Posted on 10/17/2003 11:58:54 PM PDT by PsyOp
RE: Muslim outrage over cartoons of Mohammed is very selective.
3 Responses to “MUSLIMS RIOT…WHAT ELSE IS NEW?!?” Posted on the Rick Roberts Website. February 6th, 2006.
Joe Says:
Muslim outrage huh. let’s do a review
Muslims fly commercial airliners into buildings in New York City. More then 3,000 people are murdered. No Muslim outrage. (Actually many Muslims were handing out candies and celebrating)
Muslim officials block the exit where school girls are trying to escape a burning building because their faces were exposed. No Muslim outrage.
Muslims cut off the heads of three teenaged girls on their way to school in Indonesia. A Christian school. No Muslim outrage.
Muslims murder teachers trying to teach Muslim children in Iraq. No Muslim outrage.
Muslims murder over 80 tourists with car bombs outside cafes and hotels in Egypt. No Muslim outrage.
A Muslim attacks a missionary children’s school in India. Kills six. No Muslim outrage.
Muslims slaughter hundreds of children and teachers in Beslan, Russia. Muslims shoot children in the back. No Muslim outrage.
Let’s go way back. Muslims kidnap and kill athletes at the Munich Summer Olympics. No Muslim outrage.
Muslims fire rocket-propelled grenades into schools full of children in Israel. No Muslim outrage.
Muslims murder more than 50 commuters in attacks on London subways and busses. Over 700 are injured. No Muslim outrage.
Muslims massacre dozens of innocents at a Passover Seder. No Muslim outrage.
Muslims murder innocent vacationers in Bali. No Muslim outrage.
Muslim newspapers publish anti-Semitic cartoons. No Muslim outrage
Muslims beat the charred bodies of Western civilians with their shoes, then hang them from a bridge. No Muslim outrage.
Newspapers in Denmark and Norway publish cartoons depicting Mohammed. Muslims are outraged.
Muslims are involved, on one side or the other, in almost every one of the 125+ shooting wars around the world. No Muslim outrage.
Maybe the problem isn’t the rest of the world, maybe the problem is Muslims who aren’t willing to stand up to the extremists…
- Joe
Jimmy Says:
Dear Rick and CJ,
Looks like it wouldn’t be much of a stretch to say that Islam is the religion for the genetically insecure:
1 “Radical” Muslims stand over bound prisoners and threaten them, then chanting themselves into a frenzy, they chop their heads off………Guess they are “big men” when they are wearing masks to conceal their identity while butchering a HELPLESS victim……..(yeah, I so wanna be a member of that bunch of superheroes….)
2. “Radical” Muslims strap bombs onto their bodies and get onto busloads of warlike Israeli commuters and schoolkids [not to mention all of the OTHER homicide bombings they have committed in OTHER places], and then detonate the bombs, making sure that all those “threatening” individuals are killed….. yep, they were definitely dangerous to the “peaceful” followers of Islam……..
3. Now, “Radical” Muslims are rioting because of a CARTOON, and demanding “respect” and “apologies”…………GIVE ME A FREAKING BREAK!!!!!!
Jimmy
"And while it is true that wars have been fought at one time or another in history, to advance every known religion, including Buddhism, there is no other known religion (except arguably certain forms of ancient Persian Zoroastrianism, or early modern Japanese Shintoism) that preaches imposition of belief by force....
"Hamas claims to be acting, not as the broker for its constituents’ interests, but as the popularly acclaimed voice of God. Its manifesto unambiguously proposes to advance a strictly Islamic political order, and an overwhelming majority of Palestinian Arabs believe that this is a legitimate cause. Even the losing Fatah factions agreed that Islam itself requires the “recovery” of Israel, the gradual “restoration” of a Sharia theocracy, and the imposition of Islamic authority upon subject Christians and Jews. The only disagreement was over the tactics by which results could be obtained."
"...The recent anti-Danish emotional wave coming from the Muslim world, in fact, is far from a spontaneous reaction, but it has been cunningly orchestrated by a knowledgeable insider, a real snake in the grass who has been creeping in Denmark for the last 15 years.
"Ahmed Abdel Rahman Abu Laban, a 60-year-old Palestinian imam who has been residing in Copenhagen since 1993, has become over the last few years the face of Islam in Denmark, creating his own persona of a moderate cleric who seeks dialogue but who is victimized by the widespread "racism" of the Danes....
"...Abu Laban is not the kind of person who gives up easily. After having contacted ambassadors from Muslim countries in Copenhagen, he put together a delegation with the goal of touring the Middle East to "internationalize this issue...."
"...As Prime Minister Rasmussen refused to intervene, referring to the cherished tradition of freedom of the press in his country, Qaradawi and his ilk unleashed their propagandistic war against Denmark. Abu Laban, from his mosque in the Copenhagen suburb of Nørrebro, is now happily reaping the fruits of his hard work. But, in a quintessential exercise in taqiya (double-speak), Abu Laban has tried to hide his satisfaction to the Danes. Speaking on Danish television, Abu Laban has wept crocodile tears, condemning the boycott of Danish goods and the other consequences of his actions. Yet, interviewed by al Jazeera, the imam has said just the opposite, praising the outrage of the Muslim world at his adoptive country.
"...According to DR, Intelligence documents reveal that Abu Laban has been in close contact for years with members of various terrorist organizations, and in particular with leaders of the Egyptian Gamaa Islamiya. In the beginning of the 1990s, in fact, several leaders of the Gamaa escaped the long arm of the Egyptian mukhabarat and relocated to Europe. Copenhagen became the new hometown of two of the group's leaders, Ayman al Zawahiri, currently serving as Osama bin Laden's right-hand man, and Talaat Fouad Qassimy.
"...Danes have no more patience for those who preach love in one language and war in another, those who publicly play the role of the victim, demand tolerance and then secretly incite hatred. While much of Europe has been asleep at the wheel, oblivious to the monumental threat radical Islam poses to its future, at least one country is increasing awake. Denmark's first battle is domestic, unmasking the enemy's fifth column inside its borders...."
A MESSAGE FOR MUSLIMS
from an email:
For 1,000 years, 632-1683, militant Islam spread from Arabia through Spain and into France, where they were defeated in 732 at Tours, and toward China, where they were stopped by the Mongols, and then to Vienna (twice), where they were defeated finally in 1683. They also made it into India and Indonesia, where they remain today, although most left India for West Pakistan and East Pakistan (Bangladesh) in 1947.
Islam since 1683 failed to take any land from others, and failed to make any significant advances in science, medicine, literature. music, architecture or art. Almost all their advances, such as they were, occurred before the 1600s. Their countries were unable to manufacture the simplest machines. Their agricultural practices were medieval. Only the discovery of oil gave them any wealth, and they still can't operate their oilfields without the West.
Since WWII, many Muslims have fled repressive regimes ruled by the Mullahs to find a better life in the West. Unfortunately for them - and for us - they brought with them the cause of their failure - their religion. Now, as their birth rates soar, and they gain in numbers and political strength, they are beginning to demand that the West conform to their customs, traditions, and religious law, all of which contradict with the customs, traditions, and laws of the West.
Many in the West now preach tolerance, and ask us to submit to the demands of the Muslims. To appease them. They are wrong.
NOW IS THE TIME TO SEND A CLEAR MESSAGE TO THE MUSLIMS IN THE WEST.
"You came to our countries because you were fleeing repression and a medieval culture which prevented you from enjoying the advances of the West.
"Now, some of your number are beginning to demand that we conform to your customs, traditions, and laws.
"We refuse. We will not to conform, and instead demand that you conform to our customs, traditions, and laws, or leave.
"You may practice your religion, and your customs and traditions, but only within our laws, and only to the extent that they do not conflict with our laws. Sharia is forbidden in our countries.
