Marked for Death: Islam's War Against the West and Me (15 page)

While Islam still burns with indignation over the Crusaders’ attacks, the
Umma
champions those who have slaughtered non-Muslims, claiming the atrocities demonstrate their devotion to the work of Allah. Mahmud (971-1030), Sultan of Ghazni, in present-day Afghanistan, had 50,000 Hindus slain near the Hindu temple of Somnath, which he destroyed. Muslims in Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan still celebrate Mahmud as a paragon of virtue and piety. His scribes relate how the Sultan went “on holy expedition.” They described how “the Sultan zealous for the Muhammadan religion... stretched out... the hand of slaughter, imprisonment, pillage, depopulation, and fire.... Thus did the infidels meet with the punishment and loss due to their deserts. The standards of the Sultan then returned happy and victorious to Ghazni, the face of Islam was made resplendent by his exertions, the teeth of the true faith displayed themselves in their laughter, the breasts of religion expanded, and the back of idolatry was broken.”
⁵⁰

Similarly, Alauddin Khilji (d. 1316), the Sultan of Delhi, beheaded infidels because, the Muslim chroniclers wrote, in him “the vein of the zeal of religion beat high for the subjection of infidelity.” He fought “with a view of holy war, and not in the lust of conquest.” He “kill[ed] and slaughter[ed] on the right and on the left unmercifully, throughout the impure land, for the sake of Islam.”
⁵¹

The Muslim traveler Ibn Battuta (1304-68) described how Sultan Ghiyasuddin of Madurai waged a horrific jihad in 1345. “In the morning, the Hindus who had been made prisoners the day before, were divided into four groups, and each of these was led to one of the four gates of the main enclosure. There they were impaled on the posts they had themselves carried. Afterwards their wives were butchered and tied to the stakes by their hair. The children were massacred on the bosoms of their mothers.”
⁵²

Another great jihadist was Turko-Mongol conqueror Timur (1336-1405). He was an educated man who kept a diary relating how, following Muhammad’s example, he led
razzias
against the infidels. “About this time there arose in my heart a desire to lead an expedition against the infidels, and to become a ghazi; for it had reached my ears that the slayer of infidels is a ghazi, and if he is slain he becomes a martyr,” he wrote.
⁵³
With great ferocity, Timur invaded Hindustan, aiming to slaughter everyone who refused to convert to Islam. He relates that he once had 10,000 prisoners decapitated in a single hour—“the sword of Islam was washed in the blood of the infidels”—and that on another occasion he had 100,000 prisoners killed in one day. The Bahmani Sultanate, a fifteenth-century kingdom in southern India that habitually massacred 100,000 Hindus each year, was small fry compared to Timur, whose descendants founded the Mughal Empire.

While Islam committed innumerable massacres as it swept through Asia and the Middle East, it should be noted that the Crusaders committed their own excesses in Palestine. But the difference is that Christians did not find sanction for their atrocities in Christian scripture; neither the Bible nor the example of Christ’s life command Christians to kill unbelievers. The Koran and the example of Muhammad’s life, however, do.

“Unlike Christianity, which preached a peace that it never achieved, Islam unashamedly came with a sword,” British historian Steven Runciman wrote in his work
A History of the Crusades.
⁵⁴
Although Islam today ceaselessly professes its peacefulness to the West—and, ironically, threatens to kill those like me who say otherwise—it was not always so concerned with its image. For example, medieval Muslim historian and jurist Ibn Khaldun (1332—1406) wrote clearly about the unique aggression of Islam. “The holy war is a religious duty, because of the universalism of the [Islamic] mission and [the obligation to] convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force,” he argued. “Therefore, caliphate and royal authority are united, so that the person in charge can devote the available strength to [religion and politics] at the same time. The other religious groups [do] not have a universal mission, and the holy war [is] not a religious duty for them, save only for purposes of defense.”
⁵⁵

