Given the splintering sides between Team Shia and Team Sunni, it’s not inconceivable that a nuclear Saudi Arabia could ally with the Islamic State. Both are ruled by extreme Salafist Sunni Muslims.
The Islamic State is trying to persuade Sunni Muslims that they are the true protectors of Islam. And there are some signs that it’s working. Ibrahim Hamidi, a journalist and leading analyst of the Islamic State, told the New York Times that the group is “hijacking legitimate demands”—meaning that they are filling a political and social vacuum in the areas they conquer. “Now,” Hamidi explained, “with the sectarian polarization of the region, under the skin of every single Sunni there is a tiny Daesh.” (Daesh is the Arabic acronym for the Islamic State.)
In other words, even the many Muslims who object to the Islamic State’s brutal tactics are beginning to sympathize with their goals. They’ve become so mainstream that there’s even a slang word for the many people who are inclined to support ISIS: Dawoosh, an Arabic term that means “cute little Daesh.”
The Islamic State and Iran are forcing the Islamic world into two camps, opposed to each other by virtue of a 1,300-year-old split but united in their embrace of radical Islamism and totalitarian, apocalyptic ideology. Increasingly there is no room for moderates in the middle.
Most people in the West are still blind to this—but if Phase VI of the plan is executed as effectively and efficiently as the other five phases, they won’t be blind for long.
PART TWO
Thirteen Deadly Lies
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“If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth; only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.”
—C. S. Lewis
INTRODUCTION TO PART TWO
We haven’t been honest with ourselves for a long time. We’ve allowed political correctness, fear, and simple ignorance to mask basic truths about Islam and the Quran. These truths need to be confronted in order to defend ourselves, our families, and our country.
In other words, we need to stop lying to ourselves—and, perhaps more important, we need to stop allowing ourselves to be lied to.
We hear lies about Islam nearly every day, in nearly every place, in nearly every manner. They usually originate with elites in the media, in Washington, D.C., and Hollywood. In 2010, for example, National Public Radio aired a bizarre segment with the headline “Is the Bible more violent than the Quran?” (Spoiler alert: liberal NPR says yes!) A few years later, noted Islam expert Ben Affleck took Bill Maher to task for attacking what Affleck called “the officially codified doctrine of Islam.” Questioning the tenets of Islam, Affleck claimed, was “gross” and “racist.”
The Architect of Lies
How did we get here?
With their supremacist ideology, whether the form practiced by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and the Islamic State or Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the clerics of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Islamists know what they stand for.
But do we?
I’m not so sure anymore. America and the West are more timid than ever. Those of us who stand up for our most cherished values—freedom of expression, for example—are denounced as insensitive racists and pronounced guilty of hate speech. Government leaders and media types pile on, telling us that we are in no place to criticize other cultures and religions. It’s a mentality that has infected the entire discussion—or lack thereof—surrounding Islam and terrorism.
I want to introduce you to someone whom very few people outside of academic circles have ever heard of, yet who has had the most enduring impact on the way we talk and think about Islam and the Middle East. Perhaps no one is more responsible for imposing a straitjacket of political correctness on any discussion involving Islam than the late Edward Said (pronounced SIGH-eed).
Said grew up in Jerusalem and Cairo in an affluent family. He came to America to study at an elite New England prep school, and then went on to Princeton and Harvard, where he got his Ph.D. He eventually became a professor of literature at Columbia University, where in 1978 he published Orientalism, a book that forever changed the way academia, the mainstream media, and the West’s elites thought about Islam and the Middle East.
Said argued that the entire field of Middle Eastern history and studies in the West was an exercise in creating the perception of a different and inferior “Oriental culture” so that it could be taken over by Western imperialists. He claimed that all Western scholarship on the Middle East and Islam was a form of racism, an intrinsically hostile pillar of imperialism. Any Westerner or non-Muslim who studied Islam or the Middle East, intentionally or not, developed an “absolute and systematic difference between the West, which is rational, developed, humane, superior, and the Orient, which is aberrant, undeveloped, inferior.” In other words, Said believed that if you’re a person of European descent then talking about the religion of 1.6 billion Muslims is inherently racist.
Said’s book created shock waves in the academic world. It was soon translated into more than three dozen languages, and became deeply influential in most of the world’s universities. In 2005, Edward Said’s books were assigned as reading in at least 868 courses in American colleges and universities, counting only courses whose syllabi were available online. More than forty books have been published about Said and multiple universities offer whole courses about him.
Said accused Western scholars of Eastern studies, particularly Middle Eastern studies, as conscious enablers of exploitation and subjugation. Linguists, historians, anthropologists, and archeologists had all been willing instruments of colonialism and empire building. Western scholars had accomplished this evil work by defining the West in opposition to the “other.” In the case of “Orientals” the “other” was someone “to be feared . . . or to be controlled.” He claimed that literally everything a European or American said about the Orient made them “a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric.” He framed the Israeli-Palestinian struggle in terms of white European colonial oppression of poor, helpless dark-skinned natives.
