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Robert Spencer has written a dozen books on Islam, as well as thousands of pages of commentary on Islamic law, scripture, and tradition, but this may be his most significant book yet because of its potential to alert Christians to a dangerous gap in their knowledge of Islam. Christian leaders are badly in need of a wake-up call about Islam and this is a wake-up call that is hard to ignore. Not Peace but a Sword asks questions about the relationship between Christianity and Islam that few others are asking, even though they are questions that beg for answers....

A few days ago, in the city of Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America, what has been done each year, the major marathon road race of the Boston Marathon, the 117th, which honors physical strength in the area of running, was marred by the horrible event of two pressure cooker bombing attacks towards the finish line. The result was nothing but horrible, 3 people killed, one of them, an 8-year-old boy and close to 170 injured, many losing limbs in the process. Today, a few days after the Boston Marathon bombings attacks, and the presentation of a video and pictures...

The violence in northern Nigeria is mistakenly viewed as a religious conflict rather than simply a tribal dispute over land, according to the Obama administration. Despite the ongoing Muslim destruction of churches and the slaughter of Christians – including many murdered during worship services – the U.S. Agency for International Development claims that the misunderstandings make it difficult to administer aid programs. USAID, therefore, has launched a program titled Project PEACE – an acronym for Programming Effectively Against Conflict and Extremism.

Samuel Huntington, "The Age of Muslim Wars," Newsweek, December 17, 2001 Quoted widely. Newsweek: Volume 138 - Newsweek, Inc., 2001 - pp. 140-144 The Age of Muslim Wars By Samuel P. Huntington Contemporary global politics is the age of Muslim wars. Muslims fight each other and they fight non-Muslims far more often than do peoples of other civilizations. Muslim wars have replaced the cold war as the principal form of international conflict. These wars include wars of terrorism, guerrilla wars, civil wars and interstate conflicts. These instances of Muslim violence could congeal into one major clash of civilizations between Islam...

This article appears in the Spring 2011 edition of the Intercollegiate Review. See the issue’s Table of Contents here. In 2001, former president Bill Clinton delivered a speech at Georgetown University in which he discussed the West’s response to the recent terrorist attacks of September 11. The speech contained a short but significant reference to the crusades. Mr. Clinton observed that “when the Christian soldiers took Jerusalem [in 1099], they . . . proceeded to kill every woman and child who was Muslim on the Temple Mount.” He cited the “contemporaneous descriptions of the event” as describing “soldiers walking on...

In the West we are doing our best to destroy our Christian heritage but in China, Chinese intellectuals are coming around to the view that it is precisely this heritage that has made the West so successful. Former editor of the Sunday Telegraph, Dominic Lawson, in a review in the Sunday Times of Niall Ferguson's new book, ‘Civilisation: The West and the Rest’, carries a quote from a member of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in which he tries to account for the success of the West, to date. He said: “One of the things we were asked to...

Yes I, personally, would say it is. But in what sense? Christianity has defined the very identity of Man in a far more convincing manner than any other tradition of intellectual or spiritual orientation. Therefore, competing notions must be rejected, especially from an intellectual standpoint. But if someone wishes to smoke marijuana all day long and devote himself to Shamanism, not my words nor other force on Earth can stop him. Please read the text below. The image of Man provided by Pico della Mirandola encompassess the spiritual greatness of Ancient history, the sincere faithfulness of Medieval, Scholastic, Catholicism as...

Terry Jones, the Florida "minister" who threatened to burn the Koran on the anniversary of September 11, is as much a distraction from the real challenge facing America as was Senator Joseph McCarthy when it came to communism. Communism was (and remains in its Chinese incarnation) a real threat. But radical Islam -- rabid, advancing, intolerant, subjugating -- is potentially a bigger one and must be conquered. Various apologists for the Nazis and communists in the media, academia and religion are now mostly forgotten and that's the problem. Forgetting what happens when evil is accommodated leads to terrible consequences and...

Nine years ago, I began a series of discussions about terrorism with Jack Kemp, Jeane Kirkpatrick and a small group of concerned philanthropists. Since today is the ninth anniversary of the 9/11 atrocities, that won’t surprise you. What might: Our first conversation took place before, not after, terrorists hijacked planes and flew them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Those with whom I met grasped this: While America was cashing in the post-Cold War “peace dividend,” terrorists were bombing the World Trade Center (for what turned out to be the first time), slaughtering American troops at Khobar Towers...

Slavery is one of the vilest institutions ever created by man. Islam institutionalized slavery. Allah, the Islamic God, created ETERNAL LAWS allowing Muslims to own and rape their slaves. Muslims can enslave kafirs and keep the female captives as sex-slaves. If Islam succeeds in conquering the world, there will, most likely, arise again Islamic corporations for breeding, raising, and trading slaves in tens of millions as was done until the late 19th century. Kafir women will again likely become the sex-slaves of Muslim masters. This evil horrid treatment, which so characterized fate of tens of millions of kafirs at the...

