Five Foundational Evils of Islam

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This is the 35th in a series of posts dealing with the history of what I call “the God Lie”.  In the previous post, I tried to outline what I described as “five structural errors” in Islam, namely:

1.  Islam’s error of identifying Muhammad as “the perfect man”,
2.  Islam’s error of assuming that the Koran is from God/Allah,
3.  Islam’s error of adopting Muhammad’s laws as Allah’s laws (sharia),
4.  Islam’s error of promoting deception (taqiyya), and
5.  Islam’s fatal philosophical errors.

My goal for this post is to try to explain what I mean by the following “five foundational evils” of Islam:

1.  Islam’s evil of promoting beliefs in the absence of reliable evidence,
2.  Islam’s evil of demanding adherence to dogmatic ignorance,
3.  Islam’s evils of violating human rights and advocating hate,
4.  Islam’s evil psychological manipulations of “true believers”, and
5.  Islam’s evil of waging incessant, immoral war against “unbelievers”.

At the outset, I should acknowledge that the above-listed evils (or “extreme immoralities”) of Islam are immoral according to my judgment (and also, I’m sure, in the judgments of essentially all secular humanists) but not in the judgments of essentially all Muslims.  In their judgments, the topics listed above aren’t “evil” but “good”, because as Ali Sina summarized:

According to Muslims it is not the Golden Rule that defines the good and bad, it is Muhammad who does it.  They believe that what is good for Islam is the highest virtue and what is bad for Islam is the ultimate evil.  This is the definition of good and evil in Islam.

This is the ethos of all cults.  From Asahara’s “Aum Shinrikyo” to Jim Jones’ “People’s Temple” and from Sun Myung Moon’s “Unification Church” to David Koresh’s “Davidian Branch”, the recurring theme is that the cult’s interests override human understanding of right and wrong.  In order to advance the interest of the cult, which is regarded as the ultimate good, everything (including lying and even murder and assassination) is permissible.  The end is deemed to be so lofty that it justifies the means.  This is the same idea of fascism where the glorification of the state and the total subordination of the individual to it are enforced…

The first requisite to feel the pain and suffering of others is to accept that they have feelings like us and they also feel hurt the way we do.  If we deny such feelings in others we do not feel any remorse in abusing them.  Muhammad claimed all those who disbelieve in Allah are the worst creatures.  He even said that all non-believers will end up in hell where they will be tortured for eternity.  How then can Muslims treat equally those whom they believe to be worse than beasts and deserve eternal punishment?

Thereby, just as Emerson said about social justice (“One man’s justice is another’s injustice”), one person’s morality can be another’s immorality.  Consequently, before trying to describe details about what I consider to be evils in Islam, it seems appropriate to review my meaning for ‘morality’.

In my on-line book, of which this series of posts is an appendix, I devoted many chapters to the concepts of ‘good’ and ‘evil’.  Here, therefore, I’ll provide only an outline, along with references to my more-complete explanations:

•  Rather than a “black-versus-white” or “good-versus-evil” view of morality, and rather than struggle to identify appropriate adjectives or modifying phrases (e.g., “partially good”, “somewhat evil”, etc.), it’s convenient to use a numerical scale.  At places in what follows, therefore, I’ll identify moral values on a numerical scale ranging from –10 to +10, with –10 corresponding to something judged to be “extremely bad” and +10 corresponding to something judged to be “extremely good”.        

•  As with any value, moral value has meaning only relative to some objective.  For instance, if your goal is to build a sturdy house, then it would be “good” to use appropriate building materials (e.g., the use of bricks and mortar might be judged to have a moral value of +8, and use of lumber, maybe a +6), whereas building a house out of marshmallows and peanut butter, for example, would probably be judged to have a very low moral value (maybe a –7).  Consequently, to discuss, evaluate and compare (and perhaps even agree on) morality, it’s first necessary to discuss and compare objectives.

•  The root reason why judgments about morality are contentious (e.g., the morality of parents’ indoctrinating their children in religion) is disagreements about fundamental goals.  Even a child asks “Why are we here?” – and no one knows the answer with certainty (or even if the question is reasonable).  As I reviewed in earlier posts in this series, Zarathustra’s answer (that we’re here to participate in a cosmic battle between good and evil) is the basis of the philosophies of both ancient Greek mystics (Pythagoras, Plato, the Stoics…) and of the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam…), but the philosophies of both the ancient Greek realists (Democritus, Aristotle, Epicurus…) and of most philosophers today are consistent with the fundamental idea of existentialism (Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre…):  “existence before essence”.  That is, in contrast to religious and metaphysical ideas that each human possesses an “immortal soul” with “eternal essence”, existentialism recognizes that humans first exist – and then we define our goals (or have them defined for us by our experiences and culture). 

•  Given that humans are goal-driven animals (with feelings of happiness arising when we think that we’re making progress toward achieving our goals), it’s understandable that humans are susceptible even to sometimes-bizarre suggestions about “the purpose of life” (i.e., what our goals “should be”), e.g., to placate some god or to follow in some charismatic leader’s footsteps.  Because people adopt different prime goals, they have different concepts of morality (because, again, moral values, as with any values, can be judged only relative to some goal).

•  People adopt thousands of goals (e.g., to build houses, to teach their children religion, to be happy, to finish a damnable writing task, etc.), but the prime goals of all humans seem to be similar.  Prime goals are those goals for which all other (then, lower-priority) goals would be willingly sacrificed.  Even a simple analysis suggests the obvious result that all humans pursue the following trio of interconnected, prime goals:  the survival (or even “thrival”) of themselves, their families (whatever extent they recognize to be “family”), and their other values (e.g., honesty, bravery, fidelity, liberty, etc.).  It’s relative to those prime goals that most of our judgments about morality are made, as I’ll outline and illustrate below.

•  Relative to our prime goal to survive (or better, thrive!), essentially all humans judge that continuing to live has high moral value (maybe a +9 or maybe even a +10, on a morality scale running from –10 to +10), but exceptions occur.  Some exceptions arise from confused thought, some exceptions arise from indoctrination (e.g., religious indoctrination in the oxymoronic idea of “life after death” and the ridiculous idea that religious martyrs gain instant access to eternal paradise), but some exceptions arise because, in certain circumstances, another prime goal takes precedence (e.g., even other animals will risk their lives to save the lives of family members, especially their offspring).

•  Relative to our prime goal of helping our families survive (whatever extent we recognize for our family), essentially all humans judge that protecting our families has high moral value (ranging perhaps from +1 to +10 on the morality scale, depending on details of the “protection”).  In this post, I won’t have need to delve into the huge number of complicated details that arise, also, from what different people consider to be “family members”.  Nonetheless, it’s relevant to mention the horrors that have resulted from considering as family only those people who belong to the same tribe, religion, or “race”, as did Ezra (writing as Moses), Muhammad, and Hitler.  In wonderful contrast were Zarathustra, the Buddha, Cyrus the Great, Socrates (“I am not an Athenian, nor a Greek, but a citizen of the world”) and the resulting brotherhood sentiments of the Epicureans and Stoics, which were adopted by most Christians and all humanists.

•  Relative to our prime goal of maintaining our other values, judging the morality of any act can become even more complicated, depending on our decision about how knowledge can be gained (i.e., our epistemology) and our resulting worldview.  For religious people, their worldview results in their clerics dictating values.  For humanists with a naturalistic worldview, each of us must decide on our other values by ourselves.  

That said, I can now explain what I mean by labeling the indicated features of Islam to be “foundational evils.”  Such judgments are based on my own perspective of morality, two important features of which are the following.

1.  In the category of personal morality, I consider the highest moral value (i.e., a +10) to be to use one’s brain as best one can (which means more than just thinking:  relying on data is essential), i.e., evaluate.  In that respect, I generally agree with Socrates’ assessment, “There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance”, although when applied to personal morality, I would prefer a statement similar to:  “There is only one good, willingness to learn, and one evil, refusal.”

2.  In the category of interpersonal morality, I’ve found it difficult to identify a single, all-encompassing description of acts with the highest moral value (i.e., a +10).  Elsewhere, I’ve discussed the wisdom reflected in parables and sayings from essentially every culture dealing with love (within limits) and kindness (with keenness).  And of course the reason for dealing with others compassionately is what’s described in Buddhism as karma and in modern American culture as:  “What goes around comes around.”  As for more formal statements of the highest interpersonal morality, there is Kant’s, “Always recognize that human individuals are ends, and do not use them as means to your end”, as well as my own, “Always recognize that everyone has an equal right to claim one’s own existence.” 

I therefore reassert that, from the perspective of my worldview (and, I’m sure, the worldview of all Humanists), the identified foundational features of Islam (listed at the beginning of this post and to be addressed below) are, in thought and deed, evils (i.e., on a morality scale running between –10 and +10, all have negative values).  I’ll now start on my list with:

1. Islam’s evil of promoting beliefs in the absence of reliable evidence.

In general, intelligent people hold their beliefs only as strongly as relevant evidence warrants.  It’s a part of what I consider to be the epitome of personal morality, viz., to use one’s brain as best one can, i.e., evaluate.  In contrast, suppose I said to you that I believed that you’re a liar, thief, murderer, or child molester.  Suppose, further, that you then asked me: “Why?” or “How come?”  If I responded “Just because” or “Because I believe you are”, surely you would be (at minimum) indignant.  If you were still willing to talk to me (and hadn’t started swinging your fist!), you might ask me:  “What’s your evidence?”  And if I responded something similar to “I have no evidence; I just believe it’s so”, then surely (as a minimum) you would have nothing more to do with me – and consider me to be immoral (or an immoral fool, although that would be somewhat of a pleonasm, since being foolish is almost always immoral).

Similar foolishness is the hallmark of religious people.  For a host of reasons, they believe in the existence of various gods.  Two of the main reasons for belief in a god (or gods) are apparently childhood indoctrination and the allure of replacing fear of death with dreams of eternal life in paradise (i.e., falling for the proof-by-pleasure logical fallacy).  In reality, meanwhile, there’s zero reliable evidence for the existence of any god.  As a result, I certainly agree with Richard Robinson’s summary in his 1964 book An Atheist’s Values:

Religion is more of an evil than a good because it is gravely inimical to truth and reason…  [Religious] Faith is a great vice, an example of obstinately refusing to listen to reason, something irrational and undesirable, a form of self-hypnotism…  It follows that, far from its being wicked to undermine [religious] faith, it is a duty to do so.  We ought to do what we can towards eradicating the evil habit of believing without regard to evidence…

Such errors – such evils – have led to the current, overt support of Islamic terrorists by approximately 100 million Muslims and the inadvertent support of Islamic terrorists by approximately a billion Muslims and a billion Christians.  Such inadvertent support of terrorists, from both mainstream Muslims and Christians, follows from their foolish, evil choice of holding beliefs more strongly than is justified by relevant evidence.

