"Grandfather was...", Or Obama's faith

Why is so little attention paid to the choice of vice-president? Unless, that is, this is somebody of whom the left entertainment business can make a bogey like it was made of Palin. Why is there only one debate between the VP candidates, when even on the memory of the present generation the VP has become a POTUS twice? Moreover, aren't they supposed to be a team, in consultation with each other? I would suggest then that the debates should be conducted between the candidate POTUS-VP teams, with the same question answered by both in the couple, first by the prospective POTUSes and then by VPs, with the latter then being able to show their ability to contribute and, if needed, to replace the president. To be sure, the inability would also manifest. Perhaps at some point the debate rules will be so changed. No rules, however, need to be changed in order to discuss the president's convictions. Here we go, with no segue.

I don't care what religion anybody professes, if any, as long as that anybody leaves mine alone. One would think that this criterion should leave me indifferent to the issue of Obama's faith and religiosity. Shouldn't Obama's religion, anyway, concern only those firmly assigned to the category of wingnuts, in the company of "birthers", those certified paranoids who keep pointing out that Obama was listed as "born in Kenya" until after the start of his first presidential campaign? Shouldn't Madonna only  be allowed to call him a "black Muslim in the White House" without raising an outcry? Obama himself has emphatically called himself a Christian, attended a church for 20 years, and held a Reverend from that church as a member of his family until he was told he should not anymore (can happen to anybody). That's what he is then, right?

It seems, however, that the hypothesis of Obama's Islam is viewed as offensive by the Democrats and the media not only because of all  the above, but also because it has been considered to be detrimental to his candidacy - despite his handlers' supposed view of Islam as a religion at least equal to Christianity. Sometimes the stridency of insistence on Obama's Christianity is reminiscent of Clinton's "I-did-not-have-sexual-relations-with-that-woman". Even mentioning his second name is considered an affront, as if it were something shameful and "Barack" were not a Muslim name as well. I have been reprimanded by an Obama faithful for using his three initials, as if that was any different from FDR, JFK or LBJ. A progressive colleague of mine prefers "BO" instead, which is, I think, a real insult. Is it Islamophobia among Democrats, including Obama himself? I can't see any other possible reason for these consistent attempts to dissociate Obama from Islam. Be it as it may, apparently, nobody has been ready to celebrate the first Muslim-born President (in Islam, one is a Muslim if born to a Muslim father) - at least, as much as the first "black" president was celebrated (even though Morgan Freeman says Obama is not "black" - and Freeman should know). 

Do I then smell hypocrisy in Obama's declaration that "part of [his] responsibility as President of the United States [is] to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear" - a promise he has made to no other religion? Not to Christianity in Islamic countries, where conversion to it is punished by death, and Christians are persecuted into extinction, as they are in Egypt and in the "Palestinian" territories. Not to Judaism in both the realm of institutionally antisemitic Islam and in some Christian countries where the Jews are still routinely maligned as hell's spawn. Can you imagine Obama traveling to Jerusalem and telling Israelis that it is his responsibility to fight against antisemitism everywhere? It is hard to imagine him traveling to Jerusalem at all,  the city he called the undivided capital of Israel in front of a Jewish audience - just before he took his words back when no longer facing it. Now nobody in his entire administration can find Israel's capital on the map.  

It is this smell of hypocrisy that drives me wingnuts about Obama's beliefs - that and some concrete facts. For instance, if one is to believe Obama's memoirs, a barber once asked him, upon learning his name, “Barack, huh. You a Muslim?”. To which Barack Hussein gave a rather evasive response, "Grandfather was". The question was not about his grandfather, and he did not say "yes" or "no". Or did he? Hardly any curious barber would be satisfied by this response. 

Then the reader of "The Dreams..." learns that the "Muslim faith" was in Obama's mind "linked with the Nation of Islam". Nowhere in the book that has any negative connotation, while "the much-admired success of the Nation of Islam in turning around the lives of drug addicts and criminals" is noted more than once. He "would occasionally pick up the paper from these unfailingly polite men, in part out of sympathy to their heavy suits in the summer, their thin coats in winter; or sometimes because my attention was caught by the sensational, tabloid-style headlines (CAUCASIAN WOMAN ADMITS: WHITES ARE THE DEVIL)" - but that "sensational, tabloid-style" is the extent of his criticism of the fascist movement. I can't imagine how such a headline could catch anyone's attention, unless it evoked interest rather than disgust. It is then not surprising he got no criticism - until forced to have it - for the man "who helped introduce [him] to [his] Christian faith", another fascist. The latter quote suggests that before Wright's "introduction" he had no such faith. Whether that was the case, and whether he was a Muslim or tabula rasa in that regard, I can't know for sure, but I do surmise that Christianity was more promising in his political  "mind" of an aspiring "community organizer" than Islam, his obvious alternative choice.

