ISLAM ONLY BEFRIENDS ITSELF

IN JUST A FEW DAYS, Professor Hans Kung’s lecture on “Challenges to Islam, Christianity and Judaism” will be broadcast on Sky Arts. Kung is a leading Catholic theologian and the author of Islam: Past, Present and Future. He is President of the Foundation for a Global Ethic. He is also a touted professor of Ecumenical Theology at the University of Tubingen. He knows almost as much about God as St. Francis of Assisi and twice as much about structural steel as Bill Maher and Rosie O’Donnell combined and in his own field is just as controversial about the doctrine of Papal Infallibility and celibacy.

Thus strikes, like a bolt of lightning returning to the scene of its last evidence, the opening paragraph in which Denis Schulz introduces this formidable but enemy-appeasing lecturer. Day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, we, who dare point out these same rather self-evident distinctions between these two earlier Abrahamic cults that give the lie to the shameful treachery of Islam in a world that refuses to acknowledge them, are exasperated as the supposedly great learned ones betray us. One can only hope that the expected awakening from this nightmare of disinformation comes before it is too late. Read it all...

Hans Kung is 80 years old. He’s been around a while. He says Islam is stuck in The Middle Ages. Could that be? Maybe mired would be a better word. How about frozen in time? If he means the 10th Century he could be crediting Islam with a 400-year advance that didn’t take place, an Islamic Transubstantiation from the Pleistocene Age to Richard the Lion-Hear without expunging the dinosaurs and jinni that ceaselessly prowled the Prophet’s mind searching for victims to feed his monumental ego and never-ending hatred of those who disagreed with him even as Salman Rushdie’s houris were coming to cart him away.

The challenge for Christianity and Judaism is how to survive the 21st Century; for Islam it is how to come to grips with an ongoing insanity. Christianity had the Protestant Reformation and Judaism had its own reform movement albeit on a smaller scale. Islam boasted the Andalusian Caliphate, a never-ending source of pride for all Muslims, a 10th Century beacon of enlightenment that pierced the haze of ignorance and superstition that befogged the rest of Europe.

Literature! Science! Technology! A Thousand and One Nights! Freedoms that had never been thought of! Everything but Disneyland! And this was 700 years before Jefferson and Adams! Seven hundred years before that silly Declaration of Independence! Surely, the millennium had been achieved!

Anyway that is the story the Imams and the Muslim professors and their dhimmi running dogs preach at the Cairo University and at Berkeley and Columbia and Oxford and at a thousand lesser schools of learning while students ill-equipped to determine fact from fiction sit and listen as if in the presence of Plato and Aristotle. But what is the truth? Was it the first casualty in the war of religions? There is much evidence that it was—enough to warrant a revision.

According to a legal opinion offered by Ibn Abdun in 1100 AD—from the greatest civilization that never was—the Andalusian Caliphate appears to be more of a mirage than Shangri-La or Duffy's Tavern. “No Jew or Christian,” said the opinion, “may be allowed to wear the dress of an aristocrat, nor of a jurist, nor of a wealthy individual, on the contrary they must be detested and avoided. It is forbidden to (greet) them with the (expression) ‘Peace be upon you’ In effect, Satan has gained possession of them, and caused them to forget God’s warning…a distinctive sign must be imposed upon them in order that they may be recognized and this will be for them a form of disgrace.”

This is the so-called dignity contemporary Islamic supremists and their western apologists insist was Islam's golden rule of mutual prosperity, the so-called era of peace! But these people were Jews and Christians—People of the Book! Yes, they were Jews and Christians but no one was to take them for friends! Could this have been the catalyst for the Inquisition which followed?

Other legal opinions forbade the selling of scientific books to non-Muslims because the non-Muslims—again Jews and Christians—would translate them into their own languages and take credit for them. The origins of these scientific books are debatable. Some of them predated Islam. In the 400 years since Mohammed had emerged from the desert Muslim invaders had looted and destroyed Christian and Jewish libraries. But day-to-day life in the Andalusian Caliphate was more than legal opinions. Jews were frequently massacred and Christians were regularly deported to Morocco. On that, the record appears to be clear.

