In fact, this phrase surfaces in another passage that goes far beyond mere name-calling:
Fight against those who (1) believe not in Allah, (2) nor in the Last Day, (3) nor forbid that which has been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger (4) and those who acknowledge not the religion of truth (i.e., Islam) among the people of the Scripture (Jews and Christians), until they pay the Jizyah with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued. (Quran 9:29)
Subdued. That is the proper state, according to the Quran, for anyone who does not believe in Allah. Over the course of history, the process of “subduing” unbelievers has taken a number of forms.
Muslim armies of previous eras were not above slaughtering those they conquered who refused to “submit” to Islam. For example, Muhammad led his armies to slaughter hundreds of the males of the Jewish Banu Qurayzah tribe in Medina. The men were beheaded and the women and children were taken into slavery. When twenty thousand soldiers of the Ottoman Empire—the last caliphate—captured the city of Otranto, Italy, after a two-week siege in 1480, they killed 813 of its citizens who remained true to their Christian faith. The Martyrs of Otranto were among the first group of people to be canonized by Pope Francis in 2013.
There was also the massacre and enslavement of millions of Hindus on the Indian subcontinent in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the 1.5 million Christian Armenians killed in 1915, and the more recent beheadings of Christians by ISIS.
Death was not always the only option, however. Once conquered by a Muslim force, non-Muslims could also become a dhimmi—a “protected person”—who would still be allowed to live in the Muslim-run community. But dhimmi can also mean “guilty.” And for the guilty, there was a price for protection—often literally. Recall the Quran: “Fight . . . until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.” According to Hugh Kennedy of the University of London, this passage explains “that the People of the Book (that is Christian and Jews who have revealed scriptures) should be spared as long as they pay tribute and acknowledge their position as second class citizens.”
This “tribute” is the jizya, a tax paid by dhimmis that amounts essentially to blood money. Kennedy notes that dhimmis were also often required to pay poll taxes and other levies. In addition, dhimmis are known to have been subjected to other regulations such as restricted religious practices, required shows of deference to Muslims, and wearing distinctive clothing items.
Some Muslim rulers actually preferred to maintain control over a large number of dhimmis from whom they could extract jizya tribute, as opposed to forcing them to convert to Islam (which would eliminate their extra tax). “The produce of the jizya,” Kennedy notes, “was very useful because it was paid in cash. This became specially valuable in the years when structure of caliphal finance collapsed.”
This should all sound somewhat familiar. The soldiers of the Islamic State, today’s Caliphate, have systematically executed Christians, along with other Muslims, both inside and outside their conquered territory. In lawless Libya, for example, they have executed Christians and threatened the entire “nation of the cross.” In videos that went viral around the world, the narrator at one point says to Christians: “You pay (tax) with willing submission, feeling yourselves subdued.” He quotes almost directly from verse 9:29.
In Mosul, Iraq, the Christian community, which numbered in the tens of thousands, was given an ultimatum that would have made just as much sense to Christians facing Muslim conquest centuries ago. “We offer them three choices,” ISIS said of Mosul’s Christians. “Islam; the dhimma contract—involving payment of jizya; if they refuse this they will have nothing but the sword.” Christians abandoned Mosul in droves.
ISIS delivered an even worse fate to Iraq’s Yazidi minority, a community with an ancient faith tradition that combines elements of Christianity, Shiism, and ancient religions. Tens of thousands were forced to flee their homes in the Sinjar area of northern Iraq as ISIS forces advanced. Many sought refuge in the mountains and endured a brutal state of siege. When the soldiers of the Caliphate arrived, thousands of Yazidis were slaughtered and several thousand women and girls were captured for ISIS to hold as modern-day sex slaves. A “menu” was circulated listing the prices of Yazidi and Christian girls. A female prisoner between one and nine years old could be bought for $172. ISIS took pains to attempt to justify this practice by citing sharia law.
History is repeating itself. Once again, a Caliphate is demanding blood money from nonbelievers. Those who don’t pay up get “the sword.” But the justification for exacting payment of jizya has not changed; it’s right there in the Quran.
If that’s your idea of tolerance for other faiths then I’m afraid we have very different definitions of that word.
LIE #8
* * *
“ADDRESSING FRUSTRATION, POVERTY, JOBLESSNESS IN THE MUSLIM WORLD—MAYBE EVEN CLIMATE CHANGE—WILL END TERRORISM.”
“Efforts to counter violent extremism will only succeed if citizens can address legitimate grievances through the democratic process and express themselves through strong civil societies.”
—President Barack Obama
“We fight poverty because hope is an answer to terror.”
—President George W. Bush
“We need in the medium and longer term to go after the root causes that lead people to join these groups, [such as] lack of opportunity for jobs.”
—Marie Harf, State Department spokeswoman
“Severe drought helped to create the instability in Nigeria that was exploited by the terrorist group Boko Haram. . . . It’s now believed that drought, crop failures, and high food prices helped fuel the early unrest in Syria, which descended into civil war in the heart of the Middle East.”
