Marked for Death: Islam's War Against the West and Me (18 page)

Islamic apologists refer to Koranic verses that instruct Muslims to treat their slaves well, such as sura 24:34, which tells Muslims not to force their female slaves into prostitution. However, while a Muslim is not permitted to earn money by letting other men have sex with his slave, the Koran allows
him
to have sex with her as much as he likes (suras 23:5—6, 33:50, 70:29-30).

The Koran also teaches that Allah will reward those who free a slave.
⁷⁴
On the website Answering Islam, Silas, a former Muslim, sardonically describes how this injunction is often observed: “As the slaves get too old to perform service or sexually satisfy their masters, their masters ‘manumit’ [free] the slaves. Now, aged, worn out, they are put out on the streets to fend for themselves. Their former owner has committed a great, righteous act in freeing a slave! He gets rid of the burdensome slave, and gets a bonus in heaven. What a religion!”
⁷⁵

Although the West was responsible for ending the slave trade in much of the world, Western nations bow to endless demands to apologize for their prior participation in slavery, and for the racism and “Islamophobia” that allegedly plague our societies. The Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) and its “Islamophobia Observatory” are especially critical of the West; as detailed in chapter seven, their current goal is to criminalize any criticism or satire of Islam worldwide. The Islamic world hurls these accusations and makes these demands even as slavery is found, to this very day, within its own borders, and as the most virulent racism still permeates much of the Arab world.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Survival

Our goal is not the victory of might, but the vindication of right.

—John F. Kennedy

A
fter the fall of Mecca in January 630 AD, Islam took over a third of the known world in less than two centuries. Sealing Europe off from the south and southeast, Islam became an impregnable rock, its adherents confident of their cultural superiority and military invincibility. The Crusaders’ re-conquest of Jerusalem in 1099, however, caused
fitna
(confusion), and had a lasting impact on the collective memory of the
Umma,
the worldwide Islamic community.

Nevertheless, the Crusaders’ victory proved short-lived, as Saladin recaptured Jerusalem for Islam in 1187. This brought a new impetus to Islamic expansion, culminating in the fall of Constantinople in 1453—a cataclysmic event for Christianity. Three years later, a 70-year-old Roman Catholic monk, the Italian John of Capistrano, helped stop the invading Ottomans at Belgrade. But the Christians could not resist the rising tide of Islam for long; in 1521, Belgrade fell to the Ottomans, and Serbia and Hungary were overrun.

Islam encountered a new setback in 1571, when Don Juan of Austria, commander of a united navy comprising Spain, Venice, Genoa, and the Knights of Malta, defeated the Ottoman fleet at Lepanto, off the coast of Greece. The victory at Lepanto was an omen, for the Muslims were defeated there by the West’s superior naval and military technology.

The tide turned definitively against Islam at the gates of Vienna on September 11, 1683, when Polish King John III Sobieski—with only 84,000 men (Austrians, Germans, Poles, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, and Italians) and 152 cannon—defeated a vastly larger Ottoman army of 300,000 troops, 20,000 Janissaries, and 300 heavy cannon. In a sense, the fateful date of 9/11, 1683 marked the end of the 1,000-year reign of Islam. A thousand years of darkness seemed to draw to a close. The lack of innovation—the
bida
that Islam dreaded—and the near-disappearance of the wealth-creating dhimmi population that sustained the
Umma
had exhausted and depleted Islam.

The following 250 years were catastrophic for the
Umma.
The entire Islamic world except for contemporary Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, and Saudi Arabia fell to the infidels. A tiny part of the
Umma
even briefly came under American rule. From 1899 until 1913, the U.S. Army fought the Moro Rebellion on the Philippine island of Mindanao, where Muslims (or
Moros
) form a third of the population. When the
Moros
resorted to suicide attacks, the Americans did not profess their immense respect for Islam or marvel about Islam’s contributions to world civilization. No, they adopted a different approach—they wrapped dead jihadists in pig skin and stuffed their mouths with pork. Since pigs are anathema in Islam, the
Moros
were convinced that this “unspeakable defilement” would prevent the Islamic “martyrs” from entering paradise.
¹

The outlook was bleak for Islam as its lands fell to Russia, Britain, France, Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands. Given that the Koran insists Islam is the “best nation” and that Allah has vowed to protect it, in the Islamic view, this was not supposed to happen. And yet, it did. When all seemed lost, however, Allah saved Islam, orchestrating what in Islamic eyes must look like two miraculous events: the outbreak of the French Revolution and the West’s development of an unquenchable thirst for oil.