What kind of Christianity - is a different matter. As it happens, the religion of Rev. Wright, Obama's spiritual father who baptized Obama's children and connected him to the black community, was such as to give Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. Trumpeter Award to Farrakhan  - because, in Wright's view, the antisemitic leader of the Nation of Islam "truly epitomized greatness." The award was a year before Obama's election and his abandonment of the Trinity Church under the campaign's pressure. That award must have been part of what Obama called "the much-admired success" of the Muslim faith. Indeed, in many ways, the odious "Christianity" of Wright and the "Islam" of Farrakhan, the fellow antisemites and racists, are alike. It would be an insult to everybody's intelligence to insist that Obama was unaware of that similarity and the mutual sympathies between Wright and Farrakhan, just as it is unlikely he had not heard anything truly revolting throughout the 20 years of his attendance of Wright's sermons.

One would think, however, that by the election time Obama had found out that the Nation of Islam's Islam was a bit different from historic Islam, however diverse that historic one still is. Perhaps that "link" was weakened, but not Obama's with Islam. When the time came for his foreign affairs, he declared "A New Beginning" for the relations between the US and... not another country, as one would think appropriate in those affairs, but with Islam, supposedly a religion. Now, that makes Islam a polity, doesn't it? His first TV interview was with Al-Arabiya, and in it he addressed "the Muslim world" - an entity that exists only in the minds of those who think that Islam unites countries and separates them from the other countries, a split into the world of Islam and the world of "disbelief", a familiar structure of Dar ul Islam and Dar ul Harb, the realm of Islam and the realm of war. Whereas in fact there is no "world of Islam" among the eternally conflicting "Islamic" countries and groups and tribes within them, Obama's declaration of America's reconciliation with the "Islamic world" creates that world in full accordance with Muslim mythology.

Then, of course, came the much-discussed Cairo speech, in the Al-Azhar University, "a beacon of Islamic learning" as the president, ostensibly knowledgeable of that learning, referred to the place. That's the same place whose Grand Imam, Tantawi, legitimized suicidal terror and wrote a 700-page book on antisemitic Islamic exegesis. His death in 2010 was lamented by Obama, as spoken of in his spokesman Gibbs's statement. It is this murderous source of "Islamic learning" who "graciously hosted President Obama last June in Cairo". Sure, Obama did admonish somebody anonymous in that Cairo speech that "Threatening Israel with destruction -- or repeating vile stereotypes about Jews [which is done any time when the Jews are mentioned in a mosque] -- is deeply wrong, and only serves to evoke in the minds of Israelis this most painful of memories while preventing the peace that the people of this region deserve." Bad memories, you see - as if the "peace process" has not resulted in hundreds of terror murders and is not by itself a war negating peace. 

Then Obama negated that admonishment anyway by equating terror and wars that Israel has been subjected to since before its reestablishment in 1948 with "the pain of dislocation of the Palestinian people" they "have endured" for "more than 60 years", that is, since 1948. No word about how those dislocated came to be dislocated, and what "occupation" he means that he speaks of in the very next sentence. There was no occupation "more than 60 years ago" - unless Obama agrees with the "Palestinian" narrative of "Naqba", whereby it is the very existence of Israel that is the occupation. To Obama, Israelis and Arabs are just "two peoples with legitimate aspirations, each with a painful history that makes compromise elusive," even though it is only for the "Palestinian people" that the situation is "intolerable" in his view. To Obama, the war waged by Arabs and Islam against Israel is nothing more than finger-pointing - "for Palestinians to point to the displacement brought about by Israel’s founding, and for Israelis to point to the constant hostility and attacks throughout its history from within its borders as well as beyond." In his opinion, to see this conflict from the Israeli side is as wrong as seeing it from the Arab side and means to "be blind to the truth". What is Obama's truth? Simple: forget who the aggressor is and meet the "aspirations of both sides... through two states, where Israelis and Palestinians each live in peace and security". Never mind that even in the poisonous internationally doctored prescription for that, "land for peace", Israel's part is "land". Peace is denied by the Arabs, regardless of how much land Israel is willing to give up.