Multiculturalism started out as a form of enhanced tolerance for cultural differences. Edward Said turned that into an instrument of intolerance, a system for classifying all kinds of comments about Middle Eastern religions, cultures, and societies as racist and forbidden. He taught a whole generation of students how to hurl accusations of “hostility” and “racism” when they disagree with someone.
Our universities are teaching students how to use victimhood, grievance, and taking offense as tools of control. Students are being taught socially acceptable ways to censor each other, to control each other’s speech, and to suppress beliefs they don’t agree with.
When a military unit is about to make a move or attack a target, they often start with “suppression fire.” They sweep everything in front of their attacking unit with artillery and machine-gun rounds, forcing the enemy to duck for cover so their troops can advance. That’s pretty much how Said’s theories, his framing of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, and his cult of censorship all advance the Islamist cause and the terrorists who kill in Islam’s name.
As Islamists gain momentum, there are seemingly fewer and fewer people who are willing to stand and call the enemy by their name. Said’s disciples and his fear-inducing rules for thinking about the world make those people duck for cover.
When they do, the Islamist troops advance even further.
It Is About Islam
Think back on the last decade. How many times has the following scenario played out? There’s been a horrific terrorist attack somewhere around the globe. Amid the initial confusion, several key facts become clear: The perpetrators were observant Muslims who recorded a video to alert the world they were engaged in jihad. The perpetrators’ families and community proudly declare them shahids, or martyrs. Before the day is out, talking heads in the media are showcasing a parade of Ph.D.s and government officials calmly t
elling the audience that this, in fact, had nothing to do with Islam.
It’s been the refrain since 2001, first from the Bush administration, then from Obama’s. It could’ve been a plausible argument had there been one or two terrorist attacks rather than the 25,000 global incidents (according to a website that tracks terrorist activities around the world) we’ve endured. It could’ve fooled a lot more people in a time before TV news, the Internet, and social media. But when we see the most graphic barbarism accompanied by constant calls for sharia, or Islamic law—and justified by passages in the Quran and Hadith—it should become plainly obvious that we’re being lied to.
In fact, for the mainstream media, the only criterion for alternate theories about the cause of terrorism seems to be that they must have absolutely nothing to do with Islam. Instead the causes cited usually include things like poverty, American foreign policy, and, of course, Israel. As we’ll see, they’ve even tried to make global warming the explanation for why ISIS terrorists have undertaken a campaign of murder sweeping the Middle East.
These people are clueless. But the rest of us don’t have to be.
The American people aren’t stupid. Even in the face of unrelenting media assurances, bald-faced propaganda, and smug lies from the most powerful public officials, things are so utterly and obviously wrong that even a hypnotized and often distracted nation has a hard time believing them any longer.
In this section of the book we’ll do what very few people seem to be willing to: we will take apart the lies we commonly hear about Islam. We will systematically dismantle the notion that terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda, rogue regimes like Iran, apocalyptic armies of ISIS, and their collective vision of a Caliphate have nothing to do with Islam.
Let me say it again: it is about Islam.
This is not a book written for people looking to be easily offended. I won’t be carefully parsing every word of every chapter to ensure that I am constantly using all the correct PC terminology. Anyone who has listened or watched me for a while knows my stance: people can choose good or evil, peace or violence. The faith of 1.6 billion people around the world is not inherently bad, but those who insist on a fundamentalist, outdated, supremacist reading of it are. This is the key distinction between Islam and Islamism, which is the totalitarian vision that knows no separation between religion and politics and is utterly incompatible with freedom and individual liberty.
From the heartland of Syria, to the government halls of Tehran, to the meeting places of the Muslim Brotherhood and its affiliated organizations here in America, Islamism is on the march. Under the pernicious influence of radicals who seek to impose Islamic law on the world, barbaric practices that Islam sanctioned in the seventh century—killing apostates, stoning women, and hanging homosexuals—are spreading.
Islam is increasingly becoming intolerant, not just of Westerners and others around the world who seek to stand up for basic freedoms and human rights, but of millions of Muslims as well. These voices for moderation, for a classically liberal approach that recognizes faith as something between God and an individual, not to be imposed by governments—are being silenced, and in some instances, targeted and killed.
That is the problem. A reformation within Islam is urgently needed. And yet it may be as far away as it ever has been.
Had followers of Islam worked to systemically reform it—dissociating themselves from the barbaric ways of the past—we would not find ourselves in a place where the religion itself is at the center of the debate, and unfortunately, of so much terror and death around the world. Instead, we are left with a religion that professes to be good and peaceful, but that counts among its faithful millions of followers who are anything but.
How can those things be reconciled? Are we to believe that terrorists and Islamists—people who are the strictest followers of their faith—are reading the Quran and the Hadith entirely wrong?
If that sounds as absurd to you as it does to me, then it’s time to take a closer look at what these main texts of the faith really say and why so many have found in them justification for hatred and violence.
