THERE IS NO GREATER THREAT TO AMERICA THAN JOE BIDEN!
“The American people are not with you on this,” Democrat Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) said Friday, threatening fellow Democrat President Joe Biden with loss of support, if he doesn’t demand a ceasefire in Israel’s response to the terrorist attack it suffered at the hands of Hamas on October 7.
“@POTUS, the majority of the American people are not with you on this one. #CeasefireNow,” the Muslim congresswoman claims in a social media post introducing a video, in which she attacks Biden for supporting Israel’s effort to wipe out Hamas in Gaza.
The video opens with Biden saying, “We stand with Israel.” Later, it shows Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu saying, “I want to thank President Biden for his unequivocal support.”
The video features scenes of pro-Palestine protesters flood the streets and shouting slogans like “From the river to the sea!”
Graphics sent Biden a stern warning, regarding his bid for reelection in 2024:
“JOE BIDEN SUPPORTED THE GENOCIDE OF THE PALESTINIAN PEOPLE. THE AMERICAN PEOPLE WON’T FORGET. BIDEN, SUPPORT A CEASEFIRE NOW OR DON’T COUNT ON US IN 2024.”
“We will remember in 2024,” Rep. Tlaib promises, in conclusion.
As it turns out, it appears that more Americans support Israel than Palestine in the war (though, not more Democrats, apparently). They are displeased with Biden's handling the situation, however.
Blubbering Rashida Tlaib Repeats Claim That Israel Bombed Gaza Hospital
Despite credible reports claiming that it was a misfired Hamas rocket - and not an Israeli airstrike - that hit a Gaza hospital (parking lot) and killed untold numbers of Palestinian citizens, Hamas-sympathizer and resident terrorism shill Rashida Tlaib still stood before a mob of angry protesters outside the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday and peddled the line that Israel bombed the facility with the express intent to murder innocent people, including kids.
"To continue to watch people think it’s OK to bomb a hospital with children…you know what’s so hard sometimes is watching those videos and the people telling the kids ‘Don’t cry,’ and I’m like ‘Let them cry!’” she hollered.
Tlaib then broke down in big, fat crocodile tears, telling the crowd, “If we’re not crying, then something is wrong!”
“And so I’m telling you right now, President Biden, not all of America is with you on this one, and you need to wake up and understand that! We are literally watching people commit genocide and killing the vast majority just like this!” she then screamed.
Unfortunately for Tlaib and her political soapbox, multiple angles of video footage from the scene appear to show Hamas firing a barrage of rockets toward Israel Tuesday, with one exploding in mid-air moments before the area where the hospital was located explodes. Photos from the scene taken the morning after the incident shows a decimated parking lot just outside the hospital, while the facility itself appears relatively unscathed.
Related: Media, 'Squad' Rush to Blame Israel Following Gaza Hospital Explosion
President Joe Biden said during a press briefing from Israel Tuesday that it appeared a rocket fired from Gaza caused the fatal explosion, not an Israeli airstrike. Israel has denied firing anything at the hospital, saying they have evidence the bombing came from a terrorist cell within Gaza itself.
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Muslim Group Publicly Condemns Anti-Semitic Violence and Hate, Hamas, Terrorist Attack on Israel
As violence and hatred toward Jews continues to worsen amid the Middle East war sparked by Hamas’ terrorist attack on an Israeli music festival, one Muslim group is denouncing antisemitism in all its forms and sending a message to their Jewish “brethren.”
“We Muslims have one word for Jews. Shalom,” reads the headline of the message pinned to the top of the social media page of Muslims Against Antisemitism (@MAA_UK on X/Twitter). Posted on Saturday, the message that follows is a reprint of a statement tweeted by MAA when it was formed back in 2018.
When Hamas attacked Israel last month on October 7, the Muslim group immediately began condemning both the attack and those who take joy in it (emphasis added):
“Let’s be very clear. Celebrating the brutal murder of Jews (or Palestinians), is NO cause for celebration. Today, many people have lost their precious lives. Celebrating in cars at this time is horrible & shows utter contempt and antisemitism towards all Jews.”
….
“Please watch out for each other at this time. Antisemitism must not be tolerated in communities because of what is taking place in the Middle East. Jews in the U.K. cannot and must not be targeted by those who carry the poison of antisemitism within them.”