While paying lip service to the need for the "Palestinian Authority" to "develop its capacity to govern" (Abbas's capacity to govern should have expired in January 2009), he demands that "Israelis must acknowledge [Palestine's right to exist] just as Israel's right to exist cannot be denied, neither can Palestine's" - as if that "right" of "Palestine" has not been asserted by Israel since Rabin. If Obama thinks that acknowledgment is still lacking, just as the Arabs do, nothing can convince him it's not. It is all the same to him that "privately, many Muslims recognize that Israel will not go away" and that "many Israelis recognize the need for a Palestinian state" (obviously, not privately). Aside from the question about how he could penetrate the private thoughts of "many Muslims" - how exactly can one compare the alleged private thoughts and the official position of the Israeli governments? Another question is why those thoughts are still "private" - despite all the Osloism and "peace process". The response is, of course, that those who might have such thoughts run the risk of being murdered by the "many Muslims" if they make those thoughts public. To Obama, it is "continued Israeli settlements... construction" that  "violates previous agreements and undermines efforts to achieve peace" - not the continued Arab terror, incitement, the official glorification of "martyrs", and the fact that the articles calling for the annihilation of Israel have never been removed from the "Palestinian" ruling Charter, despite the "peace process". Sure, Obama said that "Palestinians must abandon violence", but in the very next sentence he calls it "resistance", exactly what terror is called by Fatah, Hamas, Hizballah and all other terrorists and terrorism supporters. He is concerned that this "resistance" will not succeed "through violence and killing"  - not about that "Palestinians" have no right to that "resistance", moral or otherwise. This is exactly what is expected from the pupil of the antisemites and Israel-haters Rev. Wright, Rashid Khalidi, and Edward Said.

Just as he whitewashes terror by calling it "resistance", he whitewashes Islam by using the standard lie that "The Holy Koran teaches that whoever kills an innocent is as -- it is as if he has killed all mankind.  (Applause.)  And the Holy Koran also says whoever saves a person, it is as if he has saved all mankind.  (Applause.)" As other disingenuous apologists of Islam, he does not give the complete quote of this Koran 5:32 verse, 

"Because of that, We decreed upon the Children of Israel that whoever kills a soul unless for a soul or for corruption [done] in the land - it is as if he had slain mankind entirely. And whoever saves one - it is as if he had saved mankind entirely. And our messengers had certainly come to them with clear proofs. Then indeed many of them, [even] after that, throughout the land, were transgressors." 

There is a teaching, but it is Jewish, indeed found in the Talmud. It is referred to as a Jewish belief in the Koran, which is "holy" only to the Muslims. Nowhere is it seen that Islam accepts this belief despite all the applause of the Al-Azhar audience. What sounds much more genuine is another statement of Obama's that caused applause, the one expressing his pride that "the United States government has gone to court to protect the right of women and girls to wear the hijab and to punish those who would deny it". One wonders why the US government does not yet punish those who interfere with the "right of women and girls" to wear burqa - in fact, it wages a war against people who "protect" that right, in Afghanistan, wasting, as it were, the lives of young Americans.

In the end, it does not matter whether Obama's choice is antisemitic Islam or Wright's racist version of Christianity, the "black liberation theology". Both are terrible. What matters is Obama's position on the concrete issues that is defined by his ideology. This position, in which the perfectly legal building construction is equal to murder, Israel is called to return to the pre-1967 "borders" with no tangible obligation on the part of Arabs, and Jerusalem is no longer Israel's capital. This is the position where America's enemies are to be mollified and promised "more flexibility", while America's friends are to be let into the White House clandestinely, if at all, and maligned behind their backs.  It is of no interest what Obama's grandfather's faith was. His grandson's is no good, whatever its name.

