The Mohammed Code: Why a Desert Prophet Wants You Dead (22 page)

“
how terrible was my Penalty and my Warning!”

Qur’an chapter 54, verse 18

Islam, the fastest-growing
⁵⁴²
religion of the 21
^st
century, is still showing the results of The Founder Effect. It is still picking on the same people Mohammed chose as his scapegoats in 624 AD. With only fourteen million
⁵⁴³
Jews on this planet in the early 21
^st
century—less than the population of just one Islamic city, Cairo--fighting the Jews in the modern era seems like an automatic win. There are 1.6 billion Moslems
⁵⁴⁴
in 57 Moslem nations—all with armies and with the finest military machinery oil money can buy. If they duke it out with the state of Israel, a nation of five-and-a-half million Jews
⁵⁴⁵
, they will outnumber the Hebrews in that Khaibar-like sliver of a nation by a ratio of 240 to one. How could Islam possibly fail?

Even if just one Islamic nation, Iran, points its medium and long-range missiles
⁵⁴⁶
at Israel—something it’s promised the Islamic world that it’s doing
⁵⁴⁷
—that would pit Iran’s population of 69 million
⁵⁴⁸
against a mere five-and-a-half million Jews. Wipe out just two Israeli cities—Tel Aviv and Haifa—and you’ve annihilated a country.

What about retaliation? Israel, too, has nuclear weapons. As Iranian president ‘Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani said on December 14, 2001, "The use of an atomic bomb against Israel would totally destroy Israel, while [the same] against the Islamic world would only cause damage. Such a scenario is not inconceivable."
⁵⁴⁹
It’s Khaibar all over again.

But this time the folks who might be terrified into surrender are not the Meccans, but secular Islamic nations like Egypt, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Not to mention us Westerners.

Is Mohammed’s strategy of picking on the little guy, his strategy of using the Jews to make others see things his way, still alive in the militant Moslem mind? Or is it mere “Jewish paranoia”
⁵⁵⁰
? The hit-the-nerd approach popped up in May, 1998 when one of the most influential modern interpreters of the Islamic militant tradition, Osama bin Laden, tried to tell Westerners that his war to save the world and to give all humanity the truth of Islam went far, far back in time. He begged Europeans and Americans to understand that his beef was not with Westerners. His battle, he said, was really a war between Islam and the Jews. All others should spare themselves harm, step out of the way, and let the Moslems finish off the Jews without opposition.
⁵⁵¹

Bin Laden wasn’t entirely honest in this statement. He was using what Mohammed called “deceit”
⁵⁵²
—disinformation, deliberate untruths, calculated lies. In speech after speech to his Moslem brethren bin Laden said the West is “the worst civilization witnessed by the history of mankind.” Toppling the Civilization of the West was at the top of Osama’s to-be-done list. “The desired target” of “this battle”, said Osama, referring to the global war of those he led and inspired-- is “to establish the religion of Allah, Islam, on this earth and to implement His laws.”
⁵⁵³
Osama meant
all
this earth! So if you’re not a Moslem, Osama’s real target is you. And your home is the Mecca he’d like to force into surrender by making a point—by making an example of a nation of Jews.

Osama is not the only one carrying on Mohammed’s pick-on-the-nerd tradition. In 1982, three years after Osama began his career as a full-time maker of Jihad, the Islamic Revolutionary Government of Islam sent 1,500 members
⁵⁵⁴
of its internal Revolutionary Guards
⁵⁵⁵
, its holy bullies
⁵⁵⁶
, to Southern Lebanon to establish a new group Hezbollah
⁵⁵⁷
. Hezbollah’s name came from the title of one of Iran’s own government-organized gangs of holy enforcers, thugs wearing black who broke up political demonstrations in Iran’s cities with bars, chains, clubs, and fists. The name of the Iranian gangs was Ansar-e-Hezbollah
⁵⁵⁸
.