Muslims further compound their “evil habit of believing without regard to evidence” by denigrating us ‘unbelievers’ – an ignorance, an evil, that sensible humans should challenge.  But before explaining what I mean, it’s important to point out what Muslims mean by calling the rest of us ‘unbelievers’ (or kafirs).  In reality (as opposed to the distinction promoted by Muslims), everyone is both a believer and an unbeliever.  I, for example, believe in the efficacy of the scientific method (since evidence suggests it works), while simultaneously, I don’t believe in the existence of any god (since there’s zero evidence to support the idea that such things as gods exist).  But of course, by ‘unbelievers’ (kafirs) Muslims don’t mean themselves (who are unbelievers in, for example, the scientific method); they mean unbelievers in Islamic balderdash.  That distinction, alone, reveals another layer of ignorance (and therefore, evil).

In fact, there are multiple layers to the Islamic evil of promoting beliefs in the absence of reliable evidence.  One layer is the ignorance to believe in something without evidentiary support (a very serious evil, maybe a –9 on a personal morality scale running form –10 to +10).  A second layer of evil is the ignorance to maliciously segregate people into ‘believers’ versus ‘unbelievers’ (somewhere around a –4 on an interpersonal morality scale), when in reality, all of us are both believers and unbelievers (depending on the concepts under consideration).  A third layer of evil (maybe a –8 on the same interpersonal morality scale) is to identify a group of people who don’t believe in a certain, totally speculative idea (based on zero data) as being of a lower class than people who gullibly and greedily adopt such beliefs.  And a fourth layer of evil (close to a –10 on an interpersonal morality scale that runs from –10 to +10) is Islam’s promotion of Koranic injunctions advocating torture (“smite all their fingertips off”) and death (“smite ye above their necks”) for those who hold their beliefs only as strongly as relevant evidence recommends.  Such is one group of evils promoted in Islam; another is:

2. Islam’s evil of demanding adherence to dogmatic ignorance.

In some respects, this group of evils is similar to the first group addressed above (i.e., believing in the absence of supporting evidence), but as I’ll try to explain, Islam’s demand that Muslims adhere to dogmatic ignorance introduces multiple additional layers of interpersonal immorality.  Later in this post, I’ll outline some of these additional evils (out to and including waging incessant and immoral war against “unbelievers” – in Islamic balderdash), but in this section, I want to focus “just” on the evil perpetrated by Islamic clerics against Muslims, demanding that they adhere to Islamic dogma.  Thus, although it’s a personal evil to believe more strongly than relevant evidence warrants (perhaps a –9 on a personal morality scale), it’s a case of interpersonal evil (perpetrated by Islamic clerics) to demand that Muslims adhere to Islamic dogma (it’s at least a –9 on an interpersonal morality scale), because it horribly violates what I consider to be the fundamental interpersonal moral good of recognizing that everyone has an equal right to claim one’s own existence.

The concept of ‘dogma’ is defined as “a principle or set of principles laid down by an authority as incontrovertibly true.”  As I’ve repeatedly stated in these posts, the only principle or set of principles that’s “incontrovertibly true” are those dealing with closed systems (such as pure mathematics, games, and all religions).  Consequently, the “truths” of any dogma have nothing to do with truth in the real, open-system world, where the most that can be determined (applying the scientific method and Bayes’ theorem) is the probability that some claim is true.  In contrast, it’s incontrovertibly true (choosing examples in specific closed systems) that in poker “a flush always beats a straight” and in baseball that “three strikes and you’re out”, but in reality, it certainly isn’t incontrovertibly true that Moses parted the Reed Sea, Jesus walked on water, or that Gabriel conveyed any message from Allah to Muhammad.  Instead, all such religious “truth” is simply dogma, promoted by clerics either from ignorance or for their own parasitic benefits (or both).

Thanks to the efforts of Humanists (many of whom were murdered by religious fanatics), Judaism and Christianity are now passed their horrible phases of killing people who don’t believe their dogmas.  In Islam, however, the standard Sharia-law penalty for not adhering to Islamic dogma is still death.  This particularly barbaric law of the Sharia code is the prime reason why Muslims continue to wallow in their version of the Dark Ages:  any Muslim who dares to suggest that there’s something wrong with Islam can be (and probably would be) charged with apostasy – and if the religious police don’t enforce the law, Muslim fanatics will (as readers can confirm from thousands of historic and current examples by searching on the internet using “apostasy +Islam”).  The following overview is given in the Wikipedia article on Apostasy in Islam (omitting references and correcting some punctuation errors):

The traditional view sees that every person who disbelieves something that is “necessarily known to be part of Islam” by Islamic traditional scholars leads to apostasy, for instance, rejecting any sentence of the Quran and the Sunna considered to be “certainly told” by the prophet Mohammad, or considering some secular laws superior to Islamic law…  Some contemporary Muslim scholars ascribe additional requirements to disbelief to constitute apostasy, that is, an act against Islam, e.g., joining the enemies who are at war with Muslims, or as in Quran (Q. 5:33), “those who wage war against God and His Apostle”.  For those Islamic scholars, however, what constitutes “war against Allah and His Apostle” varies widely.  For many of them it can be as simple as declaring disbelief in Islam or explaining their reasons and arguments for that disbelief.

In Islamic law (sharia), the consensus view is that a male apostate must be put to death unless he suffers from a mental disorder or converted under duress, for example, due to an imminent danger of being killed.  A female apostate must be either executed, according to Shafi’i, Maliki, and Hanbali schools of Sunni Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh), or imprisoned until she reverts to Islam as advocated by the Sunni Hanafi school and by Shi’a scholars.

As an example, the same article translates (from Arabic) the following from the “Online Saudi-Arabian Curriculum”, taught at schools, under the title “Judgments on Apostates”:

An Apostate will be suppressed three days in prison in order that he may repent… otherwise, he should be killed, because he has changed his true religion; therefore, there is no use from his living, regardless of being a man or a woman, as Mohammad said:  “Whoever changes his religion, kill him”, narrated by Al-Bukhari…

For Iran, the founder of the current Islamic Republic, the maniac Ayatollah Khomeini (1900–89), stated:

Whoever insults Prophet, whoever insults sacred Imams [preachers], there is an obligation for Muslims to kill him…  If anyone ridicules a mullah [scholar], he ridicules Islam.  If he does it intentionally (he is sane, not crazy) then he is an innate apostate.  His wife is forbidden to him.  His possessions must also be given to heirs.  He should be killed.

In Pakistan, similar barbarity is practiced.  Of particular interest (as I reviewed in an earlier chapter) is that one of Pakistan’s founding fathers (and one of the most “popular and respected authors in the Islamic domains, if indeed he is not the single most widely read writer among Muslims at the present time”), Abul Ala Maududi, attempted to “justify” such blatant barbarity by developing an analogy between punishment for apostasy in Islam with punishment for treason in civilized counties.  Thus in his “manifesto” entitled The Punishment of the Apostate According to Islamic Law, Mawdudi wrote:

Every person is a natural born citizen of the United States who was born from the children of a citizen, whether he was born inside or outside the United States.  And a citizen by choice can be any person, who, after fulfilling some legal conditions, takes an oath of allegiance to the constitution to the United States.  Apart from both of these kinds of citizens the remaining people are aliens according to American law.  American law distinguishes between citizens’ and aliens’ rights and obligations in the same way that British law distinguishes between subjects’ and aliens’ rights and obligations.  An alien is free to become a citizen of the United States after he has fulfilled the legal conditions for citizenship.  But after he becomes a citizen he does not have the freedom, while residing within the borders of the United States, to renounce this citizenship and to revert to his previous citizenship.  Likewise a born citizen also does not have the right, while in the United States, to choose another nationality and to take an oath of allegiance to another state.  Analogously in the United States also the laws of treason and rebellion with reference to citizens rest on the same principles on which the British laws of treason and rebellion are founded.

Consider the law of any nation in the world and you will see the same principles operative, i.e., any state uses force to prevent the disintegration of those elements which unite it and to suppress anything tending to destroy its order…

Mawdudi’s argument that Islam is thereby considered to be not just a religion but a political ideology is revealing (a topic that I’ll return to later in this post), but his argument that apostasy is therefore equivalent to treason (e.g., in the U.S.) is fatally flawed (in more ways than one).  In the U.S. (and similarly in other civilized nations), it’s not treason to think differently and to express one’s opinion.  Instead, as stated in the U.S. Constitution (Article III, Section 3)

Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort.  No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act [italics added] or on confession in open court.

As I wrote earlier in my book:

In the U.S., it isn’t treason to think, or speak, or petition, or organize demonstrations against the “order” (e.g., to say that the President [Bush] is a nut and his policies are absurd – otherwise, my writings in this book would be treasonous!), but in Pakistan (and in other Islamic nations) it’s “treason” (punishable by death) to speak, or petition, or organize demonstrations against the “order” established by the clerics, which is based on the absurd fairy tale that some giant Jabberwock in the sky controls the universe – and that the madman Muhammad was his messenger!

Muslim governments are currently attempting to force such Islamic idiocy on the whole world via a UN resolution prohibiting “blasphemy” (of religious balderdash).  In an earlier post, I already ranted against this idiocy.  Here, therefore, I’ll repeat only my “bottom line”:  the instant that such a resolution passes in the UN (it has already passed in the Muslim-dominated Human Rights Council of the UN) is the same instant that all non-Muslim nations should discontinue their membership in the UN, starting afresh with a new international organization, re-establishing what was good with the current UN, but prohibiting all Muslim nations from joining the new international organization until they become civilized.

But in that regard and before leaving the evil of demanding belief in dogma, I should at least mention the heroes in Islamic countries who are currently risking their lives – and in many cases, losing their lives – trying to separate religion from politics in their countries.  There are literally hundreds if not thousands of such “liberals”, a few of whom I’ve tried to honor in another post.  They are the Andrei Sakharovs of the current age.  They deserve our support, of course, but equally obviously, we can’t provide the support they need and deserve, since it would put their lives in even greater jeopardy.  When they win (and I have no doubt that eventually they or their successors will wrestle control of their countries from their damnable clerics), the world will finally be able to give them the honor they deserve:  with their writings (and more), they are currently fighting tyrannies as bad as the worst of the Catholic tyranny that dragged Europe down into its Dark Ages and held it down for the worst part of 1,000 years, demanding adherence to dogma, under penalty of death.

3. Islam’s evils of violating human rights and advocating hate.

It might be thought that the worst evil of any tyranny would be to force people, under penalty of death, to abide by the dogma of the dictator (which, in the case of Islamic theocracies, is the country’s leading cleric), but actually, Islam’s violations of other human rights are even worse, especially for women.  I can’t adequately describe all the horrible treatments of Muslim women.  What follows is from Chapter Three of Women, Islam & Equality, a 1995 publication of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the National Council of Resistance of Iran.  It focuses on Iran, but similar could be written about essentially all Muslim nations, especially Saudi Arabia.

