The worship of Mohammed’s followers throughout their history has rarely constituted a religion of peace, contrary to repeated statements by leaders in the West – above all President Barack Hussein Obama. These have been made in their pursuit of trying to defuse the current crisis, but nevertheless are now a part of the problem.
One might stretch to argue that Moses, founder of Judaism, had a “battlefield commission”. But neither Jesus, Gautama nor Confucius, leaders or founders of the several other great world religions, advocated violence. Nor were they soldiers, as was Mohammed, the messenger who carried the word of Allah to his flock.
Furthermore, virtually all Muslims accept that in his last decade of what may be a largely legendary life, he pursued that career with ferocity in the destruction of his Arabian peninsular enemies, most notably the contemporary Jewish tribes who refused to accept his new religion. The history of Islam is inseparable from its attempt to conquer alien societies and turn them forcibly to its belief. That code demands—unlike the other great religions today—unquestioned obedience to a legal as well as a moral code of contradictory but supposedly God-given dictums from the Koran and the accumulation of practices in the Hadith, pronouncements and activities surrounding Mohammed the man.
Again today, as repeatedly in the past 1500 years, the West is fighting off a campaign of Muslim fanatics to overtake and replace its Judeo-Hellenist-Christian civilization. Rather than massive armies at the Tour battlefield in the eighth-century or at the gates of Vienna in the 16th and a hundred years later, this time the attacks are continual thrusts at the ineludiblely vulnerable “soft targets” of modern open societies.
As incomprehensible as it is to Westerners and non-Muslim societies of the East, these fanatics are willing to die so long as they can bring pain and disaster on their targets. It is, as some Muslim fanatics have proclaimed proudly, that the rest of the world loves life and these psychotics worship death.
When the leaders of the whole world—not excluding both Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s Mahmoud Abbas—came together in Paris for a demonstration of unity of purpose against this new threat to humanity, there was a missing figure. It was no accident, as the Communists would say, that Obama was not there among the leaders of most of the civilized world.
In a tortured and benighted view of the world’s issues, Obama apparently believes that outreach to the Muslim fanatics through Islamic state leaders—including the mother hen of all the contemporary terrorists, the insidious Muslim Brotherhood—will appease the tiger. His closest advisers make desperate attempts to convince the rest of the world that the great mass of Muslims are innocents. True enough, but that they will be the “good” Germans with the Nazis or a dozen other historical instances, and will bring down the militants is highly questionable.
Obama rides this tiger not only in great peril to the country he leads and to the world in general, but at the risk of his own role in history. Calling a blatant attack at Ft. Hood by a twisted mind—a psychiatrist indeed!—“workplace violence” not only distorts the real meaning of the incident making it impossible to deal with it, but this refusal to name the crime makes it difficult to meet out the modest reparations to the survivors.
In the same vein, by not identifying the current worldwide campaign of terrorism—now into its second decade—as an outgrowth of Islam itself, he and his advisers make it impossible to understand it and mobilize to defeat it.
At the United Nations, instead of a straightforward attack on the origins of this violence to all civilized society, Obama was busy warning against any attack on the sanctity of Mohammed’s name. (A documentary producer who had the audacity if however clumsily to challenge the relationship of Islam to the wave of terrorism is still serving a prison sentence, part of the design to obscure the martyrdom of four Americans at the hands of terrorists at Benghazi.) Nothing plays more into the lying of Muslim fanatics in dealing with their fellow citizens; they can carefully cite elements of their dogma which sanction deceit in their professions of innocence with nonbelievers.
Any attempt to take on the long-awaited need to bring the religion of Mohammed to a test of modernity and contemporary morality is denounced. Earlier attempts were abandoned after a bitter debate in Andalusia, Spain, in the late 12th century when Ibn Rushid [Averroes], ironically sometimes called “the father of modern Western secularism”, was defeated in his efforts to find a synthesis of Hellenic, Judeo-Christian and Islamic values. Ironically Averroes contributed mightily to Western religious and philosophical thought. But his Islam retreated into the thousand-year bowels of a totalitarian conformity that imprisons it to this day. Those who call for a constructive new debate are quickly denounced as “Islamophobes”—even when they come from acknowledged scholars such as the eminent modern philosopher, Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger.
It remains to be seen if Muslim leaders will rise to join Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who recently pleaded with Islamic clerics to examine their game. He argued Muslim “thinking” had stymied, that concepts “we have sacralized over the years” are “antagonizing the entire world”. In practical terms of a hard-bitten military leader of the largest and most important Arab nation, he argued that it is not “possible that 1.6 billion people [a reference to the world’s Muslims] should want to kill the rest of the world’s inhabitants—that is 7 billion—so that they themselves may live”. He warned that Egypt (or the Islamic world in its entirety) “is being torn, it is being destroyed, it is being lost—and it is being lost by our own hands.”
Again, it is no accident that the Obama Administration’s relations with the al-Sisi regime hang by a thread while it has continued to court the likes of Turkey’s increasingly Islamist President Recep Tayyip Erdogan (and with a lesser and lesser degree of success). It also continues to bemoan the fall of al Sisi’s predecessors, the discredited Muslim Brotherhood. (Alas! That is also true of Hillary Clinton with her own close connections to the Brotherhood leadership through her principal aid, Huma Mahmood Abedin.)
Recognizing Islam’s relationship to the Muslim terrorists is critical if the U.S. and the world is to defeat this aberration before it destroys Western civilization through its steady depredations, always forcing restraints on our liberties in order to defend ourselves.
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* A version of this column will be posted Monday, January 12, 2015, on the website http://yeoldecrabb.com/