For 24 years Hezbollah dug subterranean tunnels
⁵⁵⁹
and fortified bunkers
⁵⁶⁰
in the spirit of Mohammed at The Battle of the Trench. For 24 years—from 1982 to 2006--Hezbollah built up a store of more than 20,000 missiles
⁵⁶¹
…and a supply chain from Iran through Syria via tunnels 120 feet below the surface of the earth and “rat lines”
⁵⁶²
running through gullies and creek beds on the Syrian border.
⁵⁶³
That chain was designed to bring in a steady supply of missiles and armaments from Iran, a nation that by 2006 had rockets with a 1,200 mile range
⁵⁶⁴
, rockets designed to carry nuclear warheads or the chemical warheads equipped with VX nerve gas allegedly manufactured in vast quantities by Iran’s allies, the Syrians
⁵⁶⁵
.

The goal of Iran’s military arm in Lebanon
⁵⁶⁶
, Hezbollah, was very specific, very much in line with Mohammed’s example…and remarkably true to Mohammed’s blunt statement in the Hadith that,
“The Hour will not be established until you fight with the Jews, and the stone behind which a Jew will be hiding will say. ‘O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, so kill him.’”
⁵⁶⁷
Hezbollah’s mission was genocide—the extermination of the “Zionist entity.”
⁵⁶⁸
Its goal was to reestablish the traditional role of the Jews as Islam’s nerds. And it was to reestablish the tradition of killing the Jews in a manner so horrible that larger powers would surrender without a fight.

Those larger powers the militants want to terrify into surrender may well include Germany, Britain, France, Holland, Eastern Europe and the Balkan states. They may also include your nation and mine. And modern militant Islam’s attempt to massively upscale a desert strategy originally used to conquer towns so small they’d scarcely show up on a modern map, its attempt to apply that scapegoat strategy in today’s world, may represent a radical upshift, an evolutionary boost in the size, the structure, and the forms of pecking order competitions of superorganisms. But more on that in a minute.

[^^should the following chapter come at the beginning?]

"You must become so notorious for bad things that when you come into an area people will tremble in their sandals. Anyone can do beatings and starve people. I want your unit to find new ways of torture so terrible that the screams will frighten even crows from their nests and if the person survives he will never again have a night's sleep."

Hafiz Sadiqulla Hassani, reporting on

the instructions he allegedly received from his former boss, the commandant ofAfghanistan’s Secret Police under the Taleban, 2001

Why was Islam so successful despite the fact that it killed its diversity generators and gave enormous power to its conformity enforcers? Why was the Moslem system so good at trouncing other collective intelligences, other communities, when complexity theory says that as a “Stalinist system” it should have been an utter botch? Because Islam was about to take advantage of an open niche in the global social system, a power vacuum that opens in the biological eco-systems of the ocean, the forest, the field, and in the world of human beings. That open slot was the opportunity to become top predator.

Social learning machines work on a simple rule: he who gets gets more. He who loses is left out. In species from bower birds and strutting stags to Thai fighting fish, that rule translates to this: he who gathers the most goods and who can show those earthly treasures off the most flagrantly wins. He who can display the most control over the world around him comes out on top. He gets luxury, safety, power, influence, allies, and sex….lots and lots of sex. Islam was about to take a big leap upward in the business of exerting control and of grabbing goods and flaunting them. But before we sail into the tale of Islam’s great leap upward, let’s take a small detour and go back to the question of how a totalitarian dictatorship that kills its critics can possibly be a winner.

When a barbarian tribe—a tribe without big cities and without urbane sophistication, a tribe that specializes in violence, a tribe that’s’ expert in weapons-use and in raiding, a tribe that practices the techniques of war month after month and year after year, a tribe that elevates killing to a virtue, and a tribe that idealizes its mass murderers--goes up against a settled community, a community that’s built a civilization, the barbarians all too often win. Why?

If this were a just universe, it should be the other way around. The civilized, those who contribute the most to the enrichment of human lives, should be the victors. The civilized should have the sharpest, most sophisticated mass minds. The civilized should trounce the rabble and carry on their business in peace. But that’s not the way it happens. Instead, human history is littered with the results of one of the nastiest of mother nature’s tricks.