The Jews of Palestine realized this uniqueness, too. Isaac ben Samuel of Acre (1270-1350), who lived under both Christian and Muslim rule, wrote in reference to a Talmudic verse, “Our rabbis of blessed memory have said, ‘Rather beneath the yoke of Edom [Christendom] than that of Ishmael [Islam].’ They plead for mercy before the Holy One, Blessed be He, saying, ‘Master of the World, either let us live beneath Thy shadow or else beneath that of the children of Edom.’”
⁵⁶

Writing in 1630 about the Islamic Mughal Empire, Pieter van den Broecke, Director General of the
Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie
(the Dutch United East India Company), voiced doubts whether an empire “won by so many crimes and the slaughter of so many innocent victims” could prosper.
⁵⁷
Van den Broecke was perceptive; an Islamic society lives off the wealth created by others; its lords, or
pashas,
cannot live as parasites forever. By killing off the host society, they doom themselves—without
bida
(innovation), which Islam resolutely rejects, every society will fall sooner or later.

Van den Broecke’s son Paulus became a nutmeg plantation owner on the Banda Islands in present-day Indonesia. The van den Broecke family continued to live on Banda for fourteen generations, until April 19, 1999, when jihadists armed with machetes cut the throats of five members of the family and burnt down their house.
⁵⁸
The incident marked a bloody end to the van den Broeckes’ 375-year presence on the islands.

There is no escape from the yoke of Ishmael. Two and a half years after the van den Broeckes discovered that fact on Banda, the United States too realized it on a sunny day in Manhattan.

CHAPTER SIX

Tears of Babylon

Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves.

—Abraham Lincoln

I
n 1957, two years after Egypt’s government revoked her citizenship for the crime of being Jewish, a young woman and her parents fled Cairo for Britain, arriving as stateless refugees. Later gaining British citizenship through marriage, the woman studied history and adopted the pseudonym Bat Ye’or—“Daughter of the Nile”—under which she became the world’s foremost expert on the history of non-Muslims living under Islamic rule.

It was her life experience that compelled her to write about this topic. According to Bat Ye’or, “I had witnessed the destruction, in a few short years, of a vibrant Jewish community living in Egypt for over 2,600 years.... I saw the disintegration and flight of families, dispossessed and humiliated, the destruction of their synagogues, the bombing of the Jewish quarters and the terrorizing of a peaceful population. I have personally experienced the hardships of exile, the misery of statelessness—and I wanted to get to the root cause of all this.”
¹

In one of her books, Bat Ye’or describes the events surrounding the deaths of the five van den Broeke family members on Banda in 1999. At the turn of the century, jihadist warriors declared holy war on the majority Christian population of the Indonesian Moluccas (Maluku) Islands, to which the Banda Archipelago belongs. During 1999 and 2000, jihadists from Indonesia, the Philippines, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia attacked Christian villages, one after another, in a coordinated campaign.

Thousands were killed as the jihadists committed countless acts of savagery. Kids were tied together and dragged to their deaths behind speeding cars. Women and children were abducted. Masses of people were forced to convert to Islam. Both men and women were forcibly circumcised without painkillers or antiseptics. Those who resisted were beheaded. Half a million people fled as 40 percent of the Maluku capital, Ambon City, was reduced to ashes.
²

The fate of Ambon City does not stand out in history—it is simply one of countless Islamic massacres going back to the time of Muhammad himself. It was his “revelations” and his example that laid the basis for Islam’s eternal persecution of non-Muslims.

Barely eighty years after Muhammad’s death, Muslim armies had subdued Persia, the Middle East, north Africa, Spain, and Portugal, bringing large numbers of Jews, Christians, and pagans under the authority of the rapidly expanding Caliphate. For the unbelievers, the Islamic conquest meant, first and foremost, their disenfranchisement, since citizenship in the Caliphate is reserved strictly for Muslims. In many places, immigrant Arab conquerors came to rule over indigenous majorities who no longer had any rights at all in their native lands. As Allah ordered, Muslims must be “ruthless to the unbelievers but merciful to one another.”
³

In no less than thirty-two passages, the Koran states that unbelievers are Allah’s enemies or “shall become the fuel of hell;” in twenty-three passages the Islamic holy book advocates war against the infidels; and in ten places it forbids Muslims from befriending non-Muslims.
⁴
Islam offers most
kafirs
a simple choice: convert to Islam or die. For Jews and Christians—the so-called “people of the book”—there is a third option: they are allowed to accept the humiliating status of dhimmitude.