The difference between what Nathan Bedford Forrest did at Fort Pillow and what Reinhard Heydrich did in Bohemia-Moravia and what went on in the Caliphate is minimal. Yet college professors throughout Europe and America accept the Wahhabi version and hanker for the days of Ibn Abdun when peace and tolerance were the order of the day.

“In the face of the deadly threat to all humankind,” says Kung, “instead of building new dams of hatred, revenge and enmity, we should tear down the walls of prejudice stone by stone and thus build bridges of dialogue, bridges particularly towards Islam.”

Yes, heaven forbid, anyone should have the temerity to ask Islam to build bridges towards democracy, human rights and religious freedom. What an embarrassment that would be! It might anger them—make them strike out! Neville Chamberlain built bridges toward Nazi Germany and it would have worked had it not been for the warmongers at home and a handful of obstreperous politicians in Poland.

James Buchanan built bridges towards the antebellum South and was much revered by Jefferson Davis and Wade Hampton. And then old Abe Lincoln came along and ruined Old Buck’s good work by opposing the extension of slavery into the Territories. He believed in gradual emancipation—in Colonization—and would not disturb the South’s ‘Peculiar Institution’ in the States where it already existed. But he would not establish it elsewhere.

Jeff Davis insisted upon the right of every Southerner to carry his ‘property’ into the territories held in common by all the states even as Islam insists on its right to extend its version of slavery into the dar al-Harb—a slavery more encompassing than that of Dixieland because it was chosen for them by Allah and where women are told to ‘stifle’ and can be beaten for ‘disobeying’ their husbands and where male chauvinism reigns uncontested.

There were more free blacks in the antebellum south in 1860 than there are free women in Islam in 2007. In 1899, after having viewed Islam up close, Winston Churchill wrote the following:

“The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property, either as a child, a wife, or a concubine, must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men…No stronger retrograde force exists in the world.”

Kung stresses what the three Abrahamic religions have in common—charity, respect for life, injunctions against murder. Most Muslims, he insists, do not hold extremist views. But what of the Qur’an—certainly more Muslims have read the Qur’an and believe what it says than Germans read Mein Kampf. What do the Muslim scriptures say?

Qur’an 2:191 “And kill them wherever you find and catch them. Drive the out from where they have driven you out for Al-Fitnah (polytheism, disbelief, oppression) is worse than slaughter.”

Tabari: IX:69 “Killing disbelievers is a small matter to us.”

Qur’an 33:26 “Allah made the Jews leave their homes by terrorizing them so that you killed some and made many captives. And He made you inherit their lands, their homes, and their wealth. He gave you a country you had not traversed before.” (Could that be Israel?)

These are not injunctions against murder. These are extremist views. There has been no rush by moderate Muslims to renounce these verses. They are no more willing to oppose Jihadism than the average German was to oppose Hitler and the Nazis in the 1930s and less willing than many southerners had been to condemn slavery in the 1850s.

The Jihadists are relying on people like Kung and Robert Edgar to run interference for them, to mesmerize the dhimmis with endless proposals for Interfaith Dialogues while work on the new Caliphate continues apace. Kung sees little difference between the beheadings, car bombings and suicide attacks of the Jihadists and the air strikes, tank patrols and the 10,000 dead civilians in Iraq that he attributes to the United States. Little does he care or even understand that the vast majority of civilian casualties in Iraq are the result of the actions of al-Qaeda and the Shiite and Sunni militias.

Saddam Hussein killed more civilians—Kurds and Shiites—in an average year than are dying today in Iraq. More civilians are killed each year by Muslim terrorists than in the entire 350-year history of the institution that succeeded the Andalusian Caliphate in Spain—the ‘dreaded’ Inquisition!

Kung’s lecture will be aired on June 23.