—President Barack Obama
They are angry—and perhaps justifiably so.” This is a near-constant refrain we hear about the violent Islamist radicals who murder and brutalize innocent people, cut off journalists’ heads, and dismember children: these poor, sensitive souls are frustrated by their lot in life. They are mired in poverty, suffering at the hands of powerful rulers. They are suffering from droughts and crop failures caused by the CO2 emissions from your SUV. They are suffering because of colonialism. They are suffering because of racism. They are suffering because of Islamophobia.
The subtext is almost always that these terrorists are angry because of something America has done.
Maybe their brother was killed in a drone attack. Maybe they heard about a Quran being burned or flushed down the toilet at Guantánamo. Maybe they saw images on Al Jazeera of Palestinian refugees suffering at the hands of Israel’s bloodthirsty leaders—images that were probably not even taken in Gaza but are actually of violence in Syria at the hands of Bashar al-Assad. Or maybe they suffer because of the cruel, cynical bargains Western nations have made with Middle East dictators in a quest for oil.
Whatever the reason, the thinking goes, these angry young men need our help and our understanding. Author Bill Siegel has written masterfully about this tendency to blame ourselves for terrorist actions. In his book The Control Factor, Siegel suggests that when faced with a threat from radical Islam whose singular goal is our destruction, we tend to frame our perceptions in order to give us the impression we are in control of something we are not. Making ourselves the cause of the terrorists’ violence (because of oppressive colonial actions of the past, support for tyrannical powers in Muslim nations, occupation of Muslim lands, insulting of the Prophet, Israeli treatment of Palestinians, or occupation of disputed territories, failing to address Arab or Muslim poverty and lack of education, etc.), as uncomfortable as that may make us feel, is still less threatening than the realization that we are absolutely not in control. It lets us believe that since we are to blame, we can fix it by changing ourselves. The truth is that we are not and cannot.
Siegel explains that this compulsion to blame ourselves resembles the relationship between addicts and enablers. An addict typi
cally blames his behavior on the enabler, who accepts responsibility and endlessly searches for ways to fix it. Unfortunately, this spawns a deadly cycle that grows more intense: while the enabler believes in good faith that they are helping to right a wrong, the transfer and acceptance of responsibility only invites more of the same behavior. Only when we are fully able to see the threat for what it truly is, Siegel suggests, will we be able to muster the appropriate will and clarity to transform our relationship and fight it. Put simply, they come after us because we are not them; not because of anything we do.
As a result, terrorists continue to posture as victims. And we continue to fall for it.
There is an endemic need within many free people, particularly on the left, to try to empathize with those who hate us. To understand our enemies so that we can bring them around. To use the Marxist lenses of class struggle and income inequality to examine problems that have nothing to do with economics whatsoever. They revel in psychobabble so that they might be able to do something to lessen the anger these poor and unfortunate terrorists must be feeling and to assuage their own guilt for living a well-heeled life in a prosperous country.
That, at any rate, is the approach that President Obama has repeatedly taken since he first held public office. As a state senator in Illinois, Obama proclaimed, “Most often, though, [terrorism] grows out of a climate of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair.”
Referencing terrorist Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, Obama cited the plight of Abdulmutallab’s native country of Yemen: “We know . . . Yemen [is] a country grappling with crushing poverty and deadly insurgencies.”
“We cannot kill our way out of this war,” said State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf. “We need in the medium and longer term to go after the root causes that lead people to join these groups, whether it is lack of opportunity for jobs . . . We can help them build their economies so they can have job opportunities for these people.”
Many others on the left have followed this same line of thinking. Touré Neblett, one of the cohosts of MSNBC’s The Cycle, once said that “Muslim poverty is what threatens our security. Giving these men the chance to work here could diminish their poverty, their anger, and their misunderstanding of the U.S. before they are radicalized. . . .”
It’s easy to understand why some would prefer terrorists to be motivated by base emotions like anger. If someone is angry with you, you can talk to them. Reason with them. Address their grievances. It’s the equivalent of the foolish U.S. legislator who once said during World War II, “Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided.”
The problem with the idea that terrorists are attacking us because they are frustrated and angry about their status in life is that it just isn’t true. Terrorists aren’t attacking us because of our policies or past behavior or because we said something to offend them. They are attacking us because they are motivated by an ideology that urges them to kill in the name of God, that upholds martyrdom over life, that insists martyrdom will be rewarded with heavenly pleasures.
Let’s think for a moment about what the president is saying. Yes, the fact that you can’t vote in a meaningful election in Syria is terrible. If you have a grievance about that, it’s legitimate. But does that really have any impact on the thinking of lunatics who believe that murdering innocent people will get them a reward in heaven?
Would Osama bin Laden have called off 9/11 if he’d been given a voter registration card?
If poverty and anger at the establishment were the predominant motivation for terrorism, then there should be bombs and suicide attacks going on every day in parts of Washington, D.C., or Detroit or South Central Los Angeles.