The theocracy of the mullahs of Iran, who for 16 years [now, for more than 30 years] have ruled and issued decrees in the name of Islam and the Islamic Republic, is recognized throughout the world as history’s most misogynist regime.  For Khomeini and his retinue, gender is the primary distinction.  The mullahs’ God, like themselves, is a misogynist torturer, constantly calculating human beings’ sexual offenses.  They view woman as the embodiment of sexual desire, the source of sin, and the manifestation of Satan.  She must be kept out of the public view at all times, reserving her for use, under the absolute domination of men, for sexual pleasure and reproduction.  In this system of values, a woman is never considered a human being, although as a concession, she has been described on a par with children and the mentally imbalanced.  At other times, to discredit her views and testimony, she is classified among thieves and “those who wage war on God.”

In his most famous book, Tahrir-ol Vasileh (Instrument of Writing), a collection of his views and fatwas, Khomeini carefully degrades women to a level less than that of slaves and bordering on that of animals.  In the chapter on cleanliness, he declares women najes (filthy), meaning that if men need to wash only once to cleanse themselves, women must do so twice.  In his view, the multitudes of women who gather for prayers cannot hold collective prayers unless a man leads them.  Although Islam emphasizes praying collectively in the mosque, Khomeini recommends that women pray at home, and even there, it is better that they pray in the closet.  Women do not have the right to leave home without the permission of their husbands.  Men have to provide for their living expenses, but husbands are not required to pay for their wives’ serious illnesses.  Denied independent means, the wife must tolerate her condition, and await death.

From this perspective, everything finds meaning in the context of the wife’s attractiveness.  If a woman refrains from creating an environment which provides pleasure to her husband, he has the right to beat her and to add to the beating every day to force the wife into submission.  In such a situation, the husband need not even provide for his wife’s expenses.  All these affairs are unilateral and are the husband’s prerogative.  The wife has but one responsibility:  total submission.  The husband can divorce his wife in absentia:  “In divorce, it is not necessary for the wife to know, let alone agree.”  Khomeini has also sanctioned “temporary marriage,” legitimizing prostitution, specifying that a sum be paid to the woman for use of her body.  If we add to this collection Khomeini’s fatwa sanctioning the rape of virgin girls before their execution and the fatwa permitting executions of pregnant women, we arrive at a general understanding of the views of the mullahs’ mentor.

His disciple, Rafsanjani also calls for gender apartheid:  “Equality does not take precedence over justice…  Justice does not mean that all laws must be the same for men and women.  One of the mistakes that Westerners make is to forget this…  The difference in the stature, vitality, voice, development, muscular quality and physical strength of men and women shows that men are stronger and more capable in all fields…  Men’s brains are larger…  These differences affect the delegation of responsibilities, duties and rights.”  Rafsanjani describes an equitable division of labor as follows:  “Women are consumers, but men are to manage…”  Even in the home, he does not accept women as managers:  “Running the affairs of the household and financial matters are the responsibility of the husband.”

The Majlis [deputies] have similar views.  They believe, for example:  “Women must be kept unaware…  Women must accept that men rule over them.  The world must also realize that men are superior.”  The head of the regime’s Judiciary says:  “Your wife, who is your possession, is in fact your slave.”

Women, however, aren’t the only targets of the hate preached by Muslim clerics.  In fact, they stimulate even more hate for kafirs (i.e., unbelievers), for whom they advocate death.  Exactly whom they threaten to kill is described as follows in an important article entitled “Statistical Islam” written by Bruce Warner:

There is a second division that overwhelms the reader of the historical Koran [the first division being between the Medina verses (36%) and the Mecca verses (64%)].  A majority of the text concerns the kafir (unbeliever); it’s not about being a Muslim, but about the kafir.  A note:  most Koran translations use the word “unbeliever” instead of kafir, but kafir is the actual Arabic word.

This term is so important and so unknown that the meaning of kafir must be defined.  The original meaning of the word is one who covers or conceals the known truth.  A kafir knows that the Koran is true [cough, cough], but denies it.  The Koran says that the kafir may be deceived, plotted against, hated, enslaved, mocked, tortured and worse.  The word is usually translated as “unbeliever” but this translation is wrong.  The word “unbeliever” is logically and emotionally neutral, whereas, kafir is the most abusive, prejudiced and hateful word in any language.

There are many religious names for kafirs:  polytheists, idolaters, People of the Book (Christians and Jews), atheists, agnostics, and pagans.  Kafir covers them all, because no matter what the religious name is, they can all be treated the same.  What Mohammad said and did to polytheists can be done to any other category of kafir.

Typical of the Koran’s recommended treatment of kafirs is:

I [Allah] will instill terror into the hearts of the kafirs:  smite ye above their necks and smite all their fingertips off them. (Q.8:12)

The Koran is therefore “hate literature”, as defined by most civilized countries.

4.  Islam’s evil psychological manipulations of “true believers”.

If one asks how Islam can stimulate so much hate in Muslims, brief answers usually include indoctrination of children and the fear and greed of adults.  But to understand how the minds of most Muslims have been so badly corrupted (a corruption caused by clerics, families, and by patriarchal, tribal Muslim cultures), one needs to dig into details of the horrible psychological manipulations and resulting personality distortions of the poor Muslim people.  In a single post, however, it’s impossible to treat the subject in depth – especially for someone (such as I) who isn’t trained in psychology.  Therefore, below I’ll provide just a few quotations and references associated with the indicated subtitles, which for lack of an obvious alternative, I’ll generally arrange in the same order as experienced by Muslims during their lives.

4.1  Mistreatment of Infants
To gain some appreciation for Islam’s psychological distortions, I encourage interested readers to peruse the series of 15 posts entitled “The Arab Mind” at the blog ShrinkWrapped, A Psychoanalyst Attempts to Understand the World.  In Part II of his series, adult consequences of differences in parental treatments of male vs. female infants are detailed, including the following.

Arab boys are typically breast fed for 2 to 3 years, while girls are weaned after only 1 year.  There are complicated reasons for this including the folk mores that support pampering the nursing infant and the belief (which has some truth to it) that the mother will become pregnant more easily (in order to have a son) after the infant is weaned.  [As the psychologist Lloyd deMause relays, it’s common in Muslim families that:  “When a boy is born, the family rejoices; when a girl is born, the whole family mourns.”]

Arab mothers practice demand feeding.  The girl is thus weaned well before the development of significant language and once weaned, her needs are relatively neglected.  The young boy, on the other hand, continues nursing until long after the establishment of language.  He is able to verbalize his desires and is instantly gratified when he desires the breast, which comforts and arouses as well as nourishes.  As per Patai (p. 33) [Raphael Patai, author of the book The Arab Mind]:

“... the verbalization of the one major childhood desire, that for the mother’s breast, is followed, in most cases at least, by instant gratification.  And, what is psychologically equally important, the emphatic verbal formulation of the wish carries in itself, almost automatically, the guarantee of its fulfillment without the need for any additional action on the part of the child.  This experience, repeated several times a day for a number of months, cannot fail to leave a lasting impression on the psyche of the boy child.  It may not be too far-fetched to seek a connection between this situation in childhood and a characteristic trait of the adult Arab personality that has frequently been observed and commented upon:  the proclivity for making an emphatic verbal statement of intention and then failing to follow it up with any action that could lead to its realization.  It would seem that – at least in certain contexts and moods – stating an intention or wish in itself provides a psychological satisfaction which actually can become a deterrent to undertaking the action that is averred.”

In addition, we now know that insufficient frustration in early life, i.e., imperfect and occasionally delayed gratification, is an essential component of a healthy character.  Children who receive too much gratification, just as those who receive insufficient gratification in early life, are prone to developing narcissistic and borderline character traits, such as, among others, poor frustration tolerance, poor affect control, and over-reliance on the environment to help regulate internal mood states.

In Part IX of his series, the author adds:

The young boy who is always gratified does not develop the necessary ability to tolerate reasonable frustration; at the same time he develops an exaggerated sense of self, a grandiose self.  The young girl who is deprived of gratification develops a deeply impaired and damaged self, what has been called in its extreme form “soul murder” and what in more attenuated forms can evidence as poor self-esteem.  In the cases of extreme gratification and extreme deprivation, the parent responds to personal designs and needs as opposed to the Western ideal of responding to the child’s infantile needs.  Such needs include a deft dosage of deprivation and a reasonable amount of gratification; at the extremes, narcissistic vulnerability is the result.

4.2  Emotional Distortions
For those readers familiar with the emotional phases through which most Western children evolve to reach adulthood (e.g., Erikson’s model of psychosocial development), the inhibitions to which most Muslim children are subjected are shocking.  In general, as described by Arlene F. Harder:

Our personality traits come in opposites.  We think of ourselves as optimistic or pessimistic, independent or dependent, emotional or unemotional, adventurous or cautious, leader or follower, aggressive or passive.  Many of these are inborn temperament traits, but other characteristics, such as feeling either competent or inferior, appear to be learned, based on the challenges and support we receive in growing up.

For Muslim children, the challenges (in particular, mental, emotional, physical, and sexual abuses) are so formidable and the lack of parental support experienced by both girls and boys is usually so glaring that I expect most psychologists would be astounded if any Muslim ever reaches emotional adulthood.

I’m incompetent to provide a full description.  I’d encourage interested readers to study the already referenced articles by “ShrinkWrapped” about the Arab Mind and then compare his descriptions with that of Erikson’s insights as given by the psychologist George Boeree.  From that comparison, I suspect readers will agree that, in every one of Erikson’s “eight learning phases”, Muslim children suffer severe maladaptations:  in the “trust vs. distrust” phase of infants and the “autonomy vs. shame and doubt” phase of toddlers, boys are pushed to one extreme (too trusting and too much autonomy) while girls are pushed to the other extreme; in childhood and adolescent years, especially because of authoritarian fathers, boys are again pushed to one extreme and girls to the other extreme of the ranges of “initiative vs. guilt”, “inferiority vs. industry”, and “identify vs. role confusion”, a common manifestation of which is fanaticism; as a result, it’s common to find most adult Muslims in the final three phases identified by Erickson (“intimacy vs. isolation”, “generativity vs. stagnation”, and “integrity vs. despair”) trapped in states of isolation, stagnation, and despair – leading many Muslims to become terrorists.

4.3  Sexual Abuse
As bad as are the physical, mental, and emotional abuses of Muslim children, their sexual abuse is even worse:  it’s rampant.  It’s a combination of physical, mental, and emotional abuses.  Further, their sexual abuse is essentially continuous, starting when children are infants and continuing until especially the abused males are sufficiently mature sexually to start abusing younger children.

