Islam in the 21st Century

Verily, Allah has purchased of the believers their lives and their properties; for the price that theirs shall be the Paradise. They fight in Allah’s Cause, so they kill (others) and are killed. It is a promise in truth which is binding on Him in the Taurat (Torah) and the Injeel (Gospel) and the Qur’an. And who is truer to his covenant than Allah? Then rejoice in the bargain which you have concluded. That is the supreme success.

—Qur’an 9:111

The Holy Quran lays the highest emphasis on the preparation for war. It wants us to prepare ourselves for war to the utmost. The test . . . lies in our capability to instill terror into the hearts of our enemies.

—Brigadier S.K. Malik1

Allah gave the Prophet Muhammad four swords (for fighting the unbelievers): the first against polytheists, which Muhammad himself fought with; the second against apostates, which Caliph Abu Bakr fought with; the third against the People of the Book, which Caliph Umar fought with; and the fourth against dissenters, which Caliph Ali fought with.

—Mummmad al-Shaybani2

The universalism of Islam, in its all-embracing creed, is imposed on the believers as a continuous process of warfare, psychological and political, if not strictly military … The Jihad, accordingly, may be stated as a doctrine of a permanent state of war, not continuous fighting.

—Majid Khadduri3

In April of 2014, more than 300 young female students were kidnapped from a government school in Chibok, Nigeria. Less than a month later, the leader of the group responsible for the kidnapping produced a video proclaiming his intention to sell the captive girls at a slave market. The video provoked outrage in Nigeria and abroad, turning the kidnapping into a story with global reach. What few people in either the media or their Western audiences knew was that the kidnapping was just the latest episode in an ongoing war between Islam and the Nigerian people.4

The group responsible for the kidnapping is an Islamic group called Boko Haram, a name which literally translates to “western education is religiously forbidden.” Far from being a random event, the kidnapping was part of Boko Haram’s ongoing war against what it perceives as the “Westernization” of Nigeria—a country in desperate need of education given its exploding population growth and dangerous levels of poverty. Boko Haram believes what Nigeria needs is not education but more Islam. They have backed these beliefs with deadly violence: according to Amnesty International, the group was responsible for 1,500 deaths in Nigeria in the months prior to the April 2014 kidnapping alone.5

Too few realize that Boko Haram in Nigeria is not an anomaly in the Islamic world. The most populated Muslim country in the world, Indonesia, has also endured its share of religious violence. One of the deadliest examples came in 2002, when two bombs placed outside popular nightclubs on the island of Bali killed 202 people and injured 240 more. Three members of the Islamist group Jemaah Islamiyah were found responsible for the bombings and executed in 2008. This group is believed to be aiming at an overthrow of the Indonesian government in order to replace it with a strict Islamic state. The investigation of the attack uncovered an al-Qaeda financing link, with the plot mastermind receiving $30,000 (USD) to cover expenses.6

Despite its close links to the United States, few Americans are aware that the majority- Christian Philippines has also been a regular target for terror. One of the worst attacks there came in 2004 at the hands of Abu Sayyaf, an Islamist guerilla organization. Known as the “SuperFerry 14 Bombing,” this attack involved a bomb which scuttled a transport ferry, killing 116 people. Because of the fire triggered by the explosion and the difficulty of reaching the ferry on the ocean floor, only 63 bodies were ever recovered.7

Sharing borders with several majority-Muslim nations, Russia also knows the deadly danger presented by Islamist groups. In 2002, Russia endured its own mass kidnapping when Islamist Chechens seized the crowded Dubrovka Theater in Moscow, taking 900 hostages and demanding the removal of Russian troops from Chechnya. After a nearly three-day standoff, Russian special forces raided the theater, resulting in the deaths of all 40 kidnappers and 130 hostages. Islamist military commander Shamil Basayev promised afterward that his next goal would be to inflict maximum damage on the Russian people. This promise was fulfilled in 2004 with a series of suicide bombings against civilian targets.8

In 2004, at the Beslan school of North Ossetia (near the Russian border), Islamic fighters took the violence a step further. A band of fighters took more than a thousand people, many of them children, hostage at a school for three days. After the incident ended with a raid by Russian security forces, 334 hostages were found dead (including 186 children). Nearly 800 others suffered non-fatal injuries. According to local reports, many of the victims suffered severe burns, with 100 or more of the total fatalities being burned alive.9

