A FEW FAMOUS QUOTES

HISTORICAL QUOTES FROM A FEW GREAT OBSERVERS throughout the ages are uncannily in agreement about the ruthless and ugly nature of Islam.

“The West must understand the terrorists’ point of view.”

Actually, I do understand their point of view. I have read the Koran, the Hadith and the Sira. This so-called “religion of peace” is nothing of the sort. I think the founder of CAIR (the Council of American-Islamic Relations), Omar Ahmad, summed it up best when he said, “Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. The Koran, the Muslim book of scripture, should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on Earth.” This statement has been widely reported over the years, but it appears Mr. Rauf is counting on the ignorance of many people to win this argument. Ahmad’s statement reflects nothing more than a fervent wish for domination, pure and simple.

So who is this man, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, who now wants to dominate Ground Zero in the shadow of a $100 million, 13-story mosque?

Imam Rauf was born in Kuwait in 1948 after his parents fled (or were thrown out, depending on which report you read) from Egypt. His father, Dr. Muhammad Abdul Rauf, was a known member of the Muslim Brotherhood which is why some say he was thrown out of Egypt in 1948. The Muslim Brotherhood, for those of you who don’t know, was founded in 1928, only four years after the Ottoman Empire ended. It is the oldest terrorist organization in the world and has over 70 different offshoots which include al Qaeda, Hamas and Hezbollah, just to name a few. Interestingly, the Muslim Brotherhood is not only banned here in the U.S., but it was banned in Egypt as well.

People need to know history in order to understand Islam and what they are really out to achieve. At its height, the Islamic Empire covered more of the earth than the Roman Empire. The Ottoman Empire ended in 1924 and the Muslim Brotherhood came about only four years later. This is no coincidence; it was established to bring back the world domination that Islam once had. Aside from Islam conquering a huge part of the world, Islam also conquered most of Spain in the year 711 from Tariq ibn Zayid’s invasion and held it through 1248; it controlled parts of Spain until its full liberation in 1492. Spain was renamed Andalusia. So why is this of importance?

The name of the organization planning the mosque is the “Cordoba Initiative,” and this name itself is a full affront to Americans. Cordoba was the seat of the Islamic Caliphate that ruled Spain and the name is often used today by Islamic militants when recalling the glory of the Islamic Empire from the years when they occupied Spain.

Muslims are allowed, no, they are commanded, to lie. This is called “Taqiyya.” Taqiyya can be used in interaction with any non-Muslim so long as it furthers the interest of Islam. According to Islam Watch, “The word ‘Taqiyya’ literally means: ‘Concealing, precaution, guarding.’ It is employed in disguising one’s beliefs, intentions, convictions, ideas, feelings, opinions or strategies. In practical terms it is manifested as dissimulation, lying, deceiving, vexing and confounding with the intention of deflecting attention, foiling or pre-emptive blocking. It is currently employed in fending off and neutralizing any criticism of Islam or Muslims.”

The website also explains, “Falsehoods told to prevent the denigration of Islam, to protect oneself, or to promote the cause of Islam are sanctioned in the Qur’an and Sunna, including lying under oath in testimony before a court, deceiving by making distorted statements to the media such as the claim that Islam is a ‘religion of peace’. A Muslim is even permitted to deny or denounce his faith if, in so doing, he protects or furthers the interests of Islam, so long as he remains faithful to Islam in his heart.”

Is Imam Rauf just practicing Taqiyya? Is the mosque planned at Ground Zero nothing more than another mosque built out of the quest for global domination? Muslims have been destroying houses of worship built by every other faith since the rise of the Islamic Empire. The world over, Islam has ransacked tens of thousands of churches, synagogues, monasteries and holy archaeological sites, not to mention Buddhist, Sikh, Zoroastrian, Hindu temples and others. After this occurs, they build a mosque over it and claim it in the name of Allah. Domination, pure and simple.

Read it all.