Fascism is not just national socialism as a political ideology. It also involves a mob frenzy in which cruelty is whipped up and celebrated. If you listen to Louis Farrakhan, you can hear that same menacing quality in his voice; just like Chicago's Father Pfleger, who could have stepped right out of the Children's Crusade of 1220. Sadistic insults and fantasies have also been a big feature of the leftist attack against Sarah Palin and her family, just as it was part of the "high-tech lynch mob" that Clarence Thomas finally cried out against in his Senate hearing for the...

LAMB: What's the point of the book? Prof. LEWIS: How shall I put it? Let me s--let me put it this way. Here you have in the Middle East a very ancient and a very great civilization, which for 1,000 years or so was in the very forefront of human endeavor. It was the richest, strongest, most powerful, most wealthy of--of all living societies. It was also on the cutting edge of science, technology, in virtually every field. And then suddenly, within a very short period, this society is eclipsed by--is--is overshadowed, outperformed in almost every respect by what they...

One of the memes – the unconscious, uncritical, lazy thoughts that spreads from person to person like a virus – that has been particularly virulent during this ground-zero mosque controversy is that Christians have no standing to criticize the violence of Islam, given a supposedly violent Christian history. And no one event is more often invoked as an example of Christian hypocrisy than the so-called “Crusades” (so-called, because no one who fought in them called them that).The latest and most appalling example appears in the NY Times, courtesy of a Nicholas D. Kristoff. Among the many absurdities one can find...

In the 16th century, astrono mer Taqi al-Din built one of the world's great observato ries in Istanbul. It rivaled that of pioneering Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe -- while it lasted. "Taqi al-Din's observatory was razed to the ground by a squad of Janissaries, by order of the sultan, on the recommendation of the Chief Mufti," Bernard Lewis writes in his book "What Went Wrong?" "This observatory had many predecessors in the lands of Islam; it had no successors until the age of modernization." NASA Administrator Charles Bolden caused a furor when he revealed that President Obama had directed him...

'A Muslim has no nationality except his belief," the intellectual godfather of the Islamists, Egyptian Sayyid Qutb, wrote decades ago. Qutb's "children" are everywhere now; they carry the nationalities of foreign lands and plot against them. The Pakistani born Faisal Shahzad is a devotee of Sayyid Qutb's doctrine, and Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter, was another. Qutb was executed by the secular dictatorship of Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1966. But his thoughts and legacy endure. Globalization, the shaking up of continents, the ease of travel, and the doors for immigration flung wide open by Western liberal societies...

In the waning months of 1775 an elderly imam named Sayf ibn Ahmed al-Atiqi lay dying in Sudayr, a region north of Riyadh. Atiqi was a well known imam of the Nejd and he had spent his dying days opposing a new religious movement named Wahhabism. Two years before his death, this movement, led by the tribal sheikh Muhammad Ibn Saud, had conquered Riyadh, a sleepy desert oasis, and turned it into the capital of a new Islamic fundamentalist state. In April 1775, on the other side of the world, American colonists were rousted from their beds in communities west...

Hate Radio: The long, toxic afterlife of Nazi propaganda in the Arab world By Jeffrey Herf The Chronicle of Higher Education November 22, 2009 http://chronicle.com/article/Hate-Radio-Nazi-Propaganda-in/49199/ Between 1939 and 1945, shortwave radio transmitters near Berlin broadcast Nazi propaganda in many languages around the world, including Arabic throughout the Middle East and North Africa, and Persian programs in Iran. English-language transcripts of the Arabic broadcasts shed light on a particularly dark chapter in the globalization of pernicious ideas. The transcripts' significance, however, is not purely historical. Since September 11, 2001, scholars have debated the lineages, similarities, and differences between Nazi anti-Semitism and...

  Does Islam need a Reformation? Not unless you think it would benefit from additional dollops of Puritanism; further encouragement to smash altars, stained glass, and other forms of "idolatry"; prodding to ban riotous celebrations like Christmas and Easter; and support for fundamentalist Islamic schools that insist on sola Korana and sola Sunnah. Indeed, it would seem that Islam has already had its reformers. Railing against the corruption of the West (let's call it "Rome" for short) have been such modern Islamic Luthers as the late Ayatollah Khomeini, the cave-dwelling Osama bin Laden, the voice of young Islam --...

Rich Carroll Readers may recall Aesop's fable of the snake persuading a buffalo to give him a ride across the river if the snake promised not to bite. Once across, the snake of course bites the bison and responds with, "Well, you knew what I was when you gave me the ride." And so, we continue to embrace the culture of Islam, ever-so hopeful that a cult which has nurtured and nourished the last eleven thousand terrorist plots killing thousands of men, women, and children, will not pick us to be next. Under the banner of tolerance we have failed...

To Obama's "we aren't in war with Islam", well, 'Islam is at war with us' Is Obama trying to rewrite history or what? Didn't Islamic Iran hijack our people and declared a war on the "great Satan - US" in 1979? Didn't Iran's Hezbollah thugs massacre Americans in the 1980s Lebanon (where they've been on a mission to support pro-western type government in Beirut)? Who shot Bobby Kenney? Was the Islamic massacre by (mostly) "friendly" Saudi Arabs on 3,000 innocent people (911) before or after the Iraq war has started? What's Obama's res[onse to Iran's Ahmadinejad's "ultimatum" to the west...