The motivation of Basayev and the Chechens is often described by the politically innocuous term “separatism.” But it must be emphasized that the crucial issue between the Chechens and the Russians is not political administration but religion. Russia is a staunch Orthodox nation which resists attempts to Islamize its culture. The response of some Muslims within its borders has therefore been to demand that Russia give up its territory so they can have their own country. A letter from Basayev to Russian President Vladimir Putin after the Beslan attack offered peace in exchange for independence. His promise to Putin is telling: “We can guarantee that all of Russia’s Muslims will refrain from armed methods of struggle against the Russian Federation, at least for 10-15 years, on condition that freedom of religion be respected.”10

Despite a much smaller Muslim population, Western Europe is also enduring Islamist violence within its borders. One of the deadliest strikes came in 2004 with the coordinated bombings of commuter trains in Madrid. Coming three days before Spain’s general elections that year, the explosions killed 191 people and wounded about 1,800. At the time, it was the worst terror attack in Europe since the Lockerbie Bombing in 1988. The motivation of the Islamic terrorists responsible was reportedly payback against Spain for supporting the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.11

A year later, commuter rail in Europe was struck again—this time in London. Four Muslim men detonated three bombs aboard subway cars and a fourth on a double-decker bus, killing 52 civilians and injuring 700 others. This was the first-ever suicide terror attack in the United Kingdom, and it was carried out by three British-born sons of immigrants from Pakistan (the fourth was a convert born in Jamaica). Two of the attackers left behind videotapes describing the reasons and motivations for their attacks. One declares:

Our religion is Islam, obedience to the one true God and following the footsteps of the final prophet and messenger. Muhammad … Your democratically-elected governments continuously perpetuate atrocities against my people all over the world …We are at war and I am a soldier. Now you too will taste the reality of this situation.12

In 2007, Islamist violence directed at a national leader produced carnage in Karachi, Pakistan. A motorcade carrying former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was attacked in a bombing that killed about 150 people and injured hundreds more. Although Bhutto survived this attempt, another attack later that year would claim her life.

India has long been a flashpoint for Islamic violence, with one of the deadliest attacks coming in Mumbai in 2008. Members of the terror group Lashkar-e-Taiba, acting with the support of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, conducted a four-day campaign of bombings, shootings, and hostage-taking which ended in a deadly police raid. The attacks were planned in Pakistan, and fueled by Islamist ideology and drug use (attackers took cocaine to stay awake longer and inflict more deadly damage). At the end, about 164 were killed, including ten attackers, and many hundreds of others injured.13 It was the deadliest Islamic rampage in Mumbai since a 1993 terror bombing had killed 257 people.

Africa is also routinely beset by Islamic violence. Few people in the West realize that central African nations are religiously split between Christians and Muslims, and that this is an ongoing source of conflict there. Boko Haram in Nigeria, mentioned at the beginning, is one of the worst offenders. In January 2012 the organization carried out a series of assaults on Christian churches and businesses, then followed up with attacks on police stations and government offices several weeks later. The outbreak left more than 200 dead—most of them civilians.14

These attacks are only a fraction of the total. In any given year, most terrorism comes at the hands of Sunni Muslims, often against other Muslims.15 In 2011, for instance, “Sunni extremists” were blamed for 70 percent of terror-related fatalities worldwide (8,886 out of 12,533). By contrast, that year only 77 fatalities worldwide—less than one percent of the total—were attributed to “Neo-Nazi/Fascist/White Supremacist” groups.16 Yet to hear the U.S. government tell it, white Americans represent the most serious terror threat in the country.17

JIHAD AND THE SUBVERSION OF THE WEST

As Islam becomes more of a presence in non-Islamic countries the realities of jihad become a presence as well. There are two forms in which jihad is taking place in the Western world today. One is the all-too-familiar form of violent jihad; the other is the more insidious and little-remarked form of demographic jihad (explored in detail in Part 5 of this book). As Islamic scholar Sam Solomon has shown, subverting non-Islamic societies via immigration and procreation is actually an age-old technique in Islam. The first example comes from Muhammad himself, whose immigration to Medina along with his Muslim followers ultimately undermined and transformed the city. The same concepts and strategies he used to change that one Arab city are still in use by Islamic leaders around the world and have the same end: to expand the penetration and conquest of Islam further into the world.18

Free and democratic societies are particularly vulnerable to demographic jihad, since once Muslims make up a sizable voting bloc they can use the institutions of their host societies against the host. The end result can be massive separatist campaigns such as the one seen in Bosnia in the 1990s, in Chechnya in the 2000s and in southern Thailand and in the Philippines today. Islamists use Britain’s famous freedom to openly proclaim their intention to turn that country into an Islamic nation; given current demographic trends and Islamic history, this claim could become reality in our lifetimes.

