7 Reasons Why Islam is Dangerous

By Jason Sutherland

Although this is happening less often these days, I’m still discovering people who feel that all the criticism Islam cops is some kind of prejudice-driven conspiracy to smear an otherwise honourable religion. This week is the 10th anniversary of the World Trade Centre attacks, for anyone remembering this event to still believe Islam is peaceful displays an embarrassing level ignorance and intellectual laziness. I had hoped by now that most people would have found the time to go down to a book store to buy a copy of the Koran or at least borrowed a few books from the library about Islam and read up on it. Alas, intellectual laziness is forgiven in a society that doesn’t appreciate that a human being who is uninterested in the political/social going ons around them is as annoying as that lazy bum at work who won’t do anything. They hold up the political and social development for everyone, not because they’ve got an issue with progress, they’re just too lazy to contribute to the dialogue of progress.

This article is written as a quick reference to use when dealing with people who say things like, “Islam is a religion of peace,” “Islam is a beautiful religion with a noble message,” and “the terrorists have corrupted Islam”. A lot of people would look at a website like www.muslimsagainstcrusades.com and be horrified by the way they’re glorifying mass murder yet still, for fear of being called a racist, not allow them to accept this simple fact of life: Islam is dangerous. For these people, and the poor souls who have put up with these people, I have written this article.

1. Taqiyya Means Never Feeling Guilty for Lying

If you only read one section of this article, make sure it’s this one. In Islam there is a concept called “Taqiyya” where it is permissable to lie about Islam so long as it protects the faith or faithful. It comes directly out of the Koran 3:28:

Let not believers take disbelievers as allies rather than believers. And whoever [of you] does that has nothing with Allah , except when taking precaution against them in prudence. And Allah warns you of Himself, and to Allah is the [final] destination.

What this passage means is that Muslims aren’t allowed to be friends with non-Muslims unless they intend to exploit them. To fulfill this charge Muslims are allowed to lie about their religion. Strictly speaking this should only mean denying that they are in fact Muslim and pretending to be non-Muslim, however, in practice it means lying about aspects of Islam that upset non-Muslims like: Mohammed was a blood-thirsty tyrant who raped a 9 year old girl and invented the punishment of cutting off the hands and feet of petty criminals. All things practiced by devout Muslims to this day, but importantly, not by any other major religion no matter how poor and uneducated they may be.

What can we conclude from this? We simply cannot trust anything a Muslim tells us about their own religion because they’re allowed to lie about it. What’s worse, any Muslim who says they’re our friend could very well be purposely manipulating us, I know that sounds paranoid, but read what that passage in the Koran that says and keep in mind that the Koran is meant to be the literal word of Allah and cannot be questioned. We all know Christians who take turn the other cheek seriously, you can bet Muslims exist who take this seriously too.

2. Islam = Submission

For those of you who don’t know this, Islam means submission. It’s supposed to mean submission to Allah but since Allah doesn’t speak directly to anyone, not even Mohammed who had the arch-angel Gabriel act as intermissary, no one can be sure what it is Allah wants you to do. Muslims usually point out that the Koran is the literal word of Allah yet completely discount the possibility that Mohammed was 7th century Charles Manson and as such, his recitations of what the arch-angel told him might have been a load of self-serving sociopathic permissiveness. Like how Allah conveniently told Mohammed could temporarily acknowledge and pay his respects to the gods of Makkah and al-Madinah, yup, got to love a guy like Mohammed without the balls to stand up for his own faith. At least in the Jesus story the point is that it is better to die horribly for what you believe in than to tell a lie to save your own skin.

There is also this idea that submission is somehow virtuous, but it is merely temporarily pragmatic in the case of being threatened with violence and cowardly if you have a free choice. Submission is a violent act against the individual. A person who submits cannot agree or offer their advice, labour or company freely, they are compelled to because they have ceased to be an autonomous person but have become a slave. Submission means slavery, as anyone with a knowledge of BDSM knows, they would also know that it is degrading to be treated as such. Yet Islam is a religion that considers owning and dominating people to be virtuous. This opposes everything our culture’s ideal of equal, universal and inalienable human rights stands for. To endorse Islam is to surrender your human rights and dignity.

Allah tells Muslims to submit to his will or he will torture and torment you in the after life for eternity. Don’t be misled, that’s the same thing as me putting a gun to your head and telling you to give me all your money or I would kill you. Be smart, be brave, be proud and don’t submit.

3. Dhimmitude

You can always judge a religion by how well it treats it’s non-adherents. In Islam they have perfected the art of abolishing the dignity of non-adherents. They have developed this concise set of rules:

A. If they are Jewish or Christian, classify them as ‘dhimmis‘ and make them pay a special ‘tax’ (the jizya) to the Islamic endorsed government in return for not being murdered by Muslims. If they do not pay up then enslave, rob, rape and lynch them as you please.

B. If they are not Jewish nor Christian, then enslave, rob, rape and lynch them as you please.

C. If they are atheists. Kill them.

D. If they were Muslim and became apostates then kill them. Kill them now, with scalding water.

So the options are submit (slavery), submit (convert to Islam) or submit (be killed).

Charming religion.

4. Women and Law

There is nothing sadder than a woman defending Islam. This is where the horror of Stockholm syndrome shows itself most chillingly. Because the Koran is perfectly clear on these points:

Men are better than women:

“(Women) have rights similar to those (of men) over them in kindness, and men are a degree above them.” Sura 2:228

Men can have many wives:

“Marry of the women, who seem good to you, two or three or four.” Sura 4:3

Women are worth half a man:

“To the male the equivalent of the portion of two females, and if there be women more than two, then theirs is two-thirds of the inheritance, and if there be one (only) then the half.” Sura 4:11

“Unto the male is the equivalent of the share of two females.” Sura 4:176

Women’s sexuality is wrong and needs to be suppressed:

“As for those of your women who are guilty of lewdness, call to witness four of you against them. And if they testify (to the truth of the allegation) then confine them to the houses until death take them.” Sura 4:15

Selling a wife is perfectly OK:

“And if ye wish to exchange one wife for another and ye have given unto one of them a sum of money (however great), take nothing from it.” Sura 40:20

By now in this piece you should be able to get an idea of how the Islamic legal system calculates the value of individual human lives. If we put this on a table it looks like this:

Islam believes that the value of human beings can be measured

What this table means is that if a man rapes a woman then her testimony in court isn’t enough, realistically three Muslim women need to come forward as witnesses to convict one Muslim man of rape. If the women were atheists, they’d need at least 17 atheist women willing to come forward as witnesses to get a rape conviction on a single Muslim man. If you’re a woman and you’re raped by a Muslim in a Muslim country the consequences for failing to prove a charge of rape include being stoned to death for adultery so best not to complain if you’re raped.

5. Muslim Prayer Is Sick

In Christianity one prays for other people or if praying for yourself you pray to a saint to speak to god on your behalf. In other words, if you’re selfless or deserving the Christian God theoretically will listen to your prayers. This idea of prayer is actually almost unique to Christianity, yet Christians or atheists from previous/predominantly Christian societies don’t realise that Christian prayer is very different to Islamic prayer.

While Christians are busy thinking about other people or asking themselves if they deserve to be helped Muslims are praying in a completely different manner. Muslims are praying to God telling God how great, powerful, merciful, amazing, super-duper he is. If you ask me the Muslim God has some serious self-esteem issues if he needs constant reassurance of his omnipotence. If I was a religious person I would be embarrassed that my God needs a pep talk about 5 times to day otherwise he’ll torture me in hell. Psychologically this kind of prayer is deeply disturbing, don’t get me wrong, Christian prayer is bad too, but muslim prayer is borderline psychotic.

Also, Muslims aren’t allowed to pray with their arse facing Mecca because it might hurt their God’s feelings: hence they face Mecca to pray. This is fine since the Koran sees the world as flat. However, the Earth is not flat and consequently their arses, thanks to the Earth’s curve are always pointing to Mecca when they pray. If you want to point out that the curve means they can’t point their arses to Mecca, keep in mind that means they aren’t able to face Mecca when living outside Saudi Arabia either. So muslims fail at prayer and their God is apparently an insecure idiot.

6. Statistically Speaking: the most violent Religion

This is not a joke. This is not misinformation. This is not a lie. These are the statistical facts. Thanks to www.thereligionofpeace.com for keeping a record of as many confirmed Islamic terrorist attacks as humanly possible since September 11, 2001. Their data is not exhaustive of course because it doesn’t contain many attacks because they either weren’t reported or they include honour killings and judical killings like stoning or flogging people to death for petty crimes. However, what this data shows is that far from being a religion of peace, no other religion inspires nearly as much violence and bloodshed than Islam.

This graph shows that not a day goes by without an islamic terrorist attack somewhere in the world. Of course occasionally Christians, Hindus and Buddhists carry out a terrorist attack but in every recent case I’ve come across it was in response to Muslim violence against them. Even the Oslo murderer, who called himself a Christian, said his actions were necessary to fight Islam. Think of every Islamic dominated country and can you think of one of them that doesn’t have a bloody history of late? Besides Indonesia, none of them have a stable democracy, and in the case of Indonesia it’s still a young democracy that’s frequently rocked by religious violence.