“There is NO justification for murder,” MAA declared on October 8, the day after the attack, noting that “Killing Israelis going about their lives has nothing to do with a ‘free Palestine’ but everything to do with brutal murderous barbarism by fundamentalists.”
“Relations between Muslims and Jews cannot be determined by the actions of Hamas,” MAA wrote on October 9, in a post condemning Hamas and all Islamist extremism:
“We reject the Muslim Brotherhood, offshoots like Hamas and Islamist extremists and their ideological ilk who use Islam as a cover for their twisted ideals.”
“Hamas are barbarians,” MAA added on October 31.
In other posts, MAA explains to Muslims that, if Jews feel safe, Muslims will be safe, as well, and that “You can cherish Palestinians, without hating Jews.”
Muslims Against Antisemitism echoed these sentiments in its “Shalom” message posted Saturday and pinned to the top of its social media page:
“For far too long, anti-Semitism has gone unchecked. Sadly, it has become entrenched across society. Its poison can be found in all political parties and among followers of all faiths, including Islam.
“Eradicating it is a challenge faced by all of us.”
….
“[W]e stand firmly against racism directed at our Jewish brothers and sisters.
“As Muslims, we believe that our future peace, security and prosperity in this great country cannot be ensured while Jewish communities feel under threat.”
….
“[W]e must be ever vigilant against those who cynically use international issues to vilify Jews or promote anti-Semitic tropes. There is no cause that can justify the promotion of hate.”
….
“To our Jewish sisters and brothers, we say the struggle against one of history’s oldest and most virulent hatreds is not your fight alone but ours collectively.”
The message closes with a quote, in Hebrew, from the Book of Psalms:
“In peace, we say these words: Hiney ma tov u’ma-nayim. Shevet ach’im gam ya-chad.”
"Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity" is the English translation of the Bible quote.
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Son of Hamas Leader: Hamas Is ‘Nazi Group,’ Israel ‘Not Responsible’ for Civilian Fatalities in Northern Gaza
Appearing Thursday on NewsNation’s Cuomo, Mosab Hassan Yousef, a son of one of the co-founders of Hamas, referred to the Palestinian terror organization as a “Nazi group” and said Israel is “not responsible” for civilian deaths in the northern part of the Gaza Strip.
A transcript is as follows:
CHRIS CUOMO: We just had a guest on who is sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. She said what any say here, which is Israel is killing so many civilians in Palestine that this is almost about bloodlust and Hamas is there only chance to fight back, and this is an act of a desperate people. What do you say to that point of view?
MOSAB HASSAN YOUSEF: I say to that point of view that it’s better to be silent in this moment because antisemitism and anti-Israel, anti-life is the what was in common between this type of people and the Nazis. Because the Nazis, about 100 years ago, it was a point of view. And soon later, they were gassing people in chambers. Today, we have a very similar situation. We have a Nazi group. We saw what they did on October 7th. They are hiding behind children and women. Israel says evacuate, evacuate civilians. Leaflets, phone calls, through media, and give them an opportunity of 20 days to evacuate, but they didn’t. They still given shelter to Hamas. You know why? Because they are partnering with Hamas. And in this case, Israel is not responsible for any harm that happens to civilians in northern Gaza that stay in now as we speak.
KEEP IN MIND THAT PRO-MUSLIM OBAMA AND BIDEN HAVE LONG FUNDED ISLAMIC TERRORISM SPONSORED BY IRAN!
Ayatollah Khamenei: ‘Death to America’ Is Not Just a Slogan, but Iran’s ‘Policy’
The “supreme leader” of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, declared in an address on Wednesday that the common chant of “Death to America” in his country is “not just a slogan – it is a policy,” one his regime intended to bring to fruition.
Khamenei was reportedly delivering remarks on Iranian regime-controlled television regarding the ongoing conflict between the nation of Israel and the Hamas genocidal terrorist organization, which Iran funds to the tune of tens of millions of dollars a year. The Iranian regime has enthusiastically embraced Hamas following its harrowing October 7 terrorist attack against civilians in Israel, which featured door-to-door slaughters of entire families in their homes, the mass killing, torture, and rape of attendees at a peace music festival, and evidence of gruesome killings of infants as young as newborns. The “al-Aqsa flood,” as Hamas branded its killings that day, took the lives of more than 1,400 people in Israel; another 250 are believed to still be held hostage by Hamas in its stronghold of Gaza.