In seeking to undermine other cultures, whether by violence or by demographic pressure, in the name of Islam, Muslims are merely following the expressed will of the founder of Islam. Muhammad’s sayings and deeds are so often on the lips of terrorists that we should pay close attention to what he proclaims:

I have been commanded to fight all men until they testify that there is no god but Allah and that Muhammad is the messenger of Allah, and perform prayer and pay Zakat. If they say it, they have saved their blood and possessions from me, except for the rights of Islam over them.19

Osama bin Laden justified his attacks on the United States by repeating these words. This is not just an isolated statement, either. The supposedly holy Qur’an declares, “whoever seeks a religion other than Islam, it will never be accepted of him.”20 It exhorts all Muslims to “kill the [kafirs] wherever you find them, and capture them and besiege them, and prepare for them each and every ambush.”21 Apologists claim that such statements are meant figuratively, but as this book has shown, they have been understood and applied quite literally throughout the history of Islam to justify enormous barbarities.

Westerners who have been raised in a culture shaped by Greek rationality and Christian charity find it exceedingly difficult to understand that the Muslims who engage in rape and murder and strive to undermine western societies are doing exactly what their religion commands them to do. The fact that many Muslims do not do these things is a testimony not to Islam but to the basic humanity of most people, who find such actions terrible.

The idea of Islam making peace with the non-Islamic world is ahistorical and completely antithetical to the demands of Muhammad. Islamic scholar Efraim Karsh explains the Islamic view of its relation to the world with great clarity:

Islam envisages a global political order in which all humankind will live under Muslim rule as either believers or subject communities. In order to achieve this goal it is incumbent on all free, male adult Muslims to carry out an uncompromising struggle “in the path of Allah,” or jihad. This in turn makes those parts of the world that have not yet been conquered by the House of Islam an abode of permanent conflict (Dar al-Harb, the House of War) which will only end with Islam’s eventual triumph.22

Islamic scholar Majid Khadduri explains how anything less than a global Islamic political order is unacceptable:

In Muslim legal theory, Islam and shirk (associating other gods with Allah) cannot exist together in this world; it is the duty of the imam as well as every believer not only to see that God’s word shall be supreme, but also that no infidel should deny God. This world would ultimately be reserved for believers, as to non-believers, “their abode is hell, and evil is the destination.”23

The Qur’an makes clear that mere performance of pious actions is explicitly lower in religious value than active fighting on behalf of Islam:

Do you consider the providing of drinking water to the pilgrims and the maintenance of Al-Masjid-al-Haram [the mosque at Mecca] as equal to the worth of those who believe in Allah and the Last Day, and strive hard and fight in the Cause of Allah? They are not equal before Allah.24

As the example of Muhammad’s own life and the subsequent 1,400 years of Islamic history have shown, “fight[ing] in Allah’s cause” has always been understood and intended quite literally. Muhammad was a warlord who found his greatest missionary success not with preaching but with caravan raids and power-brokering from his base in Medina. During his lifetime, Muhammad arranged for raids on caravans, personally participating in many of them. These raids were essentially cases of low-level banditry given the gloss of religion because the spoils were taken by “the faithful.” As a leader, he famously put to death an entire tribe of Arabian Jews (the Banu Qurayza) along with hundreds of pagan Arabs—including many men and women of Mecca who he felt had slighted him when he was just a street preacher.25

Under the caliphs who followed Muhammad, Islam continued to be spread by the sword.26 This included wars to convert the entire Arabian peninsula followed by wars of conquest against Persia, Mesopotamia, the Levant, and soon India. Egypt, home to one of the earliest and largest Christian communities in the world, was taken by force and slowly and brutally Islamized over the course of centuries. In 700 AD, the idea that Egyptian Christianity was threatened was absurd. A century later, Christians there were second-class citizens—a position they still hold today, outnumbered 9-to-1 by an increasingly hostile Sunni majority.