It’s difficult to obtain reliable statistics about the extent of sexual abuse of any group of children.  In his online book The Emotional Life of Nations Lloyd deMause provides evidence suggesting that approximately 50% of even Western children are sexually abused (e.g., about 60% of all North American girls and 45% of all North American boys); reliable data for the Near and Far East don’t exist; I expect that essentially all children in these areas are sexually abused.  DeMause concludes:  “children who had not been sexually molested by their caretakers were a recent historical achievement, experienced by only a minority of children in a few places in the world.”

In Muslim countries, sexual abuse of children starts when they are infants, by parents (and others) massaging the infant’s genitals “to quieten them”, “to make them sleep”, or in the case of boys, “to make their penises grow longer”.  As toddlers, children are used essentially as sex toys by both men and women.  In later years, boys suffer painful circumcisions, a terrible number of girls are forced to have horrible, criminal, beastly genital mutilations, men use children for oral, anal, and vaginal sex (many apparently preferring to have sex with children rather than with women), many boys are forced into the street to earn money for the family as prostitutes, and a horrible number of girls are sold by their families like cattle.  In his referenced book, deMause describes some of the physiological, psychological, and social consequences of such childhood trauma.  As a result:  “When these abused children grow up, they feel that every time they try to self-activate, every time they do something independently for themselves, they will lose the approval of the parents in their head.”  They’re then ripe for picking by clerics, to use as pawns in clerical “holy wars”, so the clerics can continue their parasitic existences.

Illustrative are the abhorrent teachings of the founder of Iran’s current Islamic theocracy, the damnable Ayatollah Khomeini:

A man can marry a girl younger than nine years of age, even if the girl is still a baby being breastfed.  A man, however is prohibited from having intercourse with a girl younger than nine; other sexual act such as foreplay, rubbing, kissing and sodomy is allowed.  A man having intercourse with a girl younger than nine years of age has not committed a crime, but only an infraction, if the girl is not permanently damaged.

And thus the monster Khomeini sanctioned and practiced the depth of interpersonal immorality:  not just to use others as means to one’s own ends, but to use little girls (even infant girls!) for one’s sexual gratification.  

4.4  Maligning Individualism
The purpose of a major portion of the brainwashing of Muslim children, by clerics and by parents (who were similarly brainwashed when they were children), is to subsume their individualism, replacing it with membership in the Islamic collective, called the ummah (which, for Star Trek fans, is similar to the Borg).  In his 1951 book The True Believer, the American “longshoreman-philosopher” Eric Hoffer clearly saw the general mechanism and its operation:

Self-surrender, which is the source of a mass movements unity and vigor, is a sacrifice…  To ripen a person for self-sacrifice he must be stripped of his individual identity and distinctness.  He must cease to be George, Hans, Ivan, or Tadao – a human atom with an existence bounded by birth and death.  The most drastic way to achieve this end is by the complete assimilation of the individual into a collective body.  It cures the poignantly frustrated not by conferring on them an absolute truth or by remedying the difficulties and abuses that made their lives miserable, but by freeing them from their ineffectual selves – and it does this by enfolding them and absorbing them into a closely knit and exultant whole.

In the case of Muslims, the “exultant whole” is the ummah, and the Koran tells them:  “You [Muslims] are the best of peoples” (Q.3:110).  The Koran further states (as Ibn Warraq summarizes in his excellent article entitled “Islam, Middle East and Fascism”):

Islam is the most perfect of religion, and Muslims are the chosen people, as sura v.3 tells us:  “This day I have perfected for you your religion and completed My favor to you and chosen for you Islam as a religion.”  Islam is destined to triumph ultimately, sura ix.33:  “He it is Who sent His Messenger with guidance and the Religion of Truth, that He may cause it to prevail over all religions, though the polytheists are averse” (see also xlviii.28; lxi.9).

Star Trek’s Borg said:  “You will be assimilated; resistance is futile.”  Muslims say similar.  In the end, though, freedom will prevail over such evil.

4.5  Indoctrination in ignorance
I have already devoted a section in this post to “Islam’s evil of demanding adherence to dogmatic ignorance”, but here, I should at least mention some evil consequences of such psychological manipulations of the people by Muslim clerics, called mullahs (“scholars”) and imams (preachers).  Important details are given in the recent article entitled “Islam & the Mental Immune System” by Amil Imani and Wafa Sultan.  An excerpt follows.

Muslims living in theocratic states, in particular, tend to be victims of their religious brains:  their religious brains are indoctrinated, from the moment of birth, by an extensive ruthless in-power cadre of self-serving mullahs and imams who are intent at maintaining their stranglehold on the rank and file of the faithful – their very source of support and livelihood…  The mullahs and imams, as well as parents and others, envelop the receptive mind, feed it their dogma, and shield it from information that may undermine or falsify their version of belief…  [And], for as long as there are bigoted, self-serving clergy and their collaborators with first exclusive access to the blank slate, the problem of supplying wave after wave of Islamofascists will persist.  It is the brain/mind that assesses things, makes decisions, and orders actions.  To the extent that the in-place software of the religious brain is exclusionary in nature, hateful in orientation, and violent in tendency, to that extent the individual is both the perpetrator and the victim of barbaric acts.

Thus, by indoctrinating the people in Islamic ignorance, Muslim clerics mass-produce mindless automatons, willing and even eager to protect their evil, parasitic, clerical masters.

4.6  Mental Submission/ Slavery
For Muslim children to reject their individuality and to accept clerical dogma as true, their natural inquisitiveness must be suppressed.  To do so, Muslim clerics promote the evil of discouraging and even prohibiting free inquiry and critical thinking, since such would lead to questioning Islam’s “sacred literature”.  As Muhammad allegedly (and stupidly) said:

Any change is considered innovation (in Arabic, bid’a), and innovation is errant behavior (dalala).

The result is mental submission – even, mental slavery.  As an otherwise almost trivial example, five times a day, Muslims must repeatedly bow so low and so fervently to their imaginary master (Allah) that the foreheads of many become permanently bruised.  More significantly, hundreds of times a day Muslims will think or say inshallah (“if god wills it”) to acknowledge that they are their imaginary master’s (Allah’s) slaves.  In fact, the word ‘Islam’, itself, means ‘submission’ (to the Muslims’ imaginary master, Allah).

Cowered into submission to Allah (i.e., in reality, to the clerics), Muslims are ripe for submission, also, to political despots.  As a result, Muslims become slaves of both clerics and politicians, who in all Muslim countries are in collusion.  As the psychologist Wafa Sultan (who lived in Syria for her first three decades and who is now living in the U.S., but is under daily death-threats from Muslim fanatics) wrote in her 2009 book A God Who Hates (reviewed, e.g., here):

Never in the history of Islam has a Muslim cleric protested against the actions of a Muslim ruler, because of the total belief that obedience to the ruler is an extension of obedience toward God and his Prophet.  There is only one exception to this:  a Muslim cleric of one denomination may protest against the actions of a ruler who belongs to a different one.  How can a Muslim escape the grasp of his ruler when he is completely convinced of the necessity of obeying him?  How can he protest against this obedience, which represents obedience to his Prophet and therefore also to his God?  He cannot.  Islam is indeed a despotic regime.  It has been so since its inception, and remains so today.  Is there a relationship more representative of the ugliest forms of slavery than that between a ruler and a populace whom he flogs and whose money he steals while they themselves have no right to protest against this behavior?  The ruler acts by divine decree, and the people obey him by divine decree.

Thus, just as in Christendom during the Dark Ages of Europe, today in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran and other Muslim dictatorships, the collusion between Islamic clerics and politicians uses the people as mere pawns, behavior that again is at the lower limit of interpersonal immorality.

4.7  Promotion of Barbaric Morality
Oppression from Islam’s pyramid of power (starting at the top with an all-powerful god – who in reality is, of course, nothing but a manipulative tool of clerical and political despots) continues on down from Muslim men to Muslim women (as I already outlined in the previous section, dealing with violating human rights).  And as in the classic sadistic skit in which the boss berates the husband, who goes home and criticizes his wife, who scolds the boy, who beats the dog, who chases the cat, who kills the mouse… many Muslim mothers turn the lives of their daughters and daughters-in-law into hell, many of whom chose suicide – in some cases taking with them the lives of the horrible unbelievers (kafirs), who Islamic indoctrination teaches are the scum of the earth.  Islam is thus a power pyramid built with fear above and hate below, relying on the overriding law of the jungle, might makes right.

Many examples of the resulting barbaric morality are available, but here I’ll mention only the horrible concept of “honor killings” of Muslim women, which is a part of the primitive, tribal “honor system” of most Islamic cultures.  As already mentioned, as a result of the poor training by their mothers and their beatings and rapes by those in authority, the majority of Muslim males fail to become individuals.  Instead, most consider themselves as just “part of the collective” (be it the family, the tribe, or the ummah); as a result, collective ‘honor’ dominates, while individual honor is not only unknown but even unfathomable.  Similar occurred among ancient tribal cultures, including the Babylonians, Assyrians, Hebrews, and early Romans.  

As described in detail by others, the result is not the familiar (individualistic) “guilt culture” of the West, but instead, most Muslim cultures are (communal) “shame cultures”.  In such cultures, your immorality is not judged by your recognizing that you erred, but by others deciding that you (or something you possess) erred.  And since in Muslim cultures men own women, then if the community gains the impression that a woman has done something wrong, it’s not her individual guilt that's recognized as significant, but the shame she has brought to her owner.  Human Rights Watch states:

A woman can be targeted by (individuals within) her family for a variety of reasons, including: refusing to enter into an arranged marriage, being the victim of a sexual assault, seeking a divorce – even from an abusive husband – or (allegedly) committing adultery.  The mere perception that a woman has behaved in a way that “dishonors” her family is sufficient to trigger an attack on her life.

As a result, men kill their woman accused of shaming their “owners” – and thereby, approximately 5,000 such “honor killings” are estimated to occur annually throughout the Muslim world.  How many women are beaten is unknown, but almost certainly it’s ubiquitous, since the Koran (Q.4:34) condones wife beating.

4.8  Malignant Sexuality
But of all Islam’s psychological manipulations and distortions and associated evils, none is worse than Islam’s malignant manipulations of human sexuality.  I’ve already mentioned sexual abuse of infants and children, which are manifestations of Islam’s wretched distortions of the sexuality of men (and women).   For example, not only is the Koran misogynistic (e.g., see Suras 4.3, 4.11, and 4.34), Muhammad reportedly made such hideous statements as the following:

•  Women are deficient in intelligence and in religion.
•  Never will succeed such a nation as makes a woman their ruler.
•  Ask the opinion of your wives, but always do the opposite.
•  After my disappearance there will be no greater source of chaos and disorder for my nation than women.