Here we have the monthly casualties from Islam. Islamic terrorism has killed 150,000+ civilians since the World Trade Centre attack 10 years ago. The combined number of civilian deaths resulting from the Afghan and Iraq wars is approximately 80,000. Not all of these were killed by westerners either. The biggest difference here is that those 80,000 deaths were all unintended deaths whereas those 150,000+ were all planned, premediated and deliberate cold-blooded attacks on civilians. That’s the difference between accidentally dropping a loaded gun and killing someone and pointing the gun at someone and firing at them. Both are crimes, but the latter is far more serious.

Now, I’m personally against both the war in Afghanistan and retrospectively Iraq, because the statistics show that Muslims are far more interested in killing other Muslims than non-Muslims. Approximately 80% of the victims of those 150,000+ murders were Muslims, because they were the wrong Muslims: Shi’ites, Sunnis, Sufis etc…

Islam is so violent, they kill each other more than their supposed godless enemies. That’s not a spiritually enlightened state, that’s a suicidal and delusional state. A lot more non-Muslims would die, of course, if our police and intelligence services weren’t efficient in western countries. In non-western countries, religious violence doesn’t appear to be taken as seriously by police. This violence isn’t taken seriously by anyone who says Islam isn’t violent. Also, I hope people will appreciate the violence is worse now than it used to be.

7. Terrorists Aren’t Heretics, moderate Muslims Are

By this point in time I hope you’re appreciating that the moderate Muslims are just like the the moderate Christians: they don’t go to church/mosque and they don’t read the Bible/Koran. This is important, the terrorists do read the Koran and follow it faithfully, moderate Muslims by being tolerant to non-Muslims and women are clearly being heretics. The website I mentioned earlier (www.muslimsagainstcrusades.com) goes into great detail as to why Muslims who believe in secularism, democracy and women’s rights are disobeying Allah and the teachings of Islam. These people are Islamic scholars, they are an authority on this subject, not the typical tax-paying peaceful middle-class Muslim moderates you work with. To accept testimony from a moderate Muslim is to accept testimony on how to carry out surgery from a person only trained in first aid.

On a more sinister note: how moderate is moderate? Wikileaks exposed a diplomatic cable that revealed a report suppressed by the UK government that indicated that over a third of UK Muslims in university supported Islamic terrorism. In Pakistan democratic and liberal Muslim politicians are being murdered by their own people for not being Muslim enough. Pakistan now hires foreign mercenaries to protect their MPs because they can’t trust their own people not to assassinate them. Even in the UK, a Pakistani Muslim politician (naturalised UK) was threaten by Muslims for not being Muslim enough. Like Benazir Bhutto, Baroness Warsi is a prime candidate of death by irony.

And so I conclude, Islam is dangerous, and anyone who tells you otherwise needs to read the Koran, read these statistics and reconnect with reality. The sooner Islam is abolished the sooner we’ll have world peace and it won’t be abolished if we don’t recognise it as a problem that needs fixing. So pull your head out of your politically correct arse and reconnect with reality: Islam is a disease, it has no place in a civilised society and it isn’t racist to say such things.

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How Islam failed me

By Amil Imani

My name is Amil Imani, and I am a former Muslim from Iran. I am often asked why I left Islam and how did it happen. Looking back, I see no particular time or event that suddenly severed my link with Islam. There was nothing nearly as dramatic as what reportedly happened to Paul on the road to Damascus, transforming him from a rabid Christian persecutor to a devoted follower of Jesus.

My alienation from Islam had its seed in the way I was raised. My parents encouraged me to ask questions and to question everything, rather than telling me to shut up, as children are often told.

Never fully embraced Islam

Being born in a Muslim family in Iran, I was literally enveloped by Islam and everything Islamic. Many questions unavoidably kept popping in my mind, and I tried to find answers to them. More often than not, the answers I found tended to repel rather than attract me to Islam. I never fully embraced Islam. I didn't leave Islam. Islam simply failed to take me.

From very early on, I believed in a modified version of Occam's razor, also known as the lex parsimoniae or "law of parsimony." To me, an explanation with the fewest assumptions is either the correct one or the preferable one. The best answers, more often than not, are the simple ones. Islam, by contrast, seemed to supply numerous answers to the same questions in complex and confusing forms. A great many of the answers, it seemed to me, were improvisations of the clergy who took the freedom of saying what suited them. The Quran itself, being bewildering, helped the clergy in their muddled pronouncements.

My search for answers has taken me on a journey of discovery in the competing, crowded, and confusing marketplace of ideas. I noticed a universal human need to believe in some power or forces beyond ourselves and beyond the finite and the corporeal. If there were no God, we humans would make one up, it is said. I found out that, in this debate about this seemingly innate need to believe in a supernatural being, three major viewpoints have emerged: Monotheism, positing a single god who created the universe, set it in motion, and, according todeism, let it play out without interfering in it; polytheism, with many gods, sometimes requiring a "super-god" above the rest, "sorting them all out," so to speak; and atheism, characterized by dismissing any and all gods. (Other views included pantheism, humanism, freethought and mythicism.)

Of the three major camps, polytheism seemed to me the most attractive and yet troubling at the same time. And Islam's theism—"Allahism"—steeped in superstition, replete with nonsensical explanations and discriminatory sharia law, repulsed me. I discovered eventually that all the religious instruction I needed to guide my life was contained in the ancient Zoroastrian triad of good thoughts, good speech and good deeds, and I accepted the Universal Charter of Human Rights as their logical extension.

Going to the source: the Quran

Muslims contend that their faith is squarely based on the Quran and all other Islamic dogma should conform to theteaching of the Quran. They also claim that the Quran is a literal word of Allah and consider Allah the one and only creator of the entire universe. According to the Quran itself, Allah created the universe by one word of his mouth, in Arabic kon va yakoon—"be and became." These claims made my task somewhat simpler. My search was narrowed, and I focused myself fully on the Quran, aiming to understand it to the best of my ability, striving to find out what exactly Allah's words were.

Although I am not Arab, I know enough Arabic to go directly to the book of Allah and study it word by word. As I spent endless days studying the Quran, instead of becoming enlightened, I found myself more and more confused and bewildered. At that time, I ended up with the conviction that the Quran may indeed be the handiwork of Allah, as Muslims believe. But, in reality it is nothing more than a smallish book consisting of a collection of confusing verbiage, contradictory phrases and even outright errors of facts that purportedly the illiterate Mohammed authored over the course of some 20 years in a piecemeal fashion. I am certain that presenting the Quran for evaluation to a body of 100 of the greatest and most impartial scholars, fully versed in Arabic, will result in a verdict similar to my own conclusion.

As Quranic scholar Gerd-R. Puin says:

The Koran claims for itself that it is "mubeen," or clear. But if you look at it, you will notice that every fifth sentence or so simply doesn't make sense. Many Muslims and Orientalists will tell you otherwise, of course, but the fact is that a fifth of the Koranic text is just incomprehensible.

Moreover, the Quran is full of what could be called "hate speech" against non-Muslims. As summarized by Dr. Moorthy Muthuswamy:

About sixty-one percent of the contents of the Koran are found to speak ill of the unbelievers or call for their violent conquest; at best only 2.6 percent of the verses of the Koran are noted to show goodwill toward humanity. About seventy-five percent of Muhammad's biography (Sira) consists of jihad waged on unbelievers."

As an ethical and loving person, I just could not hate those billions of non-believing human beings, as required by holy writ.

"About sixty-one percent of the contents of the Koran are found to speak ill of the unbelievers or call for their violent conquest."

Time For Change

The 21st century presents great challenges and opportunities that demand new ways of thinking and behaving. The doctrine of Islam may have been appropriate for the desert dwellers of some 1,400 years ago, the people Muslims themselves stigmatize as "The Ignorant." However, Islam today is dysfunctional, to say the least. As a matter of fact, Islam went astray from the very beginning and inflicted a great deal of suffering on both its followers and those who resisted its advance.

Life is precious. It is to be protected, nurtured and celebrated. Mankind is moving, perhaps at a glacier pace, toward reconciliation and ever-expanding inclusiveness, without any group or ideology imposing itself on others. Any attempt against this trend of "unity in diversity" is doomed to failure, as exemplified by the demise of fascism and communism.

The Islamic "charter," the Quran, in many parts preaches discrimination, death and imposition of its dogma on everyone. The political system of Islam, just like fascism and communism, is likewise a dysfunctional ideology that needs to be abandoned. Humanity has matured considerably since the time of Muhammad. In order to continue its forward march, mankind must follow a roadmap appropriate for its age and state of development. It is foolish to insist that a book composed nearly a millennium and a half ago must serve as the one and only guide for humanity today.

"It is foolish to insist that a book composed nearly a millennium and a half ago must serve as the one and only guide for humanity today."

Islam as slavery

Islam is a slaveholder religion. It feels that it owns you; it condemns you as an apostate to be beheaded if you dare to leave its chains. Islam demands submission, which is the meaning of its name, and Muslims happily call themselves "slaves of Allah." In this regard, Islam also has a long history of actual slavery, justified by its texts. Non-Muslims, by contrast, respect the individual as a free human being and support one's inalienable right to believe whatever one wants to believe—even if it is a non-belief. If one still wishes to wrap oneself in this suffocating security blanket—Islam—then, I ask, please keep it to yourself and refrain from forcing it on others.

