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 7 th century, there were too many to kill or convert; and so, beginning with the 638 CE Pact of Umar (the 2 nd 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, 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.
Danusha V. Goska
[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 .
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 7 th century, there were too many to kill or convert; and so, beginning with the 638 CE Pact of Umar (the 2 nd 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.
ISLAM = THE CULT OF DEATH
CAIR IS THE MUSLIM POLITICAL PARTY OPERATING IN AMERICA
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) issued a statement on Thursday sternly condemning President Joe Biden for approving airstrikes against the Houthi jihadist terror organization of Yemen, accusing him of “unnecessarily, illegally and dangerously risking the loss of more innocent lives.”
“We fail to understand why President Biden would rather risk a regional war by bombing Yemen instead of simply stopping the Gaza genocide that is fueling conflict across the world,” Nihad Awad, the executive director of CAIR, asserted .
United States Central Command (CENTCOM) and the British Defense Ministry confirmed the execution of dozens of strikes on Houthi targets in Yemen between Thursday and Friday, intended to neutralize the terrorist organization’s ability to disrupt international commercial shipping passing through the Red Sea.
U.S. and U.K. carry out airstrikes in Yemen: An RAF FGR4 Typhoon takes off from Royal Air Force (RAF) Akrotiri military airbase in Greek Cypriot to conduct its mission against the Iranian-backed Houthis in Yemen on January 12, 2024 (UK Ministry of Defence/Anadolu via Getty Images).
“Today, at my direction, U.S. military forces—together with the United Kingdom and with support from Australia, Bahrain, Canada, and the Netherlands—successfully conducted strikes against a number of targets in Yemen,” Biden said in a statement following the strikes, “used by Houthi rebels to endanger freedom of navigation in one of the world’s most vital waterways”:
The Houthis, who are not the legitimate government of Yemen, declared war on Israel to support Hamas following the invasion of Israel on October 7 and has aided the Sunni jihadist group by attacking commercial vessels passing through the region. The attacks have had a chilling effect on ship traffic through the Bab el-Mandab Strait near Yemen, triggering a 90 percent drop year-on-year in ship traffic in the region between January 2023 and January 2024.
This photo shows Houthi forces boarding the cargo ship Galaxy Leader on Sunday, Nov. 19, 2023. Yemen’s Houthis have seized the ship in the Red Sea off the coast of Yemen after threatening to seize all vessels owned by Israeli companies (Houthi Media Center via AP).
A Houthi spokesman had confirmed the group’s resolve to continue attacking ships in the region in statements published on Wednesday – while simultaneously claiming the United States was “misleading the world about dangers threatening international navigation in these seas.”
“More killing is not the solution to this crisis. Ending Netanyahu’s genocidal war on the people of Gaza and securing a just, lasting peace by ending the occupation is the solution,” Awad, the head of CAIR, the largest Muslim advocacy group in the United States, said in his statement.
“This president is unnecessarily, illegally and dangerously risking the loss of more innocent lives – including the lives of Americans – for the sake of the genocidal Israeli government, all without approval from Congress,” Awad’s statement continued:
CAIR is planning an event in Washington, DC, on Saturday in opposition to Israel’s self-defense operations against Hamas in the aftermath of the October 7 invasion. The event is scheduled to include remarks from two presidential candidates running against Biden – Jill Stein and Cornel West – in addition to other high-profile radical leftists.
The Houthis attempted to violently seize power against the legitimate government of Yemen in 2014, triggering a civil war that remains ongoing to this day, though the Houthis control most of the country. They are an Iran-backed Shiite operation whose slogan is “Allahu Akbar, Death to America, Death to Israel, Curse on the Jews, Victory to Islam.”
Yemen’s Houthi loyalists take part in an armed parade for more than 20,000 members who have finished a military course, staged to show their willingness to battle any potential attack by the recently created coalition by the U.S., on December 20, 2023, in Amran province, Yemen. Yemen’s Houthi movement leader has warned that they would attack US ships in the Middle East if Washington waged war against them (Mohammed Hamoud/Getty Images).
The Houthi terror organization, which calls itself Ansarullah, dramatically increased its ability to obtain funding in early 2021 after the inauguration of President Biden, whose administration removed them from the State Department’s list of designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations. The removal allowed for hundreds of millions of dollars in “humanitarian aid” to pour into Houthi-controlled areas in Yemen, including from the U.S. government.