"You are forbidden to engage in bigamy or slavery. You are forbidden to deny our rights to your women.
"You will conform. You will swear allegiance to our countries, or you will be deported to any land that will accept you.
"Our demands are not negotiable. Lawbreakers will be imprisoned until deported."
NOW IS THE TIME. IF WE VALUE OUR FREEDOM, WE HAD BETTER DEMAND THAT THE MUSLIMS IN OUR COUNTRIES ASSIMILATE, OR LEAVE. NOW.
Let's examine the truth about what has been done in the name of Islam, the peaceful religion:
Armenian Genocide - Muslims
Ambon Massacre - Muslims
Beslan School attack- Muslims
World Trade Center attacks (2) - Muslims
Pentagon attack - Muslims
Malcolm Kerr, Pres. American University, kidnapped & murdered - Muslims
Paul Johnson, kidnapped and beheaded - Muslims
Pan-Am Flight 109 bombing - Muslims
Orly Airport attack - Muslims
Istanbul Airport attack - Muslims
Assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II - Muslim
Skyjack Sunday, 3 planes hijacked and blown up - Muslims
Planet Hollywood bombing in Cape Town - Muslims
La Belle nightclub bombing in Berlin - Muslims
AK-47 attack on CIA employees in Virginia - Muslim
Metro bombings in Paris (Twice) - Muslims
US Embassy bombing in Peru - Muslims
Russian Apartment Complex bombings - Muslims
Tunisian Synoqogue bombing - Muslim
Dagestan bombings - Muslims
US Consulate attack in Karachi - Muslims
North Ossetia Hospital attack - Muslims
Bombing of Mariott Hotel in Jakarta - Muslims
Australian Embassy bombing in Jakarta - Muslims
British Consulate and HSBC bombings, Istanbul - Muslims
Sudan Genocide - Muslims
US Embassies in Kenya & Tanzania attacked - Muslims
USS Cole attack - Muslims
Nicholas Berg, kidnapped and beheaded - Muslims
Bali nightclub bombings - Muslims
Moscow subway bombings - Muslims
Twin bombings of Russian airliners - Muslims
Murder of Theo van Gogh - Muslims
Kidnapping of hundreds of civilians & beheadings of scores in the Philippines - Muslims
Luxor Attacks, Egypt - Muslims
Attempted attack on Egyptian President Mubarak - Muslims
Lt. Col. W. Higgins, kidnapped & murdered - Muslims
US Embassy in Beirut attacks (Twice) - Muslims
French Embassy in Beirut attack - Muslims
Hijack of TWA Flight 847 - Muslims
Bombing of Jewish Cultural Center in Buenos Aires - Muslims
Moscow Opera House attack and hostage taking - Muslims
Bombings & Suicide attacks in Tashkent and Boukhara - Muslims
Marine Barracks attacks Beirut - Muslims
Egyptian Embassy attack in Pakistan - Muslims
Dhahran Housing Attack - Muslims
Thousands of beheadings in Algeria - Muslims
Madrid Train Bombing - Muslims
Suicide Bombers in Iraqi and Israel - Muslims
Margaret Hussan, kidnapped and murdered - Muslims
Daniel Pearl, kidnapped and beheaded - Muslims
Beheading of bound and defenseless noncombatants - Muslims
Sarajevo Market Massacre - Muslims
Modern Slave Trade in Africa - Muslims
Somnath Slaughter - Muslims
Taliban: executions of thousands and destruction of Afghan culture - Muslims
Enslavement and trade of Africans into Western Europe and Americas - Muslims
Honor rapes and killings - Muslims
Oppression of women - Muslims
Oppression and suppression of other religions - Muslims
Jihad - Muslims
Fatwa - Muslims
Plus hundreds of other attacks, bombings, rapes and murders............
Muslum hackers continue their retaliatory assault on Danish websites over the political cartoons run in Danish newspapers last year and more recently in other European publications. As this story is being written, the number is up to 1819 Danish site alone and continues to rise. The defaced sites contain messages aimed at various western folks carry a message attacking people who the hackers feel insult their religion of Islam. One site, beetlejuice.dk, was hacked by Iranian hackers calling themselves the Ashiyane Defacers Digital Security Team. This would seem to be a bit of self-promotion by the group. On this site, they left a message in different languages saying, "We are Muslims and We Cannot Let Anyone to Insult to Islam." The Ashiyane team even sent a note to Zone-H to make sure they got credit to the appropriate hackers...
The al-Ghorabaa site coordinated a 24-hour attack on this and other newspaper sites and paraded its success on 2 February with the result. Following this, the forum participants initiated discussion on how to broaden the campaign. This was aided by the death sentences on the cartoonist pronounced by radical sheikhs such as Nazim al-Misbah in Kuwait, reported on al-Arabiya television, and the report by the Lebanese daily al-Nahar that Usbat al-Ansar in the Ein Helweh refugee camp had called for “reviving the ‘tradition of slaughter”, and demanded that Osama bin Laden take vengeance (http://www.annahar.com). The threat, according to the pan-Arab daily al-Quds al-Arabi, has since been answered by the Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigades, which sent a declaration to the paper detailing how they had threatened Denmark with a “lasting war and a series of blessed raids” (http://www.alquds.co.uk).
Amid the controversy over the burning of the Danish and Norwegian embassies in Damascus and the burning of the Danish embassy in Beirut, al-Ghorabaa participants also called for a global “embassy-burning day” with Islamic youth called on to set fire to Danish embassies all over the world.
As a demonstration of the value of the web to the jihad, the day is to be coordinated by the following mobile phone message: “Urgent! Spread this; Resistance from the entire Islamic world before all Danish embassies in Muslim states, to protest against the publication of the pictures and to demand an apology; [demonstration to take place] on February 13, 2006. Participate and defend your Prophet!”
To: strategofr
"Although no one agrees with me, I believe communism and this modern version of Islam that we are seeing both originated in the same place: Russia."
I agree with you, why do you think the commies and the socialists are always at the anti-war rallies??? They know if Democracy spreads in the middle east, any hope of socialist revolution is OVER/DEAD/NADA/DONE
Read this interview with Ian Pacepa - Arafat at least, was a die hard marxist...
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Printable.asp?ID=12387
Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Ion Mihai Pacepa, former acting chief of Communist Romania’s espionage service. In 1987 he published Red Horizons (Regnery Gateway), reprinted in 24 countries. In 1999 Mr. Pacepa authored The Black Book of the Securitate, reportedly an all time bestseller in Romania. He is now finishing a book on the origins of current anti-Americanism.
Frontpage Magazine: Welcome to Frontpage Interview, Mr. Pacepa. Let’s begin. As a former Romanian spy chief who used to take direct orders from the Soviet KGB, you are obviously armed with a wealth of information. You have written about how the Soviets armed Hussein with WMDs, and also taught him how to eliminate any trace of them. Can you talk a bit about this and tell us its connection to the “missing WMDs” in Iraq today?
Pacepa: Contemporary political memory seems to be conveniently afflicted with some kind of Alzheimer's disease. Not long ago, every Western leader, starting with President Clinton, fumed against Saddam’s WMD. Now almost no one remembers that after General Hussein Kamel, Saddam’s son-in-law, defected to Jordan in 1995, he helped us find “more than one hundred metal trunks and boxes” containing documentation “dealing with all categories of weapons, including nuclear.” He also aided UNSCOM to fish out of the Tigris River high-grade missile components prohibited to Iraq. That was exactly what my old Soviet-made “Sãrindar” plan stated he should do in case of emergency: destroy the weapons, hide the equipment, and preserve the documentation. No wonder Saddam hastened to lure Kamel back to Iraq, where three days later he was killed together with over 40 of his relatives in what the Baghdad official press described as a “spontaneous administration of tribal justice.” Once that was done, Saddam slammed the door shut to any UNSCOM inspection.
