Closer to Allah

by Richard Butrick (August 2016)

Jack Jenkins, senior religion reporter for ThinkProgress, made an important point regarding the evaluation of religions:

If you try to define a religion by what is in its text, you’re already on a fool’s errand. Religion is a community. Religion, whether it’s Islam or Christianity, whether it’s Hinduism, is a group of people that interpret things, whether that’s text, whether that’s different sorts of rituals and then move on from them.

Let me pursue this point and take the mindset or world view of a community of believers – the total impact of a religion’s texts, teachers, rituals and interaction with fellow believers – as being a legitimate basis for the evaluation thereof. Certainly there has to be enough there in the holy texts to shape a community in one direction or another and critics of Islam’s holy texts play a hugely important role in countering the pabulum pumped out on a regular basis by Islamic propaganda fronts like CAIR and world leaders like President Obama who maintains that Islam is  a religion of  “…  justice, progress, tolerance, and the dignity of all human beings.”  Evidently passages like the following,

Qur’an 9:29—Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the Religion of Truth, from among the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizyah with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.

are really an endorsement of the Golden Rule that one should do unto others as one would do unto oneself.

So yes. Critics of Islam’s holy texts, from Pamela Geller to Robert Spencer and websites like The Religion of Peace play an enormously important role. But from there, the issue is how it all plays out in the practice of the various community of followers. And that is what will be the emphasis here – how the religion of Islam shapes the mindset and behaviors of its followers – not that there is no variation and even serious community conflicts that beset the communities that profess its faith.

Certainly it will not be claimed here that there is a Hindu mindset or a Buddhist mindset or for that matter a Christian mindset in the strong sense that all such communities of believers are uniform. But it will be argued here that Islam is unique in producing a mindset among some of it followers that is not seen in any other modern religion.

Since the Barbary wars, leaders of various Muslim communities have claimed religious justification for raiding kafir communities to enslave and ransom their inhabitants and piracy to do the same with kafir commerce. The various Pasha’s, Mullah’s, Mufti’s and Sultans that led the Barbary Coast of north Africa (Tripoli, Tunis, Morocco and Algiers) claimed religious justification for raiding cargo ships, seizing their bounty and killing, ransoming and enslaving their crews. This Islamic community believed that it was their religious right and even duty to do so – the will of Allah.

In particular, while not widely known, the raids on Europe’s coastal towns for white slaves started as early as the 8^th century, extended from Italy to Iceland, and by the 20^th century may have totaled some 18 million:

The trade dates as far back as the 8th and 9th centuries, during the Fatimid Caliphate, the majority of slaves were Europeans (aka Saqaliba), all of whom were kidnapped or bought along Europe’s southern coasts during the Ottoman-European wars. All in all, between 650 – 1900 AD, an estimated 10 to 18 million people from Europe, Asia, and Africa were impressed into slavery by Barbary and Arab slave traders.

When Jefferson and John Adams went to call on Tripoli’s envoy to London, Ambassador Sidi Haji Abdrahaman, they asked him by what right he extorted money and took slaves in this way. As Jefferson later reported to Secretary of State John Jay, and to the Congress, the ambassador answered

that [the right] was founded on the Laws of the Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have answered their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Mussulman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.

That was his belief as inculcated since childhood by the community of believers and their teachers and by community interaction with his peers.

Let me, to use the hackneyed phrase, “fast forward” to the present. What has changed?

An article in The Atlantic Monthly last year, which argued that ISIS is not just Islamic but very Islamic, predictably created an uproar of indignation and accusations of fomenting Islamophobia from the usual suspects from the NYT to the Huffington Post. By contrast very little has been heard from the same quarters about the treatment of Yazidis, Christians and other religious minorities in Iraq – mustn’t criticize Muslims for fear of offending Muslim sensibilities or – that ultimate crime against humanity – fomenting Islamophobia.

But let me leave aside these obvious bases for criticizing Islamic practice and even leave aside terrorist acts – from 9/11 to the Boston Bomber to Hebdo, Bataclan (victims had their eyes gouged out and their testicles shoved in their mouth), Nice, Munich and still more. Instead, the case here will be argued just on the basis of the prevailing behavior and mindset of the young Muslim males regarding the rape of kafir girls.

In one day alone there were 1,200+ sexual assaults on German women by approximately 2k Muslim “immigrants.” Merkel’s reaction? To cut a deal with Facebook and Twitter so that next time Muslims commit thousands of sexual assaults, it will be much harder for the populace to get the news out through the digital curtain of dot com censorship and propaganda. And those fewer than 1% who do get “prosecuted”? The poor dears have just been miseducated and need courses in deportment and a gentle nudging into accepting the astounding concept that infidel women have feelings, sensibilities and rights.

There is no shortage of apologists for Islam that will insist that the mass rape and sexual abuse of European women by Muslim men in Cologne and elsewhere does not fit Koranic doctrine which basically only permits rape of captive women taken in battle (Ar-Rahim) but, as the intrepid Raymond Ibrahim points out, other interrelated Islamic doctrines command Muslim men to hate all non-Muslims and to see women—especially infidel women—as little more than sex objects (or, in the words of a Muslim who recently murdered a Christian girl in Pakistan for refusing him sex:

“Christian girls are only meant for one thing: the [sexual] pleasure of Muslim men.”

Indeed raping kafir girls is a religious act that brings the rapist closer to Allah, Or, in the words of a 12 year old Iraqi girl:

He told me that according to Islam he is allowed to rape an unbeliever. He said that by raping me, he is drawing closer to Allah.

Europe’s new immigrants who are convinced that infidel women are legitimate prey are the product of Islamic communities and the Muslim clerics that guide them. Islamic communities produce such creatures en masse regardless what Western apologists claim is the real Islam. Apologists may argue till they are blue in the face but the fact is there is enough there in Islamic holy books for clerics to indoctrinate and send their zombie rapists abroad to “propagate” the infidel sluts. They are not forthcoming under the aegis of any other religion. They are bred nowhere but in cultures and culture cells claiming the authority of Islam.

Matthew 7:20 So then, by their fruit you will recognize them.

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Dr. Richard Butrick is an American writer who has published in Mind, Philosophy of Science, Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic, International Journal of Computer Mathematics among others.

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