Burning Koran: the form and the substance

Considering the violent nature of the enemy and enemy ideology, Islam, the immense courage of Ann Barnhardt is unquestionable. The young American woman posted on YouTube her videos where she reads the horrible Koranic suras, followed by burning the respective Koran pages, and criticizes the US Senator Graham for his reaction to a Koran-burning by a Florida pastor. It is telling that "[m]any Afghans did not know about the Quran-burning [by the pastor] until Karzai condemned it four days after it happened." Graham and Gen. Petraeus, another accuser of the pastor and defender of Muslims' rights to passions, do not blame Karzai, a corrupt puppet, sitting on American bayonets that apparently are beginning to be more uncomfortable for him than the threat to follow Najibullah's footsteps if the Taliban comes back.

I do disagree, however, with the form of Ms. Barnhardt's message - Koran-burning, - but not for the Petraeus and Graham reasons. Those reasons border on despicable, misplacing blame for Muslims' murdering people from the Muslims committing those murders to Americans destroying a book, the Koran, - from an expression of Islam to an expression of the American Constitution. My reason is a historic association of that form - book-burning - with the Church's burning heretical books and the Talmud, Nazis' book-burning, Soviet Communists destroying, censoring and banning  books, Muslims destroying Bibles, and other similar actions. The Heine maxim still warns that "Where they burn books, so too will they in the end burn human beings." The words are from Heine's play "Almansor", and the book burnt by the Inquisition in that play was, fittingly, the Koran. 

My view is that a possibility of such parallels in the expression of legitimate feelings towards the Koran, while protected by the Constitution, should be ruled out. Not by the law - which would indeed be dhimmitude - but by people's recognition of those historic parallels. The lack of historic knowledge or the desire to maximally dramatize the expression of one's rejection of Islam as an ideology can result in the effect opposite to the intended, raising negative reactions to the substance of the matter. The substance, with which I entirely agree: Islam is a totalitarian ideology mimicking religion, enslaving its followers and calling for them to enslave others, and pursuing global domination - from subjugation and murder of family members (women and children) to subjugation and murder of minorities in Muslim countries to subjugation and murder of "unbelievers" elsewhere and everywhere. The Koran needs to be read, and the terror inflicted by Muslims upon the world needs to be understood for what it is - following Islam as prescribed by that unholy book. Burning the Koran and calling for others to do the same is wrong in form, may prevent people from seeing the substance, and may hurt rather than help the fight against the totalitarian cult of Islam.

Fair militancy

Militant atheism is frequently selective - not in its deity-rejection but in its militancy. For instance, even though Judaism, Christianity and Islam are all "three anti-human religions" for Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion), they come from "a barbaric Bronze Age text known as the Old Testament". The latter, "known as...", of course, only to Christians (it's Tanakh for the Jews, without the changes introduced by the Christians), is, of course, responsible for everything, being a "tribal cult of a single fiercely unpleasant God." Definitely more unpleasant to Dawkins than the deity of his own religion, in whose hands he was molested as a boy - after all, that was for him only "an embarrassing, but otherwise harmless experience". Judaism is somehow to blame even for the death penalty for blasphemy practiced in Pakistan. As if penalties for blasphemy did not exist in other religions entirely independent of Judaism, and Islam did not contain enough violence that is unique to it.

It is thus comforting when an atheist is at least fair in his militancy. This is the case with Bill Maher. He is derisive of Christianity and Judaism, as he is of anything he dislikes. In his fairness though, interviewing Keith Ellison, a congressman and a Muslim convert, he called the "holy" Koran a "hate-filled book", where "Islama bin Laden" (must be a slip of the tongue) takes his instructions. Unapologetically and matter-of-factly. He sees a greater threat from Islam than even from the "right-wing" and the KKK (which would not say much if he did not consider everything on the right of Marx to be equal to KKK). There is no need to transcribe the short dialogue - just watch it.

