harmony.
However, Al-Wahhab thought this was not happening because most Muslims and their leaders had gone astray. Some believed in un-Islamic local customs and superstitions. Many wanted the freedom, wealth, and comforts of the modern Christian world. Others wanted peace and friendship with Christians, Hindus, and Buddhists instead of jihad.
As a result, the “Nasrani” (Nazarenes) dominated the world. Christians had reconquered the once Muslim lands of Spain, Portugal, and Eastern Europe. Islam was also losing land and followers in India, Africa, and the East Indies.
Al-Wahhab and his colleagues formed a new doctrine and movement to purify Islam and save the world. They called themselves “Unitarians” or “Salafis.” Outsiders called them “Wahhabis.”
Wahhabis wanted to restore Islam to what they thought it was when Muhammad was alive. That included subjugating women and suppressing music, dancing, literature, and free speech.
Wahhabis did not tolerate dissent. They despised any Muslim who disagreed with them as much as any “kaffir” (non-believer). Wahhabis even declared jihad against the Ottoman sultans, who were the “khalifas” or spiritual leaders of the Islamic world!
Wahhabis promised wealth, power, and submissive women to every man who joined their jihads. They also promised eternal life in paradise to those who died fighting with them. The Wahhabis cleverly used bribes and deception to divide, weaken, and defeat their enemies.
In 1740, Al-Wahhab forged “a remarkable partnership” with a desert tribal chief named Muhammad Ibn Saud. Al-Wahhab’s daughter married Ibn Saud’s son. Their combined families quickly achieved spectacular success.
They equipped their fighters with European rifles. Then they quickly conquered the holy cities of Mecca and Medina and the whole Arabian Peninsula. From there, they threatened Turkish control of Egypt and Iraq.
The Wahhabis also indoctrinated many pilgrims who came to Mecca from British India and the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). Those visitors began their own “modern jihad” when they returned home.
This provoked a long international “war on terror” 200 years ago. In 1815, the Ottoman Turks invaded Arabia. They arrested, tortured, and killed every Wahhabi they could find. In many areas, they simply executed every male over the age of ten. They paraded Abdullah Saud, the great-grandson of Al-Wahhab, in chains through the streets of Cairo and Istanbul. Then they beheaded him and tore his body to pieces.
During this time, the British, Hindus, Sikhs and moderate Muslims fought the Wahhabis in India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. In 1831 and again in 1857, they killed thousands of Wahhabi fighters and most of their leaders in two particularly brutal wars.
However, the Wahhabis survived. In British India and Pakistan, the Wahhabis used public relations and the British legal system to win sympathy and political support. They also established a sophisticated school in Deoband, India to peacefully promote their doctrine. More than a hundred years later, their “talibs” (students) from that school inspired and led the Taliban in Afghanistan.
For years, what was left of Wahhabis and the Saudi family in Arabia lived quietly in remote areas. However, in 1901, they made a spectacular comeback. That was when 21-year-old Ibn Saud took control of his family. Ibn Saud used modern methods, later used by communists and fascists, to create a new Wahhabi “Ikhwan” or “Brotherhood.” He persuaded young Wahhabi men to give up their nomadic lifestyle and tribal loyalties. Ibn Saud won their loyalty and had them live in permanent military settlements he built for them. Ibn Saud educated them and their sons in the same Wahhabi schools. They all submitted to the strict discipline of Wahhabi sharia. There was little crime, corruption, or favoritism.
Ibn Saud and his successors generously shared their wealth with members of their brotherhood. At first, that wealth came from taxing or plundering other tribes. Since the 1930s, most of that wealth came from oil.
This inspired Wahhabis to set up similar “brotherhoods” throughout the Islamic world. A Muslim Brotherhood was set up in Egypt in 1928. These Wahhabi brotherhoods worked closely together. They also shared new confidence that the thousand-year era of Christian dominance was almost over. Years later, al-Qaeda was a perfect example of how well these brotherhoods worked together. Osama bin Laden was in the Saudi Brotherhood. Mohammed Atef and Ayman al-Zawahiri were in the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.
Hamas founder Ahmed Yassin led the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza in the 1960s. At that time, Gaza was part of Egypt. Yassin formed a Palestinian branch of that Brotherhood only after Israel occupied Gaza in 1967.