Examples of resulting, malignant Islamic laws dealing with human sexuality include the following, copied from Gadi Adelman’s article Discussing Islam:

•  Sharia law allows obligatory female genital castration.
•  Sharia law allows husbands to hit their wives.
•  Sharia law requires women to obtain permission from husbands for daily freedoms, such as leaving the house unescorted by a male family member.
•  Sharia law instructs compulsory acceptance of polygamy and forced child marriages.
•  Sharia law requires the testimony of four male witnesses to prove rape.
•  Sharia law commands that homosexuals be executed.
•  Sharia law orders unmarried fornicators to be whipped and adulterers to be stoned to death.

Now, there’s “no way” that I can provide even adequate references to the enormous problems caused by Muhammad’s idiotic ideas about women and sex.  Below is just a single example.  It’s from a 6 August 2010 symposium on “Islam’s War on Women’s Pleasure”, as reported by Dr. Jamie Glazov.  The comments below are statements by Dr. Nicolai Sennels, a Danish psychologist who worked for several years with young criminal Muslims in a Copenhagen prison.

My findings are that growing up in the Muslim cultures is psychologically unhealthy on numerous realms.  The positive attitude towards anger and the narcissistic concept of honor prevents many Muslims from maturing as human beings.  Together with the racist and aggressive attitude towards non-Muslims, a strong identification with the Muslim umma and favoring of Middle Age religious dogmas at the expense of common sense, human rights and science, the Muslim mentality makes it impossible for most Muslims to integrate into our democratic, secular and civilized Western culture.  Not only that:  it makes Muslims into less happy and mentally healthy people.  No wonder that the core of such a culture is based on the repression of sexuality and female qualities.

There is no doubt that Muslim men’s negative view on women has a high price not only for the women but also for the men and Muslim culture in general.  We men receive a long row of qualities when we open up to women:  empathy, the ability to function in groups without creating hierarchies, and more mature ways of experiencing and expressing our emotions – these are among the most important…

The wish to bring happiness to one’s partner – especially sexual happiness – is fundamental for being able to experience and express love.  Men who do not have this wish will be cut off from the maturing experience of learning from the kind of wisdom and emotional life that only women express fully.  This leaves men less mature and less happy.  The point is that the more you give, the more you get – on all levels.  Men who joyfully see themselves as a source of bliss, satisfaction, and happiness to their female partner have found the key to their own human growth and a successful relationship.

Since Islam and the Muslim culture prevent men and women from freely meeting as equal partners, Muslims are cut off from this important cause of happiness and maturity.  The result is the childish fanaticism and immature ways of handling emotions that clearly characterize Muslim societies.  The propagation of the Islamic scriptures and Muslim males’ suppression of women and their ignoring of female qualities and need for happiness is the main cause for the suffering and hate in Islamic societies.  That terrorism arises is no surprise.

The suppression of women in Islam and Muslim culture is an effective tool in keeping its propagators aggressive and emotionally cold towards their infidel victims.  If we manage to liberate the Muslim women, we have Islam cornered and removed its corner teeth…

The question is:  Why are Muslim men so vulnerable?  How did Muslim men end up on such a fragile pedestal?  The answer is that Islam and Muslim culture depend on male aggression and needs to suppress female sensitivity.  The reason for this is that this culture is aiming on conquering and domination.  In such a culture, female softness and empathy would be distracting and a hurdle.  In such a culture, men are simply worth more than women.  This is the reason that Muslim boys are treated as kings from birth and therefore develop a fragile glass-like personality that is unable to handle defeat, inferiority, and criticism.

I am sure that Dr. Kobrin and Dr. Gutmann are right about Israel:  It is an unwelcome showcase in the Middle East that risks tempting the area’s Muslim women by promoting gender equality, human rights, and freedom.  This of course provokes the insecure Muslim men and contributes to their hate and wish for destruction of Israel and Western civilization in general.  The hate of women is in this way is very closely connected with Islam’s wish for destruction of the free world.

Actually, though, there’s probably more (than misogyny) to “Islam’s wish for destruction of the free world” (dealing with desires of Muslim’s to “cleanse their sins”, “uphold their honor”, and “punish evil”), as I’ll try to outline in the next two subsections.

4.9  Philosophical Evils
As a result of Muslims’ indoctrination in ignorance, their outlook on life is essentially unanimously perverted, leading them to erroneously conclude that their purpose in life is to placate Allah (rather than, e.g., “to help intelligence go on”), that life is a test (rather than “a happening to experience”), and therefore, that they are Allah’s slaves.  Consistent with being Allah’s slaves, Muslims adopt a horrible fatalism (inshallah = “if Allah wills it”), and consistent with all such philosophical errors (and evils), Muslims become trapped in a horrible Catch-22:  forbidden to question their indoctrination, they’re trapped into the mind-numbing (and immoral) requirement that they uncritically accept Islamic dogma.

An example of such a distorted view of the purpose of life is the following statement by “the philosophical father” of both the Muslim Brotherhood and Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda, i.e., Sayyid Qutb (pronounced KUH-tahb).  His writings have been described “as significant [to Islamic supremacism] as Lenin was to Communism.”  In his book In the Shade of the Qur’an, written while he was in an Egyptian prison between 1954 and the year of his execution, 1966, Qutb wrote:

To live “in the shade of the Qur’an” is a great blessing which can only be fully appreciated by those who experience it.  It is a rich experience that gives meaning to life and makes it worth living.  I am deeply thankful to God Almighty for blessing me with this uplifting experience for a considerable time, which was the happiest and most fruitful period of my life – a privilege for which I am eternally grateful.

Actually, though, I could agree with part of what Qutb wrote:  living “in the shade of the Qur’an” can give “meaning to life” and make life “worth living” (for those who don’t have the smarts to decide, by themselves, on the meaning and purpose of their own lives).  To follow the path (sharia) blazed by the megalomaniacal narcissist Muhammad, however, is not a “blessing”; it’s a curse.  Many Nazis and Communists apparently similarly “thought” that following Hitler and Lenin gave “meaning to life” and made their life “worth living”, but in the judgment of most of us, they were bonkers.

The resulting horrible fatalism, adopted by essentially all Muslims, is prescribed in the Koran:

If Allah afflicts you with some hurt, there is no one who can remove it except Him; and if He desires good for you, there is no one who can repel His bounty.  He strikes with it whom He wishes of his servants. [Q.10:107]

The consequences of such fatalism were described well in a recent article by the brave Dutch politician Geert Wilders, who is trying to have the Koran classified in Holland as hate literature and who therefore lives under constant threats of being murdered by Muslim maniacs.  Some excerpts from his article follow, in which he quotes Winston Churchill and Aldous Huxley.

In the late 1890s, Winston Churchill was a soldier and a war correspondent in British India (contemporary Pakistan) and the Sudan.  Churchill was a perceptive young man, whose months in Pakistan and the Sudan allowed him to grasp with amazing clarity what the problem is with Islam and “the curses it lays on its votaries.”

“Besides the fanatical frenzy… there is this fearful fatalistic apathy,” he wrote. “The effects are apparent in many countries.  Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist where the followers of the Prophet rule or live…  The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to a sole 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…  Individual Muslims may show splendid qualities – but the influence of the religion paralyzes the social development of those who follow it.” And Churchill concluded: “No stronger retrograde force exists in the world…”

The author Aldous Huxley, who lived in North Africa in the 1920s, made the following observation:  “About the immediate causes of things – precisely how they happen – they [Muslims] seem to feel not the slightest interest.  Indeed, it is not even admitted that there are such things as immediate causes:  God is directly responsible for everything.  ‘Do you think it will rain?’ you ask pointing to menacing clouds overhead.  ‘If God wills,’ is the answer.  You pass the native hospital.  ‘Are the doctors good?’  ‘In our country,’ the Arab gravely replies, in the tone of Solomon, ‘we say that doctors are of no avail.  If Allah wills that a man die, he will die.  If not, he will recover.’ All of which is profoundly true, so true, indeed, that is not worth saying.  To the Arab, however, it seems the last word in human wisdom… They have relapsed – all except those who are educated according to Western methods – into pre-scientific fatalism, with its attendant incuriosity and apathy.”

Islam deprives Muslims of their freedom.  That is a shame, because free people are capable of great things, as history has shown.  The Arab, Turkish, Iranian, Indian, Indonesian peoples have tremendous potential.  If they were not captives of Islam, if they could liberate themselves from the yoke of Islam, if they would cease to take Muhammad as a role model and if they got rid of the evil Koran, they would be able to achieve great things which would benefit not only them but the entire world.

Even worse for the entire world than Islamic fatalism, however, is that Muhammad managed to infect the minds of his followers with a twisted and evil “death wish”, which I’ll address, below, in a separate subsection.

4.10  Martyrdom
As with essentially all of Muhammad’s ideas, his idea of martyrdom wasn’t new:  for example and as I reviewed in earlier posts in this series, Socrates accepted his execution to uphold his honor and Athenian law, Jewish martyrs willingly went to their deaths during the Maccabean Revolt against the Greek rulers, and maniacal Christian martyrs behaved similarly during Roman persecution.  Muhammad, however, managed to push martyrdom one (evil) step further:  whereas his goal was to conquer, he promised his “holy warriors” (mujahideen) instant access to paradise not just for death during Islam’s defense but also during offense.  As Fjordman recently explained in his article entitled “Why Muslims like Plato?”:

The image of Socrates as a martyr who died for his beliefs might make sense to Christians, but less so to Muslims.  This is because a Muslim shahid, a term often translated as ‘martyr’, is not a person who dies for his beliefs but rather one who murders others for their beliefs and himself dies in the process, for example by blowing up a bus full of unarmed non-Muslim civilians.  According to such an Islamic worldview, Socrates was a weakling and a failure.

An illustrative analysis of the resulting Muslim mindset is the following quotation from an article entitled “Group Death Myths in Terror Cult Groups”, which was published in the Winter 2007 issue of The Journal of Psychohistory.  The article was written by the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Peter Olsson, author of Malignant Pied Pipers of our Time.

The terrifying psychological link between destructive and apocalyptic cults and Bin Laden’s terror cult lies in their total and massive denial of death…  These destructive cult leaders project their inner, unresolved narcissistic wounds and attendant rage onto and into their cult followers and subsequently anyone who disagrees with their narrow fundamentalist worldview.  The terror cult death myths serve to promote acted-out murderous or suicidal urges upon the “Evil” they perceive in the external world.  Bin Laden grandiosely defines the “West” and U.S. as evil infidels.

This “denial of death” or “death wish” is as old as Islam.  For example, the commander of Muslim forces at the Battle of Qadisiyya in the year 663 sent the following message to the commander of the Persians:

You… should convert to Islam, and then you will be safe, for if you don’t, you should know that I have come to you with an army of men that love death, as you love life.