On the night of October 7, in response to the news of mass death, the Iranian regime staged a massive street party in the heart of Tehran, featuring free sweets and lemonade, a fireworks display, and loud chants of “Death to Israel” and “Death to America.” Iranian officials have since falsely claimed that Israel as a state has “totally collapsed” and that Hamas’s victims, even the babies, were “not civilians.”
“Some officials in certain countries, who have spoken with our officials, have protested in defense of the Zionist occupiers as to why Palestinians have killed civilians,” Khamenei remarked in statements following the attack. “Firstly, this statement is contrary to the truth. Those who live in [Israeli] settlements are not civilians. They are all armed.”
Khamenei did not clarify how it is possible for the infants among the victims to be “armed.”
Khamenei expanded his hateful remarks against Israel on Wednesday by declaring that, given America’s longstanding support for that country, “Death to America” was a core goal of his regime’s foreign policy.
“The situation between America and Iran is this: When you chant ‘Death to America!’ it is not just a slogan – it is a policy,” Khamenei said, according to a translation by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI). “I have stated the reasons previously. For many years, from the 1940s to the 1970s – that is 30 years – the Americans did everything they could do against the Iranian nation.”
“They hit Iran in any way they could – financially, economically, politically, scientifically, and morally,” the elderly despot continued.
“If it were not for America’s support, if it were not for the support of U.S. weapons, the corrupt and artificial Zionist regime [Israel] would have been destroyed in the first week,” Khamenei claimed. “It would have collapsed. The Americans are behind this:”
Kamenei’s concession that Israel still exists contradicts comments made by his underlings in the aftermath of the Hamas terror spree, in which they recommended to the United States that it sever all its ties with Israel as the latter’s government had “totally collapsed.”
“We do encourage the US to abandon its absolute total support of the Israeli regime. According to information we have inside the region, both the security and political systems of Israel have totally collapsed,” Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian said in an interview with NPR last week. “Right now, the only thing functional in Israel is their war machine that is also being run and controlled and managed by the US.”
Khamenei’s “Death to America” comments also directly contradict his own prior assurances that “Death to America” was, indeed, just a slogan.
“‘Death to America’ means death to [former President Donald] Trump, [national security adviser] John Bolton, and [Secretary of State Mike] Pompeo,” Khamenei said in 2019. “It means death to American rulers. It means death to the few people running that country. We have nothing against the American nation.”
From left, National Security Adviser John Bolton, accompanied by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and President Donald Trump, speaks before Trump signs a National Security Presidential Memorandum to launch the “Women’s Global Development and Prosperity” Initiative in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, Thursday, Feb. 7, 2019 (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik).
Iran held a “National Day of Fighting Global Arrogance” on Wednesday, a euphemism for anti-American and anti-Western hatred. In addition to calling for “Death to America,” Khamenei demanded a global embargo on the nation of Israel.
“The world of imperialism has come forward with bombs, military pressure, tragedies, and crime, but you should know that the power of faith will overcome all of these,” Khamenei claimed, according to Iranian propaganda outlet PressTV, adding demands that all Muslim nations “block the export of oil and other commodities to the Zionist regime.”
Iranian leaders have repeatedly celebrated the atrocious Hamas terrorist attack and continued to do so this week for “National Day of Fighting Global Arrogance.” Major General Mohammad Hossein Baqeri, the head of the Iranian Armed Forces, called the mass killing of children, the elderly, the disabled, and random civilians “valiant, surprising, and unparalleled” in his remarks on Wednesday.
“The [terrorist attack] showed that all the notions that the Zionists and their masters had concocted were absurd and meaningless, and all their false delusion of grandeur fell into pieces with this flawless and precise operation,” Baqeri railed, condemning the alleged “brutality” of “the United States, Europe, and global arrogance.”
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CAIR Tells Biden to Fight ‘Islamophobia’ by Ending Israeli Campaign Against Hamas
'Islamophobia' is just a lie told to protect Islamic terrorists.
Just in case you were wondering whether the entire ‘Islamophobia’ hoax being ramped up was about anything except supporting Hamas, CAIR, which has its own history with Hamas, would like to clarify that yes, it’s about Hamas.
“The first and most important step President Biden must take to combat surging Islamophobia is the step that American Muslim leaders and organizations have repeatedly called on him to take: demand a ceasefire in Gaza,” CAIR Deputy Director Edward Ahmed Mitchell claimed.
