Jihad: From Muhammad To ISIS (Post Hill Press, Nashville/New York, 2018) and Dedicated
Jihad: From Muhammad To ISIS (Post Hill Press, Nashville/New York, 2018) and Dedicated
Jihad: From Muhammad To ISIS (Post Hill Press, Nashville/New York, 2018) and Dedicated
Shortly after, Martin Luther would nonetheless repeat this maxim that the Turk was
preferable to the Pope: ‘“The Turk is an avowed enemy of Christ. But the Pope is not. He is
a secret enemy and persecutor, a false friend. For this reason, he is all the worse!” Luther’s
broadside was one of the earliest examples of what was to become a near-universal tendency
in the West: the downplaying of jihad atrocities and their use in arguments between
Westerners to make one side look worse.’ (p.220-221) To Luther’s credit, though, his actions
failed to match his words, and he supported the Protestant princes who came to Vienna’s
rescue against a Turkish siege in 1525.
When the Ottomans besieged Vienna in 1683, they could count on the collaboration of
the Hungarian count Emmerich Tekeli, who had accounts to settle with the Habsburgs. Inter-
Infidel quarrels have often been exploited by the Jihadis: war is a stratagem and exploiting
disunity in the enemy camp is one of the oldest tactics. At any rate, Jihad was a merciless
campaign of conquest, and it has been alive since the earliest days of Islam.
Surrender today
The next period of Islamic conquest was in the 15th-16th century, when the Balkans,
Central India, Southeast Asia and parts of Africa largely fell to Islam. But this expansion
was, from the late 17th century onwards, followed by stagnation and decline of the Ottoman
and Moghul empires. Then followed loss of control over nominally Islamic countries to
rising European colonialism, which even triggered increasing doubt about Islam.
Thus, after the French and British saved the Ottomans from a complete rout against
Russia in the Crimea war but then forced them to sign a modernizing treaty abolishing
slavery and dhimmitude, the Ottoman grand vizier Ali Pasha advised the Caliph that the
Islamic institution of dhimmitude was actually harmful to the country: ‘Ali Pasha was
presaging the subversive idea that Kemal Ataturk would make the basis of his secular
Turkish government after World War I: the reason for Turkish failure was Islam, and the
only path to its resuscitation required discarding Islam, at least as a political system.’ (p.264)
This ought to be revived as a model for Muslims today: the realization that Islam is
backward and ultimately bad for its followers.
But this long decline would in turn be followed by another period of expansion: today.
This brings us, skipping over interesting chapters on the Ottoman decline, Napoleon in
Egypt, the European-enforced and incomplete abolition of slavery, the end of the Moghul
empire, the Mahdi uprising, the Armenian genocide, the Jerusalem mufti’s role in the Nazi
genocide of the Jews etc., to the modern age. If we take “modern” to be 1970, the process of
Westernization, of an ever-weakening grip of Islam, of bare-headed Muslimas, seemed to be
continuing. At that time, European countries thought nothing of importing massive amounts
of guest workers from North Africa and Turkey, thinking that Islam had become a harmless
folk custom, on its way out just like Christianity was for Europeans. British trade-unions
recruited among Pakistanis on a Leftist platform, never seeing a need to even mention Islam.
Even the Palestinian struggle against Israel donned the garb of Marxism and flirted with
Cuba.
But when you shift “modern” to today, a completely different picture emerges.
In 1979, US president Jimmy Carter relaxed his support to the Shah of Iran, though the
latter was besieged by both the Islamic and the Communist opposition. (It was not the first
time that the US would betray its friends, ask Chiang Kai-shek, Batista, Van Thieu, Mobutu.)
The void was soon filled by the ayatollahs, who promptly eliminated their Leftist allies.
From then on, the message went around the world that Islam is the formula for success. After
centuries of decline, an ambitious expansion could start.
In the 1980s, US president Ronald Reagan had in good faith appealed to the jihadis to
contain Soviet expansionism in Afghanistan, which obtained its immediate goal. In spite of
the revolution in Iran, the impression still prevailed among the Western bourgeoisie that
Islam had become harmless. But then this collaboration spiralled into a mushroom growth of
jihadi initiatives like al-Qaeda, the Taliban, 9/11 and many more recent terror attacks in the
West, and ultimately ISIS. These spin-offs of the collaboration with the jihadis could have
been contained if Western policy-makers had been guided by an awareness of the Islam
problem, but instead they gave in to sentimental delusions, and reaped the bloody harvest.