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The Fraud of Islam

By Amil Imani

From the primitive land of the Arabian Peninsula of over 14 centuries ago roseMuhammad, an illiterate hired hand of a rich widow Khadija, claiming he was the bearer of a perfect life prescription from God—the Quran. He claimed humanity could do no better than to follow its precepts as well as to emulate Muhammad’s own life example for a guarantee of bliss and salvation. In exchange for this, people had to embrace Islam—surrender—by surrendering their liberty to Muhammad.

Islam is the most successful fraud in the history of humanity and it is a great success. Millions of mullahs and imams keep the fraud going and over a billion and a half of the faithful pay for it. They pay in funds, labor and even life, for the IOUs issued to them by the Islamic organizations that glide through life without breaking a sweat for earning their daily bread. Islam is a fraud and Muslims are the victims.

Muhammad, during his Mecca years, was ridiculed for his confused sayings by his own tribe of Quraish. He was called “shaeron majnoon”—crazed poet.

The death of his first wife and wealthy employer Khadija left Muhammad even more vulnerable to the ridicule and harassment of the Meccans. He fled from Mecca to Medina and in the relative safety of that city with a large tolerant Jewish community, Muhammad found more people willing to join his clique.

Once in Medina, Muhammad hit on a most powerful formula for success. He justified everything by claiming that Allah wanted it this way. And Allah was nothing to trifle with. He held the key to the most magnificent paradise as well as to a dreadful hell. The duty of every good Muslim became unquestioning obedience to everything that Muhammad said and wished. Muhammad became Allah’s gatekeeper to paradise and hell.

Muhammad’s formula worked magic with the Bedouins of Arabia who thrived on robbery and killing. His religion spread like a pandemic disease in no time at all.

As Muhammad gathered more and more followers, he turned on the Jewish community of Medina, killed the men, plundered their belongings, and captured their women and children as slaves. That was the birth of “Jihad.” Be meek and deceptive first, until you gather enough power then unsheathe the sword. It worked then and it is working today.

In no time at all, the savages of Arabia, allured by the win-win promise of Muhammad—you kill you get the booty from your victims in this world—you get killed and your abode will be the unimaginably glorious sensuous paradise of Allah—sword-in-hand, sallied forth to lands near and far.

Mind Control

As humans, our two legs move us along, but it is our minds that tell us which path to take in life and what to do. As the mind commands so goes the person. Yet, for humans, the mind does not arrive in this world with a set program of instructions. Contrary to many beliefs, we are born neither as demons nor as angels. Within each one of us is a potential for a demon or an angel. Many evolve into a mix of the two, a few fortunate mature into truly angelic and some become personifications of evil. It is the mind’s program that plays the critical role in making us what we are.

Islam, from its inception, discovered the crucial secret of getting to the young mind early by adhering to the dictum: Instruction in early childhood is akin to carving in a rock. In the same vein goes the Jesuit saying, “Give me a child until he is seven, and I will give you the man,” derived from the philosophy and theology of Saint Augustine. The immense importance of getting early to the young mind is also emphasized by non-religious doctrines as diverse as the Freudian psychoanalytic theory and Watsonian Behaviorist psychology.

Islam Apologists

And here we are in the 21st century facing the onslaught of the Islamists, jihadist and Islam apologists in our culture and way of life. These are the fruits of the tree of fraud, planted by Muhammad some 1400 years ago.

Self-described doctors of Islamic religion universally practice sugarcoating the fraud of Islam. They keep ranting about the importance of accepting things on faith, denigrate reason, dangle carrots and sticks, and demand unconditional surrender in return for guaranteed bliss and salvation. The masses toe the line, support the clergy’s lavish parasitic lifestyle and the charade continues. It works like a charm. Use the Jihad of the sword when it can and use the “Soft Jihad” until the sword can be unsheathed to finish the job. And don’t forget, the end justifies any and all means, Islam apologists keep on preaching to the hordes.

Islam apologists never present the naked face of Islam. They never speak of the Islamthat thrives on hate, throws acid in the face of women who fail to don the hijab or girls going to school; flogging people for sporting non-Islamic haircuts,  stoning to death, violators of sexual norms and other forms of Islamic brutalities such as honor killing. They never talk about institutionalized pedophilia in Islam.

The prophet Muhammad “married” a six-year old child and consummated the marriage when Ayesha was only nine, when he himself was pushing sixty. When apologists are confronted with this repulsive behavior of the founder of their “perfect religion,” a few exercise the defense mechanism of denial and say it did not happen, dismissing their own most trusted historical record. Some say that it wasn’t exactly marriage. It was a politically expedient act, an act of the perfect emissary of Allah. Then we have numerous instances of the same child molestation happening in the Islamic world ever since the example set by Muhammad. It is a kind of marriage of pre-pubescent girls to older men. It was not long ago, Dr. Salih bin Fawzan, a prominent cleric and member of Saudi Arabia’s highest religious council, issued a fatwa proclaiming that there is no minimum age for marriage, and that girls can be married “even if they are in the cradle.”

Adding insult to injury, Islam has powerful and unwitting allies in the masses of good-hearted gullible Americans who bend over backwards to protect the long cherished principle of religious freedom. And it is this magnificent provision of our society that made Hillary Clinton, for example, reissues a visa to the likes of Tariq Ramadan who come to exploit the benign provisions of a benevolent system for establishing Islamic enslavement.

Political Islam

Islam is political to the core. In Islam the mosque and State are one and the same—the mosque is the State. This arrangement goes back to the days of Muhammad himself. Islam is also radical in the extreme. Even the “moderate” Islam is radical in its beliefs as well as its deeds. Muslims believe that all non-Muslims, bar none, are hellfire bound and well deserve being maltreated compared to believers.

A true Muslim does not and cannot believe in liberty. Everything is up to Allah, so says Mohammad. Everything that a Muslim does is contingent upon the will and decree of Allah. It is for this reason that the phrase Enshallah (Allah willing) always accompanies any promise or commitment that a believer makes. By embracing Muhammad as the unerring and eternal emissary of Allah, a Muslim surrenders his liberty to decide for himself.

Muslims and Liberty

A Muslim’s surrender of liberty is not merely a matter of personal choice. Muslims abandon their most precious rights and are out to make all non-Muslims also do so, by hook or crook. It is said that misery loves company. And the type of misery that the fraud of Islam has visited on Muslims and the Islamic lands is a rapidly spreading plague that must be resisted by all who cherish their God-given liberty.

In spite of massive propaganda by Islamic organizations, more and more people are beginning to recognize Islam for what it is: A Fraud.

I challenge all cultural Muslims or any other kind of Muslim who is not a jihadist, to courageously do what is right, and take that fateful step; inhale the life-nurturing fragrance of freedom, abandon the fraud of Islam altogether and enlist in the ranks of the free where all members of the human tribe can live in peace and harmony.

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A Rational Fear of Islamism

Not all fears are irrational, nor criticism unwarranted.

By Robert Spencer & David Horowitz

In recent months, several reports have appeared to a generally uncritical reception in the press, which purport to expose alleged conspiracies organized by “Islamophobes” against American citizens who mean us no harm. These reports single out for condemnation a dozen prominent conservative figures (and mostly the same dozen) who have publicly criticized the misogyny, bigotry, and terrorism promoted by many (but not all) Islamic institutions and religious texts.

The term “Islamophobia” itself was invented by the Muslim Brotherhood, which is the political fountainhead of Islamic terror, having spawned al-Qaeda and created Hamas. Not coincidently, the reports themselves have been produced by Brotherhood fronts like CAIR, and jihadist apologists like the Southern Poverty Law Center. But the latest and most elaborate Islamophobia report, transparently derivative of its predecessors, has been issued by the Center for American Progress, which is a brain trust of the Democratic party. It thus marks a disturbing development in this ugly campaign.

On examination, the term “Islamophobia” is designed to create a modern-day thought crime, while the campaign to suppress it is an effort to abolish the First Amendment where Islam is concerned. The purpose of the suffix — phobia — is to identify any concern about troubling Islamic institutions and actions as irrational, or worse as a dangerous bigotry that should itself be feared.

Is fear of terrorists inspired by Islam irrational? There have been 17,800 terrorist attacks carried out by Muslims in the name of Allah since 9/11. Is it unreasonable to be concerned that 30,000 shoulder-ready surface-to-air missiles have recently gone missing in the Muslim nation of Libya, where both government and rebels support the Islamic jihad against America and the West?

Would not a reasonable person be concerned about the attacks plotted and carried out by Muslims in the United States who claim to be inspired by the Koran and who regard themselves as holy warriors in the jihad declared by Osama bin Laden and other Muslim fanatics? These Muslim attacks include the successful massacre of unarmed American soldiers at Fort Hood by Nidal Hassan, a self-declared Muslim warrior whose anti-infidel rantings were ignored by the military brass.

These Muslim terrorists include Naser Abdo, the would-be second Fort Hood jihad mass murderer; and Khalid Aldawsari, the would-be jihad mass murderer in Lubbock, Texas; and Muhammad Hussain, the would-be jihad bomber in Baltimore; and Mohamed Mohamud, the would-be jihad bomber in Portland; and Faisal Shahzad, the would-be Times Square jihad mass-murderer; and Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, the Arkansas military recruiting station jihad murderer; and Naveed Haq, the jihad mass murderer at the Jewish Community Center in Seattle; and Mohammed Reza Taheri-Azar, the would-be jihad mass murderer in Chapel Hill, North Carolina; and Ahmed Ferhani and Mohamed Mamdouh, who hatched a jihad plot to blow up a Manhattan synagogue; and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the would-be Christmas airplane jihad bomber; and many others.