According to the same reference, a few years ago, the Secretary General of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, parroted:

We are going to win, because they love life and we love death. 

Similarly, the al-Qaeda spokesman claiming responsibility for the 2004 Madrid bombing re-parroted:

You love life and we love death, which gives an example of what the Prophet Muhammad said.

Of course, in reality, such maniacs don’t “love death”, because obviously, they don’t know (and can’t know) death.  Instead, what they love is the images of paradise that Islam has implanted in their brainwashed (or better, “brain-warped”) minds. 

The resulting warped mindset of Muslim maniacs is illustrated in the following quotation from the 11 August 2010 article by Hasyim Widhiarto in The Jakarta Post entitled “JI [Jamaah Islamiyah] crown prince Abdul Rohim sees violent jihad as inevitable”:

The youngest son of firebrand cleric Abu Bakar Ba’asyir, Abdul Rohim, 31, is tipped by many to become the future leader of the jihadist movement in Indonesia.  The young and energetic father of three daughters talked with The Jakarta Post’s Hasyim Widhiarto several days before the police arrested Ba’asyir, the spiritual leader of the Jamaah Islamiyah.  Here is an excerpt of the interview…

“So it’s obvious to see many Muslims who feel satisfied with the government as long as they are allowed to build mosques, run daily prayers, and fast during Ramadan.  But Islam is not as simple as that.  It is true that all Muslims must adhere to all five pillars of Islamic principles.  But like a house, Islam cannot stand with only pillars.  It needs walls, a roof, paint, and other things to be complete.  That’s why a Muslim must always refer to the Koran and the deeds of the Prophet Muhammad.

“People may say that some Islamic law, like cutting off hands and rajam (stoning to death), are cruel, but that is what the Koran says.  No matter how bad the laws are, they are undoubtedly the laws of Allah.

“Once the entire Islamic law is upheld, it will bring mankind into a happy and orderly life, which cannot be achieved with any man-made laws…

“For us, the implementation of sharia is our final goal.  It’s because once you declare your syahadat creed [i.e., that there is no god but Allah and Muhammad is his messenger], you must apply Islamic teachings entirely and not partially.  Of course, we cannot ask Osama (bin Laden) to come to Indonesia and implement sharia here.  It is our obligation to do that and Allah will ask your responsibility in the afterlife.”

The above quotation reveals this maniac’s mindset:  his statement “No matter how bad the [sharia] laws are, they are undoubtedly the laws of Allah” reveals that he’s lost his natural sense of morality and justice, his statement “Once the entire Islamic law is upheld, it will bring mankind into a happy and orderly life, which cannot be achieved with any man-made laws” reveals that he’s lost his ability to think rationally, and his statement “It is our obligation to do that and Allah will ask your responsibility in the afterlife” reveals his suppressed fear, possibility derived from his father having beaten Islam into him.  I find it stunning to realize that a human can so completely abandon his humanity and become an automaton.

A huge amount can be written (and has been written) on the warped mindsets of terrorists.  Here, I’ll provide just a single additional example.  The following is also from the article, quoted above, by Peter Olsson, an article that I recommend be read in its entirety.

Terrorist Bin Laden of 9-11-01 infamy, shows a frighteningly similar pattern to Malignant Cult Leaders.  Disappointment in his wealthy hypocritical Saudi father who had 50+ children, died young, and left them all alone, is a powerful dynamic.  Osama’s father though espousing strict Islamism (Wahabbism) had, like other Saudi father-figures, prospered while the poor Saudi masses were suppressed.  Osama bin Laden is the ultimate example of repressed adolescent rebellion finally run wild and out of control.  Osama bin Laden searched for stronger radical Islamic father figures.  Azzam of Afghanistan and Turabi of Sudan filled the bill according to Bodansky (1999).  Bin Laden now leads his adoring cult of Islamofascist adolescent rebels, into the Holy Terror War of WWIII.

In essence, bin Laden acts-out his narcissistic rage and inner disappointments out across the entire world.  America becomes another hated father and authority figure.  Bin Laden’s relentless Holy War of Apocalypse dwarfs Waco, Jonestown, and Asahara’s Tokyo gas attack (Van Beima, 1995).  Each of these apocalyptic cult leaders created and then projected external dangers and evils (really their own inner demons and self-hate) to justify suicidal or homicidal death rituals for their cults.

Charismatic Apocalyptic Cult leaders, in their denial, rebellion and acting out, try to hide the evidence of their inner narcissistic wounds.  They act-out their inner disappointments by leading their adoring followers and then innocent victims to their deaths.  They may be legends in their own mind, but they really are the ultimate deniers of death.

It is important for all thinking, independent, freedom-loving, and personally responsible people to be aware of the chicanery of malignant cult leaders.  WWIII is ultimately a battle for the civilized Mind and Soul.  Bin Laden’s self-proclaimed Jihad is as flawed as our Bush administrations’ notion of “Preemptive War”.  Hopefully, there will be a victory of inner responsibility and altruistic leadership, over the tendency to externalize, project, and act-out hatred and narcissistic rage.

DeMause (2006, pp. 305-307) points to a hopeful and positive solution to the terrorism problem.  He describes a proposed UN-sponsored Marshall Plan designed to reduce the abusive childrearing that is creating the terrorists.  DeMause describes Robert McFarland’s 23-year-old Community Parenting Program in Boulder Colorado, the Home Visiting Program run by the state of Colorado, and Margaret R. Kind M.D.’s program in New York City.  DeMause says of these remarkable programs and I concur:

“I have found during my four decades of research – child abuse and neglect are the central causes of wars, terrorism and social violence, and prevention of terrorism can only be accomplished by helping the family to be more loving, more nurturing and more respectful of their children’s independence.”

5. Islam’s evil of waging incessant, immoral war against “unbelievers”.

That Islam promotes incessant war against “unbelievers” (in their balderdash) is prescribed in many verses of the Koran, e.g., Sura 9, 29 states:

Fight those who do not believe in Allah, nor in the latter day, nor do they prohibit what Allah and His Messenger have prohibited, nor follow the religion of truth, out of those who have been given the Book, until they pay the tax in acknowledgment of superiority and they are in a state of subjection.

If you don’t want to be a dhimmi (i.e., in “a state of subjection”) and if you feel the above Koran declaration of war and subjugation violates reasonable statements of interpersonal morality (such as “everyone has an equal right to claim one’s own existence”), then welcome to the civilized, secular world.

That Islam’s declared, incessant war on unbelievers (in their balderdash) is immoral (not only because of its goal and its conduct but also because it’s unprovoked) is described well in the article by Raymond Ibrahim entitled “How Taqiyya Alters Islam’s Rules of War” and published in the Winter 2010 issue (Vol. XVII, No. 1, pp. 3–13) of The Middle East Quarterly (quoted below with his references omitted):

That Islam legitimizes deceit [taqiyya] during war is, of course, not all that astonishing; after all, as the Elizabethan writer John Lyly put it, “All’s fair in love and war.”  Other non-Muslim philosophers and strategists – such as Sun Tzu, Machiavelli, and Thomas Hobbes – justified deceit in warfare.  Deception of the enemy during war is only common sense.  The crucial difference in Islam, however, is that war against the infidel is a perpetual affair – until, in the words of the Qur’an, “all chaos ceases, and all religion belongs to God.”  In his entry on jihad from the Encyclopedia of Islam, Emile Tyan states:  “The duty of the jihad exists as long as the universal domination of Islam has not been attained.  Peace with non-Muslim nations is, therefore, a provisional state of affairs only; the chance of circumstances alone can justify it temporarily.”

Moreover, going back to the doctrine of abrogation, Muslim scholars such as Ibn Salama (d. 1020) agree that Qur’an 9:5, known as ayat as-sayf or the sword verse, has abrogated some 124 of the more peaceful Meccan verses, including “every other verse in the Qur’an [that] commands or implies anything less than a total offensive against the nonbelievers.”  In fact, all four schools of Sunni jurisprudence agree that “jihad is when Muslims wage war on infidels, after having called on them to embrace Islam or at least pay tribute [jizya] and live in submission [in a state of dhimmitude], and the infidels refuse.”

Obligatory jihad is best expressed by Islam’s dichotomized worldview that pits the realm of Islam against the realm of war.  The first, dar al-Islam, is the “realm of submission,” the world where Shari’a governs; the second, dar al-Harb (the realm of war), is the non-Islamic world.  A struggle continues until the realm of Islam subsumes the non-Islamic world – a perpetual affair that continues to the present day.  The renowned Muslim historian and philosopher Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406) clearly articulates this division:

“In the Muslim community, jihad is a religious duty because of the universalism of the Muslim mission and the obligation to convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force.  The other religious groups did not have a universal mission, and the jihad was not a religious duty for them, save only for purposes of defense.  But Islam is under obligation to gain power over other nations.”

Finally and all evidence aside, lest it still appear unreasonable for a faith with over one billion adherents to obligate unprovoked warfare in its name, it is worth noting that the expansionist jihad is seen as an altruistic endeavor, not unlike the nineteenth century ideology of “the white man’s burden.”  The logic is that the world, whether under democracy, socialism, communism, or any other system of governance, is inevitably living in bondage – a great sin, since the good of all humanity is found in living in accordance to God’s law.  In this context, Muslim deception can be viewed as a slightly less than noble means to a glorious end – Islamic hegemony under Shari’a rule, which is seen as good for both Muslims and non-Muslims.

This view has an ancient pedigree:  Soon after the death of Muhammad (634), as the jihad fighters burst out of the Arabian peninsula, a soon-to-be conquered Persian commander asked the invading Muslims what they wanted. They memorably replied as follows:

“God has sent us and brought us here so that we may free those who desire from servitude to earthly rulers and make them servants of God, that we may change their poverty into wealth and free them from the tyranny and chaos of [false] religions and bring them to the justice of Islam.  He has sent us to bring his religion to all his creatures and call them to Islam.  Whoever accepts it from us will be safe, and we shall leave him alone; but whoever refuses, we shall fight until we fulfill the promise of God.”

Fourteen hundred years later – in March 2009 – Saudi legal expert Basem Alem publicly echoed this view:

“As a member of the true religion, I have a greater right to invade [others] in order to impose a certain way of life [according to Shari’a], which history has proven to be the best and most just of all civilizations.  This is the true meaning of offensive jihad.  When we wage jihad, it is not in order to convert people to Islam, but in order to liberate them from the dark slavery in which they live.”