Osama bin Laden, the author of one of the most effective acts of terrorism against the West in history, was a Saudi millionaire who, by some estimates, was worth $300 million. The Taliban, as rulers of Afghanistan, had it better than most of the people unfortunate enough to have been subjected to their brutal rule. That didn’t stop them from supporting terrorism.
Study after study has been done about those who join Islamic terrorist groups. In fact, one study by British researchers found that wealth and education were positive indicators for possible terrorist activities. Another survey of four hundred al-Qaeda terrorist biographies found that more than 60 percent of members had college degrees, and that many came from middle- or upper-class backgrounds. A study of Palestinian suicide bombers found that “[n]one of [the bombers] were uneducated, desperately poor, simple-minded, or depressed. Many were middle class and, unless they were fugitives, held paying jobs. . . . Two were the sons of millionaires.”
A 2004 Harvard study began with the “reasonable assumption that terrorism has its roots in poverty.” By the end, the study determined there was “no significant relationship” between economic conditions and terrorism. “In the past, we heard people refer to the strong link between terrorism and poverty,” said Alberto Abadie, associate professor of public policy at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, “but in fact when you look at the data, it’s not there. This is true not only for events of international terrorism, as previous studies have shown, but perhaps more surprisingly also for the overall level of terrorism, both of domestic and of foreign origin.”
Islam expressly forbids anger as a justification for jihad. Consider the words of James Cromitie, a New Jersey native who converted to Islam in prison and gave himself the name Abdul Rahman. In 2009, Cromitie was arrested by the FBI after attempting to organize a terror plot to blow up two New York synagogues and launch Stinger antiaircraft missiles at a National Guard base.
During his long conversations with an FBI confidential informant (CI), Cromitie discussed a confrontation he’d had with a Jewish man at his hotel.
CROMITIE: But sometime I just want to grab him and ahhh, just kill him. But, I’m Muslim, insha ‘Allah, Allah will take care of it.
CI: Insha ‘Allah, if you, brother, if you really have to do something, you have to do something in jihad, and try and do something . . .
CROMITIE: No, because, because you angry.
CI: Angry.
CROMITIE: No, you have to do it where it’s fisabilillah.
Fisabilillah. The phrase means, literally, “in the cause of Allah.” And, according to the Quran, it’s the only legitimate reason for a Muslim to engage in jihad.
Cromitie is not alone when he rejects a worldly motivation, such as anger, as a reason for killing. One of al-Qaeda’s earliest members, Sayyid Imam al-Sharif, also known as Dr. Fadl, wrote “Jihad and the Effects of Intention Upon It,” in which he cited Quranic verses and authentic hadiths in order to affirm that the desire for wealth, fame, glory, or petty emotions was not sufficient for a jihadist to obtain a heavenly reward.
Among the reported quotes of Muhammad and Hadith that Fadl cites is this one: “Whoever is killed beneath a blind banner, becoming angry for the group and fighting for the group, then he is not from my Ummah.” Despite the claims to the contrary by a sympathetic media, anger over colonialism or wounds from “foreign domination” isn’t the reason for jihadist violence. It’s just an excuse.
Instead, firmly based in Islamic theology, Fadl urged would-be terrorists:
So strive for righteous intentions so that you will benefit from your actions and your jihad. As the Shari’ah has made the rewards of Jihad contingent upon the correct intentions of the one performing . . .
In other words, terrorists lining up to don suicide vests because they’re angry or because they just got a pink slip at work are actually giving up their ticket to paradise.
Given this clear line, why are our Western leaders indulging in the dangerous fantasy that alleviating the anger and hopelessness that exist in the Muslim world would make everything fine? Because believing we are responsible for terrorism assuages the modern West’s profound sense of guilt and self-doubt. They want to believe that there is a way to end terrorism without violence; that if we just throw enoug
h money at the problem, it will eventually go away.
Of course that will not work. Terrorists’ grievances have less to do with personal anger and disaffection and more to do with the religious ideology they’ve sworn their lives to. This necessitates a fundamentally different approach. They cannot be appeased. They cannot be reasoned with. They cannot be bribed with better jobs or cars or democratic rights.
They can only be defeated.
LIE #9
* * *
“CRITICS OF ISLAM ARE BIGOTS.”
“I consider it part of my responsibility as president of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.”
—President Barack Obama
“Islamophobia is a growing phenomenon in our society that needs to be challenged through proactive efforts. Everyone needs to do their part.”
—CAIR national executive director Nihad Awad
On the afternoon of April 26, 2014, Paul Weston, a British candidate for election to the European Parliament, was arrested as he gave a speech in the city of Winchester. In the course of his remarks, Weston mentioned the “curses” of Islam, which he called “dreadful” for its devotees. He had deplored the idea that “every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property,” and argued that Islam “paralyses the social development of those who follow it.” He concluded by calling Islam “a militant and proselytizing faith.”
Weston was placed under arrest for “suspicion of religious/racial harassment” and was jailed for several hours before being released.
Many people quickly condemned Weston as an “Islamophobe” for his speech. It’s a trendy new phrase unleashed by apologists to scare people away from criticizing Islam.