If the FBI and law-enforcement agencies had not had serious fears of Muslim fanatics, had not been possessed by a species of “Islamophobia,” all those would-be terrorist attacks would be successful attacks and carry long lists of dead innocents — infidels — along with their names.

Should those of us who are infidels — and therefore targets — not be concerned by a religion whose followers regard this Koranic incitement as the word of God: “Slay the pagans wherever you find them.” (9:5)?

Should Jews not be concerned by the Jew-hatred that permeates the sacred texts of this religion, whose prophet has said: “The last hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them, until the Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would say: O Muslim, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him” (Sahih Muslim 6985)?

Should Jews not be concerned that this genocidal incitement is enshrined in the Hamas charter and defines the agenda of an armed force that is supported by dozens of Muslim states and many factions of the international left?

Should women not fear the expansion of a creed whose God likens a woman to a field men can till: “Your women are a field for you (to cultivate) so go to your field as ye will.” (Koran 2:223)? This God has decreed that a woman’s testimony is worth half that of a man (2:282), that men can marry up to four wives, and have sex with slave girls (4:3), that a son’s inheritance shall be twice the size of daughter’s (4:11), and that husbands can and should beat their disobedient wives: “Good women are obedient…. As for those from whom you fear disobedience, admonish them and send them to beds apart and beat them.” (4:34).This God sanctions marriage to pre-pubescent girls, stipulating that Islamic divorce procedures “shall apply to those who have not yet menstruated” (65:4). Islamic law codifies all this and adds from Islamic tradition justification for honor killing, female genital mutilation, and even the prohibition of women leaving their homes without permission from a male guardian.

Gays fare no better. As Sheikh Khalid Yasin, an Islamic preacher sponsored by the Muslim Students Association, said in 2005: “God is very straightforward about this — not we Muslims, not subjective, the Sharia is very clear about it, the punishment for homosexuality, bestiality or anything like that is death. We don’t make any excuses about that, it’s not our law — it’s the Koran.” Hossein Alizadeh of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission has said that in Iran gays live with “constant fear of execution and persecution and also social stigma associated with homosexuality.” This is true not only in Iran, but in all too many areas of the Islamic world. Is gays’ fear of Islamic institutions and governments irrational? Phobic?

Finally, there is the failure of any Muslim state or authority to condemn the calls of Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah and Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for the extermination of America and Israel. The mainstream media constantly assumes that Muslims don’t take their words seriously, and that there exists a large population of moderate Muslims who reject the excesses of these violent leaders. Yet these moderates have maintained their silence in the face of the genocidal calls in the name of their God. They have failed to mount a campaign to condemn and counter the Jew-hatred expressed by their spiritual leaders, and broadcast by their government-sponsored media organizations, and taught in their schools.

What is truly irrational is not the fear of these very real threats, but the fear of those who point out these threats and whom the Muslim Brotherhood and its enablers have demonized as “Islamophobes.” What is irrational is the failure to recognize danger when it stares you in the face, and the attempt to silence those who have the temerity to attempt to warn you before it is too late.

The Revolt of Islam

When did the conflict with the West begin, and how could it end?

By Bernard Lewis

Making History

President Bush and other Western politicians have taken great pains to make it clear that the war in which we are engaged is a war against terrorism—not a war against Arabs, or, more generally, against Muslims, who are urged to join us in this struggle against our common enemy. Osama bin Laden's message is the opposite. For bin Laden and those who follow him, this is a religious war, a war for Islam and against infidels, and therefore, inevitably, against the United States, the greatest power in the world of the infidels.

In his pronouncements, bin Laden makes frequent references to history. One of the most dramatic was his mention, in the October 7th videotape, of the "humiliation and disgrace" that Islam has suffered for "more than eighty years." Most American—and, no doubt, European—observers of the Middle Eastern scene began an anxious search for something that had happened "more than eighty years" ago, and came up with various answers. We can be fairly sure that bin Laden's Muslim listeners—the people he was addressing—picked up the allusion immediately and appreciated its significance. In 1918, the Ottoman sultanate, the last of the great Muslim empires, was finally defeated—its capital, Constantinople, occupied, its sovereign held captive, and much of its territory partitioned between the victorious British and French Empires. The Turks eventually succeeded in liberating their homeland, but they did so not in the name of Islam but through a secular nationalist movement. One of their first acts, in November, 1922, was to abolish the sultanate. The Ottoman sovereign was not only a sultan, the ruler of a specific state; he was also widely recognized as the caliph, the head of all Sunni Islam, and the last in a line of such rulers that dated back to the death of the Prophet Muhammad, in 632 A.D. After a brief experiment with a separate caliph, the Turks, in March, 1924, abolished the caliphate, too. During its nearly thirteen centuries, the caliphate had gone through many vicissitudes, but it remained a potent symbol of Muslim unity, even identity, and its abolition, under the double assault of foreign imperialists and domestic modernists, was felt throughout the Muslim world.

Historical allusions such as bin Laden's, which may seem abstruse to many Americans, are common among Muslims, and can be properly understood only within the context of Middle Eastern perceptions of identity and against the background of Middle Eastern history. Even the concepts of history and identity require redefinition for the Westerner trying to understand the contemporary Middle East. In current American usage, the phrase "that's history" is commonly used to dismiss something as unimportant, of no relevance to current concerns, and, despite an immense investment in the teaching and writing of history, the general level of historical knowledge in our society is abysmally low. The Muslim peoples, like everyone else in the world, are shaped by their history, but, unlike some others, they are keenly aware of it. In the nineteen-eighties, during the Iran-Iraq war, for instance, both sides waged massive propaganda campaigns that frequently evoked events and personalities dating back as far as the seventh century. These were not detailed narratives but rapid, incomplete allusions, and yet both sides employed them in the secure knowledge that they would be understood by their target audiences—even by the large proportion of that audience that was illiterate. Middle Easterners' perception of history is nourished from the pulpit, by the schools, and by the media, and, although it may be—indeed, often is—slanted and inaccurate, it is nevertheless vivid and powerfully resonant.

But history of what? In the Western world, the basic unit of human organization is the nation, which is then subdivided in various ways, one of which is by religion. Muslims, however, tend to see not a nation subdivided into religious groups but a religion subdivided into nations. This is no doubt partly because most of the nation-states that make up the modern Middle East are relatively new creations, left over from the era of Anglo-French imperial domination that followed the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, and they preserve the state-building and frontier demarcations of their former imperial masters. Even their names reflect this artificiality: Iraq was a medieval province, with borders very different from those of the modern republic; Syria, Palestine, and Libya are names from classical antiquity that hadn't been used in the region for a thousand years or more before they were revived and imposed by European imperialists in the twentieth century; Algeria and Tunisia do not even exist as words in Arabic—the same name serves for the city and the country. Most remarkable of all, there is no word in the Arabic language for Arabia, and modern Saudi Arabia is spoken of instead as "the Saudi Arab kingdom" or "the peninsula of the Arabs," depending on the context. This is not because Arabic is a poor language—quite the reverse is true—but because the Arabs simply did not think in terms of combined ethnic and territorial identity. Indeed, the caliph Omar, the second in succession after the Prophet Muhammad, is quoted as saying to the Arabs, "Learn your genealogies, and do not be like the local peasants who, when they are asked who they are, reply: 'I am from such-and-such a place.' "

In the early centuries of the Muslim era, the Islamic community was one state under one ruler. Even after that community split up into many states, the ideal of a single Islamic polity persisted. The states were almost all dynastic, with shifting frontiers, and it is surely significant that, in the immensely rich historiography of the Islamic world in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish, there are histories of dynasties, of cities, and, primarily, of the Islamic state and community, but no histories of Arabia, Persia, or Turkey. Both Arabs and Turks produced a vast literature describing their struggles against Christian Europe, from the first Arab incursions in the eighth century to the final Turkish retreat in the twentieth. But until the modern period, when European concepts and categories became dominant, Islamic commentators almost always referred to their opponents not in territorial or ethnic terms but simply as infidels (kafir). They never referred to their own side as Arab or Turkish; they identified themselves as Muslims. This perspective helps to explain, among other things, Pakistan's concern for the Taliban in Afghanistan. The name Pakistan, a twentieth-century invention, designates a country defined entirely by its Islamic religion. In every other respect, the country and people of Pakistan are—as they have been for millennia—part of India. An Afghanistan defined by its Islamic identity would be a natural ally, even a satellite, of Pakistan. An Afghanistan defined by ethnic nationality, on the other hand, could be a dangerous neighbor, advancing irredentist claims on the Pashto-speaking areas of northwestern Pakistan and perhaps even allying itself with India.