Yassin also promoted a new weapon of modern jihad: babies. Yassin had eleven children. There were about 400,000 Arabs in Gaza when Israel first occupied the territory in 1967. There are more than two million today. Half of them are less than 18 years old.
In 1987, Yassin made Hamas a separate organization so that his bombings and murders would not cause “charities” of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood to lose international funding. However, the charter of Hamas is far more Islamic than Palestinian. Its preamble praised Muslims as “the best nation” of mankind. It also declared that Islam would “obliterate” Israel, just as Islam “obliterated” previous Crusader kingdoms.
In 2007, Charles Allen warned that “the Wahhabis cult” was winning its “modern jihad” in Europe and America as well as in Pakistan and the Middle East. Sadly, events in Israel and the rest of the world during the past month are proving that he was right.
Image: David Stanley via Flickr (cropped), CC BY 2.0.
Islam is Not a Religion
What is Islam? To answer that question, it’s more important to know what Islam isn’t. Islam is not a religion. It is an authoritarian, political ideology that forcibly imposes itself on all aspects of any society unfortunate enough to be under its yoke. Islam demands complete subjugation by its adherents. Under Islam, there is no democracy, there is no free speech, no freedom of religion, no freedom of the press, no minority rights, and there’s no right to love whoever you desire. Islam allows no dissent. It is a complete and total way of life that glorifies oppression, slavery, and death. Islam has religious, legal, political, economic, cultural, and military components. The religious component is the veil that hides the dangers of its all-encompassing ideology.
Islam was founded in the 7th century by the Prophet Mohammed. From its beginnings, Islam never attempted or bothered to convert “non-believers” by friendly persuasion. Instead, Islam converted non-believers by conquest and forcible conversion, or you were slaughtered. By the mid-8th century, Islam had conquered all the lands from the Indus River, in the east, across North Africa to the Iberian Peninsula, in the west. During that period of conquest, if subjects didn’t convert to Islam, they were put to the sword. To this day, most of those lands are still under the control of Islam. There are few exceptions: Spain and Portugal, which during the 15th century, managed to free themselves from the scourges of Islam, and Israel.
Modern day Islam is just as oppressive and dangerous as was 8th century Islam. That’s because culturally, Islam still enforces the same tenets they did 1,200 years ago. What are some of those tenets, practices, and ways of life? Islam enforces edicts against homosexuality to the point of executing homosexuals. As for women, of the ten worst countries for women’s rights, seven of them are Muslim. The Quran clearly states that women are subordinate to men, and men may beat their wives (Quran 4:34). With Islam, there’s a fine line between oppressing women and enslaving them. Islam practices female genital mutilation, a barbaric practice (look it up and be disgusted). Other realities for women in Islamic countries include: women must be escorted in public, largely because it’s too dangerous for them to walk alone (rape and assaults are common); women must cover their bodies from head to foot; and very few education opportunities which result in limited employment opportunities.
Today, in the year 2023, Islam practices slavery (here, and here), the actual commodification of other human beings, and the world stands silent. It also engages in jihad, rape, and pedophilia—yes, it’s acceptable to rape children (bacha bāzī). Also, see this clip, from CNN no less:
Today, Islam beheads its enemies (Dec 27, 2019 in Nigeria), burns people alive in cages, amputates the hands of criminals, and engages in “honor” killings of female relatives (Texas 2008). There’s nothing honorable about a father (or a brother) who kills his daughter (or his sister) because he doesn’t agree with her actions. Adulterers (and even some female rape victims) can be stoned to death, and polygamy is allowed. Earlier this year, an Iranian couple was sentenced to ten years in prison for dancing in public. To say that Islam has nothing in common with Western culture is an understatement. Islam vehemently opposes, and wants to destroy, Western society. Proof of every vile, barbaric, and evil practice engaged in by Muslims was rolled up into one event—Hamas’s attack last month on Israel.
For much of America’s history, we didn’t concern ourselves with the evils of Islam. We didn’t worry about it largely because we’re an ocean apart, and Islam’s 12th century society couldn’t much affect or threaten us. Nevertheless, America’s first foreign war was fought in the early 19th century against the Islamic states along the Barbary Coast of North Africa. Also, throughout most of the 20th century, our focus was on the evils in Europe—Nazism and communism. It wasn’t until the 1970’s that most Americans became aware of the dangers of Islam. That was when the Arabs used world oil markets to achieve their political goals. Then, in 1979, Iranians seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days. Ever since then, the Middle East and Islam have played a central role in America’s foreign policy.