What is interesting in that dialogue is not Maher's mumbling attempts at critiquing Islam, fair as they are - unusually for this self-styled "comedian", - but Ellison's helpless response. The only Koranic quote Ellison was able to produce to contravene Maher's "hate-filled book" statement was deceptively incomplete: "anyone who takes the life, it's as if he killed the whole world". That's what you usually hear from Islam's disingenuous apologists. What they never say is that the complete quote of this Koran 5:32 verse is, "Because of that, We decreed upon the Children of Israel that whoever kills a soul unless for a soul or for corruption [done] in the land - it is as if he had slain mankind entirely. And whoever saves one - it is as if he had saved mankind entirely. And our messengers had certainly come to them with clear proofs. Then indeed many of them, [even] after that, throughout the land, were transgressors." So yes, there is a belief that murdering one human is like murdering the whole humanity, but this is a Jewish belief, indeed found in the Talmud. It is referred to as a Jewish belief in the Koran. Nowhere is it seen that Islam accepts it. What it does accept is Koran 9:5, "Fight and kill the disbelievers wherever you find them, take them captive, harass them, lie in wait and ambush them using every stratagem of war." Then again, Ellison, who referred to the eternal Koran as "compiled" and stated that he accepts "non-believers", may have not done his conversion right, or perhaps has forgotten what it was since he was 19, and there is a hope for him yet.

Peace pardnership

As we find out for the umpteenth time, our "peace pardners" the philistines are really not. They are ready to wage war against Israel once Arab countries get to that. A friend commented that this is another example of taqiyya on the part of Abbas, a lie Muslims are supposed to be free to use when dealing against the kuffar, unbelievers. I think, however, that people have to be intentionally blind to buy this kind of taqiyya, or have concerns that override Israel's (and ultimately, this civilization's) security. Muslims have to be either exceptionally stupid to think it's believable, or simply realistic, knowing that however stupid and improbable their lie is, it is good enough to be either believed by the "international community", or used by the latter as another pretext to punish Jews for what they have never done - from killing Jesus to contemporary blood libels. No need to try hard.

If we, you and I, can get enough information from open public sources to detect damn lies of our "peace partners", shouldn't those having access to intelligence know a bit more? What additional proof is needed that whatever verbal concessions are given by them in English, they translate into their opposite in Arabic or, at best, are abrogated at the first opportunity - just as this is prescribed by Muhammad? Allah himself used to abrogate Koranic suras once they would become inconvenient to the ingenious "prophet" - remember the "Satanic verses", not the Rushdie book, but the actual Koran 53:19-20? Arafat openly called the Oslo accords Hudaybiyyah peace, referring to the 10-year truce that Muhammad signed with the Meccans when he was too weak to fight them, only to violate it in two years when he was ready to attack them. Why the hell wasn't Arafat and his gang immediately kicked out at least after that? The consequences of Oslo had been obvious to so many before Israel reimported sworn enemies and bandits. ZOA, for instance, of which I am a member, was against it, as it was against the abhorrent self-imposed ethnic cleansing of Gaza. Nobody among the decision-makers listened. Nobody does. I am afraid, nobody will. We are governed by people lacking not only morality, but also knowledge and the intellect to use it.

As I write this, I am listening to a Fox News report (courtesy of the ever-smiling Reena Ninan) of the "discrimination" against "Palestinians" buying real estate in Jerusalem. Of course, the "fair and balanced" reporter asks only a complaining Arab - of course, Abu Abdullah, looking so noble, decent and peaceful - how he suffers, with no possibility of finding out what the criminal Zionists think about that. I am not holding my breath for Fox News, bought by the memorable prince al-Waleed (who also helps families of suicidal murderers a little), to decry the discrimination against Jews buying land - not just in any of the 22 Arab states, but from a "Palestinian", who would be executed by the "peace pardners" if he decided to sell any. After all, the Jews got their land as stolen by the Europeans from the "Palestinian" natives, a payment for that dubious Holocaust. Just ask Barack Hussein. We know to whom he thinks Jerusalem belongs.

Islam: Religious mimicry

This is part of the page titled On the Brink I posted in August 2006, upon returning from Israel after spending vacation with my family in a miklat, shelter (see a little story about that here). Although the whole page is still relevant, this text on history in particular provides the perspective on the July 2006 war with Hizballah as well as current events.

Islam was founded by Muhammad in the first half of the VII century. Muslims are taught that Islam and its holy book, the Koran, had existed as long as had the Universe, and all Jewish and Christian prophets had been Muslims. The truth, however, is that nobody had heard about Islam until Muhammad, an illiterate, poor and mentally unstable husband of a rich and much older wife, decided to turn his dreams or hallucinations into a message to humankind under her insistence. Perhaps her plan was to solve her family problems. In the patriarchal Arab society, Muhammad’s dependent status might have been considered not quite kosher. That could have contributed to his frequenting caves and sitting there, depressed and prone to scary visions under sensory and alimentary deprivation – these were the conditions under which he received his first revelation. The divine character of that was far from clear to the future Messenger of Allah, who was scared to death by his vision and needed his wife’s reassurance.