FP: So was any Sãrindar plan activated?
Pacepa: Certainly. The minimal version of the Sãrindar plan I made for Libya’s Gaddafi. Soon after I was granted political asylum in the US, Gaddafi staged a fire at the secret chemical weapons facility I knew about (the cellar underneath the Rabta chemical complex). To be sure the CIA satellites would notice that fire and cross that target off its list, he created a huge cloud of black smoke by burning truckloads of tires and painting scorch marks on the facility. That was written in the Sãrindar plan. To be on the safe side, Gaddafi also built a second production facility, this time placed some 100 feet underground in the hollowed-out Tarhunah Mountain, south of Tripoli. That was not in the Sãrindar plan.
FP: It is undeniable, therefore, that Saddam had WMDs, right?
Pacepa: In the early 1970s, the Kremlin established a “socialist division of labor” for persuading the governments of Iraq and Libya to join the terrorist war against the US. KGB chairman Yury Andropov (who would later become the leader of the Soviet Union), told me that either of those two countries could inflict more damage on the Americans than could the Red Brigades, the Baader-Meinhof group and all other terrorist organizations taken together. The governments of those Arab countries, Andropov explained, not only had inexhaustible financial resources (read: oil), but they also had huge intelligence services that were being run by “our razvedka advisers” and could extend their tentacles to every corner of the earth. There was one major danger, though: by raising terrorism to the state level we risked American reprisal. Washington would never dispatch its airplanes and rockets to exterminate the Baader-Meinhof, but it might well deploy them to destroy a terrorist state. We therefore were also tasked to provide those countries secretly with weapons of mass destruction, because Andropov concluded that the Yankees would never attack a country that could retaliate with such deadly weapons.
Libya was Romania’s main client in that socialist division of labor, because of Ceausescu’s close association with Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. Moscow kept Iraq. Andropov told me that, if our Iraq and Libyan experiment proved successful, the same strategy would be extended to Syria. Recently, Libya’s Gaddafi admitted to having WMD, and the CIA inspectors found them. Why should we believe that the almighty Soviet Union, which had proliferated WMD all over the world, was not able to do the same thing in Iraq? Every piece of armament Iraq had came from the former Soviet Union—from the Katyusha launchers to the T72 tanks, BMP-1 fighting vehicles and MiG fighter planes. In the spring of 2002, just a couple of weeks after Russia took its place at the NATO table, President Putin and his ex-KGB officers who are now running Russia concluded another $40 billion trade deal with Saddam Hussein’s tyrannical regime in Iraq. That was not for grain or beans—Russia has to import them from elsewhere.
FP: Tell us about the PLO and its connection to the Soviet regime.
Pacepa: The PLO was dreamt up by the KGB, which had a penchant for “liberation” organizations. There was the National Liberation Army of Bolivia, created by the KGB in 1964 with help from Ernesto “Che” Guevara. Then there was the National Liberation Army of Colombia, created by the KGB in 1965 with help from Fidel Castro, which was soon deeply involved in kidnappings, hijackings, bombings and guerrilla warfare. In later years the KGB also created the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which carried out numerous bombing attacks on the “Palestinian territories” occupied by Israel, and the “Secret Army for Liberation of Armenia,” created by the KGB in 1975, which organized numerous bombing attacks against US airline offices in Western Europe.
In 1964 the first PLO Council, consisting of 422 Palestinian representatives handpicked by the KGB, approved the Palestinian National Charter—a document that had been drafted in Moscow. The Palestinian National Covenant and the Palestinian Constitution were also born in Moscow, with the help of Ahmed Shuqairy, a KGB influence agent who became the first PLO chairman. (During the Six-Day War he escaped from Jerusalem disguised as a woman, thereafter becoming such a symbol within the bloc intelligence community that one of its later influence operations—aimed at making the West consider Arafat a moderate—was given the codename “Shuqairy.”) This new PLO was headed by a Soviet-style Executive Committee made up of 15 members who, like their comrades in Moscow, also headed departments. As in Moscow—and Bucharest—the chairman of the Executive Committee became the general commander of the armed forces as well. The new PLO also had a General Assembly, which was the Soviet-inspired name given to all East European parliaments after World War II.
Based on another “socialist division of labor,” the Romanian espionage service (DIE) was responsible for providing the PLO with logistical support. Except for the arms, which were supplied by the KGB and the East German Stasi, everything else came from Bucharest. Even the PLO uniforms and the PLO stationery were manufactured in Romania free of charge, as a “comradely help.” During those years, two Romanian cargo planes filled with goodies for the PLO landed in Beirut every week, and were unloaded by Arafat’s men.
FP: You have discussed your personal knowledge of how Arafat was created and cultivated by the KGB and how the Soviets actually designed him to be the future leader of the PLO. Illuminate this picture for us please.
Pacepa: “Tovarishch Mohammed Abd al-Rahman Abd al-Raouf Arafat al-Qudwa al-Husseini, nom de guerre Abu Ammar,” was built into a Palestinian leader by the KGB in the aftermath of the 1967 Six-Day Arab-Israeli War. In that war Israel humiliated two of the Soviet Union’s most important allies in the Arab world of that time, Egypt and Syria, and the Kremlin thought that Arafat could help repair the Soviet prestige. Arafat had begun his political career as leader of the Palestinian terrorist organization al-Fatah, whose fedayeen were being secretly trained in the Soviet Union. In 1969, the KGB managed to catapult him up as chairman of the PLO executive committee. Egyptian ruler Gamal Abdel Nasser, who was also a Soviet puppet, publicly proposed the appointment.
Soon after that, the KGB tasked Arafat to declare war on American “imperial-Zionism” during the first summit of the Black International, an organization that was also financed by the KGB. Arafat claimed to have coined the word “imperial-Zionism,” but in fact Moscow had invented this battle cry many years earlier, combining the traditionally Russian anti-Semitism with the new Marxist anti-Americanism.
FP: Why has the American and Israeli leadership been deceived so long about Arafat’s criminal and terrorist activities?
Pacepa: Because Arafat is a master of deceit—and I unfortunately contributed to that. In March 1978, for instance, I secretly brought Arafat to Bucharest to involve him in a long-planned Soviet/Romanian disinformation plot. Its goal was to get the United States to establish diplomatic relations with him, by having him pretend to transform the terrorist PLO into a government-in-exile that was willing to renounce terrorism. Soviet president Leonid Brezhnev believed that newly elected US president Jimmy Carter would swallow the bait. Therefore, he told the Romanian dictator that conditions were ripe for introducing Arafat into the White House. Moscow gave Ceausescu the job because by 1978 my boss had become Washington’s most favored tyrant. “The only thing people in the West care about is our leaders,” the KGB chairman said, when he enrolled me in the effort of making Arafat popular in Washington. “The more they come to love them, the better they will like us.”
“But we are a revolution,” Arafat exploded, after Ceausescu explained what the Kremlin wanted from him. “We were born as a revolution, and we should remain an unfettered revolution.” Arafat expostulated that the Palestinians lacked the tradition, unity, and discipline to become a formal state. That statehood was only something for a future generation. That all governments, even Communist ones, were limited by laws and international agreements, and he was not willing to put any laws or other obstacles in the way of the Palestinian struggle to eradicate the state of Israel.
My former boss was able to persuade Arafat into tricking President Carter only by resorting to dialectical materialism, for both were fanatical Stalinists who knew their Marxism by heart. Ceausescu sympathetically agreed that “a war of terror is your only realistic weapon,” but he also told his guest that, if he would transform the PLO into a government-in-exile and would pretend to break with terrorism, the West would shower him with money and glory. “But you have to keep on pretending, over and over,” my boss emphasized.