ANDALUSIAN MYTH, EURABIAN REALITY

INVENTING THE PAST, and denying the present. In an encore presentation we salute the original 2004 Jihad Watch essay by Bat Ye'or and Andrew G. Bostom:

On Sunday, April 18, 2004, this revealing exchange took place between outgoing Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar, and interviewer Chris Wallace of Fox News:

Chris Wallace: “In the apartment that was blown up, police found a videotape in which the bombers referred to Spain as Andalusia, what it was called by the Muslim Moors before they were driven out in 1492.”

Jose Maria Aznar (through the translator): “So this means that Iraq, for them, was just a pretext. In the eyes of Islamic terrorism, it looks at the West, and Spain is a very special part of this parcel, because they feel that to recover Spain is to get back some of their territory.”

Islamic scholar Mordechai Nisan recently discussed the contention by the founder of the Institute of Islamic Education, M. Amir Ali, that Medieval Spain had actually been "liberated" by Muslim forces, who "deposed its tyrants". Nisan extrapolated this ahistorical narrative line, and pondered:

"Reflecting on March 11, as Muslim terrorism killed 200 and wounded 1,400 in Madrid, one wonders whether one day this event will also not be commemorated as a liberating moment. "

Events surrounding the completion of the new Granada Mosque, which was marked by celebratory announcements July 10, 2003 of a “…return of Islam to Spain”, were also consistent with Nisan's dark musings. At a conference entitled “Islam in Europe” that accompanied the opening of the mosque, disconcerting statements were made by European Muslim leaders. Specifically, the keynote speaker at this conference,

Umar Ibrahim Vadillo, a Spanish Muslim leader, encouraged Muslims to cause an economic collapse of Western economies (by ceasing to use Western currencies, and switching to gold dinars), while the German Muslim leader Abu Bakr Rieger told Muslim attendees to avoid adapting their Islamic religious practices to accommodate European (i.e., Western Enlightenment?) values.

Shortly after this event, a Wall Street Journal editorialist in a grossly distorted encomium to Muslim Spain, mentioned the “pan-confessional humanism” of Andalusian Islam, and even asserted: "one could argue that the oft-bewailed missing ‘reformation’ of Islam was under way there until it was aborted by the Inquisition."

María Rosa Menocal, Yale Professor of Spanish and Portuguese, in her 2002 hagiography of Muslim Spain, The Ornament of the World, has further maintained that "the new Islamic polity not only allowed Jews and Christians to survive, but following Qur’anic mandate, by and large protected them."

We believe that reiterating these ahistorical, roseate claims about Muslim Spain abets the contemporary Islamist agenda, and retards the evolution of a liberal, reformed “Euro-Islam” fully compatible with post-Enlightenment Western values.

Iberia (Spain) was conquered in 710-716 AD by Arab tribes originating from northern, central and southern Arabia. Massive Berber and Arab immigration, and the colonization of the Iberian peninsula, followed the conquest. Most churches were converted into mosques. Although the conquest had been planned and conducted jointly with a strong faction of royal Iberian Christian dissidents, including a bishop, it proceeded as a classical jihad with massive pillages, enslavement, deportations and killings.

Toledo, which had first submitted to the Arabs in 711 or 712, revolted in 713. The town was punished by pillage and all the notables had their throats cut. In 730, the Cerdagne (in Septimania, near Barcelona) was ravaged and a bishop burned alive. In the regions under stable Islamic control, Jews and Christians were tolerated as dhimmis - like elsewhere in other Islamic lands - and could not build new churches or synagogues nor restore the old ones. Segregated in special quarters, they had to wear discriminatory clothing. Subjected to heavy taxes, the Christian peasantry formed a servile class attached to the Arab domains; many abandoned their land and fled to the towns. Harsh reprisals with mutilations and crucifixions* would sanction the Mozarab (Christian dhimmis) calls for help from the Christian kings. Moreover, if one dhimmi harmed a Muslim, the whole community would lose its status of protection, leaving it open to pillage, enslavement and arbitrary killing.