“The development of a national strategy to combat anti-Muslim bigotry is an important step that can make a positive impact if it involves an inclusive process with all stakeholders in the American Muslim community and tackles institutional Islamophobia within the government, such as the watchlist. But first and foremost, we need a ceasefire. The American Muslim community will accept nothing less.”
There’s no ‘Islamophobia’. If the issue were attacks or harassment of Muslims, that would be the priority. Instead, it takes a backseat to protecting Hamas.
When your entire ‘Islamophobia’ program can be reduced to protecting Islamic terrorists from their victims, it’s all too abundantly obvious that the whole thing is just a strategy of playing the victim in order to enable Islamic terrorism.
CAIR is saying the quiet part out loud, that the ‘Islamophobia’ hoax exists to be put at the service of Hamas. Much as it was previously put at the service of Al Qaeda.
There’s no Islamophobia, only Islamic terrorism. ‘Islamophobia’ is just a lie told to protect Islamic terrorists.
Groups like CAIR would denounce such comments as ‘Islamophobic’, but they’re the ones making them.
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
TAKE A LOOK AROUND YOU GLOBALLY. WHEREEVER THERE ARE MUSLIMS THERE IS VIOLENCE AND MISERY. SOON THE MUSLIMS WILL BREED AN OCCUPATION OF EUROPE THAT WILL NEVER END.
THE KORAN
BIBLE OF THE MUSLIM TERRORIST:
“The Wahhabis(SAIUDIS SECT OF MUSLIMS) 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".
Misunderstanding Islamism and the Gaza War
Why did Hamas terrorists gleefully mass murder civilians in Israel? Why did the murders include atrocities such as burning people alive and chopping off their heads, even after they were dead? And, why did the crowds of “civilians” cheer and beat the dead bodies of Israelis paraded in the backs of pickup trucks in Gaza? Further, why do governments and Muslims throughout the world claim to support Hamas and/or the Palestinians? To comprehend all of this, Westerners need to gain an understanding of the religio-political movement called “Islamism.” Islamism is an entirely different phenomenon than Western political parties, and its goals and values are vastly different. Islamism is the 100-year-old movement for Islamic revival, and has been led by Iran since its Islamic revolution in 1979.
Islamic revival can best be understood by comparing it to medieval “Christian revival.” The 17th-century wars of religion between Catholics and Protestants threatened to destroy Christian society. Christianity saved itself with the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, which separated Church and State and introduced the concept of “nationalism,” with nation-states based on geographic boundaries, ethnicity, and language to determine personal identity and political loyalty.
For Christianity, nationalism and the separation of church from government in Europe was a success, resurrecting Christian Europe from decline. Three hundred years of world domination followed, marked by the Enlightenment, European colonization of the Americas, and the industrial revolution, as Europe led the world into the era of Modernity. Europe also exported its Western culture and concept of “nationalism” to the entire world. However, nationalism, which evolved from Christianity’s historic trials, would never integrate successfully into the world of Islam where loyalty could only be to God, the sovereign of the world and all mankind.
While “Christian revival” was successful due to the expulsion of religion from governance, in Islam it is exactly the opposite -- Islam was successful in its first 1,200 years precisely due to the dominance of religion in government and society. Islam experienced decline only with the advent into the Islamic world of Western political systems, European nationalism, and secularism in the last 300 years.
The movement of Islamism began in the early 1900s as an indigenous, grassroots movement championed by both poor and educated Muslims throughout the Muslim world. “Islam is the solution!” was the Islamist call to action against Westernization and secular governments which provided the masses with little hope or future. Early Islamist writer, Sayyid Qutb, in Signposts on the Path, wrote:
The leadership of Western man in the human world is coming to an end, not because Western civilization is materially bankrupt or has lost its economic or military strength, but because the Western order has played its part, and no longer possesses that stock of values which gave it its predominance. The turn of Islam has come!
Islamists do not consider themselves to be revolutionaries, in the sense of revolution changing society in a new way. Rather, Islamists strive to rebuild internally by applying traditional principles to reestablish the past strength and glory of Islam. To simply dismiss Islamists as extremists is short sighted. Islamists endeavor to build a constructive society based on justice, using the best moral values from Islamic tradition, history, and law.