Reassured, however, he realized the benefits of his newly acquired Messenger status, and proceeded in his career from a pathetic charlatan, laughed at by the people who knew him the best, to a highway robber chieftain, to a genocidal mass murderer and totalitarian ruler, removing any opposition, real or imaginary, literally by sword. That removal was really an equal opportunity treatment, as he murdered regardless of the sex, age, and ethnic origin of the opponent. This included his extermination of all men of the entire peaceful Jewish tribe of Banu Quraiza and enslavement of children and women. This was the first recorded application of the Nazis’ Babiy Yar method, long before Hitler. Jews were brought in groups and murdered on the brink of a ravine that was to be their mass grave. By Muhammad’s desire, expressed on his deathbed, Jews cannot settle in Arabia, which had been their home for centuries. The same rule, incidentally, was introduced by the British for Jewish immigration to the part of the Land of Israel they decided to call Trans-Jordan (later shortened to Jordan), assisting Hitler in murdering Jews. This has since been the rule enacted by Jordanian rulers, who consider themselves Muhammad’s direct descendants. No wonder, as Muslims are bound to follow the Sunnah (the example) of the Prophet, as they have followed it in their barbaric conquests.

Muhammad’s revelations would come to him conveniently when he had to justify another crime of his, perversion, political expediency and, eventually, the social order he created to facilitate his autocracy. That divine order (the Islamic state is supposed to be perfect) collapsed immediately upon his death into the war between the followers of Muhammad’s daughter and her husband, Muhammad’s nephew Ali, and the supporters of Muhammad’s favorite wife Aisha and her father the strongman Abu Bakr. The conflict was of the same type as the one between Anna Nicole Smith and her late husband’s children. Except that Aisha probably had a better claim to the spoils, as Muhammad “married” her when she was six and consummated that marriage when she was nine (the paragon for all humanity himself was over 50). The stakes also were much higher, and the two groups, respectively Shia and Sunni, have been killing each other since – just observe the endless slaughter in Iraq. Imagine how easy it is then for both to kill infidels.

By sword has been the way Islam has spread from the Arabian peninsula, brought under the Islamic yoke by Muhammad by the time he died in 632, to North Africa, to a large part of Asia, and – for a long time – some parts of Europe. Nowadays, helped by the boundless tolerance of Western democracies to everything they perceive as underdog, the Islamic violent takeover, still in full force with a weaker adversary as in Sudan, is supplemented by unstoppable Islamic immigration and the ensuing demographic and political changes in the world of the infidels – Crusaders and Jews. This perceived underdog position of the 1.3 billion-strong umma sitting on the oil treasure of the world has served the dual function of lulling the Western societies into deafness to Islam’s inhuman teachings while raising Muslims’ anger at their “humiliation,” which the true believers perceive as any state in which Islam is not über alles, superior. Naturally, Islamic immigration has no intention of assimilation – quite the opposite, its leaders have overt plans of (gradual) government change.

Muslims have no right to befriend Christians or Jews (Koran 5:51), let alone non-monotheists. They believe Jews are cursed by Allah (Koran 5:64) – because of the Jewish beliefs that are nowhere to be found except in Islamic teachings. They believe that Christians and Jews are to either convert to Islam, or keep their faith but assume a subhuman dhimmi position in the society under what is called “protected status” (of the kind of mafia protection), or die if they violate these conditions. Non-monotheists have no choice but to convert or die. Whether to offer a choice or not is under Muslims’ discretion. There is no choice as to who will eventually rule the world, currently divided into Dar al-Islam, the realm of Islam, and Dar al-Harb, the realm of war. Democracy, with its freedoms and human-made laws, is incompatible with Islam. Adding free elections to Islamic ideology as an attempt to introduce democracy is less meaningful than holding free elections in Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. Freedom does not necessarily create good neighbors – not when a neighbor is a criminal.