Ceausescu pointed out that political influence, like dialectical materialism, was built upon the same basic tenet that quantitative accumulation generates qualitative transformation. Both work like cocaine, let’s say. If you sniff it once or twice, it may not change your life. If you use it day after day, though, it will make you into an addict, a different man. That’s the qualitative transformation. And in the shadow of your government-in-exile you can keep as many terrorist groups as you want, as long as they are not publicly connected with your name.
In April 1978 I accompanied Ceausescu to Washington, where he convinced President Jimmy Carter that he could persuade Arafat to transform his PLO into a law-abiding government-in-exile, if the United States would establish official relations with him. Thereupon, President Carter publicly hailed Ceausescu as a “great national and international leader” who had “taken on a role of leadership in the entire international community.”
Three months later I was granted political asylum by the United States, and Romania’s tyrant lost his dream of getting the Nobel Peace Prize. A quarter of a century later, however, Arafat remains in place as the PLO chairman and seems to still be on track with the Kremlin’s game of deception. In 1994, Arafat was granted the Nobel Peace Prize because he agreed to transform his terrorist organization into a kind of government-in-exile (the Palestinian Authority) and pretended, over and over, that he would abolish the articles in the 1964 PLO Covenant that call for the destruction of the state of Israel and would eradicate Palestinian terrorism. At the end of the 1998-99 Palestinian school year, however, all one hundred and fifty new schoolbooks used by Arafat’s Palestinian Authority described Israel as the “Zionist enemy” and equated Zionism with Nazism. Two years after the Oslo Accords were signed, the number of Israelis killed by Palestinian terrorists rose by 73% compared to the two year period preceding the agreement.
FP: There simply can’t be any kind of peace in the Middle East with Arafat at the helm. What advice would you give to American and Israeli diplomats now?
Pacepa: To expose Arafat’s lies and condemn his bloody terrorism, but to avoid being implicated in physical reprisals against him—that would certainly make him a hero with the Palestinians. I strongly suggest the Ceausescu solution. In November 1989, when he was loudly reelected president of Romania, Ceausescu was as popular there as Arafat is now with the Palestinians. A month later, however, Ceausescu was tried for genocide by his own people and executed by his own people. From one day to the next Ceausescu became the symbol of tyranny. Romania turned into a free country, and twelve years later it was invited to join NATO.
FP: Tell us a bit about what you think about the state of the KGB in Russia today. Some say it is experiencing a resurrection. Is this true?
Pacepa: It certainly is. In the last dozen years, Russia has been transformed for the better in unprecedented ways. Nevertheless, that country has a long way to go until it will tear down the legacy of Soviet Communism. As of June 2003, some 6,000 former KGB officers were reportedly holding important positions in Russia’s central and regional governments. Three months later, nearly half of the top governmental positions were also held by former KGB. It is like putting the old, supposedly defeated Gestapo in charge of rebuilding Germany.
Since the fall of Communism the Russians have been faced with an indigenous form of capitalism run by old Communist bureaucrats, speculators and ruthless mafiosi that has widened social inequities and created a decline in industrial production. Therefore, after a period of upheaval, the Russians have gradually—and perhaps thankfully—slipped back into their historical form of government, the traditional Russian samoderzhaviye (autocracy) traceable to the 14th century’s Ivan the Terrible, in which a feudal lord ruled the country with the help of his personal political police. Good or bad, the historically Russian political police may appear to most people in that country as their only defense against the rapacity of the new capitalists at home and the greediness of grasping foreign neighbors.
Russia will never return to Communism—too many Russians perished at the hands of that heresy. But it seems that Russia will not truly turn westward either, at least not under this generation. If history—including that of the last 14 years—is any guide, the Russians, who are now enjoying their regained nationalism, will struggle to rebuild a kind of an Old Russian Empire by inspiring themselves from old Russian traditions and by using old Russian ways and means.
FP: So is Russia a friend or a foe of the United States in the present international environment?
Pacepa: After the Berlin Wall was torn down, I hurried over there to have a look around. The dreaded East German political police was abolished from one day to the next, and its archives were opened to the public. One year later, the Stasi’s outrageous activity was laid bare in a large, impressive museum of freedom. A member of the Berlin parliament told me that the Germans wanted to provide the world with the certitude that the past would never be repeated. To be on the safe side, the German government sold off all the Stasi’s buildings to private companies.
After the Soviet Union collapsed, the new rulers in the Kremlin did not open the archives of the Soviet Union’s political police, but in 1992 they did create their own kind of KGB museum in Moscow, in a dreary gray building behind the Lubyanka. The upper floors remain KGB offices, but the rooms on the ground floor are used for conferences and as a club for retired KGB officers—complete with disco.
On September 11, 2002, numerous former KGB officers gathered at the KGB museum. They had not congregated in order to sympathize with us on the date of our national tragedy, but to celebrate the 125th birthday of Feliks Dzerzhinsky—the man who created one of the most criminal institutions in contemporary history. A few days later, Moscow’s mayor, Yury Lushkov, one of Russia’s most influential politicians, reversed his previous opposition and now said he wanted to restore Dzerzhinsky’s bronze statue to its former place of honor on Lubyanka Square. Just before that, the new Russian president ordered that the statue of Yury Andropov be reinstated at the Lubyanka, from where it had been removed after the KGB coup in 1991. Andropov is indeed the only other KGB officer to have been enthroned in the Kremlin, and it was therefore normal for Putin to pay homage to him. For all his life, Andropov indoctrinated his subordinates to believe that American Imperialism was the main enemy of their country. Now these subordinates are running Russia. It may take another generation until the visceral hatred for the US cultivated by Andropov disappears.
FP: How does Russia fit in the War on Terror? Isn’t there at least a common interest in fighting Islamic terrorism?
Pacepa: September 11, 2001 was directly rooted in a joint Soviet/Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) operation conceived in the aftermath of the 1967 Six-Day Arab-Israeli War. The object of this joint operation was to repair Moscow's prestige by turning the Islamic world against Israel and by creating a rabid and violent hatred for its main supporter, the United States. The strategy was to portray the US, this land of freedom, as a Nazi-style "imperial-Zionist country" financed by Jewish money and run by a rapacious "Council of the Elders of Zion" (the Kremlin's epithet for the US Congress), the aim of which was allegedly to transform the rest of the world into a Jewish fiefdom. In other words, the heart of the joint plan was to convert the historical Arab and Islamic hatred of the Jews into a new hatred of the United States. We threw many millions of dollars at this gigantic task, which involved whole armies of intelligence officers.
In the late 1960s, a new element was added to the Soviet/PLO war against Israel and American imperial-Zionism: international terrorism. Before 1969 came to an end, the KGB's Thirteenth Department-known in our intelligence jargon as the Department for Wet Affairs, wet being a euphemism for bloody-invented airplane hijacking. The KGB constantly lectured at us that no one within the
American/Zionist sphere of influence should feel safe anymore. The hijacked airplane became an instrument of Soviet foreign policy-and eventually the weapon of choice for September 11, 2001.
During those years of intensive airplane hijackings, I became amazed at the almost identical pride both Arafat and KGB General Sakharovsky exhibited over their prowess as terrorists. “I invented the hijacking of [passenger] airplanes,” Arafat bragged to me in the early 1970s, when I first met him. A few months later I met with Sakharovsky at his Lubyanka office. He pointed to the red flags pinned onto a world map hanging on his wall. “Look at that,” he said. Each flag represented a plane that had been downed. “Airplane hijacking is my own invention,” he boasted.
Sakharovsky’s subordinates are now reigning in the Kremlin. Until they fully disclose their involvement in creating anti-American terrorism and condemn Arafat’s terrorism, there is no reason to believe they have changed.
FP: Mr. Pacepa. thank you. We are out of time. It was a great honor to speak with you. I hope you will return and join us again.
Pacepa: It was a great pleasure to be with you, and I would be delighted to return.
