The Mohammed Code: Why a Desert Prophet Wants You Dead (32 page)

In many of Germany’s Moslem schools, radical teachings are reportedly central to the curriculum.
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In fact, Germany is so much a home to its militant population that the headquarters of Syria’s Muslim Brotherhood—an extremist organization founded in 1928
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-- is not in Damascus or Cairo. It’s in the German city of Aachen.
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Then there’s Belgium, home to 70 mosques and to 300 Islamic centers. Not all Belgian Moslems are radicals. Far from it. But the Intelligence Committee of the Belgian Parliament says that moderate Moslems are effectively gagged in cities like Brussels. According to a Belgian Intelligence Committee report, “the Saudi-backed Salafi movement has created a religious ‘state’ within Belgium. Activists operate their own ‘Islamic police’ to enforce Islamic rules...Group members are circulating videos of Osama bin Laden and have carried out paramilitary training and parachute jumps in the Ardennes.”
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The Ardennes is the area of dense European forests through which the Germans invaded France in World War I and World War II.
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Its mere mention can make those who know their history nervous. No wonder that as early as 2002, the
Telegraph
of London concluded that Belgium is “a launch pad for terrorists”.
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In these cases, a modernist, liberal Western meme is pitting itself against a militant Moslem meme that’s been on a winning streak far longer than the modern nations of Germany or Brussels
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have existed. The question is which meme will win in the end.

France may have given us a preview of European jihad in November 2005 thanks to an influx of North African Arab laborers and asylum-seekers who had large families, and whose children and grandchildren grew France’s Islamic population to five million by 2004.
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In 300
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suburbs, towns and cities including Paris, Dijon, Marseilles, Toulouse, Rouen, Bordeaux,
Avignon, Nice, Cannes, Nantes, Lille Saint-Dizier,
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and Strasbourg, Islamic rioters—most of them Moslem youths born and raised in France--went on what the mayor of Acheres, one of the French suburbs under attack, called a "perfectly organized”
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series of urban guerrilla-style arson attacks, shooting buckshot at police and using cars and motorcycles to spread flames from the resorts of France’s Mediterranean coast to the German border.

This was a high-tech uprising. Said Patrick Hamon, a spokesman for France’s national police, “Youths are communicating by cell phones or e-mails. They organize themselves, arrange meetings, [and] some prepare the Molotov cocktails."
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The participants in this Moslem World-Wide-Webbed rebellion barbecued a total of over 9,071 cars.
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They torched two nursery schools in a single night,
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burned a youth center, a police station, a film studio, shops, and a factory, torched an entire parking lot of cars, threw firebombs into ambulances waiting for emergency patients, and spread gas in the interior of a bus full of passengers, then lit the match.

To top it off, the makers of this possible sneak peek at Jihad 3.0 went online, using Arab-language websites like tajdeed.net and alsaha.com
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to warn of more violence to come. Wrote one of the Internet warriors, who signed himself Rania, "Civil war is declared. There will no doubt be deaths. Unfortunately, we have to prepare." Said another Web warrior, "We are going to destroy everything. Rest in peace, guys."
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There were “copycat riots” in Brussels, Berlin, and Rotterdam.
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And there were nearly simultaneous riots in Arhus, Denmark. Some say that these riots were
not
spontaneous imitations of France’s upheaval
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. The outbursts were well-coordinated, and were fed instructions and encouragement by global jihadists half-a-planet away.