Today, Islamism is the only serious political alternative to secular forms of government in the Middle East, and represents the innermost aspirations of most Muslims. Islamism has already achieved political power in Iran, Sudan, Afghanistan, Gaza, Lebanon and Yemen, and exerts wide-ranging influence and pressures upon secular leadership in Muslim countries who live in fear of their power over their populations. Though divergent ideas can be found, central beliefs of Islamism focus on these areas:
Government and Law -- Islamism advocates the implementation of Shari’ah (Islamic law) and the restoration of the Koran as the sole authority for government in Muslim countries. A return to success necessitates a purification of Islamic society from secular government systems, legislation, and institutions borrowed from or imposed by the West. For Islamists, political upheaval -- if needed by the sword -- is a necessary part of the purification of their society, hundreds of years in the making.
Culture -- All Muslims know of their history as a superior religious, military, and cultural force in the world. Islamists feel their culture is threatened by Western secular influences, especially Western values, political structures, social patterns, roles of women, secular lifestyles, and styles of dress.
Wealth and Poverty -- Islamists are strongly concerned about social issues, especially the gap between rich and poor. As responsibility for the needy is central in Islam, a society with rich elites and poor masses is unacceptable. Islamists have created welfare institutions in many rural areas and poor city neighborhoods.
Dominance of Unbelievers Over Muslims -- Western military presence in Muslim countries constitutes an affront to Islamists. Islamists believe that dominance by unbelievers is blasphemous, as it can lead to abasement of faith, immorality, and violations of Holy Law.
The United States of America -- Islamists often refer to the United States as “evil,” “the enemy of God,” and “the Great Satin.” Most Westerners have trouble understanding such passionate rhetoric, and simply dismiss it as comical. However, as the United States is the acknowledged heir and reigning master of Western civilization, it inherited the historic animosities against the West, becoming the target of objection, hate, and rage by Muslims.
Jewish/Western Conspiracy -- Islamists view Israel as the center of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy, whose purpose is to infiltrate Muslim countries, destroy Islamic values, and instill the germ of Westernization, with the ultimate goal of eradicating Islam.
Israel -- For Islamists, the very existence of an independent Jewish state called Israel is a theological and historic impossibility. In Islam’s natural social order, the Jews’ proper place can only be as protected tributaries (dhimmi) under the leadership of Islamic society, not as rulers of a sovereign state. Israel is thus their number one target, and unacceptable in any size or circumstance. On its road to revival, Islam must reacquire Palestine to redeem itself from the humiliation of a Jewish dhimmi state. Therefore, Western-style “peace” between Israel and the Islamic world is unattainable. Peace can only be achieved in Islamic terms -- peace with justice -- which requires the eradication of political independence of Jews and the domination of the Islamic society (ummah) over them.
Western misunderstanding of the movement of Islamism led to today’s conflict in the Middle East. For Israel, the Gaza war represents the final collapse of the misunderstandings and political fantasies of the Israeli left who embraced the secular PLO terror organization and turned over the Gaza Strip to them in 2005. The PLO was quickly routed by the duly elected Islamist Hamas movement who expelled the PLO and established a Palestinian state whose sole purpose was to wage war on Israel.
The U.S. government is today mistakenly characterizing HAMAS as “a few bad apples” while lionizing and promising massive aid to “civilian” Gazans, whom they view as innocent bystanders who deserve protection, food, medicine, Internet, cell service, and ultimate statehood. All this is to set up a U.S. led political settlement after the war.
As depicted in my 2008 film, Farewell Israel: Bush, Iran and the Revolt of Islam, the assumed friendly Jewish secretary of state Henry Kissinger played Golda Meir and Israel during the 1973 Yom Kippur War with military assistance to set up after-war diplomacy. So too today is another Jewish secretary of state, Anthony Blinken, setting up Israel for political defeat after the Gaza war.
The Biden administration will demand payback for assisting Israel in the war with a PLO run Palestinian state to include Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem. The U.S. Middle East “peace plan” will include security guarantees from the increasingly far Left anti-Israel Democrat party-run U.S. government and promises of recognition by various Arab states. If Benjamin Netanyahu refuses the plan, claiming it is an existential threat, a major U.S. effort will be made to remove Bibi from office in exchange for his political rivals who will accept “peace.” Most of all for Joe Biden, the peace plan will provide him with a “success story” to counterbalance his record of disastrous domestic policies. If implemented, the U.S. peace plan will be at the expense of Israel which will be doomed to fight another future war for its very existence from indefensible borders.