Jenny
95 posted on 02/15/2006 7:37:45 PM PST by Jenny Hatch (Mommy Blogger)
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An Historical Perspective on Islam
Let’s begin our consideration of these questions with some historical background.
Muhammad, the man who dictated the Koran and gave birth to Islam, was born in Mecca in the Saudi Arabian peninsula in 570 A.D. His father died before he was born, and his mother died when he was six years old. He was raised first by a grandfather and later by an uncle.
Muhammad was illiterate throughout his life. Until the age of 25 he worked in caravans. During his extensive travels, he encountered many Christians and Jews. Through his conversations with them, he picked up bits and pieces of both Judaism and Christianity.
His life was radically changed at age 25 when he met a wealthy widow 40 years old who fell in love with him. Their marriage enabled Muhammad to live a life of leisure from that point on.
Muhammad’s Call
Fifteen years after his marriage, at age 40, Muhammad had a visitation from a spirit. Supposedly, this spirit told him that he was called of God to be a “prophet” and an “apostle.” It is interesting to note that there was no tradition in Arabian religions of either prophets or apostles. These terms were obviously used by Muhammad to appeal to Jews and Christians.
Muhammad continued to have spirit visitations. They would throw him into a trance, and his utterances during the trances were written down by scribes. These ethereal statements became the Koran, but they were not compiled until after Muhammad’s death. When the compilation was made, the utterances were not organized either chronologically or by subject matter. The result was a jumble of disorganized and often incoherent sayings which are frequently contradictory.
For example, the Koran1 gives four conflicting accounts of Muhammad’s call to be a prophet [the word, Sura, means chapter]:
Suras 53 and 81 — God, or Allah as he is called in Arabic, personally appeared to Muhammad.
Suras 16 and 26 — The call was from the Holy Spirit.
Sura 15 — Angels issued the call.
Sura 2 — Gabriel was the one who appeared to him.
Muhammad’s Revelations
At the time Muhammad received his initial visitation, there were over 300 gods being worshiped in Mecca by pilgrims who came there each year to pray at the Ka’aba, a small cubic building that housed a black meteorite and effigies of the various gods. One of those gods was Allah, the moon god.
Muhammad decided to proclaim that there was only one god — and he selected Allah as that god. That’s the reason the crescent moon became the symbol of Islam. Muhammad also proclaimed that he was the prophet of Allah.
Initially, Muhammad expected both Jews and Christians to receive his new revelation. Thus, early passages in the Koran speak admiringly of “the people of the Book.” These are the passages that Muslims in the West love to quote in their effort to prove that Islam is a tolerant religion. An example is Sura 5:82 which says, “You will find that those who are nearest in love to the believers [Muslims] are those who say, ‘We are Christians.’”
Muhammad’s Rejection
But when Jews and Christians rejected Muhammad, he turned fiercely against them, and later passages in the Koran speak of them disparagingly:
Sura 5:51 commands Muslims not to take Jews and Christians as friends.
Sura 9:29 commands Muslims to fight against Jews and Christians until they either submit to Allah or else agree to pay a special tax.
Sura 2:65-66 and Sura 5:60 contain references to Jews as “apes and swine to be despised and rejected.” (Think of that! You can be sure that such a statement did not come from the true God of this universe who selected the Jews to be His Chosen People.)
Jews and Christians were not the only ones who rejected Muhammad’s new revelations. The people of his own tribe, the Quraysh, also rejected him. In response, Muhammad succumbed to the temptation to appease his tribe by announcing that it would be okay for them to worship the three daughters of Allah — named Al-Lat, Al-Uzza, and Manat.
This declaration led to the infamous “Satanic verses” of the Koran which were later deleted when Muhammad reverted back to monotheism. Muslims have tried ever since to cover-up this diversion from the faith. You may remember that in 1989 an Indian writer by the name of Salman Rushdie brought up this taboo topic when he wrote a novel entitled, The Satanic Verses. The Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran condemned him and called for his assassination. A three million dollar bounty was placed on his head, and he has been in hiding ever since.
Muhammad’s Trek
The opposition to Muhammad in his home town of Mecca continued to grow until he was forced to flee 250 miles to Medina where his message was received. The Islamic calendar dates from this year when Muhammad fled to Medina and found a receptive audience, resulting in the formal establishment of Islam as a religion. It was the year 622 A.D., and that date represents year one of the Muslim calendar, which is a lunar calendar. The year 2001 is the year 1422 in the Muslim dating system.
After the death of his wife, Muhammad married at least 11 other women (some sources place the total as high as 16). He also took several concubines. He married one girl who was only six years old and had sexual relations with her when she was 9.2 According to the Koran, only the prophet could have unlimited wives. All other Muslim men are limited to four (Sura 4:3).
Muhammad died on June 8, 632 A.D. in Medina at age 63. He left no successor, and Islam soon broke into warring sects such as the Shiites and the Sunnis.
The Spread of Islam
All of those who survived Muhammad took up the sword, as directed by the Koran, and devoted themselves to advancing Islam through military might. The resulting spread of the religion was phenomenal. Within a century, Islamic forces had conquered Saudi Arabia, the entire Middle East, Central Asia, and large parts of India. The armies raged through Egypt and across North Africa, destroying corrupt Byzantine Christianity in their path.
In 710 A.D. the Islamic armies crossed the Straits of Gibraltar and quickly conquered three-fourths of Spain and Portugal. They then invaded France and took one-third of the nation. They were 125 miles from Paris when they were miraculously defeated at the Battle of Poitiers (also known as the Battle of Tours) in 732 A.D. by a French army led by Charles Martel. Their influence in Spain lived on for a few more centuries before they were slowly driven back to North Africa.
A second powerful attempt to subjugate all of Europe was made 900 years later in the 17th Century when the Turks began to expand their Ottoman Empire. They took Greece, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and parts of Romania and Hungary. By 1683 they had reached the gates of Vienna where once again the Western forces won a miraculous victory against overwhelming odds.
Following this second attempt to conquer Europe, Islam fell into a state of depression and stagnation until it was awakened in the 20th Century due to several factors:
The Amassing of Great Wealth — due to the discovery of vast reservoirs of oil in Arab lands.
The Re-establishment of the Nation of Israel — interpreted by Islamic clerics like Khomeini as a judgment of Allah due to Islamic stagnation and apostasy.
The Positioning of U.S. Armed Forces — the placement during the 1990's of American troops throughout the Middle East in response to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.
The Encroachment of Western Culture into the Muslim World — due to the penetration of Western movies, television programs, and consumer goods.
The Cultural Nature of Islam
The encroachment of Western culture cannot be stressed too much. It seems trivial to most Westerners, but that is because of the failure to understand that Islam is a cultural religion that deifies 7th Century Arabian culture.4
Westerners tend to view religion as something intensely personal and private, and not as a cultural phenomenon. For example, Christianity is “supra-cultural” in that it allows people to live, dress and eat in accordance with the culture in which they exist. This is not so with Islam. In Islam there is no “secular realm” that is free of religion. Islam regulates every aspect of life to the point that religion, politics, and culture are inseparable. Islam is thus fueled by a subtle form of racism in which 7th Century Arab culture is to be imposed upon all other cultures.
Here are some examples of the cultural nature of Islam:
Political Structure — The tribalism of 7th Century Arabia is the political structure sanctioned by the Koran. The chief has absolute authority. There is no concept of civil rights. This principle is reflected today in the reality that all Islamic countries are ruled by dictators, and civil liberties, like freedom of speech and religion, do not exist.
Prayer — A Muslim is required to pray five times a day toward Mecca. This is a symbol of the underlying cultural imperialism that lies at the heart of Islam. Think of it — what if all Russian Orthodox throughout the world were required to pray toward Moscow? Or, if all Roman Catholics were required to face Rome when they prayed? What if Evangelical Christians were required to pray toward Jerusalem? Such requirements would imply a cultural attachment to the focal point of prayer.