Whereas Islam is thus first and foremost a political doctrine and movement, the “religious” facet of Islam adds to the picture not merely the neutralization of the instinct of self-preservation but indeed its reversal. The brain-washed Muslim suicidal murderers perceive their certain demise not as death but as the virtually only way to ensure their staying alive (and well in Paradise). They are also convinced that they do a great favor to those Muslims who unintentionally get killed in a terror act because those are supposed to attain similar benefits. Most importantly, this eternal life is contrasted not with death, but with the almost certain alternative of their ending up in Hell, which is described in great detail in the Koran and the Sunnah, leaving little to imagination. Hell is virtually unavoidable for a believing Muslim, unless he is committed to jihad. Therefore, both negative and positive reinforcements are employed in the Islamic indoctrination, which has shown a great efficiency with a large number of people – not only when they receive it from their childhood, but – tellingly – with new converts as well. The usual straw-man counter-argument that only a small proportion of Muslims are in this altered state of consciousness is clearly invalid because there is no need for more than a minute proportion of 1.3 billion Muslims, properly educated and armed, to achieve a catastrophic effect. It is true, as human rights defenders in the US declare, that it is bad in general to discriminate in accordance with faith. It is not true, however, when the faith includes the current and actively enacted mainstream notions of human sacrifice and the subjugation or extermination of the other faiths. However highly developed the Aztec civilization was, had it survived till now, its bloody rituals would be forbidden, and if they were an inseparable part of the Aztec religion, it would be categorized into cult and banned. Islam, the ideology whose followers, led by Muhammad’s example, rape, enslave, behead unarmed civilians, execute “blasphemers,” and commit mass murder of children, thrives. The concept of Islam as a monotheistic religion serves this political ideology to protect it from the eradication that would certainly be in the cards for it due to its fascist and violent character. This religious mimicry, first used by Muhammad for ennobling, nay, sacralizing his morbid desires and immunizing himself from human critique, is still employed for the same purpose and perfected by Muslim spokespeople.

It is uncanny how the ongoing events resemble the pre-WWII layout. Russia, jealous of what it perceives to be the imperial position of the US, is playing, again thinking that it will gain dominance through pitting today’s Nazis against the West. France, true to its colors, stubs its allies in the back and is trying to appease the enemy. The rest of Europe keeps silence, thinking that if it keeps its head low, it will keep it – with profit. Antisemitism, reinforced by anti-Israelism, is as rampant around the world as in 1930’s, if not more. The left intelligentsia, ignorant in the matter as usual, but omniscient regardless by default, supports a totalitarian ideology – as long as that claims to fight for the “insulted and humiliated.”

Despite all experience with Nazism, the world has yet to grasp that violent ideology can only be fought as an infectious disease: by correctly identifying the agent, and by stopping its propagation by eliminating it and/or raising immunity against it - not by trying to appease it. Translated into the situation with Islam, that would mean first and foremost neutralizing those who spread the violent ideology - imams, mullahs and sheikhs, whose almost uniform obesity and penchant for hoarding female resources suggest that they themselves are not in a hurry to see the huris. This gives a strong hope that they can be persuaded to relay to their flock that jihad is about learning the multiplication table, brushing teeth and doing good deeds rather then cutting infidel throats, as the believers are used to erroneously think. Ataturk knew that well enough to deal with mullahs and employ healthy anti-Islam safeguards that have survived and protected Turkey till now as a relatively modern and open country, despite all its mosques and muezzins [again, this was written in 2006]. This is what should have been done in Iraq, instead of allowing its post-Saddam constitution to be based on the Koran - which is a bit like if Germany were allowed to use Mein Kampf for the same purpose after WWII.

“War on terror” may be a convenient shorthand. It is politically correct, but is as senseless as would be a war on guns or tanks, because terror is only a tool of war. The war that has been conducted by Islam, with variable intensity, against Dar al-Harb. Now is the first time, however, when the means of waging a truly decisive jihad have become available. Unless the complacent Western world learns from past lessons, it will be taught new apocalyptic ones, already under preparation by true believers in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and wherever there is a mosque with a properly thinking imam. One who knows that

Abu Huraira reported Allah's Messenger (may peace be upon him) as saying: 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: Muslim, or the servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him; but the tree Gharqad would not say, for it is the tree of the Jews. (Sahih Muslim, Book 041, Number 6985; also Sahih Muslim, Book 041, Number 6981-6984; and Sahih Bukhari, Volume 4, Book 52, Number 176-179, 56: 791).

If you are a good Muslim, you must follow the Sunnah. I doubt there are so many Gharqad trees around.