The same pattern of conquest has continued to today. With a few exceptions, such as the Spanish Reconquista, the recovery of Sicily from the Moors, and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, Islam’s history has been one of steady increase by means of violent seizures and demographic replacement. Because of the military and technological superiority of western nations today, Islam is unable to seize territory as it once did. But the demographic approach is still available—and thanks to multiculturalism and politically correct western policies, it has been able to proceed in Europe to a dangerously high level.

Two flashpoints of violence in the world today illustrate the danger if demographic replacement continues unimpeded. In Israel, conflict between Israeli Jews and Muslim Palestinians has been constant and almost uninterrupted since the foundation of Israel after World War II. Despite enormous genetic and cultural similarities between Palestinians and Jews, who can be described fairly as Semitic cousins, violence continues to claim lives in the region.27

In India, the danger is even more apparent. Formerly, the countries of Pakistan and Bangladesh were also part of India, but due to the large Islamic populations there a separatist movement led to a partition of the country (a civil war later tore the Muslim nation into two separate nations). The country that is now Pakistan was formerly 25 percent Hindu. But whereas the vast majority of Hindus left for India during the partition, many Muslims remained in India, where they are still about 14 percent of the population. Even the partition isn’t enough—many Muslims want it all. Despite 1,300 years of violence and a bloody partition, the conflict between Muslims and everyone else in India continues.

Compare the conflicts in Israel and India with the two World Wars or America’s Vietnam War. The latter conflicts, however bloody and devastating, nevertheless had an end. Driven by theology, the conflicts in Israel and India have continued for decades if not centuries and show no sign of stopping. If demographic and terror threats are allowed to continue in the west, the same conflict will come there, too. India’s past (and present) will be Europe’s future. So far, western political and cultural leaders have been unwilling to identify the problem, let alone come up with solutions. It has therefore fallen to ordinary citizens to stand up and do something before it is too late to act.

THE FREE WORLD’S COMING CONFLICT WITH ISLAMIC IMPERIALISM

The 21st century will be a pivotal moment in human history—the moment when human freedom battles its bloodiest and most dangerous enemy, Islamic imperialism. The key struggles of the 20th century were against totalitarianism. From the right, the liberal democracies of the West fought the Fascist governments of Hitler and Mussolini. From the left, they fought the Communist states of the Soviet Bloc. But the battle against Islamic imperialism will be an even tougher test.

This war will be fought on many fronts. The greatest threat currently posed by Islamic imperialism was mentioned above: the demographic jihad. All across Europe the same pattern holds—native-born populations are shrinking in size while Islamic immigrants are still coming and reproducing in greater numbers. Initial evidence suggests these immigrants do not assimilate. The children are more likely to be religious and less likely than their parents to adopt the languages and customs of the host countries. So long as European nations allow Muslims to arrive on their shores en masse, the demographic threat will only increase.

Terrorism is the second-greatest threat posed by Islam. As the Boston Marathon Bombing showed, large organizations and lavish funding are unnecessary when it comes to producing terror on a devastating scale. Two individuals working with limited funds managed to bring the entire city of Boston to its knees for several days, killing or injuring hundreds and inflicting millions of dollars of economic damage. Defeating Islam means defeating the ideology which radicalizes people like the Tsarnaev brothers. No other approach can succeed.

The threat posed by Islam dwarfs the threat of Nazism and Communism combined. Nazism lasted less than 15 years and died with its creator. Communism held on for little more than 70 years before collapsing due to economic inefficiency. Neither system had the demographic strength or the transcendental metaphysics which has allowed Islam to remain a potent threat for 1,400 years.

On top of that, the authoritarian dictators of the 20th century could be reasoned with. The conflict between Communism and Capitalism was economic, not cultural. Russian civilization is still essentially Western, and Russians do not immigrate to the West to form rape gangs and terrorize the local populations. Muslims do. President Nixon and his aide Henry Kissinger were able to establish trade and friendly relations with China, despite the fact that the Chinese were Communists with a totalitarian worldview. The Cuban Missile Crisis reached a peaceful resolution because Soviet Communists and Americans shared a preference for life over death and for society over destructive chaos.