Pilgrimage — A Muslim is required, despite the hardship and cost, to make a pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia once in his lifetime. Again, what if all Christians were required to go to Rome once in their lifetimes?
Dietary Laws — The only foods allowable are those that were acceptable in 7th Century Arabia.
Women — What an illiterate, nomadic tribeswoman wore in the desert in 7th Century Arabia is what is mandated for Muslim women today. The plight of women in Islamic countries today is despicable. They can be kept prisoners in their homes. They cannot appear in public without a covering. They are usually denied the right to vote. They are often denied anything more than a rudimentary education. In strict Islamic countries, women are generally treated as sub-human.5 Sura 4:34 says, “Men are the managers of the affairs of women . . . Those women who are rebellious — admonish them, banish them to their couches, and beat them.”
Punishment — Cruel and unusual punishment is practiced throughout the Islamic world. Incarceration without due process is common. Punishments often include torture, the cutting off of body parts (hands, ears and tongues), the gouging out of eyes, beheading, and public flogging — all representative of 7th Century Arabian culture. The Koran specifically commands that those who disobey Allah are to be tortured (Sura 8:12-14).
Time magazine recently presented a chilling summary of the cultural nature of Islam as it is evidenced in the “moderate” Islamic nation of Saudi Arabia:6
Despite the modernization that took place after the discovery of oil reserves in 1938, Saudi Arabia remains a land where rigid religious and traditional values are strictly enforced. Cinemas and discos are outlawed; men and women are separated in banks, schools, and fast-food restaurants; women must wear veils and are forbidden to drive. Public decency police known as muttawa comb shopping malls searching for women whose loose scarves reveal a curl of hair and forcing store owners to shut during prayer times. Unforgiving Saudi justice is on view after the main prayer every Friday, when a swordsman beheads blindfolded murderers, sorcerers, drug smugglers, and other criminals in Riyadh’s “Chop-chop Square.”
The Spiritual Nature of Islam
Islam is a typical works salvation religion centered around a false god. Its fundamental tenets deny the heart of the Christian Gospel, revealing its demonic origin.
The Koran — As I have already pointed out, the holy book of Islam is riddled with contradictions. Consider, for example, what it says about creation. In one place it asserts that Allah created everything in “the twinkling of an eye” (Sura 54:49-50). Elsewhere it says that the time period of the creation was two days (Sura 41:9, 12); four days (Sura 41:10); six days (Suras 7:54, 10:4, and 32:4); in “a day equaling 1,000 years” (Sura 32:5); and also in “50,000 years” (Sura 70:4). That’s a total of six different time periods!
The Koran contains many scientific errors. A crude example is found in Sura 18:8-86 where it says that Alexander the Great followed the setting of the sun and discovered that it went down into the waters of a muddy spring!
Many Arabian fairy tales about genies are contained in the Koran, and the book is also full of historical errors. It presents Mary the mother of Jesus as the sister of Moses and Aaron (obviously confusing her with their sister, Miriam). The Noahic flood is placed in the time of Moses, and the claim is made that one of Noah’s sons refused to enter the Ark and was drowned.
The Koran also pictures Abraham as offering Ishmael as a sacrifice in Mecca, whereas the biblical account has Abraham offering Isaac on Mt. Moriah in the area that would later become the heart of Jerusalem.
God — The Koran asserts that the god of Islam is the God of Christians and Jews (Sura 29:46). Nothing could be farther from the truth.
The god of Islam, Allah, is most definitely not the God of the Bible. Allah is presented in the Koran as an autocratic ruler who is aloof and arbitrary (Sura 5:40). Allah is unknowable whereas the God of the Bible is knowable (2 Timothy 1:12). Allah is impersonal, unlike the personal God the Scriptures reveal (1 Peter 5:6-7). Allah is unitarian (Sura 4:48) whereas the God of the Bible is trinitarian (2 Corinthians 13:14). Here is what the Koran says about the God of the Bible (Sura 4:171): “Believe in Allah and say not ‘Trinity.’ Cease! It is better for you! Allah is only One God. Far is it removed from his transcendent majesty that he should have a son.”
Allah is capricious (Sura 2:284), whereas the true God is trustworthy. And Allah is never anywhere presented as a god of love — which is the essence of the nature of the true God (1 John 4:7-16).
Jesus — The Koran denies point blank that Jesus was the Son of God (Sura 112:2-3). It also denies His atoning sacrifice by claiming that he never died (Sura 4:157). A substitute died for Him on the Cross. Jesus was translated to Heaven, like Enoch, where He will remain until He returns to kill all pigs, destroy all crosses, and convert the world to Islam. Jesus will marry, reign for 40 years and then die and be buried next to Muhammad in Medina. Jesus is characterized in the Koran as nothing more than “an apostle of Allah” (Sura 4:171).
Sin — There is no concept of sin in Islam and therefore no need for forgiveness. Shame replaces sin. Everything is a matter of honor verses dishonor. In the Muslim view, man does not need redemption, he only needs some guidance so that he might develop the inherently pure nature with which the Creator has endowed him. If he will be faithful in his prayers, almsgiving and fasting, God is likely to overlook his failures and usher him into Paradise.
Ethics — The situation determines the appropriate action, not a standard of right and wrong. As an example, Al Ghazzali (1058 - 1111), one of the greatest Muslim theologians, wrote: “Know that a lie is not wrong in itself. If a lie is the only way of obtaining a good result, it is permissible. We must lie when truth leads to unpleasant results.”11 The Koran sanctions revenge: “If anyone transgresses . . . against you, transgress likewise against him” (Sura 2:194).
Salvation — Islam is a religion of works. One obtains favor with Allah by performing the five pillars of the faith:
Reciting the creed that there is one god, Allah, and his prophet is Muhammad.
Praying five times a day toward Mecca.
Giving alms to the poor.
Fasting from sunrise to sunset one month a year during the month of Ramadan.
Making a pilgrimage to Mecca.
Another way to reach Paradise is to die fighting for Allah (Sura 3:157).
Islam is so works oriented that it teaches that good deeds cancel bad ones (Sura 11:114). In contrast to all this emphasis on works, the true Word of God teaches that it is impossible to earn salvation because it is a gift of God’s grace that is received through faith in Jesus as Lord and Savior (Ephesians 2:8-10).
Heaven — The Islamic Paradise is a place of sensual pleasure consisting of gluttonous feasts and endless sex orgies (Suras 52:17-24; 55:54-56; and 78:32-34).
The Intolerant and Militant Nature of Islam
One of the most controversial issues regarding Islam concerns whether or not it is a militant religion. Muslims in the West argue it is peace-loving. Westerners who have experienced it in the Muslim world argue it is inherently intolerant and militant.
The Koran itself preaches intolerance toward other religions. Sura 5 contains the following command: “Take not Jews and Christians for friends... He among you who takes them for friends is one of them... Choose not for friends such of those who received the Scripture before you [Jews and Christians].. But keep your duty to Allah” (verses 51, 55, 57). Extreme intolerance is commanded in Sura 5:33 — “[For those who do not submit to Allah] their punishment is . . . execution or crucifixion, or the cutting off of hands and feet, from the opposite sides, or exile from the land.”
The Koran also expresses an intolerant attitude toward any person who decides to reject the Islamic faith or convert to another religion. Such persons are to be executed (Sura 9:12). In the Hadith (the oral tradition of Muhammad’s sayings) it says “Whoever changes his religion, kill him” (Hadith 9:57). These commands are practiced in all Islamic Fundamentalist countries today.
With regard to militancy, the Koran not only condones it, it commands it:
Fighting is prescribed for you, and [some of] you dislike it. But it is possible that you dislike a thing which is good for you, and that you love a thing which is bad for you. But Allah knows, and you know not (Sura 2:216).