Twenty-five years later, collaboration with jihad has become everyday policy. Our
politicians, even and especially those who have Muslim countries bombed and invaded (Bill
Clinton, George W. Bush, Tony Blair, Nicholas Sarkozy, David Cameron, Barack Obama,
Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, François Hollande), though they all have the blood of Muslim
and other civilians in the Near East on their hands, have also praised Islam to the skies. None
of them has ever uttered a word of Islam criticism, or ‘Islamophobia’ as they call it, and
some of them have even organized repression against Islam critics. (Spencer himself was
refused entry into the United Kingdom under Cameron, when Theresa May was home
minister; and under Obama he was refused FBI protection for an Islam-critical event that did
indeed become the target of an Islamic terror attack.) Their interventions in Iraq, Lybia and
Syria destabilized authoritarian but modernist regimes and cleared the way for ayatollahs and
ISIS.
Redefining jihad
In 1998, after bomb attacks on the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salam, Bill
Clinton declared in a speech at the UN: ‘Some may
have the world believe that almighty God himself, the merciful,
grants a license to kill. But that is not our understanding
of Islam.…’ (p.327-328)
This soon became the orthodoxy. Academics whitewash Islam’s history and theology,
top feminists like Germaine Greer whitewash female genital mutilation, Amnesty
International advocates the ‘freedom’ to wear the burqa. The media downplay Islamic terror
and crime, and after every bomb attack they hurry to ensure us that “it has nothing to do with
Islam”, diametrically in conflict with the vows the terrorists themselves had taken before
their deeds, often videotaped, or their leaders’ declarations afterwards. If at all they had to
face the fact of terror, they blamed it on ‘troubled’ individuals or on one organization, which
then consisted (in David Cameron’s words) of ‘monsters, not Muslims’. And when Muslims
use the word jihad, Westerners hurry to claim that it means the ‘great jihad’, a spiritual
struggle, while the physical struggle is only the ‘little jihad’, moreover purely defensive.
Yet, in an interview in 2001, Osama bin Laden explained: ‘This matter isn’t about any
specific person, and it is not about the al-Qai’dah Organization. We are the children of an
Islamic Nation, with Prophet Muhammad as its leader. Our Lord is one, our Prophet is one,
our Qibla [the direction Muslims face during prayer] is one, we are one nation [ummah], and
our Book [the Qur’an] is one. And this blessed Book, with the tradition [sunnah] of our
generous Prophet, has religiously commanded us [alzamatna] with the brotherhood of faith
[ukhuwat al-imaan], and all the true believers [mu’mineen] are brothers. So the situation isn’t
like the West portrays it, that there is an “organization” with a specific name (such as “al-
Qai’dah”) and so on. (p.322-323)
Bin Laden’s mentor Sheikh Abdullah ‘Azzam’s written exhortation to Muslims to join
the jihad in Afghanistan, Join the Caravan, is likewise studded with Qur’anic quotations and
references to the life of Muhammad. Azzam denied that Muhammad ever understood jihad
solely as a spiritual struggle. “The saying, ‘We have returned from the lesser Jihad [battle] to
the greater Jihad,’ which people quote on the basis that it is a hadith, is in fact a false,
fabricated hadith which has no basis. It is only a saying of Ibrahim bin Abi Ablah, one of the
Successors, and it contradicts textual evidence and reality.” He quotes several authorities
charging that ahadith narrated by Ibrahim bin Abi Ablah are false, including one who
reports: “He was accused of forging hadith.” Azzam also invokes the medieval Islamic
scholar Ibn Taymiyya, who wrote: “This hadith has no source and nobody whomsoever in
the field of Islamic knowledge has narrated it. Jihad against the disbelievers is the most
noble of actions and moreover it is the most important action for the sake of mankind. (…)
the Messenger of Allah (SAWS) used to go out on military expeditions or send out an army
at least every two months.” He quotes a hadith in which Muhammad says that Islam’s
“highest peak” is jihad.’ (p.324)
Surrender
Indeed, in a matter of decades, Western Europe has lost the will to survive as a
non-Muslim entity. It no longer resists Islamization, so it has allowed millions upon millions
of Muslims in without demanding any de-Islamization from them. In India, this same
internal weakening of resolve has been in evidence since Mahatma Gandhi’s rise to the
Congress leadership in 1920. Both European and Hindu elites have taken to blathering that
all religions are essentially saying the same thing, and they are allergic to any less-than-rosy
study about Islam itself. India having started earlier on this delusional course, it reaped the
fruits earlier: in 1947 it lost a fifth of its territory to the newly-created Islamic republic of
Pakistan. In the concomitant genocide, it lost a million of its people, and again some two
million in East Pakistan in 1971.