Hollywood film director Joel Gilbert is president of Highway 61 Entertainment. Among his many films are political documentaries including The Trayvon Hoax: Unmasking the Witness Fraud that Divided America; Trump: The Art of the Insult; There's No Place Like Utopia; Dreams from My Real Father; Atomic Jihad; and Farewell Israel: Bush, Iran and the Revolt of Islam and his new film and book Michelle Obama 2024: Her Real Life Story and Plan for Power.
Image: Tasnim News Agency
Barbarism: Tape emerges of Hamas terrorist 'playing' with severed heads
Is there any sicker, viler, more demonic movement in the world today than the Hamas terrorist organization?
The latest from them is that Hamas's terrorists, fresh from murdering 1,400 people on October 7, blood undoubtedly still dripping from their hands, made a tape of themselves describing how they "played" with severed heads of their Israeli victims:
According to William A. Jacobson at Legal Insurrection:
Audio was recovered of the terrorists admitting they played with decapitated heads while at Kibbutz Nirim:
“They cut off their heads with knives…. take photos of the heads as the guys are playing with them.”
And of course, they took selfies of themselves doing it.
These savages are depraved beyond belief. Did someone ask them if they had fun? They have a funny idea of fun.
It's not the first we have heard of Hamas's depravities and atrocities in that horror attack they conducted on innocent Israeli civilians on that terrible day last October.
Jacobson also cited a Jewish Telegraph Agency report indicating that they baked live babies in ovens:
[First responder] Moskowitz had come to Shura, a military base near the central Israeli city of Ramle, as a volunteer with the United Hatzalah emergency response corps. The base had been transformed into a center for identifying those killed in the Oct. 7 massacre by Hamas, the terror group that controls Gaza, and Moskowitz was soon pulled into the gruesome task of helping to unload and transfer dozens of bodies that arrived there.
The baby came from Kibbutz Kfar Aza, one of the communities hardest hit in the attack. It arrived in a small bag whose contents told a grim story: a tiny body, burnt and swollen, with the telltale marks from being pressed against a heating element.
“They took the baby and put it, literally, in a kitchen oven,” Moskowitz said in a video testimony recounting the assessment of professional staff at the base.
They had sex with corpses, a real turn-on for them.
They beheaded babies and children.
They conducted mass rape (where are the western femininists?)
They tied families up together and burned them alive, and set their safe rooms on fire.
They looted with abandon.
They murdered everyone in their path.
They would have to have souls rotted to the bottom to be able to do these evil things, no goodness whatsoever left in them. It makes one feel tainted just to hear about all the terrible things they did. And like demons, they took such pleasure in their atrocities, as if detached from whatever humanity they might have had left in them.
They are monsters.
What's bad here is that they wanted us to know that they are monsters. They wanted us to know how vile they are, which is why they made the tapes for general distribution.
That's an actual recruiting tool for them. A recent study of terror attacks in France revealed that the best recruiting boosts the ISIS and other linked terrorists found was in the publicizing of their vilest, most evil acts. It drew more to their miserable movement.
Eric Hoffer explained that dynamic in his 1951 bestseller, "The True Believer," citing inordinate 'sinners' eager to shed their unwanted selves as ideal candidates for this kind of fanatical mass movement. A selection of quotes around this issue, all of them insightful, can be found here.
A little summary from the CalMatters site is here:
As summarized in Wikipedia, “Hoffer argues that fanatical and extremist cultural movements, whether religious, social, or national, arise when large numbers of frustrated people, believing their own individual lives to be worthless or spoiled, join a movement demanding radical change. But the real attraction for this population is an escape from the self, not a realization of individual hopes.” Thus, a mass movement attracts followers “not because it can satisfy the desire for self-advancement, but because it can satisfy the passion for self-renunciation.”
That has to be what's going on. I was friends with Eric when I was a teenager and remember going over to his close friend Lilly Fabilli Osborne's house in San Francisco, where Lilly made dinner for us and we watched news reports of a Palestinian attack and revolt in the early 1980s on T.V.
As the media attempted to justify their actions and waxed about their need for a 'homeland,' Eric told me they were fanatics of this True Believer stripe and didn't care about a homeland, what they wanted to wreak ruin on Israel.
They're still out there, worse than everm, and Eric understood what they were doing very, very well.