The French Revolution was a huge jolt, setting in motion events that ultimately raised the
Umma
out of its lethargy. French revolutionary troops, led by General Napoleon Bonaparte, invaded Egypt in 1798 for the greater glory of the French state and its geopolitical goal of building a canal as a gateway to India. The arrival of the French revolutionaries revamped Islam at a crucial moment when its resources were diminishing due to its lack of innovation, the decline of its dhimmi population, and dwindling influxes of new slaves.

Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt was the first major European penetration into the heart of Islamic territory since the Crusades seven centuries earlier. Upon his arrival in Alexandria on July 1, 1789, Napoleon issued a proclamation. “People of Egypt, they tell you that I have come to destroy your religion; do not believe them,” he declared. “I respect God, his Prophet and the Koran.” He added, referring to the French army, that “the French, too, are true Muslims. Proof of this is that they went to Rome and overturned the government of the Pope, who always pressed Christians to wage war against Muslims. Next they went to Malta and destroyed the Knights who claimed that God ordered them to go to war against Muslims.”
²

Napoleon’s words impressed less than his deeds. The French general crushed the Egyptian army, exposing the weakness of Islamic rule. This came as a blow to young Muslims, who became convinced of the need for political revolution along with military and administrative modernization.

Insisting that individuals completely submit to the state, the French revolutionaries were alluring to Islam, echoing Islamic commandments that the individual must be subordinated, if necessary by force, to an all-powerful Islamic state. In a sense, Islam encountered a “kindred soul” in Western totalitarian revolutionary thinking. Some argue this thinking became a model for Islamic modernists, but in fact these ideas merely encouraged Islam to return to its own totalitarian roots.

Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt also influenced Islam in another way. This humiliating military defeat, followed by 150 more years of continual Western colonization of the Islamic world, forced Islamic ideologues to realize they had to master the instruments of their own defeat; they—so to speak—had to use Satan to cast out Satan. Ending its thousand-year ostracism of the West, Islam from the nineteenth century onward began parroting Western revolutionary jargon, adopting Western technological and scientific innovations, and embracing the belated industrial revolution that Western colonial administration was bringing to the Islamic world—all with the goal of advancing jihad and world domination.

Paradoxically, Islam’s reliance on Western innovations further heightened the
Umma’s
anti-Western envy and resentment, turning the ideology even more belligerent. “Islam is not merely a religious creed [but] a revolutionary ideology,” Pakistani Salafist leader Syed Abul Ala Maududi declared, “and jihad refers to that revolutionary struggle... to destroy all states and governments anywhere on the face of the earth, which are opposed to the ideology and program of Islam.”
³
Demonstrating the strange hypocrisy that marks Islam’s view of the West, Maududi traveled to the United States for medical care. He died in 1979 in a hospital in Buffalo, New York, where his son worked as a doctor.

Islam’s strategy of using Western innovations against the West itself achieved major success thanks to Ayatollah Khomeini, a reactionary madman with the backward mindset of a seventh-century desert dweller. Replacing the Shah of Iran with a clerical dictatorship, Khomeini’s revolution was enabled by Western stencil duplicators, telephone lines, transistor radios, and tape recorders that conveyed his sermons to the Iranian masses. Based in a Paris suburb, Khomeini used Western technology to direct an anti-Western revolution 2,600 miles away.