By the end of the eighth century, the rulers of North Africa and of Andalusia had introduced Malikism, one of the most rigorous schools of Islamic jurisprudence, and subsequently repressed the other Muslim schools of law. Three quarters of a century ago, at a time when political correctness was not dominating historical publication and discourse, Evariste Lévi-Provençal, the pre-eminent scholar of Andalusia, wrote: "The Muslim Andalusian state thus appears from its earliest origins as the defender and champion of a jealous orthodoxy, more and more ossified in a blind respect for a rigid doctrine, suspecting and condemning in advance the least effort of rational speculation."

The humiliating status imposed on the dhimmis and the confiscation of their land provoked many revolts, punished by massacres, as in Toledo (761, 784-86, 797). After another Toledan revolt in 806, seven hundred inhabitants were executed. Insurrections erupted in Saragossa from 781 to 881, Cordova (805), Merida (805-813, 828 and the following year, and later in 868), and yet again in Toledo (811-819); the insurgents were crucified, as prescribed in Qur’an 5:33*.

The revolt in Cordova of 818 was crushed by three days of massacres and pillage, with 300 notables crucified and 20 000 families expelled. Feuding was endemic in the Andalusian cities between the different sectors of the population: Arab and Berber colonizers, Iberian Muslim converts (Muwalladun) and Christian dhimmis (Mozarabs). There were rarely periods of peace in the Amirate of Cordova (756-912), nor later.

Al-Andalus represented the land of jihad par excellence. Every year, sometimes twice a year, raiding expeditions were sent to ravage the Christian Spanish kingdoms to the north, the Basque regions, or France and the Rhone valley, bringing back booty and slaves. Andalusian corsairs attacked and invaded along the Sicilian and Italian coasts, even as far as the Aegean Islands, looting and burning as they went. Thousands of people were deported to slavery in Andalusia, where the caliph kept a militia of tens of thousand of Christian slaves brought from all parts of Christian Europe (the Saqaliba), and a harem filled with captured Christian women. Society was sharply divided along ethnic and religious lines, with the Arab tribes at the top of the hierarchy, followed by the Berbers who were never recognized as equals, despite their Islamization; lower in the scale came the mullawadun converts and, at the very bottom, the dhimmi Christians and Jews.

The Andalusian Maliki jurist Ibn Abdun (d. 1134) offered these telling legal opinions regarding Jews and Christians in Seville around 1100 C.E.: "No…Jew or Christian 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. They are the confederates of Satan’s party; Satan’s confederates will surely be the losers!’ (Qur’an 58:19 [modern Dawood translation]). 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."

Ibn Abdun also forbade the selling of scientific books to dhimmis, under the pretext that they translated them and attributed them to their co-religionists and bishops. In fact, plagiarism is difficult to prove since whole Jewish and Christian libraries were looted and destroyed. Another prominent Andalusian jurist, Ibn Hazm of Cordoba (d. 1064), wrote that Allah has established the infidels’ ownership of their property merely to provide booty for Muslims.

In Granada, the Jewish viziers Samuel Ibn Naghrela and his son Joseph, who protected the Jewish community, were both assassinated between 1056 to 1066, followed by the annihilation of the Jewish population by the local Muslims. It is estimated that up to five thousand Jews perished in the pogrom by Muslims that accompanied the 1066 assassination. This figure equals or exceeds the number of Jews reportedly killed by the Crusaders during their pillage of the Rhineland, some thirty years later, at the outset of the First Crusade.

The Granada pogrom was likely to have been incited, in part, by the bitter anti-Jewish ode of Abu Ishaq, a well known Muslim jurist and poet of the times, who wrote: "Put them back where they belong and reduce them to the lowest of the low..turn your eyes to other [Muslim] countries and you will find the Jews there are outcast dogs...Do not consider it a breach of faith to kill them...They have violated our covenant with them so how can you be held guilty against the violators?"