Meanwhile, the majority of Western news analysts said that the French disturbance had nothing to do with Islam and was by no means a Holy War. But according to reports from Paris, both tajdeed.net and alsaha.com called the mayhem in the streets of France, “a new jihad”.
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This jihadist call was echoed on the streets, where, according to
Chicago Tribune
foreign correspondent Tom Hundley, writing from Paris, the rioters, “scuffled with police and set fire to cars while chanting, ‘The holy war has begun.’"
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The strife went on for 21 days and nights.
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Islamic spokes-groups, reporters, and mainstream Western politicians tried to explain away the violence as the product of the standard Western litany of social sins—poverty, oppression, unemployment, and humiliation—all elements that undoubtedly came into play. The unemployment rate among France’s Moslems was a staggering 30%.
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And the French Observatory Against Racism reported that it had sent 325 resumes to French employers, resumes with identical work experience and credentials, but with different names and places of origin. The result: the odds of getting a job if you had a name of North African origin were seriously stacked against you. Native Frenchman or French woman were five times as likely to be hired as you were.
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What’s more, there were strong voices of moderation in the French Islamic community. Reuters reported that “imams and mosque groups in the suburbs have called for calm”
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and described, “the sight of imams and local Muslim leaders in the suburbs calming down angry teenagers who reject all other authority”.
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But not all this moderation was what it seemed. The Union of French Islamic Organizations issued a fatwa stating that the riots were in violation of Islam. Said the fatwa, “Aggression is forbidden by Islam according to the verse [Qur’an 2:190]: 'Begin not hostilities. Lo! Allah loveth not aggressors'.
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This statement sounds peaceful. But it isn’t. It’s designed to mislead.

The quote that actually appears in the Qur’an’s Chapter 2 verse 190 reads, “
Fight in the cause of Allah those who fight you but do not transgress limits; for Allah loveth not transgressors.”
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The next sentence in the Qur’an is telling. It reads, “And slay them wherever ye catch them and turn them out from where they have turned you out.”
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This is not an order for peace. It is an instruction for battle. And the restraint it calls for isn’t kindness toward the enemy. It’s a warning not to break the military rules of Islam—rules about details like how to divvy up the booty.
The Union of French Islamic Organizations’
fatwa seemed to embody one of Islam’s basic strategies in war—“guile”
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, dishonesty and surprise. Mohammed summed it up when he said “war is deceit.”
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In other words, as Mohammed’s first biographer, Ibn Ishaq spelled out in great detail, jihad is made by carefully using lies.
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Intellectuals writing in Arabic agreed that the causes of the riots were joblessness and discrimination, not Islam. But these same intellectuals warned that the French riots could easily be repeated worldwide. Wrote an editorial writer in Iran’s daily newspaper
Jomhouri-ye Eslami
, “"Discrimination is also rising in England, Germany, America, Canada, and many other Western countries.”
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What
Jomhouri-ye Eslami
called “this disease” of discrimination against Moslems was eroding “the patience of the people who had for years suffered from the racist discrimination”. Discrimination and racism, added
Jomhouri-ye Eslami
, were turning a “quiet movement…to overt and violent rebellion.”
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Al-Arabiya TV director Abd Al-Rahman al-Rashed warned that the violence, “will recur in the future, even if it calms down for some time”.
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A C-Span panel discussion convened by the Islamic group CAIR--The
Council on American-Islamic Relations--warned against Arab bashing. Like so many others, its panelists said that only one factor had triggered the European disturbances—discrimination. But halfway around the world an Indian expert on Islamic activism from the South Asia Analysis Group told a different story. He said the riots had started spontaneously, then had been prodded along by three international extremist groups
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: Hizb ut-Tahrir, which operates in 40 countries, Lashkar-e-Toiba, based in Pakistan, and Jamaat-ul-Fuqra
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, a New-York-and-Pakistan-based Jihadist group that gave the world the shoe bomber, Richard Reid, a middle-class kid born in London of a Jamaican father
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who walked into a passenger plane with his explosives hidden in the tongue, lining
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, and sole of his shoe.
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(In 2002, Reid boarded American Airlines flight 63 from Paris to Miami, waited until the plane was in flight, lit a match, bent over in his passenger seat, and was about to light a triacetone triperoxide fuse protruding from his shoe’s tongue. A passenger screamed and the 6’4” Reid was wrestled to the floor by two flight attendants, doused with water passed cup by cup by passengers, and sedated by two doctors on the flight
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.)