Fight and slay the pagans wherever you find them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem of war (Sura 9:5).
Fight in the way of Allah . . . and slay them [the unbelievers] wherever you find them and drive them out . . . and fight them until . . . religion is for Allah (Sura 2:190-193).
Muhammad is quoted in the Hadith as saying, “The sword is the key of heaven and hell. A drop of blood in the cause of Allah — a night spent in arms [war] — is of more avail than two months of fasting and prayer. Whosoever falls in battle, his sins are forgiven, and at the day of judgment, his limbs shall be supplied by the wings of angels and cherubim.”
Muslim Propaganda
Muslims living in Western democracies try to defend their religion by quoting Sura 2:256 which says, “There is no compulsion in religion.”
In evaluating this very lonely verse in the Koran, you need to keep in mind first that it was written before Muhammad was rejected by Jews, Christians and his fellow Arabs — before he fled to Medina and started responding in hatred to all his detractors. But even more important is the fact that Islamic teachers themselves argue that this verse was later abrogated, either by the words or actions of Muhammad.
Some argue that the verse was abrogated by Muhammad’s later orders for his troops to fight until unbelievers were compelled to surrender to Islam.
Others argue it was abrogated by Sura 9:73 which says, “O Prophet, struggle with the unbelievers and hypocrites, and be harsh with them.”
A third group argues that the words of the verse do not mean what they seem to say. They argue the words mean that religion cannot be used to force someone to do something evil, but compelling people to accept the truth of Allah is a religious duty.
A fourth group of Islamic clerics accepts the words to mean what they say, but they argue that they were part of Allah’s strategy to advance Islam. While Muslims were weak, Allah spoke through Muhammad and told them to tolerate infidels. But when the Muslims became strong, Allah commanded them to cease being tolerant and attack and subdue the infidels.
The bottom line is that regardless of the explanation, the result is the same — the verse has been abrogated, and infidels must embrace Islam or face death.
Muslims sometimes counter by pointing to the intolerance and violence that have characterized both Jews and Christians at certain times in their histories. They point to the slaughter of the Canaanites when the Jews took the Promised Land under the leadership of Joshua. And, of course, they point to the Christian Crusades in the Middle Ages. Using these examples, they accuse Jews and Christians of being hypocritical in attacking the intolerance and violence of Islam today.
With regard to the Jews, this argument ignores the fact that God used them as an instrument of His judgment against the tribes living in Canaan — just as He later used the Assyrians and Chaldeans to judge the Jews (Genesis 15:16; Leviticus 18:24-25; Deuteronomy 9:5). He never told the Jews to conquer the world for Him, and He provided them with precise instructions as to how they were to treat aliens who might wish to live among them. They were to be treated with dignity and were to be provided with justice (Leviticus 19:17, 33 and Deuteronomy 27:19). Even more, the Jews were commanded to love their neighbors as they loved themselves (Leviticus 19:18).
Regarding the Christian Crusades, they were an aberration in Christian history based upon perverted Catholic doctrine and not upon any biblical injunction. In contrast, the intolerance and violence that have characterized Islam throughout its history are firmly rooted in the Koran.
What a contrast all the ghastly commands of Muhammad are to the loving words of Jesus who told Christians:
“Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew 5:44).
“Whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn to him the other also” (Matthew 5:39).
“Do not judge, lest you be judged” (Matthew 7:1).
“However you want people to treat you, so treat them” (Matthew 7:12).
“You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 22:39).
“This is my commandment that you love one another” (John 15:12, 17).
“Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13).
And what a contrast it is between the admonition of Muhammad to conquer for Allah with the sword and Jesus’ exhortation to go forth in peace and appeal to people’s hearts through the preaching of the Gospel, relying on the persuasive power of God’s Holy Spirit.
The Imperialistic Nature of Islam
From its inception, Islam has been committed to what it calls jihad — a word meaning holy war. The duty of Muslims is to subjugate or destroy “infidels” — the term the Koran uses for all non-believers.
In the Muslim viewpoint, the world is divided into two regions — those areas controlled by Islam, called Dar al-Islam (meaning the House of Islam) and those called Dar al-Harb (the House of War). The Koran commands Muslims to fight non-Muslims until they exterminate all other religions, leaving Islam as the one and only religion in the world (Suras 2:193 and 8:39). Muhammad is quoted in the Hadith as saying, “I have been ordered to fight with the people until they say, none has the right to be worshiped but Allah” (Hadith 4:196).
Regarding terror, Allah orders Muslims to terrorize non-Muslims on his behalf: “Strike terror (into the hearts of ) the enemies of Allah and your enemies” (Sura 8:60). Allah then assures his followers that he will assist them: “I will instill terror into the hearts of unbelievers. Smite them above their necks and smite all their finger-tips off them. It is not you who slay them, it is Allah” (Sura 8:12, 17).
Concerning jihad, the Koran guarantees Paradise to those who fight for Allah (Sura 4:74). It promises instant Paradise for those who die in battle (Suras 9:111 and 47:5-6). Dying for Allah is presented as better than living: “And if you are killed or die in the Way of Allah, forgiveness and mercy from Allah are far better than all that others may amass [of worldly wealth]” (Sura 3:157).
Martyrs are promised a sensual and luxurious life in Paradise (Sura 52:17-22). According to Al-Ghazzali, one of Islam’s greatest teachers, when a martyr reaches Paradise, he “will marry 500 companions, 4,000 virgins, and 8,000 divorced women.” Commenting on this statement, Randall Price, biblical teacher and Middle East expert, observed that the Islamic Paradise is “just the kind of place that adolescent, unmarried men, isolated through their lives from the opposite sex by rigid cultural standards, would die for.”
Islamic Sermons
The murderous imperialistic nature of Islam is clearly revealed in the sermons delivered weekly throughout the Muslim world. Consider the following excerpt from a sermon by Sheikh Ibrahim Madhi that was broadcast live over Palestinian television on June 8, 2001. Referring to a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv that had killed 21 Israeli teenagers the week before, he praised the terrorists: “Blessings to whoever waged jihad for the sake of Allah. Blessings to whoever raided for the sake of Allah. Blessings to whoever put a belt of explosives on his body, or on his son’s body, and plunged into the midst of the Jews, crying, ‘Allahu Akbar!’ Praise to Allah!”
Then he expressed the imperialistic aims of Islam by issuing warnings to nations that would be “erased:” “Allah is almighty . . . We must prepare the ground for the army of Allah that is coming according to [divine] predestination. We must prepare a foothold for them. Allah is willing for this unjust state of Israel to be erased. The unjust state, the United States, will be erased. The unjust state, Britain, will be erased.”
A similar sermon was delivered the previous year on October 13, 2000, by Dr. Ahmad Abu Halabiya. It too was carried live on Palestinian television. He proclaimed that the true terrorists are the Jews “who must be butchered and killed, as Allah the Almighty has said.” He called for Muslims to have no mercy on the Jews: “Fight them wherever you are. Wherever you meet them, kill them, . . . and kill those Americans who are like them — who stand by them.” As an incentive to carry out these murderous exhortations, the cleric added: “O brothers in belief, the beautiful bride has a costly price and dowry . . . Our bride is Paradise. O brothers in belief . . . the cost of the dowry of this bride . . . is that we fight in the path of Allah, and kill and be killed.”
Keep in mind that these are quotes from sermons! Can you imagine a Jewish rabbi or a Christian minister urging their congregations to go out and kill a Muslim for God?
Fundamentalist Goals
The Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran was the modern day Islamic spokesman who revived Muhammad’s vision of world conquest. He taught that the re-establishment of Israel was a Satanic miracle allowed by Allah because of the lukewarmness of the Muslim masses. He called for a renewal of true Islam to accomplish three purposes:
To overthrow the “secular” rulers of Islamic countries (like Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, and Egypt), just as he had done in Iran.