The Muslim Berber Almohads in Spain and North Africa (1130-1232) wreaked enormous destruction on both the Jewish and Christian populations. This devastation—massacre, captivity, and forced conversion—was described by the Jewish chronicler Abraham Ibn Daud, and the poet Abraham Ibn Ezra. Suspicious of the sincerity of the Jewish converts to Islam, Muslim “inquisitors” (i.e., antedating their Christian Spanish counterparts by three centuries) removed the children from such families, placing them in the care of Muslim educators. Maimonides, the renowned philosopher and physician, experienced the Almohad persecutions, and had to flee Cordoba with his entire family in 1148, temporarily residing in Fez—disguised as a Muslim—before finding asylum in Fatimid Egypt.

Indeed, although Maimonides is frequently referred to as a paragon of Jewish achievement facilitated by the enlightened rule of Andalusia, his own words debunk this utopian view of the Islamic treatment of Jews: "..the Arabs have persecuted us severely, and passed baneful and discriminatory legislation against us...Never did a nation molest, degrade, debase, and hate us as much as they.."

A valid summary assessment of interfaith relationships in Muslim Spain, and the contemporary currents responsible for obfuscating that history, can be found in Richard Fletcher's engaging Moorish Spain. Mr. Fletcher offers these sobering, unassailable observations:

"The witness of those who lived through the horrors of the Berber conquest, of the Andalusian fitnah in the early eleventh century, of the Almoravid invasion- to mention only a few disruptive episodes—must give it [i.e., the roseate view of Muslim Spain] the lie. The simple and verifiable historical truth is that Moorish Spain was more often a land of turmoil than it was of tranquility...Tolerance? Ask the Jews of Granada who were massacred in 1066, or the Christians who were deported by the Almoravids to Morocco in 1126 (like the Moriscos five centuries later)…

In the second half of the twentieth century a new agent of obfuscation makes its appearance: the guilt of the liberal conscience, which sees the evils of colonialism—assumed rather than demonstrated-foreshadowed in the Christian conquest of al-Andalus and the persecution of the Moriscos (but not, oddly, in the Moorish conquest and colonization). Stir the mix well together and issue it free to credulous academics and media persons throughout the western world.

Then pour it generously over the truth…in the cultural conditions that prevail in the west today the past has to be marketed, and to be successfully marketed it has to be attractively packaged. Medieval Spain in a state of nature lacks wide appeal. Self-indulgent fantasies of glamour...do wonders for sharpening up its image. But Moorish Spain was not a tolerant and enlightened society even in its most cultivated epoch."

The socio-political history of Andalusia was characterized by a particularly oppressive dhimmitude that is completely incompatible with modern notions of equality between individuals, regardless of religious faith. At the dawn of the 21st century, we must insist that Muslims in the West adopt post-Enlightenment societal standards of equality, not "tolerance," abandoning forever their hagiography of the brutal, discriminatory standards practiced by the classical Maliki jurists of "enlightened" Andalusia.

Read it all.

Pity the poor liberals whose minds have been mismanaged with great skill, who also refuse to snap to the simple fact that not everyone frames the world according to Karl Marx. In fact, one point two billion Muslims frame the world in entirely different terms, and are demanding that you take notice, and will kill you if you don't, no matter how peaceful one thinks one is, or they think they are. Dismissing what we know of this pernicious ideology with the wave of a feted hand because one thinks religion is, yawn, "the opium of the people" just doesn't win the day, nor the war that is creeping down your neck and mine.

It's time to take this fight to the Left. They've earned it.

THE MYTH OF MUSLIM PEACEFULNESS

If you draw a line aground the Muslim world, you draw a line through 90% of the conflict zones in the world. Teachers murdered in Thailand and the Phillipines, students blown up in Russia, Christians kidnapped in Nigeria, Afghanistan and Pakistan, one atrocity following after the other. Year in and year out Muslims with no so-called Al Qaeda links have committed heinous crimes against innocent people, mostly from other religious cultures in a perpetual religiously-ordained land grab, and among their own in an aggressive act of religious oppression. Recently an Imam based in England said he would dance with joy if Iran nuked Israel. The death of 2-3 million people would cause this religious figure an orgasm of joy.