The House of War

In the course of human history, many civilizations have risen and fallen—China, India, Greece, Rome, and, before them, the ancient civilizations of the Middle East. During the centuries that in European history are called medieval, the most advanced civilization in the world was undoubtedly that of Islam. Islam may have been equalled—or even, in some ways, surpassed—by India and China, but both of those civilizations remained essentially limited to one region and to one ethnic group, and their impact on the rest of the world was correspondingly restricted. The civilization of Islam, on the other hand, was ecumenical in its outlook, and explicitly so in its aspirations. One of the basic tasks bequeathed to Muslims by the Prophet was jihad. This word, which literally means "striving," was usually cited in the Koranic phrase "striving in the path of God" and was interpreted to mean armed struggle for the defense or advancement of Muslim power. In principle, the world was divided into two houses: the House of Islam, in which a Muslim government ruled and Muslim law prevailed, and the House of War, the rest of the world, still inhabited and, more important, ruled by infidels. Between the two, there was to be a perpetual state of war until the entire world either embraced Islam or submitted to the rule of the Muslim state.

From an early date, Muslims knew that there were certain differences among the peoples of the House of War. Most of them were simply polytheists and idolaters, who represented no serious threat to Islam and were likely prospects for conversion. The major exception was the Christians, whom Muslims recognized as having a religion of the same kind as their own, and therefore as their primary rival in the struggle for world domination—or, as they would have put it, world enlightenment. It is surely significant that the Koranic and other inscriptions on the Dome of the Rock, one of the earliest Muslim religious structures outside Arabia, built in Jerusalem between 691 and 692 A.D., include a number of directly anti-Christian polemics: "Praise be to God, who begets no son, and has no partner," and "He is God, one, eternal. He does not beget, nor is he begotten, and he has no peer." For the early Muslims, the leader of Christendom, the Christian equivalent of the Muslim caliph, was the Byzantine emperor in Constantinople. Later, his place was taken by the Holy Roman Emperor in Vienna, and his in turn by the new rulers of the West. Each of these, in his time, was the principal adversary of the jihad.

In practice, of course, the application of jihad wasn't always rigorous or violent. The canonically obligatory state of war could be interrupted by what were legally defined as "truces," but these differed little from the so-called peace treaties the warring European powers signed with one another. Such truces were made by the Prophet with his pagan enemies, and they became the basis of what one might call Islamic international law. In the lands under Muslim rule, Islamic law required that Jews and Christians be allowed to practice their religions and run their own affairs, subject to certain disabilities, the most important being a poll tax that they were required to pay. In modern parlance, Jews and Christians in the classical Islamic state were what we would call second-class citizens, but second-class citizenship, established by law and the Koran and recognized by public opinion, was far better than the total lack of citizenship that was the fate of non-Christians and even of some deviant Christians in the West. The jihad also did not prevent Muslim governments from occasionally seeking Christian allies against Muslim rivals—even during the Crusades, when Christians set up four principalities in the Syro-Palestinian area. The great twelfth-century Muslim leader Saladin, for instance, entered into an agreement with the Crusader king of Jerusalem, to keep the peace for their mutual convenience.

Under the medieval caliphate, and again under the Persian and Turkish dynasties, the empire of Islam was the richest, most powerful, most creative, most enlightened region in the world, and for most of the Middle Ages Christendom was on the defensive. In the fifteenth century, the Christian counterattack expanded. The Tatars were expelled from Russia, and the Moors from Spain. But in southeastern Europe, where the Ottoman sultan confronted first the Byzantine and then the Holy Roman Emperor, Muslim power prevailed, and these setbacks were seen as minor and peripheral. As late as the seventeenth century, Turkish pashas still ruled in Budapest and Belgrade, Turkish armies were besieging Vienna, and Barbary corsairs were raiding lands as distant as the British Isles and, on one occasion, in 1627, even Iceland.

Then came the great change. The second Turkish siege of Vienna, in 1683, ended in total failure followed by headlong retreat—an entirely new experience for the Ottoman armies. A contemporary Turkish historian, Silihdar Mehmet Aga, described the disaster with commendable frankness: "This was a calamitous defeat, so great that there has been none like it since the first appearance of the Ottoman state." This defeat, suffered by what was then the major military power of the Muslim world, gave rise to a new debate, which in a sense has been going on ever since. The argument began among the Ottoman military and political élite as a discussion of two questions: Why had the once victorious Ottoman armies been vanquished by the despised Christian enemy? And how could they restore the previous situation?

There was good reason for concern. Defeat followed defeat, and Christian European forces, having liberated their own lands, pursued their former invaders whence they had come, the Russians moving into North and Central Asia, the Portuguese into Africa and around Africa to South and Southeast Asia. Even small European powers such as Holland and Portugal were able to build vast empires in the East and to establish a dominant role in trade.

For most historians, Middle Eastern and Western alike, the conventional beginning of modern history in the Middle East dates from 1798, when the French Revolution, in the person of Napoleon Bonaparte, landed in Egypt. Within a remarkably short time, General Bonaparte and his small expeditionary force were able to conquer, occupy, and rule the country. There had been, before this, attacks, retreats, and losses of territory on the remote frontiers, where the Turks and the Persians faced Austria and Russia. But for a small Western force to invade one of the heartlands of Islam was a profound shock. The departure of the French was, in a sense, an even greater shock. They were forced to leave Egypt not by the Egyptians, nor by their suzerains the Turks, but by a small squadron of the British Royal Navy, commanded by a young admiral named Horatio Nelson. This was the second bitter lesson the Muslims had to learn: not only could a Western power arrive, invade, and rule at will but only another Western power could get it out.

By the early twentieth century—although a precarious independence was retained by Turkey and Iran and by some remoter countries like Afghanistan, which at that time did not seem worth the trouble of invading—almost the entire Muslim world had been incorporated into the four European empires of Britain, France, Russia, and the Netherlands. Middle Eastern governments and factions were forced to learn how to play these mighty rivals off against one another. For a time, they played the game with some success. Since the Western allies—Britain and France and then the United States—effectively dominated the region, Middle Eastern resisters naturally looked to those allies' enemies for support. In the Second World War, they turned to Germany; in the Cold War, to the Soviet Union.

And then came the collapse of the Soviet Union, which left the United States as the sole world superpower. The era of Middle Eastern history that had been inaugurated by Napoleon and Nelson was ended by Gorbachev and the elder George Bush. At first, it seemed that the era of imperial rivalry had ended with the withdrawal of both competitors: the Soviet Union couldn't play the imperial role, and the United States wouldn't. But most Middle Easterners didn't see it that way. For them, this was simply a new phase in the old imperial game, with America as the latest in a succession of Western imperial overlords, except that this overlord had no rival—no Hitler or Stalin—whom they could use either to damage or to influence the West. In the absence of such a patron, Middle Easterners found themselves obliged to mobilize their own force of resistance. Al Qaeda—its leaders, its sponsors, its financiers—is one such force.

"The Great Satan"

America's new role—and the Middle East's perception of it—was vividly illustrated by an incident in Pakistan in 1979. On November 20th, a band of a thousand Muslim religious radicals seized the Great Mosque in Mecca and held it for a time against the Saudi security forces. Their declared aim was to "purify Islam" and liberate the holy land of Arabia from the royal "clique of infidels" and the corrupt religious leaders who supported them. Their leader, in speeches played from loudspeakers, denounced Westerners as the destroyers of fundamental Islamic values and the Saudi government as their accomplices. He called for a return to the old Islamic traditions of "justice and equality." After some hard fighting, the rebels were suppressed. Their leader was executed on January 9, 1980, along with sixty-two of his followers, among them Egyptians, Kuwaitis, Yemenis, and citizens of other Arab countries.

Meanwhile, a demonstration in support of the rebels took place in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad. A rumor had circulated—endorsed by Ayatollah Khomeini, who was then in the process of establishing himself as the revolutionary leader in Iran—that American troops had been involved in the clashes in Mecca. The American Embassy was attacked by a crowd of Muslim demonstrators, and two Americans and two Pakistani employees were killed. Why had Khomeini stood by a report that was not only false but wildly improbable?

These events took place within the context of the Iranian revolution of 1979. On November 4th, the United States Embassy in Teheran had been seized, and fifty-two Americans were taken hostage; those hostages were then held for four hundred and forty-four days, until their release on January 20, 1981. The motives for this, baffling to many at the time, have become clearer since, thanks to subsequent statements and revelations from the hostage-takers and others. It is now apparent that the hostage crisis occurred not because relations between Iran and the United States were deteriorating but because they were improving. In the fall of 1979, the relatively moderate Iranian Prime Minister, Mehdi Bazargan, had arranged to meet with the American national-security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, under the aegis of the Algerian government. The two men met on November 1st, and were reported to have been photographed shaking hands. There seemed to be a real possibility—in the eyes of the radicals, a real danger—that there might be some accommodation between the two countries. Protesters seized the Embassy and took the American diplomats hostage in order to destroy any hope of further dialogue.

For Khomeini, the United States was "the Great Satan," the principal adversary against whom he had to wage his holy war for Islam. America was by then perceived—rightly—as the leader of what we like to call "the free world." Then, as in the past, this world of unbelievers was seen as the only serious force rivalling and preventing the divinely ordained spread and triumph of Islam. But American observers, reluctant to recognize the historical quality of the hostility, sought other reasons for the anti-American sentiment that had been intensifying in the Islamic world for some time. One explanation, which was widely accepted, particularly in American foreign-policy circles, was that America's image had been tarnished by its wartime and continuing alliance with the former colonial powers of Europe.