To take back the land of Palestine for Allah, exterminating Israel in the process.
To conquer the rest of the world for Allah.
Notice the first priority was the transformation of secular Islamic countries into religious states ruled by the Koran. Then would come Israel and the world.
In a proclamation made by Osama bin Laden in 1998, he listed the same goals and prioritized them in the same order. He then identified the United States as the prime obstacle to the achievement of these goals. Accordingly, he called on Muslims everywhere “to comply with Allah’s order to kill the Americans and plunder their money wherever and whenever they find it.”
It is important to note that the eradication of Israel is not the top priority. Nor is Israel viewed as the major obstacle to world conquest. I emphasize this because many Americans are saying that the key to winning the war against terrorism is to dump Israel. More and more, on radio talk shows, I hear people saying, “Let’s cut Israel loose. Let the Arabs have it. Then they will leave us alone.”
That is utter nonsense. Israel is not the cause of Islamic terrorism toward the West. If Israel were to disappear tomorrow, Fundamentalist Islam would still be determined to destroy America as part of its plan to take the world for Allah. And if we were to abandon Israel, the Muslim world would interpret it as an act of cowardice, proving our word is meaningless and that we truly are, as they say, “a depraved society devoid of values.” Our abandonment of Israel would only whet their appetite. Islamic Fundamentalism cannot be appeased. It must be defeated.
We are told again and again by "experts" and "talking heads" that Islam is the religion of peace, and that the vast majority of Muslims just want to live in peace.
Although this unquantified assertion may be true, it is entirely irrelevant. It is meaningless fluff, meant to make us feel better, and meant to somehow diminish the specter of fanatics rampaging across the globe in the name of Islam. The fact is, that the fanatics rule Islam at this moment in history. It is the fanatics who march. It is the fanatics who wage any one of 50 shooting wars world wide. It is the fanatics who systematically slaughter Christian or tribal groups throughout Africa and are gradually taking over the entire continent in an Islamic wave. It is the fanatics who bomb, behead, murder, or honor kill. It is the fanatics who take over mosque after mosque. It is the fanatics who zealously spread the stoning and hanging of rape victims and homosexuals. The hard quantifiable fact is, that the "peaceful majority" is the "silent majority" and it is cowed and extraneous.
Communist Russia was comprised of Russians who just wanted to live in peace, yet the Russian Communists were responsible for the murder of about 20 million people. The peaceful majority were irrelevant. China's huge population was peaceful as well, but Chinese Communists managed to kill a staggering 70 million people.
The Average Japanese individual prior to World War 2 was not a warmongering sadist. Yet, Japan murdered and slaughtered its way across South East Asia in an orgy of Killing that included the systematic killing of 12 million Chinese civilians; most killed by sword, shovel, and bayonet. And, who can forget Rwanda, which collapsed into butchery. Could it not be said that the majority of Rwandans were "peace loving".
FrontpageMag.com | 03/01/2006 | Debris Trail
Hitoshi Igarashi, Tsukuba University assistant professor of literature and translator of the novel by Salman Rushdie, was found murdered on the morning of July 12, 1991 near his office on the university campus in Ibaraki prefecture, 69 kilometers north of Tokyo. He was stabbed in the abdomen and his neck was slashed. Police found only footprints and stains of type O blood, which they believe belonged to the attacker. He was 44-years-old when he was killed. The case remains unresolved.
The Satanic Verses was first published in 1988. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Iran's political and spiritual leader of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, ruled that the book was blasphemous against Islam and issued a fatwa, or religious edict, calling for the death of Rushdie and all those involved in the book's publication with knowledge of its content. The Japanese translation was published in 1990.
An Italian translator of the book also suffered injuries in an attack in Milan several days before Igarashi's murder. In 1993, a Norwegian publisher was shot and severely injured in an attack outside of his house in Oslo. In Turkey, 37 people died when their hotel in Sivas was burned down by Muslims protesting against Rushdie's Turkish translator.
Several days after Igarashi's murder, an anti-Tehran Islamic group issued a statement claiming the Iranian government had dispatched an assassination squad to kill him. The Iranian Embassy in Tokyo strongly denied the allegation. To the indignation of the Japanese public, some Muslims in Japan applauded the murder and declared that even if the murder was not committed by a Muslim, God made sure that Igarashi "got what he deserved."
"The 'offense to Islam' ruse is merely an excuse for Muslims to revert to their default mode: rioting and setting things on fire. These people have a serious anger management problem. So it's not exactly a scoop that Muslims are engaging in violence. A front-page story would be 'Offended Muslims Remain Calm'." — Ann Coulter. May, 2006.
Jay Leno, May, 2006:
I did something dumb this weekend — I walked into a Muslim bakery and asked for a Danish. ...
There's a new comic book coming out where Batman goes after Osama bin Laden. And you thought radical Muslims hated cartoons before. Holy Shi'ite Batman! ...
"Muslims are the only people who make feminists seem laid-back." — Ann Coulter. May, 2006.
"President Bush said in a speech in Washington Thursday that al-Qa'ida once plotted a terrorist attack on Los Angeles. It makes no sense at all. People who want to destroy America would never attack Hollywood, if only out of professional courtesy." — Argus Hamilton.
"In a world in which Danish cartoons insult the prophet and Disney Piglet mugs insult the prophet and Burger King chocolate ice-cream swirl designs insult the prophet, maybe it would just be easier to make a list of things that don't insult him." — Mark Steyn.
"[T]hree cartoons made political points. One showed Muhammad turning away suicide bombers from the gates of heaven, saying 'Stop, stop—we ran out of virgins!' —which I believe was a commentary on Muslims' predilection for violence. Another was a cartoon of Muhammad with horns, which I believe was a commentary on Muslims' predilection for violence. The third showed Muhammad with a turban in the shape of a bomb, which I believe was an expression of post-industrial ennui in a secular—oops, no, wait: It was more of a commentary on Muslims' predilection for violence. In order to express their displeasure with the idea that Muslims are violent, thousands of Muslims around the world engaged in rioting, arson, mob savagery, flag-burning, murder and mayhem, among other peaceful acts of nonviolence. Muslims are the only people who make feminists seem laid-back." — Ann Coulter.
"It is not yet unreasonable to hope that Tehran can be forced to back down by a combination of economic sanctions, political isolation, and diplomatic heat. The best solution of all would be regime change, brought about by Iran's restive population of dissidents and democrats (aided by clandestine American support of the kind that helped dissidents behind the Iron Curtain in the 1980s). But if a nonmilitary strategy is to have any chance of success, it must be very clear that military action is Plan B—and that the United States is quite prepared to wield that 'big stick' if Iran will not abandon its atomic ambitions... Iran is not just a potential menace—it is a clear and present danger right now. The radical Islamists in Tehran bankroll the world's deadliest terrorists. They foment violence in Iraq. They lied for 18 years about their nuclear activities. They persecute democratic activists and oppress women. They declare that their goals are 'a world without Zionism or America' and 'the destruction of Anglo-Saxon civilization.'... Fanatic, apocalyptic, totalitarian, the mullahs who rule Iran see their destiny as waging jihad and extending theocracy across the entire Middle East. Under no circumstances can such enemies be permitted to acquire nuclear weapons—or to doubt that we will do what we must to make sure that they don't." — Jeff Jacoby.
Impressive! Thank you.
"Burger King...withdrew its ice cream cones from its British menus because Rashad Akhtar of High Wycombe complained that the creamy swirl shown on the lid looked like the word 'Allah' in Arabic script. I don't know which sura in the Koran says don't forget, folks, it's not just physical representations of God or the Prophet but also chocolate ice cream squiggly representations of the name, but ixnay on both just to be 'sensitive'." — Mark Steyn.
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