And it should go without saying that taqiyya in the service of altruism is permissible.  For example, only recently, after publicly recounting a story where a Muslim tricked a Jew into converting to Islam – warning him that if he tried to abandon Islam, Muslims would kill him as an apostate – Muslim cleric Mahmoud al-Masri called it a “beautiful trick.”  After all, from an Islamic point of view, it was the Jew who, in the end, benefited from the deception, which brought him to Islam…

This, then, is the dilemma:  Islamic law unambiguously splits the world into two perpetually warring halves – the Islamic world versus the non-Islamic – and holds it to be God’s will for the former to subsume the latter.  Yet, if war with the infidel is a perpetual affair, if war is deceit, and if deeds are justified by intentions – any number of Muslims will naturally conclude that they have a divinely sanctioned right to deceive, so long as they believe their deception serves to aid Islam “until all chaos ceases, and all religion belongs to God.”

Such deception will further be seen as a means to an altruistic end.  Muslim overtures for peace, dialogue, or even temporary truces must be seen in this light, evoking the practical observations of philosopher James Lorimer, uttered over a century ago:  “So long as Islam endures, the reconciliation of its adherents, even with Jews and Christians, and still more with the rest of mankind, must continue to be an insoluble problem.”

In closing, whereas it may be more appropriate to talk of “war and peace” as natural corollaries in a Western context, when discussing Islam, it is more accurate to talk of “war and deceit.”  For, from an Islamic point of view, times of peace – that is, whenever Islam is significantly weaker than its infidel rivals – are times of feigned peace and pretense, in a word, taqiyya.

If the reader judges that it’s highly moral (maybe a +6 on a morality scale running from –10 to +10) to develop and promote friendships and that it’s highly moral (maybe a +8) to treat others as well as you would wish they’d treat you, then you would probably judge taqiyya to be highly immoral (maybe a –7 on the same morality scale, because it destroys friendships by mistreating others), and you would probably judge waging unprovoked war to subjugate others (to use others as a means to one’s own ends) to be close to the limit of immorality (i.e., at least a –9).  Such is another of the evils of Islam.

Consistent with taqiyya, Islamic clerics immorally portray Islam to “unbelievers” and to initiates as a “Religion of Peace”, while promoting Islam to its mature members (e.g., its mujahideen, i.e., its “holy warriors”) as superior to and at war with all “unbelievers” (in its balderdash).  As an example, the former Mufti of Egypt and (as of 28 March 2010) the new Sheikh (head) of Al-Azhar University (widely regarded as the most authoritative Sunni Islam’s religious establishment), Dr. Ahmad Al-Tayyeb (whose name is also spelled Tayeb) stated during an interview with Egyptian journalist Markram Muhamad Ahmad, as reported in the 11 August 2010 issue of MEMRI (Special Dispatch No. 31558):  

It is not true that Islamic civilization imposed itself upon the world by the force of the sword.  Islam spread throughout the world because it is the religion of natural faith and the religion of wisdom, which spoke to the minds of the people and to their hearts, cultivating equality among humans and promoting justice.  The sword is not fitting as a symbol of Islam because Islam [represents] mercy and justice, and because a Muslim does not bear his sword in order to attack others, but in order to protect the land, the homeland, and the faith.  Islam encourages a Muslim to be strong and capable of defending his homeland, his religion, and himself, but does not encourage him to act aggressively toward others.

He added:

The “verse of the sword” descended regarding those who came out against Islam and fought Muslims, expelled them from their homes, and did them great injustice.  The context of the verse – the verses which precede and follow it – confirms this [understanding].  Proper Koranic thinking determines that there is no religious coercion.  When Allah approached the Prophet and said:  “Will you then force men till they become believers?” [Koran 10:99] the intent of the question at the beginning of the verse is to refute [any claim] that the Prophet was forcing the people to believe [in Islam].

This cleric is either ignorant or a liar, and given that he’s head of Al-Azhar University, it seems unlikely that he’s ignorant of Islam.  In contrast to such deception, the following quotations illustrate the opinions of various Islamic supremacists that Islam is superior to and at war with all “unbelievers” (in its balderdash).

1.  The first example (from Robert Spencer’s 2002 book Islam Unveiled) is a statement by the Ayatollah Khomeini (1900–89; the maniacal founder of the current, Iranian, Shi’ite theocracy) as given in Amir Taheri’s book, Holy Terror: Inside the World of Islamic Terrorism, Adler & Adler, 1987, p. 242.

Islam says:  Whatever good there is exists thanks to the sword and in the shadow of the sword!  People cannot be made obedient except with the sword!  The sword is the key to Paradise, which can be opened only for the Holy Warriors!  There are hundreds of other [Qur’anic] psalms and Hadiths [sayings of the Prophet] urging Muslims to value war and to fight.  Does all this mean that Islam is a religion that prevents men from waging war?  I spit upon those foolish souls who make such a claim.

2.  The following is from a 14 August 2007 statement by the current, maniacal President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (whose recent “fraudulent re-election” caused widespread unrest and suppression in Iran):

There is no truth on earth but monotheism and following tenets of Islam, and there is no way for salvation of mankind but rule of Islam over mankind.

3.  The following is from another article by Raymond Ibrahim, this one entitled “The Two Faces of Al Qaeda” (a Sunni terrorist organization), published in the 21 Sept. 2007 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education (Vol. 54, Issue 4, p. B13):

Soon after 9/11, an influential group of Saudis wrote an open letter to the United States saying, “The heart of the relationship between Muslims and non-Muslims is justice, kindness, and charity.”  Bin Laden wrote in response:

As to the relationship between Muslims and infidels, this is summarized by the Most High’s [Allah’s] Word:  “We renounce you.  Enmity and hate shall forever reign between us – till you believe in Allah alone.”  So there is an enmity, evidenced by fierce hostility from the heart.  And this fierce hostility – that is, battle – ceases only if the infidel submits to the authority of Islam, or if his blood is forbidden from being shed, or if Muslims are at that point in time weak and incapable.  But if the hate at any time extinguishes from the heart, this is great apostasy!

Allah Almighty’s Word to his Prophet recounts in summation the true relationship:  “O Prophet! Wage war against the infidels and hypocrites and be ruthless.  Their abode is hell – an evil fate!”  Such, then, is the basis and foundation of the relationship between the infidel and the Muslim.  Battle, animosity, and hatred – directed from the Muslim to the infidel – is the foundation of our religion.  And we consider this a justice and kindness to them.

4.  The following are statements by bin Laden’s advisor and Al Qaeda’s chief fanatic and spokesman Ayman al-Zawahiri:

I say to you that we are in a battle and that more than half of this battle is taking place in the battlefield of the media…

There is no reform except through jihad…

Like its glorious predecessors in New York, Washington, and Madrid, this blessed battle has transferred the battle to the enemies’ land.

5.  The following is by the would-be Times-Square bomber Faisal Shahzad:

You will see that the Muslim world has just started…  Islam is coming to the world, inshallah [Allah willing], Islam will spread on the whole world.  And the democracy will be defeated, and so was Communism defeated, and all the others isms and schisms will be defeated, and the word of Allah will be supreme, inshallah.  And Muslims are gonna do that.

6.  As another example (from hundreds if not thousands that could be chosen), the following is from Saudi cleric Muhammad Al-Arifi, speaking on Egypt’s Al-Rahma TV on 19 July 2010:

Devotion to Jihad for the sake of Allah, and the desire to shed blood, to smash skulls, and to sever limbs for the sake of Allah and in defense of His religion, is, undoubtedly, an honor for the believer [in Islamic balderdash].

7.  And as my final example, the following 2007/07/01 statement is by Hassan Butt, a former Muslim terrorist who was born and raised in Britain and who explains the “justification” used by Muslim terrorists for waging unprovoked war against the entire world, including civilians.

…what drove me and many of my peers to plot acts of extreme terror within Britain, our own homeland, and abroad was a sense that we were fighting for the creation of a revolutionary state that would eventually bring Islamic justice to the world.

How did this continuing violence come to be the means of promoting this (flawed) utopian goal?  How do Islamic radicals justify such terror in the name of their religion?  There isn’t enough room to outline everything here, but the foundation of extremist reasoning rests upon a dualistic model of the world.  Many Muslims may or may not agree with secularism, but at the moment, formal Islamic theology, unlike Christian theology, does not allow for the separation of state and religion.  There is no ‘rendering unto Caesar’ in Islamic theology because state and religion are considered to be one and the same.  The centuries-old reasoning of Islamic jurists also extends to the world stage where the rules of interaction between Dar ul-Islam (the Land of Islam) and Dar ul-Kufr (the Land of Unbelief) have been set down to cover almost every matter of trade, peace and war.

What radicals and extremists do is to take these premisses two steps further.  Their first step has been to reason that since there is no Islamic state in existence, the whole world must be Dar ul-Kufr.  Step two:  since Islam must declare war on unbelief, they have declared war upon the whole world.  Many of my former peers, myself included, were taught by Pakistani and British radical preachers that this reclassification of the globe as a Land of War (Dar ul-Harb) allows any Muslim to destroy the sanctity of the five rights that every human is granted under Islam:  life, wealth, land, mind and belief.  In Dar ul-Harb, anything goes, including the treachery and cowardice of attacking civilians.

In the U.S. and U.K., illustrations of such “treachery” (i.e., subterfuge, or “Stealth Jihad”, or covert activities of Muslim maniacs practicing taqiyya) are documented in the 23 January 2010 blog post by “tencherbone” entitled “Muslim Subversion, Sedition, and Social Sabotage – Islam is the Enemy Within”.  One example of such subterfuge in the U.S., described by a member of the Muslim Brotherhood (namely, Mohamed Akram), is contained in the document entitled “An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Brotherhood in North America”.  [By the way, readers who choose to download the full document should notice that:  1) although the first 15 pages are in Arabic, the remainder of the document provides a translation into English, and 2) the final page of the document lists 29 Islamic organizations in North America that are affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood (from the Muslim Students’ Association, MSA, to the Foundation for International Development, FID)].  Revealing statements in the document include the following:

In order for Islam and its Movement to become “a part of the homeland” in which it lives, “stable” in its land, “rooted” in the spirits and minds of its people, “enabled” in the live [sic] of its society and has firmly-established “organizations” on which the Islamic structure is built and with which the testimony of civilization is achieved, the Movement must plan and struggle to obtain “the keys” and the tools of this process in carry [sic] out this grand mission as a “Civilization Jihadist” responsibility which lies on the shoulders of Muslims and – on top of them – the Muslim Brotherhood in this country.

The process of settlement is a “Civilization-Jihadist Process” with all the word means.  The Ikhwan [brothers] must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and “sabotaging” its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.  Without this level of understanding, we are not up to this challenge and have not prepared ourselves for Jihad yet.  It is a Muslim’s destiny to perform Jihad and work wherever he is and wherever he lands until the final hour comes…

The obvious conclusion, then, is that no one should trust what any Muslim says:  the Koran requires “true” Muslims to continuously try both to advance Islam and, when it’s expedient, to lie while doing so.  The only trustworthy Muslim is therefore an ex-Muslim – and even then, one needs to be cautious, since to advance Islam, Muslims are permitted to claim to be ex-Muslims.  Consequently, the only ex-Muslims that can be trusted are those (such as Al Sina, Ibn Warraq, and Wafa Sultan) who actively and effectively attempt to exterminate Islam – and who, thereby, deserve western freedoms more than the majority of westerners.