In their country's defense, some American commentators pointed out that, unlike the Western European imperialists, America had itself been a victim of colonialism; the United States was the first country to win freedom from British rule. But the hope that the Middle Eastern subjects of the former British and French Empires would accept the American Revolution as a model for their own anti-imperialist struggle rested on a basic fallacy that Arab writers were quick to point out. The American Revolution was fought not by Native American nationalists but by British settlers, and, far from being a victory against colonialism, it represented colonialism's ultimate triumph—the English in North America succeeded in colonizing the land so thoroughly that they no longer needed the support of the mother country.

It is hardly surprising that former colonial subjects in the Middle East would see America as being tainted by the same kind of imperialism as Western Europe. But Middle Eastern resentment of imperial powers has not always been consistent. The Soviet Union, which extended the imperial conquests of the tsars of Russia, ruled with no light hand over tens of millions of Muslim subjects in Central Asian states and in the Caucasus; had it not been for American opposition and the Cold War, the Arab world might well have shared the fate of Poland and Hungary, or, more probably, that of Uzbekistan. And yet the Soviet Union suffered no similar backlash of anger and hatred from the Arab community. Even the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in 1979—a clear case of imperialist aggression, conquest, and domination—triggered only a muted response in the Islamic world. The P.L.O. observer at the United Nations defended the invasion, and the Organization of the Islamic Conference did little to protest it. South Yemen and Syria boycotted a meeting held to discuss the issue, Libya delivered an attack on the United States, and the P.L.O. representative abstained from voting and submitted his reservations in writing. Ironically, it was the United States, in the end, that was left to orchestrate an Islamic response to Soviet imperialism in Afghanistan.

As the Western European empires faded, Middle Eastern anti-Americanism was attributed more and more to another cause: American support for Israel, first in its conflict with the Palestinian Arabs, then in its conflict with the neighboring Arab states and the larger Islamic world. There is certainly support for this hypothesis in Arab statements on the subject. But there are incongruities, too. In the nineteen-thirties, Nazi Germany's policies were the main cause of Jewish migration to Palestine, then a British mandate, and the consequent reinforcement of the Jewish community there. The Nazis not only permitted this migration; they facilitated it until the outbreak of the war, while the British, in the somewhat forlorn hope of winning Arab good will, imposed and enforced restrictions. Nevertheless, the Palestinian leadership of the time, and many other Arab leaders, supported the Germans, who sent the Jews to Palestine, rather than the British, who tried to keep them out.

The same kind of discrepancy can be seen in the events leading to and following the establishment of the State of Israel, in 1948. The Soviet Union played a significant role in procuring the majority by which the General Assembly of the United Nations voted to establish a Jewish state in Palestine, and then gave Israel immediate de-jure recognition. The United States, however, gave only de-facto recognition. More important, the American government maintained a partial arms embargo on Israel, while Czechoslovakia, at Moscow's direction, immediately sent a supply of weaponry, which enabled the new state to survive the attempts to strangle it at birth. As late as the war of 1967, Israel still relied for its arms on European, mainly French, suppliers, not on the United States.

The Soviet Union had been one of Israel's biggest supporters. Yet, when Egypt announced an arms deal with Russia, in September of 1955, there was an overwhelmingly enthusiastic response in the Arab press. The Chambers of Deputies in Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan met immediately and voted resolutions of congratulation to President Nasser; even Nuri Said, the pro-Western ruler of Iraq, felt obliged to congratulate his Egyptian colleague—this despite the fact that the Arabs had no special love of Russia, nor did Muslims in the Arab world or elsewhere wish to invite either Communist ideology or Soviet power to their lands. What delighted them was that they saw the arms deal—no doubt correctly—as a slap in the face for the West. The slap, and the agitated Western response, reinforced the mood of hatred and spite toward the West and encouraged its exponents. It also encouraged the United States to look more favorably on Israel, now seen as a reliable and potentially useful ally in a largely hostile region. Today, it is often forgotten that the strategic relationship between the United States and Israel was a consequence, not a cause, of Soviet penetration.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is only one of many struggles between the Islamic and non-Islamic worlds—on a list that includes Nigeria, Sudan, Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Chechnya, Sinkiang, Kashmir, and Mindanao—but it has attracted far more attention than any of the others. There are several reasons for this. First, since Israel is a democracy and an open society, it is much easier to report—and misreport—what is going on. Second, Jews are involved, and this can usually secure the attention of those who, for one reason or another, are for or against them. Third, and most important, resentment of Israel is the only grievance that can be freely and safely expressed in those Muslim countries where the media are either wholly owned or strictly overseen by the government. Indeed, Israel serves as a useful stand-in for complaints about the economic privation and political repression under which most Muslim people live, and as a way of deflecting the resulting anger.

Double Standards

This raises another issue. Increasingly in recent decades, Middle Easterners have articulated a new grievance against American policy: not American complicity with imperialism or with Zionism but something nearer home and more immediate—American complicity with the corrupt tyrants who rule over them. For obvious reasons, this particular complaint does not often appear in public discourse. Middle Eastern governments, such as those of Iraq, Syria, and the Palestine Authority, have developed great skill in controlling their own media and manipulating those of Western countries. Nor, for equally obvious reasons, is it raised in diplomatic negotiation. But it is discussed, with increasing anguish and urgency, in private conversations with listeners who can be trusted, and recently even in public. (Interestingly, the Iranian revolution of 1979 was one time when this resentment was expressed openly. The Shah was accused of supporting America, but America was also attacked for imposing an impious and tyrannical leader as its puppet.)

Almost the entire Muslim world is affected by poverty and tyranny. Both of these problems are attributed, especially by those with an interest in diverting attention from themselves, to America—the first to American economic dominance and exploitation, now thinly disguised as "globalization"; the second to America's support for the many so-called Muslim tyrants who serve its purposes. Globalization has become a major theme in the Arab media, and it is almost always raised in connection with American economic penetration. The increasingly wretched economic situation in most of the Muslim world, relative not only to the West but also to the tiger economies of East Asia, fuels these frustrations. American paramountcy, as Middle Easterners see it, indicates where to direct the blame and the resulting hostility.

There is some justice in one charge that is frequently levelled against the United States: Middle Easterners increasingly complain that the United States judges them by different and lower standards than it does Europeans and Americans, both in what is expected of them and in what they may expect—in terms of their financial well-being and their political freedom. They assert that Western spokesmen repeatedly overlook or even defend actions and support rulers that they would not tolerate in their own countries. As many Middle Easterners see it, the Western and American governments' basic position is: "We don't care what you do to your own people at home, so long as you are coöperative in meeting our needs and protecting our interests."

The most dramatic example of this form of racial and cultural arrogance was what Iraqis and others see as the betrayal of 1991, when the United States called on the Iraqi people to revolt against Saddam Hussein. The rebels of northern and southern Iraq did so, and the United States forces watched while Saddam, using the helicopters that the ceasefire agreement had allowed him to retain, bloodily suppressed them, group by group. The reasoning behind this action—or, rather, inaction—is not difficult to see. Certainly, the victorious Gulf War coalition wanted a change of government in Iraq, but they had hoped for a coup d'état, not a revolution. They saw a genuine popular uprising as dangerous—it could lead to uncertainty or even anarchy in the region. A coup would be more predictable and could achieve the desired result—the replacement of Saddam Hussein by another, more amenable tyrant, who could take his place among America's so-called allies in the coalition. The United States' abandonment of Afghanistan after the departure of the Soviets was understood in much the same way as its abandonment of the Iraqi rebels.

Another example of this double standard occurred in the Syrian city of Hama and in refugee camps in Sabra and Shatila. The troubles in Hama began with an uprising headed by the radical group the Muslim Brothers in 1982. The government responded swiftly. Troops were sent, supported by armor, artillery, and aircraft, and within a very short time they had reduced a large part of the city to rubble. The number killed was estimated, by Amnesty International, at somewhere between ten thousand and twenty-five thousand. The action, which was ordered and supervised by the Syrian President, Hafiz al-Assad, attracted little attention at the time, and did not prevent the United States from subsequently courting Assad, who received a long succession of visits from American Secretaries of State James Baker, Warren Christopher, and Madeleine Albright, and even from President Clinton. It is hardly likely that Americans would have been so eager to propitiate a ruler who had perpetrated such crimes on Western soil, with Western victims.

The massacre of seven hundred to eight hundred Palestinian refugees in Sabra and Shatila that same year was carried out by Lebanese militiamen, led by a Lebanese commander who subsequently became a minister in the Syrian-sponsored Lebanese government, and it was seen as a reprisal for the assassination of the Lebanese President Bashir Gemayyel. Ariel Sharon, who at the time commanded the Israeli forces in Lebanon, was reprimanded by an Israeli commission of inquiry for not having foreseen and prevented the massacre, and was forced to resign from his position as Minister of Defense. It is understandable that the Palestinians and other Arabs should lay sole blame for the massacre on Sharon. What is puzzling is that Europeans and Americans should do the same. Some even wanted to try Sharon for crimes against humanity before a tribunal in Europe. No such suggestion was made regarding either Saddam Hussein or Hafiz al-Assad, who slaughtered tens of thousands of their compatriots. It is easy to understand the bitterness of those who see the implication here. It was as if the militia who had carried out the deed were animals, not accountable by the same human standards as the Israelis.