With the recent, partly self-inflicted terror attacks, in parallel with the rising demands
of its ever-growing Muslim community, Europe is now catching up fast. One way the
European and Hindu elites try to avoid having to face the challenge of jihad, is interreligious
dialogue. They consider themselves very clever and enlightened, but their stratagem is quite
old and history teaches how it tends to end:
‘In the early tenth century, the patriarch of Constantinople Nicholas I Mystikos made
an early attempt at interfaith outreach, writing to the Abbasid caliph Muqtadir in cordial
terms: “The two powers of the whole universe, the power of the Saracens and that of the
Romans, stand out and radiate as the two great luminaries in the firmament; for this reason
alone we must live in common as brothers although we differ in customs, manners and
religion.” Like later attempts at interfaith outreach, this one was for naught. The jihad
continued.’ (p.137)
The end of the story was that on 28 May 1453, emperor Constantine XI Paleologus
could do no more than exhort his men to a terminal fight against the troops of ‘the mad and
false Prophet, Mohammed’ (p.371), and that on 29 May, the Ottoman army conquered
Constantinople, turning it into the capital of the Ottoman Caliphate.
But several years before the end came, Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus spoke
some grim truths about Islam, that no non-Muslim doubted in his own day, though they
became a scandal when repeated in our own. Manuel, ‘little remembered after his death, shot
to fame nearly six hundred years later, when on September 12, 2006, in Regensburg,
Germany, Pope Benedict XVI dared to enunciate some truths about Islam that proved to be
unpopular and unwelcome among Muslims worldwide. Most notoriously, the pope quoted
Manuel on Islam: “Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will
find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he
preached.” (…) In the twenty-first century, Manuel’s words were denounced as
“Islamophobic”.’ (p.196)
Spencer subtly but repeatedly sketches the contrast between the fierce resistance by
our ancestors and today’s surrender mentality: “The Battle of Tours in 732 may have stopped
the complete conquest and Islamization of Europe. The warriors of jihad would appear again
in France, but they would not come close again to gaining control of the whole country until
many centuries later, by vastly different means, when there was no longer a Charles Martel
to stop them.”’ (p.94)
The absence of a much-needed Charles Martel is obvious among our politician, nut
nowhere more striking that in the Papacy. In the past there have been Popes who, out of dire
necessity, paid tribute to jihadis, but even then they never put Islam on the same footing as
Christianity. And when the power equation was a bit better, the Pope acted as a strategic
centre for organizing Crusades or to motivate kings for the defence of Vienna or the battle of
Lepanto. Even the last Pope, Benedict XVI, has famously uttered some criticism of Islam.
But the Pope, Francis, has voluntarily knelt before Muslims and kissed the Quran. It is just
sickening to hear the inheritor of such a proud tradition now parrot the worst pro-Islamic
propaganda lies.
Worse, ‘Pope Francis was not just a defender of Islam and the Qur’an but of the Sharia
death penalty for blasphemy: after Islamic jihadists in January 2015 murdered cartoonists
from the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, Francis obliquely justified the murders
by saying that “it is true that you must not react violently, but although we are good friends if
[an aide] says a curse word against my mother, he can expect a punch, it’s normal. You can’t
make a toy out of the religions of others. These people provoke and then [something can
happen]. In freedom of expression there are limits.”’ (p.357) Jihadis who aren’t that well-
informed about the reigning mentality in the Unbeliever camp, have shown no gratitude by
threatening even Francis. An ISIS poster shows him beheaded. And that may well become
the fate of all the other camp-followers on the Islamic jihad. They can only be rescued by
Unbelievers: either the Muslims massively abandon Islamic belief, or those who don’t
believe in either Islam or Islamophile propaganda somehow get the upper hand quickly.
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