A problem with American foreign policy is that no president, from Nixon all the way through to our current crumbling commander, has properly understood Islam, the best example being Bush’s post-9/11 statement: “Islam is a religion of peace.” That was an idiotic statement, given that 3,000 Americans had just been slaughtered in the name of Islam. The United States’ lack of understanding wouldn’t be a problem if we weren’t in the 21st century—but we are. And a 12th century ideology of hatred and death is a huge problem given modern technologies which gives Islamists the ability to wander the globe killing, maiming, and enslaving in the name of their ideology.
You might wonder what I have against Islam, but let me ask this question: Knowing the profoundly immoral nature of tyrants and authoritarian regimes, would you be alright if Nazism or communism ruled over two billion people on the planet? I’m guessing most people would say “NO” to both, because the evils of these ideologies have no place in a civilized society of unalienable rights. Well, the evils of Islam are just as bad—perhaps worse—as the evils of any totalitarian form of rule ever devised by man. Islam doesn’t want peace; it preaches struggle, constant struggle, because it is an ideology that uses religion.
Many people might disregard the dangers of Islam, as we do have Muslims here in America, and we don’t see things like Muslim men buying children, or public beatings by administrators of Sharia “justice.” But, Muslims are a small percentage of our population at this moment. Anywhere Islam is the majority, there is oppression, conflict, and struggle. Think of the wars and conflicts being fought on this planet; then, think of the countries that have large Muslim populations, and you’ll find those two maps overlay one another. From Nigeria in Africa, to Yemen on the Arabian Peninsula, Gaza, Syria, Afghanistan, and to the jungles of the Philippines, Islamic societies are engaged in armed conflicts to suppress and oppress those populations. And also don’t forget, a small number can be very dangerous: the 9/11 attack was carried out by only 19 Muslims.
In Islamic countries, conflicts, struggles, and oppression have been ongoing for centuries; no end in sight, and it’s important to remember that above all, Islam is an ideology as dangerous and evil as any ideology ever conceived, using religion as a scapegoat.
Image generated by AI.
remember the saudis invasion of america sept 11
Blue State Blues: 50 Years of Excuses for Palestinian Terror Are Enough
We don’t hear much about the Palestinian cause, between wars.
The late Palestinian intellectual Edward Said defended Yasser Arafat — who was then still a notorious terrorist, not yet a corrupt kleptocrat — by saying that his sensational violence at least kept the Palestinian cause from disappearing entirely from the world’s consciousness, and kept the Palestinian diaspora unified, even at the moral price of backing terror.
Said wrote that 50 years ago. But it is almost exactly the same argument used by the Hamas leaders who spoke to the New York Times this week, telling the western public that without their attack on Israel — with all its horrific atrocities — that the Palestinian cause would have been forgotten, left behind in the progress of the Abraham Accords and in the excitement of a “normalization” deal between Saudi Arabia and Israel.
It is worth asking whether the Palestinians could have done something else in those 50 years to advance their cause, beyond killing Israeli civilians. Or whether violence against Israelis is the Palestinian cause, and how it came to be that way.
After all, you never see pro-Palestinian activists doing much to help “Palestine” between wars — and this time, they started marching after the terror attack, not the Israeli response.
It is easier to destroy than to create.
Let’s rewind to the beginning.
Israel is the spiritual homeland of the Jewish people, and has been for many thousands of years. Jews have lived there continuously for millennia, and even during periods of exile and dispersion, they still faced Jerusalem during prayer — as Jews still do today.
The idea of creating a Jewish state emerged in the late 19th century as a response to persecution in Europe, and Jews began moving back.
A generation or so later, in the early 20th century Arabs living in the region began to feel their own national stirrings, and the Palestinian Arabs were no different — though initially, they wanted to be part of a broader Arab empire, not a separate state.
When the British took over from the Ottoman Empire after the First World War, with a Mandate from the League of Nations, they struggled to reconcile promises to both sides.
