The Mohammed Code: Why a Desert Prophet Wants You Dead (2 page)

Send yourself back in time to the year 2001 and put yourself in the mind of Osama bin Laden for a minute. You are not a sadist. You do not enjoy killing. But you have a job, one of the most important jobs on the planet—saving humanity.

You know with absolute certainty that God has made this planet. God has made punishment, forgiveness, charity, and weapons. And God has made you and me. God has also told us the one true way to follow his will, the one true way to avoid roasting in hell.

What’s more, God has done his utmost to communicate his commands to those of us He has made. He has sent between 25 and 240 thousand prophets
²
, each delivering His truths. Those truths are not limited to mere religion. They include what many Moslem scholars refer to as “a complete system of life”
³
— a system of government, a system of laws, a system of manners, a system of worship, and even a system of military practice.
⁴

Each prophet was given this total system, this Holy bundle of instructions on how to conduct a good life. Some of those prophets were listened to. Many were not. Among those who got the ear of mankind were Abraham, Moses, and Jesus
⁵
. To each, God delivered the same message—the message you can find word-for-word today in Islam’s holy book, the Qur’an. Then what happened? According to mainstream Islam, the Jews took the word of God and perverted it. Generation after generation, they adapted Moses’ holy orders to fit the needs of their time. Every adaptation, every adjustment, and every new update twisted the original truth and turned it into a lie. Those lies are what the Jews call their Torah, the Old Testament of the Bible.

The same thing happened with Jesus. According to Islam, God gave Jesus the complete truth—the truth of Islam. Then Jesus’ followers mangled Jesus’ message, perverted it, and turned it from a truth to a savage distortion that’s led hundreds of millions to the fires of eternal torment—the fires of hell.

Despite mankind’s pig-headedness, God the all-merciful gave it one last shot. He sent one final messenger to humanity—Mohammed, a man of absolute honesty. Mohammed delivered God’s code of life—his religion, his governmental system, his laws, his court system, and his military orders. And for the first time, a people did not screw God’s message up. For the first time a people realized that to remain true to your creator, you have to reject the lies of “modern,” secular thought. You have to shun the temptation to twist the truth to fit the present. You have to look back, straight back to the life of Mohammed.

Which people finally managed this act of supreme fidelity, this act of total obedience and commitment? The Moslems. First the Arabs, a uniquely noble race.
⁶
Then all those who said yes to the truth that, "There is no god but Allah and Mohammed is His Prophet."
⁷
Only the Moslems accepted the form of utter submission to Allah’s will known in God’s own language, Arabic, as “Islam.”

Remember, you are Osama bin Laden. The year is 2001. It’s 1,379 years after Mohammed established his—and God’s—rule in the tiny desert town of Medina. Two thirds of your fellow 21
^st
century humans are literally on the path to hell. They are misled by lies like democracy, human rights, separation of mosque and state, Christianity, and Buddhism. They live in the shackles of a tyranny they do not see. God gave us his own laws from 622 to 632 AD. Yet over four billion humans suffer under the oppression of profane governments like those in the United States, England, France, Germany, India, Thailand, and China. The leaders of this huge slice of humanity believe that man can write his own constitutions, that groups of men and women gathered in Congresses and Parliaments can write laws, and that god’s slaves
⁸
—his creations--have “rights” that defy His will. Because of these false notions, over four billion of your fellow humans will suffer an eternity in an afterlife so painful that they’ll be roasted over a spit, screaming while their skin is burned inch by inch. Then, when the ash of their crisped and blackened dermal tissue falls off, they’ll be given a new skin so they can feel the same pain all over again.
⁹

You are Osama bin Laden. You want to liberate all of mankind. What would you do? Would you sit by idly while four billion of your fellow humans live in darkness and are condemned to an eternity of torture? Or would you bring them the light? Would you open their eyes to truth? Would you liberate them so they can enter paradise? And would you perform this liberation even if it meant the deaths of thousands? If you had nuclear weapons, would you bring truth to the misguided even if it meant the deaths of millions? As an idealist out to save man and womankind, as an upholder of truth and justice, would you look back to what you know is the single template of righteousness, the single guide to God’s wishes, the life of Mohammed, before you decide?