In short, in the last two centuries, Islam realized it needed to find a new target for exploitation due to its diminishing supplies of dhimmis and slaves. The new target became the
harbi
—people from the
Dar al-Harb,
the non-Islamic world. Islam now acts as a parasite of the
harbis,
avidly sucking a continuous flow of alien but necessary goods and services that Islam cannot create for itself. This includes what is currently the biggest source of income for many Islamic nations—oil—a resource that Western nations have discovered and developed, but whose riches mostly flow to Islamic countries simply due to accidents of geography. This process has strengthened and reinvigorated the
Umma
to the point that Islam, thanks to Western technology, now presents a more dire threat to the West than ever before.

Islam still cultivates all its traditional hatreds, including the vilest anti-Semitism, but it is increasingly willing to emulate its enemies in order to defeat and eradicate them. Consider this declaration by Mahathir Mohamad, the reportedly pro-Western former prime minister of Malaysia, from the Tenth Summit of the Organization of the Islamic Conference in 2003:

The Muslims will forever be oppressed and dominated by the Europeans and the Jews.... It cannot be that there is no other way. 1.3 billion Muslims cannot be defeated by a few million Jews.... The Europeans killed six million Jews out of 12 million. But today the Jews rule this world by proxy.... We are up against a people who think. They survived 2000 years of pogroms not by hitting back, but by thinking. They invited and successfully promoted Socialism, Communism, human rights and democracy so that persecuting them would appear to be wrong, so that they may enjoy equal rights with others. With these they have now gained control of the most powerful countries and they, this tiny community, have become a world power. We cannot fight them through brawn alone. We must use our brains also.
⁴

The Wahhabi aristocrats of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf emirates have become experts at deceiving the West. The worldview of these men, like that of Khomeini, is stuck in the seventh century, yet when necessary they talk Western, act Western, dress Western, and worm their way into Western society. The proceeds from oil—Allah’s miraculous gift to the Arabs—allow them to acquire all the necessities the Western
harbis
can offer.

Islam was sustained for more than a millennium by non-Muslim dhimmis and slaves. And when Islam seemed doomed in recent times, it was saved by the technology and industry of the non-Muslim West. Exposure to Islam is ultimately fatal for us, but for Islam, contact with the West is a vital lifeline. Without the West, Islam cannot survive. Western technicians and an army of non-Muslim Asian workers power the economies of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf emirates. Without
harbis,
the Arab princes could not pump their oil or build their extravagant palaces, nor could they fund the worldwide network of Islamic schools, mosques, media outlets, and cultural institutions that advocate overthrowing the West and making Islam supreme everywhere.

“How tremendously European one feels when one has seen these devils in their native muck!” English author Aldous Huxley wrote to a friend in 1925 after spending several months in the Arab world. “And to think that we are busily teaching them all the mechanical arts of peace and war which gave us, in the past, our superiority over their numbers! In fifty years time, it seems to me, Europe can’t fail to be wiped out by these monsters.”
⁵

Huxley identified Islam’s Achilles’ heel: it is both destructive and self-destructive. Left to itself—deprived of what the young Winston Churchill in 1899 called “the strong arms of science against which [Mohammedanism] had vainly struggled,”
⁶
—Islam dies in its own deserts. With nothing else to destroy, it destroys itself, as it had nearly done until Western technology saved it.

One of the most dangerous vehicles of Islam today is the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), based in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Founded in 1969 by thirty Islamic states, the group aims to “galvanize the Ummah into a unified body... safeguarding the true values of Islam and the Muslims.”
⁷
The OIC now counts fifty-seven member states, making it the second-largest international organization after the United Nations.

The OIC forms the largest voting bloc in the UN, where it uses this dominance to subvert individual freedom. As mentioned in chapter six, the OIC’s current fixation is encouraging international bodies and governments to recognize criticism of Islam as a human rights violation. Its efforts have met with some success, such as the approval in March 2010 by the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) of a resolution criminalizing “defamation of religions.”
⁸
The resolution, authored by Pakistan on behalf of the OIC, explicitly mentions only one faith: Islam.
⁹
For the OIC, Islam is the only religion worthy of protection.