The dilemma was difficult to solve, but dividing the land seemed the least bad option. This was acceptable to the Jewish side, which simply wanted sovereignty of any kind — especially with the growing danger to Jews in Europe.
But the Arabs — who were only known as “Palestinians” much later — clung to the idea that there could be no Jewish state at all, and not even any Jewish immigration, not even refugees from the Nazis.
The man most responsible for this intransigence was named Hajj Amin al-Husseini. The British sought to appease him by appointing him Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. He abused that position to foment riots against Jews, most notoriously in the Hebron massacre of 1929. The British tried to keep the Arabs onside in the Second World War by banning Jewish immigration, but al-Husseini sided with Hitler and the Nazis anyway.
There has never really been a reckoning with this history. The Palestinian Arab leadership collaborated with Hitler and made sure, through pressure on the British, that Jews had nowhere to escape.
After the war, the Germans were “de-Nazified” through public acknowledgment of Hitler’s crimes. But that never happened in the Arab world, which still incubated Nazi antisemitism alongside radical Islamic sentiments.
In 1947, the newly-formed United Nations tried to tackle the same problem that had vexed the British, and came up with the same answer: partition into a Jewish state and an Arab state.
But the Arabs decided to destroy the Jewish state rather than build their own, and declared war. They lost, and the same pattern has repeated itself for decades. The Palestinians have aways rejected statehood in favor of violence.
Up to 2000, it was possible to believe that some Palestinian grievance justified the rejection. But when then-President Bill Clinton offered Arafat nearly all of the West Bank, and shared sovereignty over Jerusalem’s holy sites, and possible compensation for Palestinian refugees, Arafat walked away. He then launched a cynical and destructive campaign of terror that Hamas, the Islamist rival of Arafat’s nationalists, continued.
That shattered the Israeli left, which had long supported compromises with the Palestinians, believing that peace was possible. For the last 23 years, Israelis have been looking for a workable alternative to solve the problem — from building a barrier along the West Bank, to unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, to making peace with the other Arab states in the hope that the Palestinians could eventually be persuaded to set war aside.
Yet the Palestinian leadership had other ideas — boosted by Iran, which continued to fund and arm terror groups.
In 2001, at the UN World Conference Against Racism, which was held in Durban, South Africa, global anti-Israel activists seized on the idea of casting Israel as the new “apartheid” state — which, like South Africa, had to be dismantled. It was an idea without merit, but the symbolism appealed to western leftists.
I happened to be at the World Conference Against Racism, which ironically saw a shocking outbreak of anti-Jewish hatred. Anti-Israel activists literally broke up a meeting to discuss antisemitism, which had nothing to do with Israel.
The same impulse persists in the efforts of anti-Israel activists to tear down posters of Israeli hostages: there can be no acknowledgement of Jewish victimhood, which is part of Israel’s reason for being.
But ask these activists what they have actually done to help “Palestine,” and you will find no answers. They have not invested in economic development; they have not donated to Palestinian schools. A few may have donated to Palestinian relief efforts, but none has given thought to building Palestinian institutions.
The one question that unravels them, every time, is: “What kind of Palestinian state do you want?” They don’t know.
They just want to “free Palestine,” and “from the river to the sea,” which the president of Harvard admitted this week was an antisemitic slogan: it envisions the destruction of Israel and the genocide of its Jews.
Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh recently urged followers to imagine a post-Israel “Palestine.” He wants an Islamic state. The likely outcome: Gaza. a complete wreck, a constant threat to its neighbors.
The world has heard Palestinian excuses for terrorism for 50 years. The difference now is that those same excuses come from Ismail Haniyeh rather than Edward Said — both from comfortable exile.
The only portion of the Palestinian Arab population that has moved beyond this are the Israeli Arab citizens, who are deciding, in the face of Hamas terror, that they would rather be Israeli than Palestinian. Their “free Palestine” is Israel.
There is talk about what to do with a post-Hamas Gaza. The White House wants it run by the Palestinian Authority, which has never worked. My preference would be to pay Gazans to relocate to the West Bank and annex Gaza to Israel, solving the problem of Palestinian geographic contiguity.
What do the Palestinians themselves want? We don’t know. They don’t either. Again, it is easier to destroy than to create. But “no more Israel” is not an acceptable answer.
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.