No other people in the world stake a claim to high morality and yet happily pursue the mass murder of others. Why are Muslims so full of hate and intolerance for others, except that this behavior is ingrained in their specific Islamic personality, as dictated by the Qur'an? In this day and age this is the only question worth asking in Islamic Studies. Islamic Art and Poetry are pointless to the main question of the world today. Any Islamic studies course needs to make the connection between the conduct and teaching of Mohammad and the modern day conduct and attitudes of Muslims.

Five Reasons Why, Among the "Great Religions," Islam Is A Focus of Particular Concern:

Reason #1
Islam is unique among religions in having a developed doctrine, theology, and legal system mandating warfare against unbelievers. This is found in the Qur'an and Sunnah, as well as in Islamic jurisprudence. Many like to point to violent passages in the Bible as an alleged equivalent to this, but actually the Bible contains no open-ended, universal command for believers to wage war against unbelievers, as does the Qur'an (9:5, 9:29, 2:190-193, etc.).

Reason #2
Muhammad said, "If someone changes his Islamic religion, kill him." That bit of gentleness from Muhammad can be found here in the most canonical of hadith collections, Bukhari.

Reason #3:
Islamic texts encourage terror and fighting to a far larger degree than the original texts of other religions, concludes [Danish linguist] Tina Magaard. She has a PhD in Textual Analysis and Intercultural Communication from the Sorbonne in Paris, and has spent three years on a research project comparing the original texts of ten religions. “The texts in Islam distinguish themselves from the texts of other religions by encouraging violence and aggression against people with other religious beliefs to a larger degree. There are also straightforward calls for terror. This has long been a taboo in the research into Islam, but it is a fact that we need to deal with," writes Magaard, adding, "Moreover, there are hundreds of calls in the Qu'ran for fighting against people of other faiths. If it is correct that many Muslims view the Qu'ran as the literal words of God, which cannot be interpreted or rephrased, then we have a problem. It is indisputable that the texts encourage terror and violence."


Reason #4
Since 9/11/01, thousands have died in Islamic terror attacks all over the globe.

Reason #5
But perhaps the greatest reason many people focus worried scrutiny toward Islam is that it commands Muslims to use persuasion (which would include voting), deception, terror, and demographic jihad (immigration and reproduction) to spread the rule of Islamic law all over the globe, and to subordinate non-Muslims to the status of debased, second-class citizens.

Qur'an, Chapter 9, verse 29: "Fight those who do not believe in Allah, nor in the latter day, nor do they prohibit what Allah and His Messenger [Muhammad] have prohibited, nor follow the religion of truth, out of those who have been given the Book [Jews and Christians], until they pay the tax in acknowledgment of superiority and they are in a state of subjection."

In response to worries about efforts to impose Islamic law around the world, and of late particularly in Europe some Muslim apologists respond that when Spain was dominated by Islam, it was a multicultural paradise for Christians and Jews.
Not so. An excellent reference is the book "While Europe Slept" by Bruce Bawer. Even noted Medieval scholar Maria Rosa Menocal in her extended whitewash of Muslim Spain called The Ornament of the World, as Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch has pointed out, admits that the laws of dhimmitude were very much in force in the great Al-Andalus [Muslim Spain]:

The dhimmi, as these covenanted peoples were called, were granted religious freedom, not forced to convert to Islam. They could continue to be Jews and Christians, and, as it turned out, they could share in much of Muslim social and economic life. In return for this freedom of religious conscience the Peoples of the Book (pagans had no such privilege) were required to pay a special tax—no Muslims paid taxes—and to observe a number of restrictive regulations: Christians and Jews were prohibited from attempting to proselytize Muslims, from building new places of worship, from displaying crosses or ringing bells. In sum, they were forbidden most public displays of their religious rituals.

About Muslim Spain, Andrew Bostom and Bat Ye’or write:

Iberia (Spain) was conquered in 710-716 AD by Arab tribes. Most churches were converted into mosques. It proceeded as a classical jihad with massive pillages, enslavement, deportations and killings.