Thanks to modern communications, the people of the Middle East are increasingly aware of the deep and widening gulf between the opportunities of the free world outside their borders and the appalling privation and repression within them. The resulting anger is naturally directed first against their rulers, and then against those whom they see as keeping those rulers in power for selfish reasons. It is surely significant that most of the terrorists who have been identified in the September 11th attacks on New York and Washington come from Saudi Arabia and Egypt—that is, from countries whose rulers are deemed friendly to the United States.

A Failure of Modernity

If America's double standards—and its selfish support for corrupt regimes in the Arab world—have long caused anger among Muslims, why has that anger only recently found its expression in acts of terrorism? In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Muslims responded in two ways to the widening imbalance of power and wealth between their societies and those of the West. The reformers or modernizers tried to identify the sources of Western wealth and power and adapt them to their own use, in order to meet the West on equal terms. Muslim governments—first in Turkey, then in Egypt and Iran—made great efforts to modernize, that is, to Westernize, the weaponry and equipment of their armed forces; they even dressed them in Western-style uniforms and marched them to the tune of brass bands. When defeats on the battlefield were matched by others in the marketplace, the reformers tried to discover the secrets of Western economic success and to emulate them by establishing industries of their own. Young Muslim students who were sent to the West to study the arts of war also came back with dangerous and explosive notions about elected assemblies and constitutional governments.

All attempts at reform ended badly. If anything, the modernization of the armed forces accelerated the process of defeat and withdrawal, culminating in the humiliating failure of five Arab states and armies to prevent a half million Jews from building a new state in the debris of the British Mandate in Palestine in 1948. With rare exceptions, the economic reforms, capitalist and socialist alike, fared no better. The Middle Eastern combination of low productivity and high birth rate makes for an unstable mix, and by all indications the Arab countries, in such matters as job creation, education, technology, and productivity, lag ever farther behind the West. Even worse, the Arab nations also lag behind the more recent recruits to Western-style modernity, such as Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore. Out of a hundred and fifty-five countries ranked for economic freedom in 2001, the highest-ranking Muslim states are Bahrain (No. 9), the United Arab Emirates (No. 14), and Kuwait (No. 42). According to the World Bank, in 2000 the average annual income in the Muslim countries from Morocco to Bangladesh was only half the world average, and in the nineties the combined gross national products of Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon—that is, three of Israel's Arab neighbors—were considerably smaller than that of Israel alone. The per-capita figures are worse. According to United Nations statistics, Israel's per-capita G.D.P. was three and a half times that of Lebanon and Syria, twelve times that of Jordan, and thirteen and a half times that of Egypt. The contrast with the West, and now also with the Far East, is even more disconcerting.

Modernization in politics has fared no better—perhaps even worse—than in warfare and economics. Many Islamic countries have experimented with democratic institutions of one kind or another. In some, as in Turkey, Iran, and Tunisia, they were introduced by innovative native reformers; in others, they were installed and then bequeathed by departing imperialists. The record, with the possible exception of Turkey, is one of almost unrelieved failure. Western-style parties and parliaments almost invariably ended in corrupt tyrannies, maintained by repression and indoctrination. The only European model that worked, in the sense of accomplishing its purposes, was the one-party dictatorship. The Baath Party, different branches of which have ruled Iraq and Syria for decades, incorporated the worst features of its Nazi and Soviet models. Since the death of Nasser, in 1970, no Arab leader has been able to gain extensive support outside his own country. Indeed, no Arab leader has been willing to submit his claim to power to a free vote. The leaders who have come closest to winning pan-Arab approval are Qaddafi in the seventies and, more recently, Saddam Hussein. That these two, of all Arab rulers, should enjoy such wide popularity is in itself both appalling and revealing.

In view of this, it is hardly surprising that many Muslims speak of the failure of modernization. The rejection of modernity in favor of a return to the sacred past has a varied and ramified history in the region and has given rise to a number of movements. The most important of these, Wahhabism, has lasted more than two and a half centuries and exerts a significant influence on Muslim movements in the Middle East today. Its founder, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703-87), was a theologian from the Najd area of Arabia. In 1744, he launched a campaign of purification and renewal. His purpose was to return the Muslim world to the pure and authentic Islam of the Prophet, removing and, where necessary, destroying all later accretions. The Wahhabi cause was embraced by the Saudi rulers of Najd, who promoted it, for a while successfully, by force. In a series of campaigns, they carried their rule and their faith to much of central and eastern Arabia, before being rebuffed, at the end of the eighteenth century, by the Ottoman sultan, whom the Saudi ruler had denounced as a backslider from the true faith and a usurper in the Muslim state. The second alliance of Wahhabi doctrine and Saudi force began in the last years of the Ottoman Empire and continued after the collapse. The Saudi conquest of the Hejaz, including the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, increased the prestige of the House of Saud and gave new scope to the Wahhabi doctrine, which spread, in a variety of forms, throughout the Islamic world.

From the nineteen-thirties on, the discovery of oil in the eastern provinces of Arabia and its exploitation, chiefly by American companies, brought vast new wealth and bitter new social tensions. In the old society, inequalities of wealth had been limited, and their effects were restrained, on the one hand, by the traditional social bonds and obligations that linked rich and poor and, on the other hand, by the privacy of Muslim home life. Modernization has all too often widened the gap, destroyed those social bonds, and, through the universality of the modern media, made the resulting inequalities painfully visible. All this has created new and receptive audiences for Wahhabi teachings and those of other like-minded groups, among them the Muslim Brothers in Egypt and Syria and the Taliban in Afghanistan.

It has now become normal to designate these movements as "fundamentalist." The term is unfortunate for a number of reasons. It was originally an American Protestant term, used to designate Protestant churches that differed in some respects from the mainstream churches. These differences bear no resemblance to those that divide Muslim fundamentalists from the Islamic mainstream, and the use of the term can therefore be misleading. Broadly speaking, Muslim fundamentalists are those who feel that the troubles of the Muslim world at the present time are the result not of insufficient modernization but of excessive modernization. From their point of view, the primary struggle is not against the Western enemy as such but against the Westernizing enemies at home, who have imported and imposed infidel ways on Muslim peoples. The task of the Muslims is to depose and remove these infidel rulers, sometimes by defeating or expelling their foreign patrons and protectors, and to abrogate and destroy the laws, institutions, and social customs that they have introduced, so as to return to a purely Islamic way of life, in accordance with the principles of Islam and the rules of the Holy Law.

The Rise of Terrorism

Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda followers may not represent Islam, and their statements and their actions directly contradict basic Islamic principles and teachings, but they do arise from within Muslim civilization, just as Hitler and the Nazis arose from within Christian civilization, so they must be seen in their own cultural, religious, and historical context.

If one looks at the historical record, the Muslim approach to war does not differ greatly from that of Christians, or that of Jews in the very ancient and very modern periods when the option was open to them. While Muslims, perhaps more frequently than Christians, made war against the followers of other faiths to bring them within the scope of Islam, Christians—with the notable exception of the Crusades, which were themselves an imitation of Muslim practice—were more prone to fight internal religious wars against those whom they saw as schismatics or heretics. Islam, no doubt owing to the political and military involvement of its founder, takes what one might call a more pragmatic view than the Gospels of the realities of societal relationships. Because war for the faith has been a religious obligation within Islam from the beginning, it is elaborately regulated. Islamic religious law, or the Sharia, deals in some detail with such matters as the opening, conclusion, and resumption of hostilities, the avoidance of injury to noncombatants, the treatment of prisoners, the division of booty, and even the types of weapons that may be used. Some of these rules have been explained away by modern radical commentators who support the fundamentalists; others are simply disregarded.

What about terrorism? Followers of many faiths have at one time or another invoked religion in the practice of murder, both retail and wholesale. Two words deriving from such movements in Eastern religions have even entered the English language: "thug," from India, and "assassin," from the Middle East, both commemorating fanatical religious sects whose form of worship was to murder those whom they regarded as enemies of the faith. The question of the lawfulness of assassination in Islam first arose in 656 A.D., with the murder of the third caliph, Uthman, by pious Muslim rebels who believed they were carrying out the will of God. The first of a succession of civil wars was fought over the question of whether the rebels were fulfilling or defying God's commandment. Islamic law and tradition are very clear on the duty of obedience to the Islamic ruler. But they also quote two sayings attributed to the Prophet: "There is no obedience in sin" and "Do not obey a creature against his creator." If a ruler orders something that is contrary to the law of God, then the duty of obedience is replaced by a duty of disobedience. The notion of tyrannicide—the justified removal of a tyrant—was not an Islamic innovation; it was familiar in antiquity, among Jews, Greeks, and Romans alike, and those who performed it were often acclaimed as heroes.

Members of the eleventh-tothirteenth-century Muslim sect known as the Assassins, which was based in Iran and Syria, seem to have been the first to transform the act that was named after them into a system and an ideology. Their efforts, contrary to popular belief, were primarily directed not against the Crusaders but against their own leaders, whom they saw as impious usurpers. In this sense, the Assassins are the true predecessors of many of the so-called Islamic terrorists of today, some of whom explicitly make this point. The name Assassins, with its connotation of "hashish-taker," was given to them by their Muslim enemies. They called themselves fidayeen—those who are ready to sacrifice their lives for their cause. The term has been revived and adopted by their modern imitators. In two respects, however—in their choice of weapons and of victims—the Assassins were markedly different from their modern successors. The victim was always an individual—a highly placed political, military, or religious leader who was seen as the source of evil. He, and he alone, was killed. This action was not terrorism in the current sense of that term but, rather, what we would call "targeted assassination." The method was always the same: the dagger. The Assassins disdained the use of poison, crossbows, and other weapons that could be used from a distance, and the Assassin did not expect—or, it would seem, even desire—to survive his act, which he believed would insure him eternal bliss. But in no circumstance did he commit suicide. He died at the hands of his captors.