Despite this, for decades America followed an irrational and self-destructive foreign policy of supporting Islamists to spite and injure the Soviets. The most famous example is the decade-long nurturing of violent jihad in Afghanistan to oppose the Soviet invasion, but America was also encouraging Islamic radicals throughout central Asia to keep the Soviet state destabilized. Now the USSR is no more, but the radicals remain. The Soviets made efforts to reach a rapprochement with the U.S. During the Cold War, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev argued for peaceful coexistence between the Soviet Union and the West:

What, then, is the policy of peaceful coexistence? … In its simplest expression it signifies the repudiation of war as a means of solving controversial issues. However, this does not cover the entire concept of peaceful coexistence. Apart from the commitment to non-aggression, it also presupposes an obligation on the part of all states to desist from violating each other’s territorial integrity and sovereignty in any form and under any pretext whatsoever. The principle of peaceful co-existence signifies a renunciation of interference in the internal affairs of other countries with the object of altering their system of government or mode of life or for any other motives.28

This offer was rejected.
Instead, during the Cold War the United States was committed to a policy of

containment. In practice, this meant providing support to anti-Communists around the world. Due to this policy, America supported the most conservative and Islamist Muslim states (Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and the other Gulf Cooperation Council nations) against the secular Arab states (Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon). Thanks to Cold War priorities, America treated secular Arabs as potential Communists and jihadist Muslims as reliable allies.

Compare the Islamic jihadists in the Middle East today with the Soviet Communists. No one doubts that if Osama bin Laden had had access to nuclear weapons, 9/11 would have ended with a far higher body count. What deterrence can there be with a determined Islamist who believes that dying in war with the infidel will send him to Paradise? And this is not merely speculation. In 2003, a prominent Saudi cleric named Nasir al-Fahd issued a fatwa permitting the Islamic use of weapons of mass destruction. “If a bomb were dropped on them, destroying ten million of them and burning as much of their land as they have burned of Muslim land,” Fahd said, “that would be permissible without any need to mention any other proof.”29 Fahd’s arguments were embraced by bin Laden’s successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri. Another prominent jihadist, Mustafa Setmariam Nasar, further declared in a 2004 manifesto:

The ultimate choice is the destruction of the United States … through weapons of mass destruction, namely nuclear, chemical, or biological means, if the Muhajidin [sic] can achieve it with the help of those who possess them or through buying them.30

No one should be lulled into thinking that only “extremists” would resort to genocidal violence given the opportunity. Former Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad declared in 2008, “Israel’s days are numbered … the peoples of the region would not miss the narrowest opportunity to annihilate this false regime.”31 While some dismiss such statements as “extremism,” they are actually completely conventional in Iran and around the Muslim world. The allegedly moderate former Iranian President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani delighted the crowds of Tehran a month after 9/11 by declaring:

If a day comes when the world of Islam is duly equipped with the arms Israel has in its possession, the strategy of colonization would face a stalemate because the application of an atomic bomb would not leave anything in Israel.32

The jihadist threat was first unleashed on the world 1,400 years ago. Following in the footsteps of their warlord founder Muhammad, the early Islamic community quickly brought jihad from Arabia to Asia, to Africa, and even into the heart of Europe. As this book—and countless studies, histories, and documented records—have shown, the effect of this conquest was brutal and absolute. Millions were killed. Cultures and religions which had endured for millennia were crippled or destroyed outright. Coptic civilization in Egypt, Zoroastrian civilization in Persia, Christian civilization in North Africa and Turkey, and Hindu and Buddhist civilizations on the Indian subcontinent all were desecrated, deformed, and destroyed by the Islamic onslaught.

As the example of India shows, there is no end to jihad. Even if the Islamists achieve their goal of Islamizing a country—as has been the case with Pakistan, which was once part of India—the jihad only continues against “heretics” who do not follow the proper form of Islam. For 1,300 years Islam has been at war with India. In like fashion, it will be at war with Israel over Palestine for 1,300 years or more. Islam never seeks peace. When it is weak,it will sue for a truce. When it is strong, the jihad begins again. In the 19th century, Islam was weak compared to the Western powers, which were aided by modern technology and weaponry. In the 21st century Islam feels itself strong enough to raise the sword of jihad again.

Islam means submission—submission to Arab supremacy and Arab imperialism. We of the West have no choice but to fight back. The alternative is death or slavery. Following their Prophet, Muslims divide the world into two groups: believers and infidels. One group will win and the other will lose. If Islam wins, it will be the death of the West. It will be the death of Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, Confucian, African, and Native American civilizations. All the accomplishments of freedom and equality—the end of slavery, equality for women, the memories of the classical past—all will be lost. Islamic imperialism must be defeated and Islam itself must be reformed.