The word dhimmitude is derived from the Arabic word
dhimma,
related to the word for servitude. The dhimma is a “protection pact” in which Muslims agree to protect the lives and properties of Jews and Christians, known as “dhimmis,” in return for the dhimmis’ payment of the poll tax, the
jizya.
⁵

When Umar, the second Caliph, sent his troops to Mesopotamia in 636, he ordered them, “Summon the people to [Allah]; those who respond to your call, accept it from them, but those who refuse must pay the poll tax out of humiliation and lowliness. If they refuse this, it is the sword without leniency.”
⁶
Umar acted in accordance with the Koranic verse, “Fight against such of those to whom the Scriptures were given... and do not embrace the true faith, until they pay tribute out of hand and are utterly subdued.”
⁷

As Umar indicated, the status of dhimma and the payment of the
jizya
were meant to degrade non-Muslims. Many unbelievers accepted these conditions because, at least in theory, subservient dhimmis were guaranteed a few fundamental protections, such as the right not to be slaughtered. However, Islam allows Muslims to revoke the dhimma pact at any moment. In his
History of the Jews,
Paul Johnson explains that many Jews from Islamic Spain and the Near East fled north into Christian territory because under Islam their right to practice their religion, and even their right to live, might be arbitrarily withdrawn at any time.
⁸

Dhimmitude served an essential function in the Caliphate related to Islam’s wariness of
bida
(innovation). Innovation, of course, is vital to technological progress, economic growth, and wealth creation. Because Islam generally condemns
bida
as something that risks diverting Muslims from the example of Muhammad, Islamic societies had problems creating their own wealth. But they needed to find
some
source of income, so they extorted
jizya
payments from non-Muslims. These taxes, in fact, were the Caliphate’s most important source of income from its inception. Islamic rulers extracted them from non-Muslims with great ferocity and relentlessness, with punishments including torture and making relatives responsible for defaulters.

Although the Caliphate needed the dhimmis’ special taxes, it treated non-Muslims so badly that masses of them either fled or converted to Islam in order to join the privileged, wealth-consuming class.
⁹
“The men scattered, they became wanderers everywhere,” an eighth-century monk wrote about the fate of the dhimmis in Islamic Mesopotamia. “The fields were laid waste, the countryside pillaged; the people went from one land to another.”
¹⁰
Under Islamic rule, the non-Muslim population also declined because, according to Islamic law, when a Muslim man marries a non-Muslim woman (the opposite is forbidden), the children have to be raised as Muslims.
¹¹
Thus, dhimmitude—the status of permanent humiliation, degradation, and insecurity—led to the asphyxiation of Christian and Jewish life in the Islamic world, consigning Islamic society to poverty and backwardness, forcing it to constantly conquer new lands in order to capture more economically productive dhimmis.

Reliant on forced
jizya
payments from ever dwindling numbers of dhimmis, Islamic rule was parasitic and economically disastrous. Professor Bernard Lewis found that it even led to the near disappearance of the wheel in the pre-modern Middle East. As Lewis explains, “A cart is large and, for a peasant, relatively costly. It is difficult to conceal and easy for requisition. At a time and place where neither law nor custom restricted the powers of even local authorities, visible and mobile assets were a poor investment.”
¹²
Indeed, the fear of predatory Islamic authority impoverished much of the Middle East, north Africa, Anatolia, and Persia.

“The Muslims are not the sons but the fathers of the desert,” Jean-Claude Barreau, head of the French government bureau for international migration, wrote in his 1991 book
De l’Islam en général et du monde moderne en particulier
(On Islam in General and the Modern World in Particular).
¹³
Calling the spread of Islam “one of the great catastrophes in history,” Barreau observed that wherever populations become Islamic, agriculture collapses and the economy and science stagnate. In a textbook example of punishing the messenger, the French government fired Barreau for writing his book. Like Barreau, those who oversee the West’s immigration policies know the truth but are not allowed to speak it.