Toledo, which had first submitted to the Arabs in 711 or 712, revolted in 713. The town was punished by pillage and all the notables had their throats cut. In 730, the Cerdagne (in Septimania, near Barcelona) was ravaged and a bishop burned alive. In the regions under stable Islamic control, Jews and Christians were tolerated as dhimmis—like elsewhere in other Islamic lands—and could not build new churches or synagogues nor restore the old ones. Segregated in special quarters, they had to wear discriminatory clothing. Subjected to heavy taxes, the Christian peasantry formed a servile class attached to the Arab domains.

The humiliating status imposed on the dhimmis [Christians and Jews under Muslim rule] and the confiscation of their land provoked many revolts, punished by massacres, as in Toledo (761, 784-86, 797). After another Toledan revolt in 806, seven hundred inhabitants were executed. Insurrections erupted in Saragossa from 781 to 881, Cordova (805), Merida (805-813, 828 and the following year, and later in 868), and yet again in Toledo (811-819); the insurgents were crucified, as prescribed in Qur’an 5:33.

The revolt in Cordova of 818 was crushed by three days of massacres and pillage, with 300 notables crucified and 20,000 families expelled. Thousands of people were deported to slavery in Andalusia [Muslim Spain], where the caliph kept a militia of tens of thousand of Christian slaves brought from all parts of Christian Europe (the Saqaliba), and a harem filled with captured Christian women. Society was sharply divided along ethnic and religious lines, with the Arab tribes at the top of the hierarchy, followed by the Berbers who were never recognized as equals, despite their Islamization; lower in the scale came the mullawadun converts and, at the very bottom, the Christians and Jews.

In Granada, the Jewish viziers Samuel Ibn Naghrela and his son Joseph, who protected the Jewish community, were both assassinated between 1056 to 1066, followed by the annihilation of the Jewish population by the local Muslims. It is estimated that up to five thousand Jews perished in the pogrom by Muslims that accompanied the 1066 assassination. This figure equals or exceeds the number of Jews reportedly killed by the Crusaders during their pillage of the Rhineland, some thirty years later, at the outset of the First Crusade.

The Muslim Berber Almohads in Spain and North Africa (1130-1232) wreaked enormous destruction on both the Jewish and Christian populations. This devastation—massacre, captivity, and forced conversion—was described by the Jewish chronicler Abraham Ibn Daud, and the poet Abraham Ibn Ezra.

Although Maimonides is frequently referred to as a paragon of Jewish achievement facilitated by the enlightened rule of Andalusia, his own words debunk this utopian view of the Islamic treatment of Jews: "The Arabs have persecuted us severely, and passed baneful and discriminatory legislation against us. Never did a nation molest, degrade, debase, and hate us as much as they."

Europeans came over and conquered America. In the conflict, both sides did bad things. But the smoke has cleared and most Americans honor the Country’s Indian heritage. I was involved in a construction project whereby the taxpayer built twenty-some nice new homes on the Reservation for Indian families, free of charge. Sports teams go by the names of Indian tribes. Look at the number of US towns named after the Indians. America’s premier coin is the $50 American Buffalo, with an Sioux warrior on the face side.

Compare Manifest Destiny with Islamic expansion where Buddhist statues are blown up, Jewish remains are destroyed, and locals are converted, subjugated, or killed. These muslims can stand around and make direct threats, we see them posted in the news and on blogs all the time like: "UK your 911 is on the way!", meanwhile the infidels stand back, take it, with no visits to the courts.

Draw one cartoon and that schizophrenic religion is afire while the nihilistic Western dhimmis comment with awe about how these thugs are so passionate in their beliefs. Must be simply fabulous to be a Muslim, since neither he nor she has to worry about being politically correct. This outrage, any Muslim outrage is not about the pope, a Palestinian homeland, Israel, or any of the endless red herrings they toss out. It is about a belief system that would collapse under it own weight if the truth could be told without cities burnings and thousands if not millions people dying.