To understand men like Osama bin Laden (the iconic exemplar of long-distance urban guerrilla warfare), Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (the George Washington and Thomas Jefferson of the Islamic Revolutionary Republic of Iran), Dr. A.Q. Khan (the father of The Islamic Bomb, the Pakistani nuclear warhead first tested in 1998), Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (the president of Iran who, in 2006, went on national TV accompanied by dancers to announce that Iran had joined the club of nuclear nations), to understand the heads of groups like Hezbollah and Hamas, to understand the militant Moslems making headlines today and who’ll make headlines tomorrow and well beyond, you have to understand the key to their way of thinking. Like them, you have to understand the life of Mohammed. You have to understand
The Mohammed Code
.

First, a word of full disclosure. I am heavily biased when it comes to militant Islam. Militant Islam says that I should be killed. Why? I believe in tolerance, pluralism, and freedom of speech. Not just mild freedom of speech, but extreme freedom of speech—the right to say the outrageous, the rebellious, and the heretical. To militant Islam these “fake concepts” of “freedom, democracy, [and] human rights”
¹⁰
are a slap in the face of God. They are Satanic lies. But there’s more. I am an atheist, a secular scientific thinker, and…even worse…a Jew. Mohammed did not take kindly to Jews. Said Mohammed, “Whoever of the Jews falls into your hands, kill him.”
¹¹
And,
“The Hour will not be established until you fight with the Jews, and the stone behind which a Jew will be hiding will say. ‘O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, so kill him.’”
¹²

My introduction to militant Islam came in 1962. My parents and grandparents were Zionists…people who wished ardently for the right of Jews to return to a homeland that appears in a flood of Hebrew prayers, the Promised Land, the Hebrew territory from which Jews were expelled over and over again and which the Jews stubbornly rebelled to retake in 66 AD, 133 AD, 351 AD, 438 AD, and 614 AD.
¹³
Those Jews, my ancestors, battled the biggest imperialists of the day, the Romans. Rome periodically got fed up with Jewish freedom fighters and removed most of the Hebrews from the land Jews had inhabited since 1,200 BC.
¹⁴
Rome scattered this remnant across the face of the Old World. Yet Jews insistently trickled back into what they considered their native land again, and by 636 AD,
¹⁵
Arab historians say these Hebrew returnees and the Jews still on the land of Judea had built 41 cities
¹⁶
in what is today called Palestine and Israel. Then came an imperialist force that made the Romans look like pipsqueaks, a violent, militaristic, colonialist empire on its way to becoming the largest in the history of the planet—one of the few imperial powers still around in today’s world and still, like us, in a mood for conquest: the empire of Islam. According to the 9
^th
century Moslem historian
Abu Al-Abbas Al-Baladhuri
¹⁷
the armies of Islam wiped those 41 Jewish cities off the face of the map. For the next 1,312 years,
¹⁸
Jews would end their springtime holiday Passover dinner with the phrase, “Next year in Jerusalem.”

Zionists like my grandparents and parents were proud of the fact that Jews had trickled back into Israel once again in the 19
^th
and 20
^th
century, had drained the malarial swamps, had run irrigation lines to the deserts, and had made this slice of miserable Turkish land one-sixth the size of New York State
¹⁹
into a garden, a rich farmland. To my grandparents and parents, Zionism meant establishing a Jewish state and teaching our Arab brethren to turn the vast and barren 2 billion acres
²⁰
under Arab control into a land with trees, groves, and valleys abundant in harvests.

In 1962, when I was 19 years old, my father offered to send me for a year to Israel, a country a mere fourteen years old. Israel had kibbutzim—one of the most radical forms of social experiment on the planet. These were socialist agricultural communities in which the land and goods were held in common by roughly 350 adults. The children were raised together by child-care experts, the meals were made in a communal kitchen and eaten in a communal dining hall, and the laundry was done by a communal laundry staff. As a result, when they finished their day of farming, parents could romp with their kids for hours, free from the worry of nagging their children to clean up their bedrooms, and free from the need to shop and cook a meal.

My dad’s offer sounded good. I wanted to see if 19
^th
and 20
^th
century thinkers were right…if by changing the structure of society you could change human nature and wipe away greed, gripes, and violence. The kibbutz was a laboratory of social change. So I said yes.