In sum, it’s critical for all civilized people to realize that Islam is not a “religion of peace”.  In fact, it’s not just a religion:  similar to Nazism, Islam is a totalitarian ideology that uses the trappings of religion to advance its supremacist political agenda (recall “Gott mit uns” of the Nazis).  Further, it’s not just “Islamophobes” who say that Islam isn’t a religion of peace.  [And actually, the term “Islamophobia” should be rejected, because a ‘phobia’ is an irrational fear.]  For example, the following is the opinion of the “right-hand man of the founder of Pakistan”, “prominent Islamic scholar”, Allama Pervez (1903–85):

Islam is not a ‘religion’ in the ordinary sense of the word.  ‘Religion’ is the English equivalent for the Arabic word Mazhah, which does not occur even once in the whole of the Holy Quran.  The Quran has, instead, used the word Addeen for Islam, which means a particular way of life.

That is, the madman Muhammad declared war on those who didn’t believe his balderdash and who refused to be ruled by Arabs.  Muslims follow Muhammad.  Therefore, it’s time (in fact, it’s way past time) to realize that Islamic Fundamentalists (or “Islamists”) are waging an immoral, incessant war on the civilized world.

To be sure, all Muslims aren’t Islamists.  As in most religions, probably the majority of Muslims don’t study their “holy books” – a large fraction of them can’t even read.  Similar to most of us, the vast majority of Muslims undoubtedly want “just” peace and prosperity.  Yet, according to Gallup poll data published in 2006, such evils are adopted by about 7% of all Muslims (ranging from a high of 26% in Egypt to a low of 1% in Morocco), i.e., by roughly 80 million Muslims worldwide.  That is, roughly 80 million Muslims (!) desire your subjugation or death.  In particular in the U.S., where a few percent of the total population practices Islam, polls show that approximately 300,000 American Muslims support suicide bombing and at least 100,000 American Muslims support Al Qaeda – and “fully 25% refused to answer the question.”

Again, Islamists don’t consider the war they wage against us to be immoral:  as far as they’re concerned, our enslavement is for our own good; only evil kafirs don’t want to be Muslims!  Further, they consider the rules of war as described, for example, in the treaties of the Geneva Conventions to be merely man-made laws, not what they claim to be God’s laws (as given in the Koran), which permit such activities as targeting civilians, using female prisoners as sex slaves, and beheading male prisoners.  They consider flying aircraft loaded with passengers into a civilian skyscraper or detonating a bomb in a hospital ward for infants to be “justified”, because all non-Muslims are kafirs (i.e., worse than vermin).  They do not recognize your right to claim your own existence, unless you acknowledge that you are Allah’s slave.  It’s we (who choose freedom over slavery, who claim our right to our own existences) who declare their war mongering as immoral.

To win the war against Islamists won’t be easy, because it’s both an ideological and an asymmetric war.  Consequences of the asymmetry are familiar:  a single critically placed monkey wrench can ruin the most elaborate machine, it’s always easier to destroy than create, fear is easier to generate than security, and nihilists will always have an advantage so long as anything is cherished.  One complication of the ideological battle is that it’s much easier for the Islamists to spread their message in the free world (where freedom and methods to communicate are available) than it is for us to spread enlightenment in their closed and technologically backward nations.  An additional major complication is that a huge number of Muslim barbarians are already within our gates.

Consequently, to win the war against such uncivilized, barbaric, supremacists, the following five steps seem essential.

1.  All citizens in the free world should become informed about the Muslim menace and then communicate their concerns to their elected representatives, too many of whom are either ignorant of the threat or are being paid by oil-rich Arabs to ignore the threat.  A likely alternative to informed decisions, now, will be bloodbaths on our streets in years to come – because, in the end, the majority of Americans (for example) won’t surrender their freedoms.

2.  Following the lead of Geert Wilders, our elected representatives should remove from its pedestal what all Muslims worship most:  not Allah, not the memory of Muhammad, but the Koran, itself.  If Muslims could be honest with themselves, they’d recognize that they worship the Koran not because it’s “Allah’s holy book”, but because of vacuous promises from clerical con artists of supremacy in this life and paradise in a fictitious life-after-death.  But whereas brainwashed Muslims are mentally unable to be honest with themselves, and whereas the Koran promotes not only nonsense but also evil, then all governments in the free world should diminish the Islamists’ communication advantages by taking appropriate measures toward classifying the Koran as “hate literature” – and then each country should proceed according to its own laws governing such hideous literature, e.g., to ban it from general circulation within their countries (just as most Islamic countries ban free-world literature).

3.  All fundamentalist Islamic clerics and all those affiliated with such organizations as the Muslim Brotherhood should be banned from the free world.  To permit them to remain among us is as foolish as it would have been to invite Nazis or Communists to promote their ideologies within our countries.

4.  All Muslim immigration to the civilized world should be terminated, save for those ex-Muslims seeking political asylum as a result of their concerted efforts to undermine the Islamists.

5.  All Islamists residing in the civilized world (i.e., those who consider Muhammad to be “the perfect man”, those who consider Islam to be “an all-encompassing way of life”, and those who support the violent replacement of their host country’s laws with Islamic laws, i.e., sharia) – should be charged with treason and, if found guilty, either incarcerated or relocated to Islamic nations.  As Serge Trifkovic recently wrote:

I submit to you that all Western countries need laws that will treat any naturalized citizen’s or legally resident alien’s known adherence to an Islamist world outlook as excludable – on political, rather than “religious” grounds.  It is politically feasible to articulate the demand that citizenship of a democratic Western country should be denied to all Islamic activists.

Amazingly, even some Muslims agree – and would go even further.  For example, the following was written by Khudayr Taher, an Iraqi Shi’ite writer living in the U.S.

Countries have the right to defend themselves and assure their citizens’ safety from terrorism.  Likewise, it is clear that the [major] source of the terrorist crimes in Europe and America is the Muslims who live in these countries.

The security services cannot know people’s intentions and sort out who is the noble immigrant and who is a terrorist criminal.  [But] wherever there are Muslims, their presence has produced crimes of terrorism and murder.

Among those Muslims in Europe and America who do not practice terrorism, most of them do not have loyalty and sincere attachment to these countries that have offered them all of the means of life in dignity – housing, studies, work, and citizenship…

The legitimate question is this:  Since the security services cannot sort out the good immigrant from the bad terrorist… why don’t these countries deport all Muslims, of all races, from Europe and America, and [thus] find rest from the danger of terrorism, and protect their peoples?

I, as an Arab Muslim immigrant, sincerely call on the countries of Europe and America to deport all Muslims from their territories – including myself, despite my love and my sincere attachment to the U.S…

I, on the other hand, wouldn’t want to go that far.  Rather, I’d say to Khudayr Taher:  “Welcome to freedom; consider yourself at home!”

As for military actions in the war against Islamists, such activities should be targeted and minimized:  maybe deploy some “special forces” on the ground, but in general, optimize use of drones, bombers, and missiles to destroy terrorist training-camps and any facilities developing advanced weapons.  And as for “winning the hearts and minds” of the people, although we should blanket them in their own languages with messages of freedom conceived since the time of the Enlightenment, no money or effort should be expended on “nation building”.  In general, best will be to leave it to Muslims to break free from their clerical chains by themselves.

In my view, therefore, the key to winning the war against the Islamists is the same as the key used to win the war against Communists:  confinement.  If the Islamists have no victims to plunder, if we confine them to live in Muhammad’s sewer, then eventually, Muslims will get sick of Islam’s errors and evils.  In his excellent presentation “Islam: What Is To Be Done?” Hugh Fitzgerald (who is much more knowledgeable than I about both history and Islam) suggests similar and emphasizes that the first important step is for citizens of the free world to inform themselves about Islam:

Which now brings me to what, instead of those wasteful wars, and that sentimental messianism, of Iraq, and to a lesser extent Afghanistan, should be done – not to bring “victory” in the war of self-defense against the Jihad now visited, in every sense, upon us, because no “victory” is possible – but, rather, to “redimension” (cut down to size) the problem, to make it less dangerous, to bring down the level of risk.  How is this to be done?

In the first place, through self-education and through dissemination of what you have learned about Islam to others.  They don’t have to know everything about Islam, but they have to know something.  And bookish knowledge should be supplemented by an understanding of Muslim behavior, and how it reflects what Islam inculcates.  You don’t have to know a specialized vocabulary, though such words as Jihad and dhimmi and taqiyya are useful to understand, to define for others, and to employ…

And then what?  Then one would see that the war of self-defense against Islam is primarily an ideological war, and we have to be sure of ourselves, sure that whatever our own great faults, or the faults of our societies, they are as nothing compared to the death-in-life that Islam presents.  We need to grasp what Islam teaches, and what the consequences are of growing up in societies suffused with Islam, and what happens to individual liberties, to the enterprise of science, to the practice of art, when one is raised up in a society where everything militates against free and skeptical inquiry…

If Americans, for example, would educate themselves about Islam, then in contrast to the recent debacle, surely they’d stand up for their rights, refusing to submit to Muslim blackmail (i.e., refuse to behave as dhimmis).  In this debacle, no less than the American President, Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, and Commanding General in Afghanistan (as well as a bunch of clerical con artists) put enormous, direct pressure on a flamboyant, otherwise-ignorable, probably schizophrenic pastor in Gainesville, Florida, not to burn his copy of the Koran today, the 9th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, saying that the pastor’s exercise of freedom of speech would “put our troops at risk.”

Where was the uproar?  For what, pray tell, do those well-paid government servants think that our brave troops willingly risk their lives – if not to protect American freedoms?  (That a host of clerics followed suit is understandable, since I expect that they’re all beginning to feel that their con games are collapsing.)  I hope that, in contrast to such a debacle and by the time of the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Americans would reject such dhimmintude.

Thus, whereas the most certain knowledge that humans have been able to gain (even more certain than the knowledge that we exist) is that there are no gods (and never were any), therefore, no book is “holy”:  they’re all just tools-of-the-trade of clerical con artists.  If a book belongs to you and if you’re so inclined, then burn it – or if you're worried about resulting air pollution, then bury it.  It's biodegradable.  In time, all “holy books” will rot away.

On the other hand, though, in the case of a “keeper”, if you’re inclined to burn, bury, or otherwise destroy your copies of the two volumes of Morse and Feshbach’s Methods of Theoretical Physics, then since I gave my copies to one of my sons, perhaps you’d first contact me.  Maybe we could make a deal.

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