Image: Twitter screen shot
Hamas sends women and children out to counter Israel troops
Ynet news has reported that when Israeli troops entered Gaza, they were prepared to face off against Hamas soldiers—and, indeed, there was heavy fighting. However, they were first met by 100 women and children. These women and children did not come out to plead for peace. Instead, they were Hamas’s front line.
I’ll be the first to admit that the Ynet report is hard to read because it’s in Hebrew, so I’m operating off of an automatically generated Google translation. However, those who can read Hebrew vouch for the translations: Hamas’s front line was women and children. Here’s the pertinent language:
In the battle for the Hamas stronghold: 100 children and women went out to face the fighters
[snip]
A war of iron swords : Givati fighters, who are more identified than any other brigade in the IDF with the Gaza arena, lost 13 of their comrades in two serious incidents in the first days of the ground maneuver: 11 soldiers of the Sabar Battalion were killed yesterday (Tuesday) by an anti-tank missile hitting a Nam APC “R” in the north in the Gaza Strip, and two soldiers of the Givat patrol were killed by an anti-tank missile in the building where the force was staying.
[snip]
During the battle on the 17th Force base adjacent to Jabaliya, the IDF soldiers were faced with an unusual sight: Hamas sent a group of about 100 children and women towards them to act as a human wall. “We are prepared for more cases of such cynical and blatant use of the population,” said one of the officers.
People unfamiliar with history might be disinclined to believe this report, assuming, instead, that it’s Israeli propaganda. However, those of us who were around in the 1980s remember something about the Iran-Iraq War that raged throughout that decade: Iran (which is funding Hamas and provides much of its strategic guidance) relied heavily on brigades made up of young children:
The minimum fighting age on the Iranian side of the conflict was age 16. Children much younger than this, even to age 12 were frequently among the Iranian dead in the fighting.
The Ayatollah Khomeini gave them “keys to paradise” if they died as his martyrs in the war.
As many as 100,000 Iranian children died in the fighting during the course of the Iran-Iraq War.
The children weren’t just sent into battle. Iran also used them to clear land mines. Back in 1984, in a time before Obama when the left still understood that the fanatic Shia Mullahs were the bad guys, Terence Smith wrote an article for the New York Times about how Iran used children:
THEIR TICKET TO PARADISE IS the blood-red headband and the small metal key that they wear into battle. ‘‘Sar Allah,’’ (‘‘Warriors of God’’), some of the headbands read in Farsi script, identifying the wearers as divinely designated martyrs who will use their keys to go directly to heaven if killed in the holy war against Iraq declared by their leader, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The headbands and the keys are worn by young boys, aged 12 to 17, who are recruited by local clergy or simply rounded up in the villages of Iran, given an intensive indoctrination in the Shiite tradition of martyrdom, and then sent weaponless into battle against Iraqi armor. Often bound together in groups of 20 by ropes to prevent the fainthearted from deserting, they hurl themselves on barbed wire or march into Iraqi mine fields in the face of withering machine-gun fire to clear the way for Iranian tanks. Across the back of their khaki-colored shirts is stenciled the slogan: “I have the special permission of the Imam to enter heaven.”
I still remember reading back then, perhaps in the Atlantic, about a seasoned Iraqi general who said the most terrifying sight he ever saw was waves and children heading toward his troops.
With that history in mind, it’s easy to believe the Israeli reports that Hamas soldiers had no problem using women and children to shield them. After all, it’s long been acknowledged that Hamas uses hospitals, schools, and playgrounds as its weapons storage facilities and as the place from which to launch its rockets.
For jihadis, the world is a binary place, one with only Us (the Muslim Ummah) and Them (all those who haven’t subordinated themselves to Islam). The ones in the “Them” category are to be killed (as cruelly as possible), enslaved, or taxed, whichever is most expedient, while the ones in the “Us” category are to dedicate themselves to the great jihad, whether as warriors or human shields. As I said, it’s binary.
THE KORAN
BIBLE OF THE MUSLIM TERRORIST:
“The Wahhabis(SAIUDIS SECT OF MUSLIMS) 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.
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.
TAKE A LOOK AROUND YOU GLOBALLY. WHEREEVER THERE ARE MUSLIMS THERE IS VIOLENCE AND MISERY. SOON THE MUSLIMS WILL BREED AN OCCUPATION OF EUROPE THAT WILL NEVER END.