The twentieth century brought a renewal of such actions in the Middle East, though of different types and for different purposes, and terrorism has gone through several phases. During the last years of the British Empire, imperial Britain faced terrorist movements in its Middle Eastern dependencies that represented three different cultures: Greeks in Cyprus, Jews in Palestine, and Arabs in Aden. All three acted from nationalist, rather than religious, motives. Though very different in their backgrounds and political circumstances, the three were substantially alike in their tactics. Their purpose was to persuade the imperial power that staying in the region was not worth the cost in blood. Their method was to attack the military and, to a lesser extent, administrative personnel and installations. All three operated only within their own territory and generally avoided collateral damage. All three succeeded in their endeavors.

Thanks to the rapid development of the media, and especially of television, the more recent forms of terrorism are targeted not at specific and limited enemy objectives but at world opinion. Their primary purpose is not to defeat or even to weaken the enemy militarily but to gain publicity—a psychological victory. The most successful group by far in this exercise has been the Palestine Liberation Organization. The P.L.O. was founded in 1964 but became important in 1967, after the defeat of the combined Arab armies in the Six-Day War. Regular warfare had failed; it was time to try other methods. The targets in this form of armed struggle were not military or other government establishments, which are usually too well guarded, but public places and gatherings of any kind, which are overwhelmingly civilian, and in which the victims do not necessarily have a connection to the declared enemy. Examples of this include, in 1970, the hijacking of three aircraft—one Swiss, one British, and one American—which were all taken to Amman; the 1972 murder of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics; the seizure in 1973 of the Saudi Embassy in Khartoum, and the murder there of two Americans and a Belgian diplomat; and the takeover of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro, in 1985. Other attacks were directed against schools, shopping malls, discothèques, pizzerias, and even passengers waiting in line at European airports. These and other attacks by the P.L.O. were immediately and remarkably successful in attaining their objectives—the capture of newspaper headlines and television screens. They also drew a great deal of support in sometimes unexpected places, and raised their perpetrators to starring roles in the drama of international relations. Small wonder that others were encouraged to follow their example—in Ireland, in Spain, and elsewhere.

The Arab terrorists of the seventies and eighties made it clear that they were waging a war for an Arab or Palestinian cause, not for Islam. Indeed, a significant proportion of the P.L.O. leaders and activists were Christian. Unlike socialism, which was discredited by its failure, nationalism was discredited by its success. In every Arab land but Palestine, the nationalists achieved their purposes—the defeat and departure of imperialist rulers, and the establishment of national sovereignty under national leaders. For a while, freedom and independence were used as more or less synonymous and interchangeable terms. The early experience of independence, however, revealed that this was a sad error. Independence and freedom are very different, and all too often the attainment of one meant the end of the other.

Both in defeat and in victory, the Arab nationalists of the twentieth century pioneered the methods that were later adopted by religious terrorists, in particular the lack of concern at the slaughter of innocent bystanders. This unconcern reached new proportions in the terror campaign launched by Osama bin Laden in the early nineties. The first major example was the bombing of two American embassies in East Africa in 1998. In order to kill twelve American diplomats, the terrorists were willing to slaughter more than two hundred Africans, many of them Muslims, who happened to be in the vicinity. The same disregard for human life, on a vastly greater scale, underlay the action in New York on September 11th.

There is no doubt that the foundation of Al Qaeda and the consecutive declarations of war by Osama bin Laden marked the beginning of a new and ominous phase in the history of both Islam and terrorism. The triggers for bin Laden's actions, as he himself has explained very clearly, were America's presence in Arabia during the Gulf War—a desecration of the Muslim Holy Land—and America's use of Saudi Arabia as a base for an attack on Iraq. If Arabia is the most symbolic location in the world of Islam, Baghdad, the seat of the caliphate for half a millennium and the scene of some of the most glorious chapters in Islamic history, is the second.

There was another, perhaps more important, factor driving bin Laden. In the past, Muslims fighting against the West could always turn to the enemies of the West for comfort, encouragement, and material and military help. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, for the first time in centuries there was no such useful enemy. There were some nations that had the will, but they lacked the means to play the role of the Third Reich or the Soviet Union. Bin Laden and his cohorts soon realized that, in the new configuration of world power, if they wished to fight America they had to do it themselves. Some eleven years ago, they created Al Qaeda, which included many veterans of the war in Afghanistan. Their task might have seemed daunting to anyone else, but they did not see it that way. In their view, they had already driven the Russians out of Afghanistan, in a defeat so overwhelming that it led directly to the collapse of the Soviet Union itself. Having overcome the superpower that they had always regarded as more formidable, they felt ready to take on the other; in this they were encouraged by the opinion, often expressed by Osama bin Laden, among others, that America was a paper tiger.

Muslim terrorists had been driven by such beliefs before. One of the most surprising revelations in the memoirs of those who held the American Embassy in Teheran from 1979 to 1981 was that their original intention had been to hold the building and the hostages for only a few days. They changed their minds when statements from Washington made it clear that there was no danger of serious action against them. They finally released the hostages, they explained, only because they feared that the new President, Ronald Reagan, might approach the problem "like a cowboy."

Bin Laden and his followers clearly have no such concern, and their hatred is neither constrained by fear nor diluted by respect. As precedents, they repeatedly cite the American retreats from Vietnam, from Lebanon, and—the most important of all, in their eyes—from Somalia. Bin Laden's remarks in an interview with John Miller, of ABC News, on May 28, 1998, are especially revealing:

We have seen in the last decade the decline of the American government and the weakness of the American soldier, who is ready to wage cold wars and unprepared to fight long wars. This was proven in Beirut when the Marines fled after two explosions. It also proves they can run in less than twenty-four hours, and this was also repeated in Somalia. . . . The youth were surprised at the low morale of the American soldiers. . . . After a few blows, they ran in defeat. . . . They forgot about being the world leader and the leader of the new world order. [They] left, dragging their corpses and their shameful defeat, and stopped using such titles.

Similar inferences are drawn when American spokesmen refuse to implicate—and sometimes even hasten to exculpate—parties that most Middle Easterners believe to be deeply involved in the attacks on America. A good example is the repeated official denial of any Iraqi involvement in the events of September 11th. It may indeed be true that there is no evidence of Iraqi involvement, and that the Administration is unwilling to make false accusations. But it is difficult for Middle Easterners to resist the idea that this refusal to implicate Saddam Hussein is due less to a concern for legality than to a fear of confronting him. He would indeed be a formidable adversary. If he faces the prospect of imminent destruction, as would be inevitable in a real confrontation, there is no knowing what he might do with his already considerable arsenal of unconventional weapons. Certainly, he would not be restrained by any scruples, or by the consideration that the greatest victims of any such attack would be his own people and their immediate neighbors.

For Osama bin Laden, 2001 marks the resumption of the war for the religious dominance of the world that began in the seventh century. For him and his followers, this is a moment of opportunity. Today, America exemplifies the civilization and embodies the leadership of the House of War, and, like Rome and Byzantium, it has become degenerate and demoralized, ready to be overthrown. Khomeini's designation of the United States as "the Great Satan" was telling. In the Koran, Satan is described as "the insidious tempter who whispers in the hearts of men." This is the essential point about Satan: he is neither a conqueror nor an exploiter—he is, first and last, a tempter. And for the members of Al Qaeda it is the seduction of America that represents the greatest threat to the kind of Islam they wish to impose on their fellow-Muslims.

But there are others for whom America offers a different kind of temptation—the promise of human rights, of free institutions, and of a responsible and elected government. There are a growing number of individuals and even some movements that have undertaken the complex task of introducing such institutions in their own countries. It is not easy. Similar attempts, as noted, led to many of today's corrupt regimes. Of the fifty-seven member states of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, only one, the Turkish Republic, has operated democratic institutions over a long period of time and, despite difficult and ongoing problems, has made progress in establishing a liberal economy and a free society and political order.

In two countries, Iraq and Iran, where the regimes are strongly anti-American, there are democratic oppositions capable of taking over and forming governments. We could do much to help them, and have done little. In most other countries in the region, there are people who share our values, sympathize with us, and would like to share our way of life. They understand freedom, and want to enjoy it at home. It is more difficult for us to help those people, but at least we should not hinder them. If they succeed, we shall have friends and allies in the true, not just the diplomatic, sense of these words.

Meanwhile, there is a more urgent problem. If bin Laden can persuade the world of Islam to accept his views and his leadership, then a long and bitter struggle lies ahead, and not only for America. Sooner or later, Al Qaeda and related groups will clash with the other neighbors of Islam—Russia, China, India—who may prove less squeamish than the Americans in using their power against Muslims and their sanctities. If bin Laden is correct in his calculations and succeeds in his war, then a dark future awaits the world, especially the part of it that embraces Islam.

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