Houthi leaders became involved in the conflict between Hamas and the Israeli government in the aftermath of the October 7 attacks, in which Hamas terrorists stormed Israel and engaged in door-to-door raids on random families, killing babies, gang raping and executing women, torturing victims, and desecrating their corpses. The terrorists filmed many of their atrocities to share on social media, uploading videos of the bodies of their victims to the victims’ social media accounts. Israeli officials estimated Hamas killed 1,200 people and maintain more than 120 hostages in Gaza.
CAIR and its affiliates have enthusiastically opposed Israeli operations to prevent another attack. On October 7, the United States Council of Muslim Organizations (USCMO), an umbrella organization including CAIR, published a statement condemning “the recent unprovoked and continuous attacks by Israel on Palestinian towns, cities, and refugee camps.”
“We condemn Israel’s targeted and indiscriminate killing of civilians, including innocent children, women, and the elderly, and we denounce the inhumane siege imposed on the nearly 2 million inhabitants of Gaza,” the statement read, “a clear violation of international law and an implied declaration of open war on the Palestinians which oblige them to be in constant self-defense.”
CAIR has been declared a terrorist organization by the United Arab Emirates and was named by federal prosecutors as an unindicted co-conspirator in a Hamas-funding operation.
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ISTANBUL (AP) – Turkey carried out airstrikes targeting Kurdish militants in neighboring Iraq and Syria on Saturday, the Turkish Defense Ministry said. This comes a day after an attack on a Turkish military base in Iraq killed nine Turkish soldiers.
Turkey often launches strikes against targets in Syria and Iraq it believes to be affiliated with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, a banned Kurdish separatist group that has waged insurgency against Turkey since the 1980s.
The defense ministry said aircraft struck targets in Metina, Hakurk, Gara and Qandil in north Iraq, but didn’t specify areas in Syria. It said fighter jets destroyed caves, bunkers, shelters and oil facilities “to eliminate terrorist attacks against our people and security forces … and to ensure our border security.” The statement added “many” militants were “neutralized” in the strikes.
On Friday night, attackers attempted to infiltrate a military base in northern Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdish region, killing five soldiers. Four others died later of critical injuries. The Turkish Defense Ministry said 15 militants were also killed.
There was no immediate comment from the PKK, the government in Baghdad or the Kurdish region’s administration.
Turkey launched Operation Claw-Lock in northern Iraq in April 2022, during which it established several bases in Duhok Governorate. Baghdad has repeatedly protested the presence of Turkish troops and called for their withdrawal.
Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan expressed his condolences for the deaths of the Turkish soldiers on social media platform X, formerly Twitter.
“We will fight to the end against the PKK terrorist organization within and outside our borders,” he wrote.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was to hold a security meeting in Istanbul later Saturday, Fahrettin Altun, the president’s communications director, wrote on X.
Meanwhile, Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya announced police had detained 113 people suspected of ties to the PKK following raids across 32 Turkish provinces.
He added that four people were arrested after police identified 60 social media accounts that “praised the separatist terrorist organization for provocative purposes” or had spread misleading information.
Three weeks ago, PKK-affiliated militants tried to break into a Turkish base in northern Iraq, according to Turkish officials, leaving six soldiers dead. The following day, six more Turkish soldiers were killed in clashes.
Turkey retaliated by launching strikes against sites that officials said were associated with the PKK in Iraq and Syria. Defense Minister Yasar Guler said at the time that dozens of Kurdish militants were killed in airstrikes and land assaults.
It wasn’t immediately clear if Friday night’s attack and the one three weeks earlier targeted the same base. The Rudaw news website, based in Erbil in northern Iraq, reported that the base attacked on Friday was located on Mount Zap in Amedi district, which lies 17 kilometers (10 miles) from the Turkish border.
Meanwhile, Turkey’s state-run news agency Anadolu said a senior PKK militant was “neutralized” in Iraq. Faik Aydin was targeted in an operation run by the Turkish intelligence agency, or MIT, some 160 kilometers (100 miles) inside the Turkey-Iraq frontier, Anadolu reported.
The PKK, which maintains bases in northern Iraq, is considered a terror organization by Turkey’s Western allies, including the United States. Tens of thousands of people have died since the start of the conflict in 1984.
Turkey and the U.S., however, disagree on the status of the Syrian Kurdish groups, which have been allied with Washington in the fight against the Islamic State group in Syria.