Dhimmis who chose not to flee Islamic rule faced a wide range of incentives to convert to Islam. Some converted to end their own persecution and to eliminate the risk of themselves or their families being randomly enslaved or killed. Ambitious dhimmis also converted to gain access to the many trades and professions that were off-limits to non-Muslims. Furthermore, conversions occurred due to Islam’s prohibition on dhimmis testifying against Muslims; in Islam, non-Muslims always lose their court case to Muslims unless the unbelievers themselves become Muslims.
¹⁴

Of course, dhimmis also converted to escape the crushing tax burden imposed on non-Muslims. Officially, the
jizya
no longer exists in Islamic countries, though Islamic extremists sometimes extort money from non-Muslims and defend the crime as a form of
jizya.
¹⁵
But other traditional restrictions on dhimmis persist today, including the Islamic prohibition against the proselytizing of Christianity or Judaism to Muslims. In Morocco, Christians are free to practice their religion, but converting Muslims to another religion is punishable by up to three years in prison.
¹⁶
This is not some arcane legal technicality, but an actively enforced law. In March 2010, sixteen Dutch and American citizens who ran an orphanage in Morocco were deported for allowing children to read from a children’s Bible. These were “stories of Noah and the Ark and Jonas and the whale. Stories that appear in the Koran as well,” said Herman Boonstra, one of the expelled Dutchmen, who added that the children “got Koran lessons all the same.” Nevertheless, the Moroccan government announced that it would “continue to take stern action against everyone belittling religious values.”
¹⁷
In light of these events, the dhimmified Catholic and Evangelical churches of Morocco issued a joint statement denouncing the “deplorable” activities of the deported Christians.
¹⁸

Islam is always finding new, creative ways to humiliate non-Muslims, providing yet another incentive for dhimmis to convert. The Caliphate’s dhimmis had to allow Muslims into their house whenever Muslims demanded. They were not allowed to carry arms or ride horses or mules. They had to wear identifying badges (though they were banned from wearing their own religious symbols) and refrain from dressing like a Muslim.
¹⁹
A dhimmi was also forbidden from employing Muslim servants. In 1880 in Entifa, Morocco, draconian punishment was meted out to an elderly Jewish man who hired a poor Muslim woman to work for him and his wife: he was nailed to the ground and beaten to death, his property was confiscated, and the Jewish community had to pay a ransom to retrieve his corpse for burial.
²⁰

Jews indeed met a grim fate under Islamic rule, despite the popular myth today that the Caliphate was a beacon of religious tolerance. A Jewish document of 1121 describes how a Jew in Baghdad had to wear “two yellow badges... a piece of lead weighing [3 grammes] with the word
dhimmi
on it [and] a belt around his waist. The women have to wear one red and one black shoe and have a small bell on their necks or shoes.... The vizier appointed brutal Muslim men to supervise the [Jews] and hurt them with curses and humiliations.... The Moslems were mocking the Jews and the mob and youths were beating them up in all the streets of Baghdad.”
²¹

Seven hundred years later, not much had changed. William Shaler, the American consul general in Algiers from 1816 to 1828, wrote that the Jews of Algiers, who constituted a quarter of the city’s population, were “a most oppressed people; they are not permitted to resist any personal violence of whatever nature, from a Mussulman; they are compelled to wear clothing of a black or dark colour.... They are pelted in the streets even by children.... They learn submission from infancy, and practice it throughout their lives.... It appears to me that the Jews at this day in Algiers constitute one of the least fortunate remnants of Israel existing.”
²²

In 1854, Karl Marx wrote in the
New York Daily Tribune
about the plight of the Jews in Jerusalem. The city’s population numbered 15,500 souls, he wrote, comprising 3,500 Christians, 4,000 Muslims, and 8,000 Jews. “Nothing equals the misery and the sufferings of the Jews at Jerusalem,” Marx said. “[They are] the constant objects of Mussulman oppression and intolerance... living only on the scanty alms transmitted by their European brethren.”
²³
Islam subjected Christians to similar humiliation. In 1909, the British vice consul in Mosul, Iraq, noted that “almost any Christian submissively makes way even for a Moslem child.”
²⁴