LIE #1
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“ISLAM IS A RELIGION OF PEACE, AND ISLAMIC TERRORISTS AREN’T REALLY MUSLIMS.”
“Islam is a religion that preaches peace.”
—President Barack Obama
“I stopped calling these people Muslim terrorists. They’re about as Muslim as I am. I mean, they have no respect for anybody else’s life, that’s not what the Koran says.”
—Howard Dean, former Democratic Party chairman, on MSNBC
For decades Americans have been told that Islam is a religion of peace.
This is an endless refrain, repeated by presidents and prime ministers, media figures and sports stars, the pope, and even terrorists themselves.
In the days after the 9/11 attacks the Bush White House went to great pains to stress that the United States was not at war with all people of the Islamic faith. The administration assumed, incorrectly, that Islam is not much different than the host of other religions that differ from Christianity. They wanted to believe that Islam preaches peace—so they decided that it did.
On September 17, six days after the World Trade Center was toppled and the Pentagon smoldered, President George W. Bush went to an Islamic center in Washington, D.C., and sought to distance Islam from the attacks.
“These acts of violence against innocents violate the fundamental tenets of the Islamic faith,” Bush said. “And it’s important for my fellow Americans to understand that. . . . That is not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace.” Former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice also noted “the benevolence that is at the heart of Islam.”
The Obama administration has continued this theme and taken it to tortuous extremes. Under questioning from Congress, then–attorney general Eric Holder spent two straight minutes refusing to say the word Islam in conjunction with terrorism. “I don’t want to say anything negative about a religion,” Holder explained in his testimony. Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton has also been overly politically correct, noting that most Muslims are “peaceful and tolerant people” and attacking those who have “distorted” the Islamic faith.
Sometimes telling a lie often enough gets people to believe it.
A 2009 poll conducted by the Washington Post and ABC News indicated that 58 percent of Americans believe that Islam is a “peaceful religion.” There’s been a shift in those numbers recently, thanks in part to the unraveling of the Middle East and the rise of the Islamic State, but not a huge one. A 2015 Rasmussen poll found that 52 percent of Americans now believe that Islam encourages violence to a greater degree than other religions. That still leaves 48 percent of Americans—nearly half the country—who have bought into the idea that Islam itself really is the “religion of peace” that its apologists claim.
These apologists justify their claim in several ways. First, they discuss the word Islam itself, asserting that Islam actually translates to “peace,” because in Arabic it is based on the same root word, salam. That word, salam, can be found in the traditional greeting assalamualaikum (“Peace be upon you”).
But as Middle East scholar Daniel Pipes explains, the word Islam more accurately translates to “submission.” “There is no connection in meaning between salām and islām, peace and submission,” he writes. “These are two distinct words with unrelated [meanings]. In brief, ‘Islam = submission.’ ”
The notorious British Islamic preacher Anjem Choudary, a vocal supporter of the Islamic State and a cofounder of the terrorist group Al-Muhajiroun, agrees with this analysis. In an op-ed piece justifying the attack by al-Qaeda-linked terrorists on the magazine Charlie Hebdo, which killed twelve journalists and a Paris policeman, Choudary wrote:
Contrary to popular misconception, Islam does not mean peace but rather means submission to the commands of Allah alone. Therefore, Muslims do not believe in the concept of freedom of expression, as their speech and acti
ons are determined by divine revelation and not based on people’s desires.
But even this is not enough for apologists of radical Islam. Those who cling to the “religion of peace” dogma argue that “submission” itself is a sign of peaceful intention. Submitting to the will of Allah is a personal choice made by every Muslim to help them find peace and tranquility. After all, they claim, many Christians speak about “surrendering” to God’s will. An academic project called “Muslim Voices” at the University of Indiana notes that “in Christianity, surrendering to God is a way of putting your life into more capable hands—in fact, Jesus asked many of his disciples to surrender their livelihoods and follow him.”
In addition to debating word origins and meaning, advocates of “Islam is peace” cite the highest authority possible, the Quran. Take, for example, President Obama’s 2009 Cairo speech. “The Holy Quran,” Obama said, “teaches that whoever kills an innocent, it is as if he has killed all mankind; and whoever saves a person, it is as if he has saved all mankind.”
If this were in fact the sum of what the Quran says on this topic, then President Obama would have a strong case—but it’s not. Obama, like many others, is misquoting the verse, found in Sura 5:32. Here is the actual translation:
Because of that We ordained for the Children of Israel that if anyone killed a person not in retaliation of murder, or (and) to spread mischief in the land—it would be as if he killed all mankind, and if anyone saved a life, it would be as if he saved the life of all mankind. And indeed, there came to them Our Messengers with clear proofs, evidences, and signs, even then after that many of them continued to exceed the limits (e.g., by doing oppression unjustly and exceeding beyond the limits set by Allah by committing the major sins) in the land!