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Saudis Bombed Houthis in Yemen for Years, Now Urge U.S. to Show ‘Restraint’ Saudi Press Agency via AP 5:11
The government of Saudi Arabia issued a statement calling for “restraint and avoiding escalation” on Friday in response to American and British airstrikes in Yemen against the Shiite Houthi terrorists controlling that country.
“While the Kingdom stresses the importance of preserving the security and stability of the Red Sea region, in which freedom of navigation is an international demand [and of] interest of the entire world,” a statement from the Saudi Ministry of Foreign Affairs reads , “[Saudi Arabia] calls for restraint and avoiding escalation in light of the events the region is witnessing.”
The statement described the Saudi government as watching the developments with “great concern.”
Saudi Arabia has engaged in military action against the Houthis in Yemen for nearly a decade, since the eruption of a civil war there in 2014. Riyadh has faced years of global condemnation from human rights organizations for its operations in the country, which some activists have labeled “war crimes .”
The U.S. and U.K. armed forces confirmed dozens of strikes within Yemeni territory between Thursday and Friday on strategic targets including “radar systems, air defense systems, and storage and launch sites for one-way attack unmanned aerial systems, cruise missiles, and ballistic missiles,” according to U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM). CENTCOM published a video of the strikes, which are a response to the Houthis severely disrupting global commercial shipping by randomly attacking container vessels attempting to transit through the Red Sea.
Houthi leaders responded to the attacks by declaring they would expand their terrorist activities against London and Washington.
“Washington and London must acknowledge responsibility for aggravating the situation at the Red Sea, and the militarization of the body of water,” Brigadier General Abdullah bin Amer, a Houthi leader in the terror group’s “Moral Guidance Department,” said on Friday, according to the Iranian state propaganda outlet PressTV . “They must be ready to embrace a heavy price, and bear all the deleterious consequences of this open aggression.”
The Houthis – an Iran-backed, Shiite jihadist organization that launched a civil war against the legitimate government of Yemen in 2014 – declared war on Israel in October as a gesture of support to Hamas, a Sunni terrorist organization also bankrolled by Iran. As part of that war, Houthi leaders announced they would attack commercial shipping vessels transiting the Red Sea, vowing to target only ships with ties to Israel. In reality, however, the terrorists have attempted drone attacks on ships with no significant relationship to Israel and prompted a significant percentage of shipping to reroute away from the region, taking the much longer route around Africa’s Cape of Good Hope.
Prior to the group’s rising prominence as a disrupter of global trade, the Houthis engaged in direct bombings of Saudi Arabia in response to Riyadh’s support for the legitimate government of Yemen that the terrorists overthrew. Some of the most dramatic bombings occurred in 2022, when the Houthis escalated attacks on Saudi oil facilities. In March of that year, Houthi drone and missile strikes on the city of Jeddah caused a massive fire at an Aramco oil tank facility near the site of an F1 car race.
The Houthis “put into question our ability to supply the world with the necessary energy requirements,” Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman warned that month.
“In the old days, we, along with our friends here in the UAE, worked on a collective effort to assure and ensure energy security. These pillars are no longer there,” Bin Salman said, an apparent reference to the absence of American support under Biden.
The administration of Joe Biden opposed Saudi Arabia’s involvement against the Houthis in Yemen, limiting sales of “offensive” weapons to the presumed U.S. ally and removing the Houthis from the State Department’s list of designated foreign terrorist organizations. The delisting allowed hundreds of millions of dollars to pour into Houthi-controlled Yemen.
The concessions to the Houthis – a group whose slogan is “Allahu Akbar, Death to America, Death to Israel, Curse on the Jews, Victory to Islam” – were some of Biden’s first actions as president in 2021.
Biden reportedly considered allowing offensive weapons sales to Saudi Arabia again in 2022, but ultimately took no publicly known action.
Saudi Prince Turki al-Faisal, an influential member of the royal family, said in May 2022:
Saudis consider the relationship as being strategic, but (feel) as being let down at a time when we thought that America and Saudi Arabia should be together in facing what we would consider to be a joint, not just irritant, but danger to the stability and security of the area.
“The fact that President Biden delisted the Houthis from the terrorist list has emboldened them and made them even more aggressive in their attacks on Saudi Arabia, as well as on the UAE,” he added.
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