Playback speed:
The Stream
Just when the world had accepted the notion that Israel’s war on Palestinians and their supporters was wholly unjust, a Muslim scholar has — like so many before him — announced that it is Muslims who thrive on and must always wage unjust wars on Israel and everyone else.
During a Sept. 11 speech, Muhammad al-Dadow al-Shantiqi, former vice president of the International Union of Muslim Scholars, declared that the current conflict “is another chapter in the war that is ongoing since 1948 [the creation of modern Israel] and to this day.
This is not a war against the Zionist entity, but against the infidel world in its entirety.” [emphasis added]
In other words, Muslims are not limited to fighting what is widely seen as a defensive war against an aggressive Israel — which many around the world might understand — but are in a de facto war against the entire non-Muslim world.
Surely this is an odd assertion? After all, many non-Muslim nations around the world are sympathetic to the Palestinians and highly critical of Israel. So why does this Muslim scholar see them also as enemies to be fought?
Here we come to the crux of the problem with Islam: Unlike all other major religions, it has a political mandate to conquer the entire non-Muslim world — which by default is its mortal enemy — through jihad.
A Religious Duty
The entry for “jihad” in the Encyclopaedia of Islam states that the “spread of Islam by arms is a religious duty upon Muslims in general … Jihad must continue to be done until the whole world is under the rule of Islam … Islam must completely be made over before the doctrine of jihad can be eliminated.”
Scholar Majid Khadurri (1909-2007), after defining jihad as warfare, writes that jihad “is regarded by all jurists, with almost no exception, as a collective obligation of the whole Muslim community.”
As such, it should be no surprise that wherever and whenever Muslims live alongside non-Muslims, conflict, violence, and outright wars tend to be the norm — or, as political scientist Samuel Huntington memorably put it in Clash of Civilizations, “Islam’s borders are bloody.” He continued:
Wherever one looks along the perimeter of Islam, Muslims have problems living peaceably with their neighbors. The question naturally rises as to whether this pattern of late twentieth century conflict between Muslim and non-Muslim groups is equally true of relations between groups from other civilizations. In fact, it is not. Muslims make up about one-fifth of the world’s population but in the 1990s they have been far more involved in intergroup violence than the people of any other civilization. The evidence is overwhelming. [p. 256]
Bad Neighbors
Indeed, matters have only gotten worse since Huntington’s book came out nearly 30 years ago. Whether one looks in Africa, where Muslims everywhere are slaughtering their Christian neighbors — going so far as to commit a genocide in Nigeria — or in Europe, where crimes and other “anti-infidel” forms of violence have spiked in direct proportion to Muslim migration, Huntington’s words remain true: “Muslims have problems living peaceably with their neighbors.”
This is why prudent Westerners have for centuries been finding the question of achieving permanent peace with the Islamic world a vexatious problem. Law professor James Lorimer (1818-1890) succinctly stated this problem well over a century ago:
So long as Islam endures, the reconciliation of its adherents, even with Jews and Christians, and still more with the rest of mankind, must continue to be an insoluble problem. … For an indefinite future, however reluctantly, we must confine our political recognition to the professors of those religions which … preach the doctrine of “live and let live.” (The Institutes of the Law of Nations, p. 124)
In other words, political recognition — with all the attendant negotiations and diplomacy that come with it — should be granted to all major religions and civilizations except Islam, which does not recognize the notion of “live and let live,” and therefore must always and everywhere be suppressed by those who would have peace.
Obligated to Be Terrorists?
Surely in this context, Israel’s war becomes more logical. If it is going to extreme and uncompromising lengths, that is because Islam makes its adherents go to extreme and uncompromising lengths.
As if any more proof was needed, just a few days ago, İsmet Özel, a well-known “poet” from Turkey, boasted during a televised conference that
Muslims are terrorists. The first duty of Muslims is to be terrorists. Kafirs [infidels] should be afraid of Muslims. If they are not afraid, then a Muslim is not a Muslim.
In light of all this, it is for the reader to decide whether a variation of an old adage (once attributed to “Huns”) is valid: “The Muslim is always either at your throat or at your foot.”
SOURCE: RAYMOND IBRAHIM
Raymond Ibrahim, author of Defenders of the West and Sword and Scimitar, is the Distinguished Senior Shillman Fellow at the Gatestone Institute and the Judith Rosen Friedman Fellow at the Middle East Forum.
